The last post on spatial vs narrative navigation got quite an interesting comment thread, and interesting response posts by both Angus and Cap’n Transit, all of which I encourage you to read. Commenter Russ also offered several useful scholarly links, especially to Janet Vertesi’s very readable article exploring how the familiar London Tube map structures people’s images of the city. Continue Reading →
Author Archive | Jarrett
Confessions of a Spatial Navigator
Can science explain why some transit system maps are so much better than others? Alex Hutchinson has an excellent article in the Canadian newsmagazine The Walrus on how increased reliance on Global Positioning Systems (GPS) for navigation may be reshaping our brains. Might this be related to the difficulty of getting good maps of a transit system?
Humans have two methods of navigation. Spatial navigators can construct maps in their heads as they experience a place, and also tend to be good at using maps as navigational aids. Narrative navigators navigate by creating or following verbal directions. For spatial navigators, the answer to the question where? is a position in mapped space. For narrative navigators, the answer to where? is a story about how to get there. Obviously, this is a spectrum; many of us are in the middle with partial capabilities in both directions. (I think we probably all know this from our own experience, but according to Hutchinson, the definitive academic study showing this difference has the amazingly recent date of 2003.)
Taxi drivers, obviously, have to be spatial navigators, because they must constantly plot courses for trips they’ve never made before. Before the advent of GPS, this requirement actually shaped their brains. Hutchinson writes:
Berlin: Serene Images for a Hiatus
It’s going to be quiet the rest of this week on Human Transit. I’m in Canberra all week doing full days of meetings to brief various stakeholders about the Strategic Public Transport Network Plan that I have been doing for them over the last two years.
While waiting for new material, these images from Berlin’s Märkisches Museum U-bahn station may serve as a calming visual hold-music. (Click to enlarge and sharpen.) They’re a series of artworks clearly based on maps of Berlin from different times of in its history. German Wikipedia tells me that they’re the work of Jo Doese, Karl-Heinz Schäfer, and Ulrich Jörke, and that they were completed in 1988, under communist rule, the year before the wall came down. I enjoy their Deco-like cool and serenity. (click below to continue)
Karlsruhe: A Ride on the “Tram-Trains”
Sparked in part by a suggestion from a reader, I spent two days last month in Karlsruhe, a pleasant but not touristed small city in the southwest of Germany. In rail transit circles, Karlsruhe is famous for inventing “tram-trains,” a vehicle and service type that can operate in the street as a streetcar/tram, but can also go onto standard railway lines, often shared with intercity passenger rail and freight, to go longer distances into the surrounding suburbs. This means that the service you board in your outer suburb can flow right into the city’s core streetcar network, and get you closer to your inner-city destination than the train station would be; thus saving you from having to make a connection.
Earthquake and Transformation
The San Francisco Loma Prieta earthquake was 20 years ago today. (I believe I’m the only person who spent the entire quake inside Stanford’s Memorial Church, my closest brush with death to date. I wrote about that experience, in a more self-consciously literary voice, here.)
What would the Bay Area look like today if the quake hadn’t occurred? I’m almost sure the Embarcadero and Central Freeways would still be towering over the city, and the cars that they delivered into Chinatown and Hayes Valley would still be there, circling, looking for parking.
Oakland wouldn’t have Mandela Boulevard, formerly Cypress Street, but nor would there be a new freeway looming over West Oakland BART station. We might not have seen the permanent modal shift to BART and AC Transit buses triggered by the temporary closure of the Bay Bridge, or at least not so suddenly.
What else do you think would be different? What would be the same?
Photo of Memorial Church by Michael Connor from http://www.connorphotography.net
Unhelpful Word Watch: Mass Transit
A reader writes with my favorite kind of question: one that contains its own answer. It’s about the term mass transit:
The Urbanophile on Chicago: From Good to Great?
Aaron Renn at The Urbanophile occupies a really important junction in the blogosphere, and I wish he had more company there. He loves transit but he’s interested in all aspects of urban development and policy, so he tends to place transit issues in the larger context of a city’s politics, especially conversations about civic identity. He writes mostly on Midwestern US cities, venturing to California only to prophesy its doom. But he has a good grasp of national and global peers and often draws on them for inspiration.
He’s just completed a series on the transit challenges facing Chicago, but his descriptions of the political challenge are true of many cities. It’s not about the technical or network planning issues — for those I rely on The Transport Politic — but he does deal with how transit proposals connect, or fail to connect, with fundamental desires of both the business booster and the average citizen.
Check it out. There’s even some sex.
Arrival by Train: How End-Stations Differ from Through-Stations
I’ve seen some great rail stations on my just-completed Europe trip, and some problematic ones. It’s brought me back to an old point about station design that not everyone understands: Through-stations and end-stations are completely different design and planning problems. They generate completely different kinds of space and completely different sensations of arrival and departure. It’s pointless, for example, to compare New York’s dreary Penn Station, a through-station, with magnificent Grand Central, an end-station. They are apples and radishes. Consider:
Getting Beyond Paris (or Your City)
Angus Grieve-Smith has posted a translation of an intriguing Le Monde interview of architect Roland Castro, one of the leading architects on a project for re-envisioning the suburban belt around Paris.
Paris Rapid Transit: The Four Levels of Nomenclature
A continuation of this post.
The core branding idea of the Paris RER is a really powerful one. Here’s
how it used to be presented, as a consistent citywide product
(click to enlarge; full-size map here):
