Today seems to be the climax of the conflict in Iran, and I’m up far too late following the news. What’s it about? The truth. Huge numbers of citizens are risking their lives to create a more truthful society, one needing fewer lies. If we think about what we advocate as environmentalists or urbanists or transit advocates, it’s ultimately just that, I hope. We’re looking for clarity, truth. We’re trying to see through the murk (some natural, some man-made) and give others the courage to do the same.
Author Archive | Jarrett
Mundane Things That Really Matter: Defining “On Time”
A great piece by Michael Perkins in Greater Greater Washington highlights a perennial problem with on-time performance measures for urban buses. He cites the policy of the Washington area transit agency, WMATA, which says that a bus is considered on-time if it’s no more than two minutes early and no more than seven minutes late. Perkins explains, with diagrams, that under this policy you could wait 19 minutes for a bus that supposedly ran every ten minutes, and yet the bus (and the one 19 minutes in front of it) would both be considered on-time.
(By the way, the WMATA standard sounds lax to me, though I haven’t done a survey. Few agencies I’ve worked with accept anything more than five minutes late, or one minute early.)
Slippery Word Watch: Express
A good post at Greater Greater Washington on Washington DC priority bus corridors reminds me of an old question about the word express:
Metro is working hard to develop “priority bus corridors,” with express buses that run more often, more quickly, and more reliably than existing service
What does express mean in that sentence? It’s not clear, but it seems to be the everyday meaning: “fast, with a dash of coolness, compared to local-stop service.”
Like a lot of transit planners, I use the word express in a more precise sense, as one of three kinds of stopping pattern that seem to encompass most successful transit services:
When Expansion is Dilution
My post on crowdsourcing bus stop design included a pitch for the importance of branding in making a particular quality of service visible. I cited the obvious example of the Los Angeles Metro Rapid, the region’s network of frequent and relatively fast buses. Integral to the Rapid product was a distinctive logo, colour scheme, and on the first lines at least, shelter design.
But Los Angeles commenters such as Wad pounced, reminding me that as the Rapid brand expanded, bits of it started falling off:
The Revolution on Transit
Amid the mounting civil unrest in Iran’s capital, when everyone fears that mass violence may be imminent, let’s pause to notice that the Tehran Metro is still running.
Andrew Sullivan‘s wall-to-wall coverage includes this cellphone-video record of a ride on the Metro on this exuberant and anxious day.
It’s an immense challenge to keep a transit system running in such conditions. Transit operations are a real-time collaboration of many people with different political views. The fierce disagreement inflaming the population must also divide and arouse the transit workforce. Some may even feel tempted to distort the operation in a way that benefits their side of the conflict. In such conditions the necessary teamwork becomes a real test of an operating company and its staff.
Obviously, there are baser considerations at work. I’m sure the government would have shut down the metro — which is clearly helping the opposition assemble larger crowds than the government can muster — if they didn’t need to maintain the illusion that life is normal in Tehran apart from a few hooligans.
But I just want to recognise the ordinary drivers and dispatchers and attendants who are keeping the Metro running in these days of terrifying uncertainty. It’s not just diligence, it’s courage.
Comment of the Week: Connection or Intersection?
In an early but still timely post, I argued that we should abolish the depressing American verb to transfer, and replace it with to connect.
Peter Parker of Melbourne on Transit came back with a useful clarification:
Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Design
Bus stops can be pretty basic, or pretty elaborate. Aaron Antrim points me to a Utah-based project, Next Stop Design, that collects ideas for bus stop design from the public, then allows users to rate them. Such a project on a large enough scale could start to generate some “wisdom of crowds” about what kinds of bus stops people like. (This currently leading design, a “covered-wagon” theme for Utah, is by “hopkimp,” details here.) Continue Reading →
Did Sim City Make Us Stupid?
Ah, SimCity. … As a youngster I spent many hours building fields of residential tract housing, industrial parks, huge blighted and substantially vacant commercial districts, mega-highways connecting them all, and Godzilla.
When I recently discovered that the original SimCity was released as open source, I had to download it and try it out. I knew that it was inaccurate, but it was nostalgia. Then I discovered exactly how inaccurate it was. “No mixed residential and commercial areas?!? WTF!” I did play it long enough to also notice that transportation was pretty much a capital expenditure with no operating costs. Sigh.
Yes, those are the two of the worst fallacies built into the original Sim City:
Suppose Money is Like Water
The commenters seem to focus on how charmingly obsolete the thing is, but my first reaction was: What a great teaching tool! Someone should create working online model of it, complete with all the rushing and gurgling sounds, that we can all play with on our laptops.
In a democracy, the greatest threat to national security is public ignorance. The same is true of a democratically governed city. That’s why as a transit planner, I’ve come to view explaining what I do as one of the most important parts of my job.
Rail Rapid Transit Maps, to Scale
Neil Freeman recently posted a great collection of rail rapid transit maps, all drawn to scale, and all at the same scale. The image at right, of course, is New York City,
He calls them subway maps, but of course that term suggests that the service is all underground, which few “subway” systems are. What matters is that they’re rapid transit. In this case, they’re specifically rail rapid transit, which is why Staten Island’s rail line in the lower left appears disconnected from the rest. In reality, it’s just connected by rapid transit of a different mode: the Staten Island Ferry.
(By “rapid transit” this blog always means transit services that run frequently all day in an exclusive right of way with widely spaced stations — linking centers to each other, for example, rather than providing coverage to every point on the line as local-stop services do.)