Author Archive | Jarrett

using development charges as a transit funding mechanism

Posted on May 9, 2013 in Funding, Toronto, Urban Structure

Travis Allan and Cherise Burda over at the Pembina Insitute, a Toronto-based energy think tank, have an interesting post up on the prospects of using real estate development charges as a funding mechanism for transit. Development charges are fees developers pay to municipalities meant to offset the capital costs of extending or improving services like water or sewage systems that are imposed by new construction. However, the manner in which these fees are calculated is not always conducive to the type of development a city may be trying to encourage. Moreover, transit is rarely a serious consideration in assessing the charge. This is particularly important when development occurs in a place or a pattern that is difficult or impossible to provide good transit service to, such as those that violate the "Be on the way" rule. The original post explains some of the problems the authors observe in Ontario's development charge:

The development charge, as currently implemented in most Ontario municipalities, is crudely designed. There is a strong chance that it is subsidizing less-dense, single family homes while making compact, transit-friendly development more expensive. Development charges also likely overcharge some commercial development, and this could be contributing to the flight of office space to the suburbs, in locations underserviced by transit.
In many Ontario municipalities, including Toronto, new development is charged based on who will use it. For example, many municipalities have a per-unit rate for apartment building units, and another rate for detached single-family homes, regardless of where the buildings are located within the municipality, how much land area they occupy and the cost necessary to service them.

No matter the amount of new road or sewer needed to adequately serve a place, the development charge is assessed based on the number of residents or users. This is obviously perverse. Actual development impacts on the public purse vary based on location and density than by the number of residents or users.

If a city like Toronto wants to make it easier to developers to build a certain type of development, changing the fee structure is one way to create an incentive. But what does this mean for transit?

The authors propose to use a portion of this revenue to pay for infrastructure investments needed to provide transit service to new developments. At the same time, the city could make changes to the structure of the development charge to incentivize the construction of transit-supportive development. If it worked, and there were no unforeseen consequences, the effect could be self-reinforcing: development charges encourage the type of development that transit needs to work well, and pay for some of the cost of providing that service. The supply of housing and commercial buildings that are accessible and designed to work with transit increases, more people are able to live and work in them:

Developers continue to build in sprawling greenfields because it is often cheaper and easier than building developments in walkable, transit-oriented neighbourhoods. Lack of supply means homebuyers are priced out of these locations and are literally “driven” to the urban and suburban fringes, where long and stressful auto commutes are required — and this only leads to more congestion.

Since the vast horizontal distances of greenfields require much more infrastructure person, why should this be as cheap, in development charges, as building compactly??

guest post: solving the mystery of portland’s missing ‘faire’

Posted on May 6, 2013 in Amusing, Guest Posts, Portland

Evan Landman is the new fulltime associate at my firm, Jarrett Walker & Associates. He holds a BA in Human Geography from University of British Columbia and was formerly a planning intern for the Portland area regional government, Metro. He tweets on transit and other Portland topics at @evanlandman.

On a recent weekend, I had the opportunity to participate in a transit scavenger hunt and race hosted by Portland Afoot, a low-car lifestyle citizen journalism outfit. Players traversed the city using TriMet to solve the mystery of "Who Whacked Ms. Faire LeSquare?", a pun on the free fare zone that until September 2012 covered Portland's downtown core and a portion of its inner eastside.

The crowd prior to the start of the race.

The event kicked off at Velocult, a bike shop and bar in Portland's Hollywood neighborhoood, near to a transit center and light rail station. Around 60 teams of 3-5 players took part; by my estimate, something like 250 people came out to spend one of the nicest days of the year so far riding transit. At times, it felt like everyone in town who writes, blogs or tweets on transit or mobility had turned up to play. One group even had members who came down on the train from Seattle to participate!

In addition to solving the murder mystery, each team could score points by visiting distant transit centers, using different modes to travel, riding multiple transit lines, spotting public art, or meeting TriMet employees. Amusingly, there were also points available for anyone who was able to get a photo of themselves being grilled by a fare inspector. The entire game was smoothly run through the clever use of unique Twitter hashtags to track everyone's progress.

I found out about the game the day before, so I didn't have time to register a team, but some folks short a player were kind enough to let me tag along. We used light rail, a number of bus lines, the Portland Streetcar, our feet, and a dragonboat to visit destinations across the Metro area, from the eastern transit center at Parkrose to the far western suburb of Hillsboro. Portland Afoot stationed volunteer actors (including one member of the city council) at different points around town to continue the story, and to provide clues and directions.

At the end of the day, the entire contingent met back at Velocult, where it was revealed that LeSquare had skipped town to Calgary (which has retained its downtown free fare zone). The organizers lined up several generous prize packages for the top three finishers, with freebies from Car2Go, Zipcar, and a long list of local retailers and restaurants. Best of all, one lucky finisher won a free one-year TriMet pass!

In the spirit of play, Portland Afoot brought hundreds of people onto Portland's transit system for trips very different than the home-work commute. This sort of event serves as a wonderful tool to get people to use transit in an unfamiliar way, and shows that riding the bus or light rail can be both functional and fun. If I can use transit to have fun on a sunny Saturday, maybe I can start to imagine other new ways I could be using the system? If nothing else, this serves as a reminder that people in Portland, including young, politically engaged people, can still get excited about TriMet despite its recent cutbacks and continual pillorying in the media.

JW postscript: I recall playing a similar game in around 1978, with a team including David Bragdon — later the elected CEO of Portland's regional government. Just imagine how much more fun Evan would have had without a phone, computer, or realtime information, on an infrequent, confusing transit network that only went downtown!

chicago: bus rapid transit moves forward

Posted on April 25, 2013 in Bus Rapid Transit, Chicago

Chicago is moving forward with an ambitious and large-scale Bus Rapid Transit project on Ashland Avenue, a north-south corridor running from Cortland to 31st parallel to the Red Line L to the east. Back in 2011, I did a post on a report from a Chicago nonprofit called the Metropolitan Planning Council on a plan for a network of BRT lines in the city. At the time, it looked like Western was the natural choice for rapid transit as the longest arterial in Chicago; following a study and outreach process on both streets last year, Ashland was chosen instead. Here is the proposed alignment, with the BRT corridor in yellow and potential future extension in black. (It's a beautifully straight line, designed to function not just with Chicago's radial rail network but also with its grid-shaped network of frequent bus lines.)

Ashland BRT Route Map, http://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/brt/map_routemap_ashlandbrt.png

Today, the street is composed of four travel lanes, parking lanes, and a median alternating with a turn lane. It's interesting to read the press materials for this project, because they heavily emphasize the importance of the repurposed right-of-way and related improvements, rather than focusing on the character the vehicles. They also frequently highlight the suitability of the "70' curb-to-curb right-of-way". From the Ashland BRT Project Factsheet:

Dedicated center bus lane in each direction to keep buses out of general traffic during boardings
Limited stops: every 1/2 mile and at CTA 'L' stations
Transit Signal Priority intersections and longer green lights to keep traffic moving

The redesigned street will sport a dedicated busway with median stations, one travel lane in each direction. As the urbanists will like, it removes a general purpose travel lane but retails the majority of on-street parking spaces. The initial Western-Ashland study considered alternatives that places the BRT right-of-way against the curb, as well as removing travel lanes or parking lanes. Ashland Avenue will also continue to be served by local bus service.

This is clearly open BRT, meaning the buses could enter and exit the busway at many points. Ashland Avenue BRT buses, for example, are likely to want to run further along Ashland than the facility currently goes, reducing the need for multiple transfers. An open design allows for other bus lines whose routes take them onto the busway to realize the benefits of the reserved right-of-way where it exists. In this case, open BRT means that buses will need doors on both sides, so that they can open on the left at busway stations and on the right at ordinary curb stops beyond the busway's end.

Ashland Ave BRT Project Rendering, http://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/page_header_images/680header_centerbrtrender.jpg

This looks like a great project. It's position in a high-frequency grid means that it will be useful for trips extending far beyond the busway itself. It makes the street itself a nicer place. And it seems precision engineered to improve travel time, and thus access, for a wide swath of Chicago, making transit an even more logical choice for an even larger spectrum of riders.

You can also view an interview with the project's lead planners, here.

frequent network maps: san francisco east bay

Posted on April 24, 2013 in Branding, Frequent Networks, San Francisco

Another great frequent network map from the prolific Steve Boland, this time of the East Bay region of California including Oakland and Berkeley . I previously covered his San Francisco frequent network here. Steve has created a series of transit maps for other cities, which can be found at his website, San Francisco Cityscape. Have a look at a small part of the map showing Downtown Oakland, below (or follow the link to view the full map):

Steve's done a great job drawing a map to show routes running at 10-15 minute weekday frequencies, and uses color to draw a distinction between local and rapid bus service, BART, and several shuttle services that operate in the same vicinity. The map doesn't try to show the more complex background of less frequent services. The best agency maps (Seattle, Vancouver, Spokane, Portland) have begun doing thi as well. But maps showing only the Frequent Network are also highly useful, especially for people who want to use transit but just can't afford to wait long. That's why every Los Angeles rapid transit station has a "15-minute map", and why many other agencies (Portland, Minneapolis, Brisbane) do maps of the Frequent Network alone. Remember: Frequency is freedom! So a frequency map is a map of your freedom as a transit rider.

can green thinking value straight lines?

Posted on April 23, 2013 in Meditations

As people who value the durability of human civilization celebrate Earth Day, here's a question they might think about.

Ecological thinking values localness, smallness, and natural processes. It talks about place, community, and the Earth as a unit. These things are all naturally circular. Everywhere in sustainability thinking is the image of the circle: the cycles of ecological process, the cycles of generations, the natural cycles of the earth at many scales.

So today, if you want to make any activity look durable and ecologically sound, even "cool," you draw a circular diagram of it.

US Forest Service

But the circle is much more than a diagram of natural process. The circle is also closure, embrace, inward-lookingness. It is the essence of all the concentric units by which we define "home": our families, our households, and our "community" at whatever scales we choose to identify it. What all those things have in common is that we want a boundary between "inside" and "outside." The circle — which has the feature of enclosing the largest possible area within the smallest possible boundary — is the natural image.

Thus, in the lexicon of Australian Aboriginal art, famous for its extraordinary powers of emotive abstraction, a circle means place.

Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi, Kuninka (Western Quoli) Dreaming at Kaakaratintja, 1987. Artcurial.com

…which is why Aboriginal art so often reminds us of maps, where the same is often true. Whatever a place is in reality, our minds think of it as enclosed, bounded in the most efficient possible way, a circle.

So, in the absence of a strong planning ideology or natural barriers, ancient and medieval cities tend to be more or less round.

… because in addition to minimizing circumference, and hence the cost of fortification, a circle minimizes the average distance between two points within itself.

It is natural that today's green thinking, obsessed with restoring communities and cycles, thinks in circles. The stable circular cycle is the model of success. The successful community feels enclosing in the way that the successful family does. It hugs you, and nothing is more circular than an embrace.

The green movement, and especially efforts at durable urbanism, knows how to talk about circles of many scales: concentric circles, overlapping circles, all kinds of circularity and enclosure. Even the notion of downshifting technologically, to simpler systems maintanable by smaller units of organization, evokes circles. It's intriguing that in the iconography of tech, the circle has come to mean off, while the straight line means on.

So my question is simple.

Can those who value a civilization based on durability, community, and harmony with natural processes achieve those goals — at any scale — while insisting on circularity as the core metaphor for all forms of success?

… because to do so is to define the straight line as the enemy.

Durable urbanism, and ecological thinking in general, has many enemies that are shaped like straight lines, or at least as paths that will never close into cycles. Climate change, peak oil, war, exploitation, and pollution are not cyclical, at least not at a scale that's relevant to human life. We see them instead as linear processes colliding with larger limits that are themselves linear, shaped like walls: competing armies, starvation, the fixed limits of the earth.

This is the story of my career: Transportation planners — including those of us who value the goal of a more durable civilization — are in the business of trying to convince circle-lovers of the value of straight lines. This, I've come to believe, is the core of why the conversation is difficult, and why so many people in the urbanist and placemaking professions have trouble reconciling themselves to transport needs, or even claim dominion over them.

Because face it: Transportation is about straight lines. It begins with the desire to be somewhere other then where you are, in order to do something you want to do, and the basic shape of that human desire is a line from where you are to where you need to be.

So the history of transportation, since the industrial revolution, has been about circular communities and places feeling attacked by the straight lines that any useful form transportation must draw. In the 1850s, Henry David Thoreau recognized the community-piercing and place-destroying role of railroads as clearly as Jane Jacobs did of freeways a century later. The transportation technology didn't matter: what mattered was that something that had to be linear was piercing something that's naturally round: the place, at any scale.

And so, today, we have an urbanist discourse that is all about somehow taming the straight line, bending it into a circle. A long strain of urbanism, epitomized by Darrin Nordahl's work, imagines that transit planning could be based on the tourist experience, even though tourist travel is unlike destination-motivated in this exact respect: The tourist's desire really is a circle: the loop shape of the tour. But all other transport is motivated straight-line desires, the need to be there so that we can do something.

So is the circle always the image of goodness for the ecological way of thought? And is the straight line always evil?

Again, becuase it encloses maximum area in a the shortest possible boundary, the circle is the logical shape of fortification. Our subconscious need for fortification, around our households and communities, remains with us in the form of NIMBYism – a deeply-felt revulsion at almost any change that arises from outside, whether it's urbanists rezoning your neighborhood or transport planners proposing a rail line. NIMBYism is the walled medieval city repelling all forms of attack. To view your community as a circle is to emphasize its separation from its context. To view it as a point where lines converge is to emphasize its relatedness.

Can we ever treasure a process of resonance and symbosis between the circle and the path, as Aboriginal art does? Can we experience all circularity as deepened and made richer through its dialogue with the linear?

Uta Uta Tjangala, Untitled (Jupiter Well to Tjukula), Art Gallery of New South Wales

In other words: Can the green movement — in its ecological as well as urbanist dimensions — ever welcome into its circular models the unapologetic straight line of real transportation?

You can imagine the line curving eventually, as all lines do, but locally we need lines to be straight, to get us from here to there. Will that always feel like a violation of green principles? Or is there a path to welcoming it into a durable world?

subway car configurations: a matter of taste?

Posted on April 18, 2013 in Access, Public Outreach, Rail Transit

Chicago Transit Authority is asking its customers how seating should be configured in its rail rapid transit cars. Whet Moser has a good writeup in ChicagoMag.com. Here are the choices:

The one on the left is "Chicago-style" seating, with most seats in pairs facing along the length of the car. The one in the middle is "New York-style" seating, with most seats facing sideways. The third is a hybrid.

Transit agencies commonly do surveys that imply that these things are just a matter of taste, as though they'll go with whatever their riders prefer. This question is not just a matter of taste. The left hand image has the most seats but the least capacity. The middle image as the fewest seats but the greatest capacity. Seats with their backs to the wall take up much less space than seats in pairs facing forward or back. And of course, any seat takes up more space than a standee in a crowded car. This is why really crowded subway systems inevitably gravitate toward side-facing seats.

So the question should be not whether you like the the configuration on the left, but whether you like it so much that you don't mind being left behind at rush hour because the train is full.

The survey asks you which configuration you prefer, and which you like better in terms of "personal space." But it doesn't inform the reader that the more forward- and back-facing seats there are, the more people will be left behind on the platform during the peak and the less ridership the system will be able to handle.

Almost all choices are tradeoffs, so when you ask the public their opinion, you need to explain what the real consequences of the options are. (At least that's my firm's approach to public outreach!)

GIS conference seeks presenters

Posted on April 14, 2013 in General

The call for presentations is out for this year's GIS in Transit Conference, October 16-18, 2013, at the Keck Center of the National Academies in Washington, D.C. The conference planning committee is seeking proposals focused on uses of geographic and spatial analysis to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of transit planning, operations and marketing.

Some of the examples of topics the organizers have in mind will look familiar to Human Transit readers: using GTFS feeds to publish transit data and third-party applications for transit are just two from a much longer list. Proposals are due April 15. Have a look at the call for presentations for full details and submission requirements, or visit the conference website for more information.

a new wiki for transit!

Posted on April 10, 2013 in General

I've recently learned of a new resource for sharing knowledge and best practices related to transit planning: transitwiki.org. The project is funded by Caltrans and managed by the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, and is a novel response to California agencies' financial constraints that have limited the ability of staff to travel and attend conferences. As you would expect, much of the content so far is drawn from contributors' experiences working in California, but the wiki contains quite a lot of generally useful information on a variety of topics related to transit funding, management, planning, and operations. For more information, visit the website or the project's new twitter account.

how google (or you) could change the game

Posted on April 8, 2013 in Frequent Networks, Legibility, Maps

Google could transform how many people experience transit in about 15 minutes. Well, maybe a few days. They have the tools to do something that's a big effort for the transit agencies: Frequent Network maps.

But in fact, any app-maker could do it too.

Nate Wessel's guest post, on why trip planners can never replace or substitute for maps, gives us the clue.

For the last three years, this blog has been preoccupied with the visualization of frequency. Frequency is freedom. Reducing the wait is the essence of what makes transit resemble the freedom we associate with cars, and it's also crucial to allowing multiple lines to function as a network.

As this comes to be better understood, the concept of frequent network mapping is gradually spreading through the transit industry. I first made the case here, and explored some details here. The idea is spreading. If you don't believe me, just explore this blog's Frequent Networks category (let me know if you encounter other examples I should feature).

Frequent lines are so special — as the network useful to busy people who can't build their lives around a timetable — that they need to stand out. If you haven't seen a map of the Frequent Network in your city, I contend that you really don't understand how your transit system works. As I argue at the links above, frequent network mapping can be transformative in helping people understand how a transit system actually functions, and why frequency is worth caring about.

As Nate argues, and as I argued a few years ago, no trip planner will ever substitute for maps. What's more, no map of a single trip we care about will substitute for a map that actually shows you the network, just as most of us need to see maps of our city. The Frequent Network is especially crucial to see, and not just for the general public. Powerful people form ideas about transit from looking at maps, and if they can't see frequency, they are being misled about how the network works.

Still, it takes time for ideas to penetrate a transit bureaucracy. Google, though, could do it tomorrow, by just setting up a little interface that reads midday frequencies out of the timetable data they already have, and draws a Frequent Network map. OK, quick automated mapping is often ugly. It might take a few weeks to make it beautiful. You might also want to give the user control of the frequency threshold. Service every 15 minutes is frequent in Phoenix but not in San Francisco.

Actually, it doesn't even need Google. Given public GTFS feeds, anybody can build this app, right?

Imagine arriving in an unfamiliar city and wanting to see where you can get to easily on transit. Or imagining thinking about a location decision, and wanting to make sure there's frequent service there, going to the places you go. Simplistic tools like WalkScore's Transit Score won't help you! You need to see the network yourself.

Imagine that the resulting map is so useful that it comes to replace the convoluted transit information in most travel guides, which can't do much more than draw a map of a subway system, or give you a bunch of phone numbers if there isn't one. Tourists, too, don't like waiting long.

What am I missing. If this makes sense, give me some credit for the idea, and take it away.

guest post: nate wessel on why google transit will never be enough for small to medium-sized systems

Posted on April 8, 2013 in Guest Posts, Legibility, Maps

Nate Wessel lives in Cincinnati, Ohio where for the last few years he's been working to improve public understanding of the local transit system. In 2011 he designed and published his own map of the system and he now writes the Cincinnati Transit Blog. Nate has a degree in urban planning from the University of Cincinnati from where he graduated this past June.

I've heard quite a few times that Google Transit and similar technologies have made hand-rendered transit maps outdated. Being myself a maker of hand-made, tangible maps and having spent the last couple of years physically working with a lot of maps, I find myself with a bit of a gut reaction to this common claim. It's more than just a reaction to an existential threat though. My reaction is to an idea that would toss the baby out with the bathwater. Not only are lovingly created, tangible transit maps incredibly valuable to our understanding of the cities we live in, they're essential to the widespread use of transit. We'll need to go back to basics.

What do maps do? What are maps? Why are they?

Maps are like Cliffs-Notes for the physical world. We don't have time to read the whole book but we still need to get an idea what it's about before the test. You'll probably never manage to explore the entirety of one mid-size city let alone a country or the whole world. Yet we still want to see what's out there, where we could go if we wanted to and what we'd find when we got there. Understanding the shape and nature of the whole world or even one city through direct physical experience is a practical impossibility.

We all need an understanding of the world beyond our fingertips; that's absolutely essential to modern human existence. It's why we have novels, to pick one example. A story from another life lets us share an experience we haven't yet had and perhaps never will. It lets us plumb the depths (and heights) of our own emotions and thoughts by momentarily opening ourselves up to the author's. We don't necessarily have to go there ourselves to learn something of love or sorrow(or downtown). Our innate curiosity pulls us to see what's possible in the world and within ourselves.

The same goes for everything on TV, in print, and many things on the internet. Most media lets us reach beyond our own personal experience to learn something of the world we can't see directly. We absolutely need these things. They give us an understanding of the broader world and let us contextualize our own existence. They show us what's normal, and more importantly what's possible for ourselves; where we can go and what we can do. Kids can't dream of being astronauts if they've never heard of one. We can't speak seriously of knights in shining armour and chivalry and honor and of other deeply interesting ideas until we've read of their existence and felt something of it ourselves. In exactly the same way maps show us what's possible in the physical world. They tell us that Spain is a place in Europe, that Queens is connected to Manhattan by subways and bridges, and that it's not similarly connected to Britain. We can't think of taking transit until we know what transit does and doesn't.

The other critical thing maps (and some other media)do is provide us with answers to specific questions. These might be:

"Which line can I take to Queens?"
"Are there coffee shops within walking distance of my current location?"
"Exactly how much will the bus cost?"

Filling this need for specific information is in part why the encyclopedia was so revolutionary during the Renaissance and why the internet can be so powerful today. The amount of precise information available to people is just exploding. The age of science and empiricism has given us the idea of bulk 'information' as something that can succinctly and precisely answer an isolated question. "Where is the nearest bike shop?" We now keep stock of them in a Google database that can return the answer in milliseconds. Often you can ask the most esoteric questions of the Internet and find a succinct and satisfying answer in less than a minute. That's stupendously useful for travellers and college students with deadlines.

So maps (and other media generally) have two big functions: First to inform broadly and second to answer specifically. The informative function must necessarily precede the precise answering function. We need to know what's generally possible before we can know what exactly to ask. We need to know that transit is even an option before we can ask how exactly to use it.

Answering specific questions with specific answers is what Google Transit does well. Here's how it works:

You tell Google Transit your location and exactly where you want to go.
You tell it when you want to go there(usually now).
It decides exactly the fastest way to do it, with perhaps a second option if it's a close call.
It puts this exact path on a map and narrates directions like "turn left" or "wait here".

In many circumstances, this is quite useful. Many people, if they're taking a one-time trip to somewhere they don't normally go, will just want a quick answer; if the trip is possible, a computerized map can tell them exactly how to get there and exactly how to get back. That's often a very handy thing.

But Google Transit totally misses the first function of maps: informing us about the world, sating our curiosity, and showing us the possible. Google transit doesn't tell us anything about where transit goes generally. It makes us ask questions like "how do I get from exactly here to exactly there right now?"

Without a basic understanding of what's possible it's left to hope that "here" is a decent place to start and that "there" is even a realistic possibility. Downtown Cincinnati for example has transit operating on just about every street, but you can't even spot it in the Google Transit interface before inquiring about a specific trip.

When we ask questions without knowing that a reasonable answer even exists, we're sometimes confronted with answers like "no results" or "there's one trip three days from now at 3:29am". Without a broader understanding of how the whole thing works, we don't know what to ask or if the answer we got doesn't sound right. Worse, when we get these disappointing answers to the wrong questions, we get confused and frustrated. Transit users need more guidance than "not possible" or "how about Tuesday?"give us. Also, some specific answers that serve us well for the moment will be misleading in the future. Here for example…

…Google Transit suggests we take the #19 northward, but says nothing of the invisible #17 that runs parallel to it at more than twice the frequency. You can easily imagine someone who's once looked up their route on Google Transit regularly letting a #17 pass by while they wait for a #19 and complain about headways. Similar situations must happen a thousand times a day.

Exploring a transit system with Google Transit is like blind men trying to understand an elephant by touch. This part is thick, this part is bumpy, we don't know how any of the parts attach to each other, and the whole thing is constantly, inexplicably moving. A thoughtfully hand-rendered transit map tells us what the elephant really is. It doesn't go into detail about the dimensions of it's toenails, but tells us of it's overall size, shape and temperament. It tells us that you might be able to ride the thing and that you probably don't want to try poking it with a sharp stick. Once we know these basics we can begin to ask exactly what the trunk is for.

That's why hand-rendered system maps continue to be completely relevant in the heyday of the computer. A map like that of DC's Metro tells us more about the city and how to use the transit system than any GTFS feed ever could on it's own.

A hand-rendered map must necessarily simplify a system, showing only some lines and only some landmarks. To do so it makes value judgements, something a computer has never yet been capable of. It does most of the hard work of understanding for us because a map-maker must understand the transit system before he can make a map of it; it's not just a matter of dumping all the routes into a GIS program. That deeper understanding of the transit system is an experience most people don't yet have and it's exactly what they're looking for when they explore a system map. Similarly, when they explore a novel they may be looking for a deeper understanding of the human condition, history, or their own lives. In either case, they're most essentially looking for their possibilities. "What is there?" "What is within my reach?" What is possible for me?

It seems like most big American cities put these questions, at least so far as transit is concerned, largely to rest decades ago with their famous metro maps but that many small and mid-sized cities, particularly those that primarily use buses, provide little if any coherent, holistic map of how their system operates. They often seem content with either no system maps at all or only topographically accurate maps that de-emphasise and confuse the areas that can benefit from transit the most: those that are dense and well served by multiple lines.

Dense areas by definition get less space than their human value warrants on a topographically accurate map. Every famous transit map, whether it's DC's or New York's or London's does just the opposite; exploding dense, important areas like Downtown Manhattan and condensing suburban service. They do this not only because that makes them easier to draw, but because that emphasis on the dense is typically the actual emphasis of the transit system itself. A map that embodies the logic of a transit system is one that tells us most truly how the system works and most basically what we can do with it. We need something of that understanding before Google Transit can work well. We need to know what the elephant is.

But that deep understanding of a transit system and of a city is so different for each system that no computer program could ever yet describe every system well. Google maps can't yet do it. It's something that just can't be automated.

Google Transit can give us the answers but it can't give us the questions. And that's why it will never be enough for a transit agency to publish schedules to Google Transit without also publishing a substantial and thoughtfully developed system map made by people who are more than passingly familiar with the transit system and with the city.

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