Frequent Networks

vancouver: the frequent network revealed

Posted on April 2, 2012 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Vancouver

One of North America's most advanced transit agencies, TransLink in Vancouver, has finally published a Frequent Network Map as well as a page explaining why that map is important:

This 15 minute or better service runs until 9 p.m. every day, and starts at 6 a.m. on weekdays, 7 a.m. on Saturdays and 8 a.m. on Sundays. This level of service might be provided by one or more types of transit, such as buses or SkyTrain.
People traveling along FTN corridors can expect convenient, reliable, easy-to-use services that are frequent enough that they do not need to refer to a schedule. For municipalities and the development community, the FTN provides a strong organizing framework around which to focus growth and development.

As longtime readers know, I've long advised that high frequency services must stand out from the complexity of a transit map, and be promoted separately, so that people can see the network that's available to people whose time is highly valuable. Many individuals, and a few agencies, have drawn Frequent Network maps as a result. For more, see the Frequent Network category.

Meanwhile, this is a hugely important moment for Vancouver, especially because of the way the Frequent Network can organise future land use, and help everyone make better decisions about location. This map should immediately go up on the wall in every city planner's office, and in the office of every realtor or agent who deals in apartments. It's far more useful than, say, WalkScore's Transit Score in showing you the actual mobility that will arise from your choice of location, in the terms that matter to you.

how frequent is freedom?

Posted on December 29, 2011 in Frequent Networks

“Frequency is freedom” is one of the slogans I’ve used on this blog and in my book. Charles Montgomery, author of the forthcoming book Happy City (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2012), asks “how frequent is freedom?” and goes on …

I’m writing in hopes you can answer a particularly vexing question. … I have tried and failed to find empirical evidence showing the transit frequency at which users can simply show up without consulting schedules or feeling anxious. All I have found are dense reports about ‘elasticity’ and then a range of planners’ ‘gut feelings’ suggesting anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes.

Have you found any evidence suggesting a certain headway crosses a threshold of reducing the friction and perceived difficulty of transit enough to change the game at any stop?

Elasticity is the ratio between an outcome and the variable that’s supposedly affecting it. We say that the “elasticity of frequency is 1.0” if every time you double a frequency, ridership also doubles. If ridership goes up only 80% when you double a frequency, that’s called an elasticity of 0.8. Obviously, modelers of elasticity have to sort out a lot of different variables and seek elasticities for each. You’ll find discussions of elasticity of frequency, fare, travel time, and a range of other transit variables in the literature.

But the concept of elasticity implies that there’s some linear relationship between frequency and ridership outcomes, describable by a ratio. This in turn implies that frequency affects ridership in the same way at all levels of frequency. Most transit planners know that isn’t right, that there’s a “phase-shift” in the relationship at the point where the customer stops planning their life around a timetable.

It’s very tough to make a hard case, because the only “hard” data on these things comes from observing the effects of frequency changes, and as you can imagine, other things are usually happening at the same time as a frequency change. It also takes a year to see the results of any service change fully manifest, and by then other stuff has happened that muddies the data.

So I’m in the “planner with a hunch” category. I can tell you that the top-performing all-day routes in most networks I’ve studied (top performing in riders per unit of service) are mostly high-frequency routes in dense areas. Both the frequency and the density are important. And in most cases, the threshold of “high frequency” is around every 15 minutes all day. Lower frequencies are usually associated with much lower performance.

One big caution, though, is that our tolerance for frequency varies with trip distance. A 15-minute wait for a one-hour ride feels a lot different from a 15-minute wait for a three-minute ride. So we generally aim for higher frequencies where we’re aiming for shorter trips. However, frequency is so expensive that it’s often affordable only where the capacity is required.

If any other reader has seen the definitive study on this phase-shift let me know. My hunch is the case will be made by comparing different frequencies of service through similar land use, rather than by comparing the results of frequency changes. But again, that’s a hunch, and defining “similar land use” presents its own thicket of difficulties.

sydney: new efforts at frequency mapping (guest post)

Posted on November 23, 2011 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Sydney

Kevin McClain is currently a Project Officer at Easy Transport, the Regional Coordination Office for Community Transport in Northern Sydney. He holds a masters degree in Transport Management from the University of Sydney.

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about Frequency Mapping on Human Transit starting with this post. Here in Australia we have seen frequency maps for Melbourne and Brisbane, but other than this map, we haven’t seen one for Sydney. Inspired by the efforts so far, I set out to try and make a frequency map of the services in Northern Sydney, the region where I currently live and work. This effort was also driven by the desire to reduce the number of resources a transport user would need to consult in order to plan a trip. Currently there are seven different system maps for services in the Northern Sydney Area alone: five bus maps (each covering different areas), one rail map and one ferry map. Ultimately I ended up developing two maps: One frequency map of all of the services in Northern Sydney and one map of all frequent services across all of Sydney.

I work for Easy Transport , which provides transport information for seniors and people with disabilities. We also serve as the regional coordination office for Community Transport in the Northern Sydney Region and provide travel training to residents. Our Northern Sydney map was developed to be a tool that could be used by the travel training program and potentially help promote our service.

One of the challenges I have struggled with is the fact that there are a variety of service types in Sydney (buses, trains, ferries, and light rail) and people seem to want to be able to tell the difference between the service types when they look at a public transport map. This makes frequency mapping more difficult. In the Spokane map, all services are provided by bus. There is no need to show service types. Creating a map that shows service types and then shows frequency within each of those service types quickly gets complicated.

For the Northern Sydney map I started by showing bus, train and ferry frequencies at the following levels 1-15 min, 16-30 min and 31-60 minutes. This quickly proved to be too much, therefore the train lines were modified to show only stations that had frequent services (1-15 minutes) and stations that didn’t (Click here to download high resolution PDF.)

One alternative is to show only frequent and infrequent services (1-15 minutes and 16-60 minutes). While this reduces the amount of information available, it also makes the map more legible. (Click here to download high resolution PDF.)

The map of all frequent services across all of Sydney is less complicated. Only the suburban train services and frequent bus services are shown. [JW: Sydney has no frequent all-day ferry services.] Train frequency was again shown on a station by station basis. This version has the same colours for the train lines as are used in the CityRail map. (Click here to download high resolution PDF.)

While this alternative does not have the colours of the train lines. (Click here to download high resolution PDF.)

One of the main points of both maps is to show where the frequent bus services are in Sydney. While train frequency is also important, there has been a recent expansion of frequent bus services across Sydney with the introduction of the Metro bus services (in red on the map of all frequent services). I think that it is important to show how these new services, along with existing frequent bus services, fill in some of the gaps.

Each of the maps show the trade-off between providing more information and a clear map that emphasizes the frequent services. Try planning a trip on one version of the map and then the other. Does the level of information provided affect the routes you chose? Are you able to figure out where the routes are going? Are there areas that are particularly confusing? Which version of each of the maps do you prefer?

These maps are still in draft form and I would welcome comments and suggestions about how the maps might be improved. And yes, there are errors on both of the maps. Corrections or any frequent routes that I might have missed are also welcome. You can send me feedback either by commenting on this post or by emailing me at [email protected].

san francisco: frequent network map refined

Posted on November 4, 2011 in Branding, Frequent Networks, Maps, San Francisco

SF Cityscape has done a refinement of their excellent frequent network map for San Francisco, one that highlights the basic structure of the network that's useful for impatient people at all times of day. You can download the full GIF and or PDF here. A slice:

The map is so cool that I feel liberated to nitpick. Some other basic principles for maps of this type, worth considering:

Limited stop service (numbers with an L suffix in San Francisco) is substantially faster than local-stop, so I think it deserves its own color, possibly shading gradually to the local color when the limited segment ends, as 71L does west of Masonic. A separate color would also clue in the viewer that those lines stop only at the points indicated, while locals stop at more stops.
To further clarify the previous point, I'd come up with a really tiny stop symbol to mark all stops on local-stop services — maybe labeling them in smaller print or not labeling them at all. This would give a visual indication of frequency of stops that would give an accurate view of relative speed. You really do not want to ride all the way across the city on Line 1, which stops every block or two. Such a notation would help the limited stop services — which really are useful for going all the way across the city — stand out more effectively.
The mapmaker has followed the transit agency's practice of marking only wheelchair-accessible stops on the surface streetcars such as N. In fact, these line stop every 2-3 blocks, so I would be inclined to mark all stops, maybe using a notation like that above. I'd also advocate separate maps highlighting issues that matter to disabled persons. (Has any transit authority published special maps or online map layers specifically for people in wheelchairs etc, as an alternative to including all this information on a main system map?)
I would also be inclined to emphasize that surface stops around a rapid transit station are indeed AT that station, so for example I would extend the Van Ness and Civic Center station bullets to encompass the adjacent bus stops rather than giving those stops separate coordinate names. This is especially important on schematic maps because the user is wary that a small space on the map might be a large distance.

But again, I can nitpick usefully only because it's a really great map!

spokane: a very clear network map

Posted on September 11, 2011 in Frequent Networks, Loops, Maps

Spokane Transit (Washington USA) has a new network map out that is one of the clearest I've ever seen. It carefully delineates not just frequent services from infrequent ones, but also presents cases where basic infrequent lines combine to form frequent segments, and ensures that peak commuter express services are visible but can't distract from the clear all-day pattern. The whole thing in its full glory is here: Download Spokane 2011 map. The legend, too, is both clear and wonkish at the same time.

Congrats to Spokane Transit for designing this map for the public.

Full disclosure: I was the lead planner on a restructuring study for Spokane Transit back around the turn of the century, and if I remember right, our project invented the continuous two-way frequent loop of Lines 33 and 44. (The loop is closed on the west side as Line 20, as shown on the full PDF.) Despite many excellent improvements (and some sad service cuts) since then, it's great to see it still operating.

This kind of two-way loop is often useful as a way to combine radial lines and grid elements into a single service. Line 33, for example, intersects Line s 24, 25, and 90 in a grid manner, one line north-south and the other east-west, allowing for a range of L-shaped trips via a connection at this point. However, Line 33 also flow through so that the same segments can also be experienced as radial; if you stay on the bus, you'll get downtown eventually, and to a lot of other useful destinations.

I sometimes caution against excessive attachment to loops. In some contexts, with far more financial resources, I might applaud the breaking up of this loop, as I did of London's Circle Line. Given the extreme financial pressure on US transit agencies, though, I would contend that Spokane's frequent loop was an efficient solution, maybe even an elegant one.

UPDATE: The next post on the Spokane map, looking at colorblindness issues and comparing the map to Portland's, is here.

what if route numbers signified service level?

Posted on August 15, 2011 in Frequent Networks, Legibility

From the new line numbering scheme (and service plan) in Allentown-Bethlehem, Pennsylvania:

All routes will be designated with a three-digit number which will provide an indication of the level of service
100’s routes act as the core routes – they will provide service Monday through Saturday throughout the day and into the evening. These routes will also operate on Sunday;
200’s routes provide service along key urban corridors Monday through Saturday during day hours;
300’s routes provide service on the more suburban corridors in the region and operate Monday through Friday during day hours;
400’s routes continue to act as special routes to provide added capacity to meet demand from Allentown School District students;
500’s routes are LANta Flex routes – new flexible, reservation based feeder services designed for more suburban areas; and
600’s routes are circulator and crosstown routes designed to address specific markets.

So the whole numbering system is about service quantity. Clearly, too, the higher numbers mean "don't less this distract you from the more versatile lower-numbered routes," which is exactly the principle of good frequency branding or a good network map such as Portland's (which distinguishes four tiers: light rail, frequent bus, infrequent bus, and peak-only).

Obviously, most agencies would resist the Allentown-style numbering because it means that if you change a service level you need to renumber the route. But if followed through, it would be a step toward branding a core network (presumably also the most frequent) with route numbers, yet another way for that most versatile network to be most visible to customers.

Personally I wouldn't recommend this if it were exclusively about service duration, as the summary states. I'd do it only if it were also about a frequency distinction, or at least an intended one. But it's interesting that while Frequent Networks are intended to be lasting top priorities of an agency, and usually represent permanent strong markets, no agency (in either North America or Australasia) has "locked in" the commitment to a Frequent Network by numbering the frequent lines differently.

How urbanist visionaries can muck up transit

Posted on July 16, 2011 in Advocacy, Architecture, Demand-Response, Frequent Networks, Los Angeles

Architects and urban visionaries play an incredibly important role in a leadership-hungry culture. They have to know a little bit about almost everything, which is hard to do. But for some reason, certain segments of the profession have decided that the basic math and geometry of transit isn't one of those things they need to know, even when they present themselves as transit experts.

To see what I mean, I encourage you to watch this short video from Gensler Architects in Los Angeles. It's a concise summary of all the crucial mistakes that you'll need to confront in much "visionary thinking" about transit. (If Gensler takes down the video, read on. I've inserted enough screenshots from it that you can follow.)

[NETWORK_LA transit from tam thien tran on Vimeo.]

The five most common "visionary" mistakes about transit, all on display in the video, are:

Disinterest in costs and efficiency. Visionaries do need to set aside cost and efficiency for part of their brainstorming phase, because by doing so they might come upon an idea that's efficient and affordable in a completely new way. But they don't have a coherent idea until they've brought those factors back in, at least at the level of order-of-magnitude reasonableness. Sadly, some urbanists scoff when I use the word efficiency, assuming that this means I've lost touch with human needs, aspirations, aesthetics and values. In reality, efficiency means how much of those good things you can have in a world of limited resources. Even in the arts, we speak often of the efficiency or economy with which an artist achieves an aesthetic effect. (The Gensler video, for example, is efficient in displaying all five of these fallacies in only five minutes.)

Fixation on transit technologies as though they were the essential distinction between different mobility outcomes. For more on this, see here.

Confusion about scale. In transit, if it doesn't scale, it doesn't matter. Because visionary thinking often focuses first on a prototype – a tiny example of the hoped-for transformation — it often goes too far without thinking about scalability. Sure, this cool idea works in one suburb or in one cool building, but that says very little about whether it would work in a whole city. Gensler's particular error about scale is …

Confusion about "flexibility," a dangerous slippery word. Gensler imagines that a demand-responsive style of transit, in which you make a request on your phone and the transit system somehow deviates to meet your personal needs, is scalable to a vast, dense city where the transit system is already very crowded much of the time. More on this below.

Ignorance about what's already working, leading to premature demolition fantasies. If you already hate buses, you won't have much interest in understanding why so many people use them. Like many urbanist visionaries, Gensler doesn't appreciate the very high ridership and efficiency of the existing transit system across the core of Los Angeles. This allows them to jump to the conclusion that the system should be replaced instead of incrementally improved. (Tip: Prematurely dismissing the relevance of something that so many people clearly find useful is an excellent way to sound elitist, regardless of the nobility of your intentions.)

So watch the Gensler video if you can, but you can also follow along via my screenshots and comments below. You'll see these mistakes again and again in the urban visioning business.

0:27 Gensler states the question as "Get LA on transit HOW?" No argument with the question.

0:51 Transit is divided into a set of vehicle types, and these types (light rail, metro, bus) are confused with "methods" of transport. For more on the absurdity of treating bus/rail distinctions as primary, see here.

0:53 "We have only these methods. What if we added more?" An interesting question to which transit experts (and economists, and engineers) have a very good answer. The more competing systems you establish in the same market trying to do the same thing, the less well any of them will function, and the less investment any one of them will justify.

0:56 They now begin to analyze vehicles in terms of distance, sustainability, flexibility. What's missing? Cost! Efficiency! Some things are just wildly expensive relative to what they deliver. Darrin Nordahl has already been down this path, evaluating technologies by discussing only their supposed benefits. That's not evaluation, it's either aesthetic rumination or marketing. (Neither of those are bad things, but they have to be identified as what they are.)

1:20. They talk about distances but their graphic is talking about speeds. These are fair for personal modes but absurd generalizations for the transit modes. When your notion of "rail" conflates light rail, heavy metro rail subways, and 70 mile-long infrequent commuter rail, the word "rail" means nothing relevant about speed or travel distance, or any other transit outcome apart from capacity. (Note that the earlier claim "we have only these methods" implies that these three kinds of rail are the same thing in every way that matters.)

Likewise, if you think buses have an ideal distance, you're unclear on the role of local buses vs Bus Rapid Transit vs long-haul expresses, all of which are very successful in Los Angeles. Gensler imposes a "technology first" frame on the data, thereby concealing almost everything that matters about how transit gets people where they're going.

In transit, the real speed distinctions within transit are usually not direct results of technology. Speed is the result of how often you stop and what can get in your way. See here.

2:00. Staggering incoherence in comparing input (bus service) to an unrelated output (total ridership including rail). What's more, the numbers are misleading. Per the 2011 APTA Fact Book, Los Angeles MTA has America's 3rd highest total boardings and 2nd highest total bus boardings. In the context of its starved resources and the vagueness of public support for it, the Los Angeles bus system is working brilliantly.

2:26. Here is Gensler's biggest mistake:

Which of these two networks would you rather travel on?

Gensler has mistaken metaphor for logic. They think that "liberating" bus routes has something to do with liberating or enabling people. The idea is barely explained and totally incoherent.

Today, in our supposedly "inflexible" system, you'll find a bus going down a major boulevard with maybe 60 people on it. Some of them want to go somewhere straight ahead, some want to go to somewhere ahead and to the left, some want to to somewhere ahead and to the right. Fortunately, they are in a high frequency grid system, which will take all of them to their destination, either directly or via a connection to a north-south line, probably by a path similar to what they'd have followed if driving. So this huge number of diverse people making diverse trips are all moving toward their destinations on a reasonably direct path. This is the extraordinary power of the high-frequency grid. So instead, Gensler proposes bus lines should twist and turn just because somebody with an iPhone wants them to?

Personal technology has great opportunity to better inform us about all transit services, and it can transform the convenience of transit at low-demand places and times, by influencing the operations of low-ridership, low-capacity services, such as demand-responsive buses and taxis.

Quite possibly, personal apps will allow demand-responsive service to replace some low-demand fixed-route buses, which is fine with most transit planners. Those low-ridership buses run mostly for social-service or "equity" reasons, and if there's a more efficient way to do that, I expect many transit experts would be all for it. It would let them concentrate on the high-ridership, high-capacity services that can achieve a great deal of personal mobility and sustainability, very efficiently.

Successful high-capacity frequent transit needs to take on more of the rigidity of subways, in order to spread the benefits of subways (which we can't afford everywhere) more widely. That means it needs to be even more frequent, reliable, legible, permanent, and reinforced with infrastructure investment. Fortunately, within limited resources, many transit agencies are now trying to do that.

The video is full of entirely laudable and familiar green ideas, but then we get to this …

3:23 In Gensler's Los Angeles, every transit trip must be reserved. Do you really want to have to make an appointment with a single vehicle and driver, because that's the only way to make any use of all the buses swarming around you on unpredictable paths? Or might you prefer a simple frequent transit corridor where so many buses are coming all the time, in such a predictable pattern, that you can take any of them, and are thus almost guaranteed a vehicle soon even if one breaks down?

4:20 "What if we had PERSONAL service?" they ask? Well, the extreme of personal service would be low-ridership system in a tiny town, where the driver has time to learn everyone's name. Is that what Los Angeles wants to be? Or would you rather live in a city where you can get anywhere you want to go easily, starting right now, without making a reservation, and even with the option of spontaneously changing your path or destination, just like motorists do?

To me as someone who values my personal freedom, flexibility, spontaneity, human dignity, and travel time, Gensler's Los Angeles would be a hell-world worse than Blade Runner. Fortunately, it's also mathematically impossible.

We've blown up transit networks before, of course, and Gensler's vision should remind us of what was thought about cars vs. transit in the 1940s. Like personal technology today, cars were just so wonderful for the individual that we just assumed the world could be made in their image. (The technical term for this idea — that the world will bend to reflect my emotional needs and enthusiasms — is narcissism.) So we made a deep investment in a car-and-highway technology that could not possibly scale to big cities. Gensler proposes the same mistake: Because our iPhones are so cool, they assume that the city, at every scale, can be reinvented around them.

For a more positive vision of the future of Los Angeles, one that begins by noticing the city's strengths and looking at how to build on them, see here and especially toward the end of an interview here.

Network Design for High Ridership, a Small Dense City Example

Posted on July 11, 2011 in Basics, Frequent Networks, Halifax, Urban Structure

How do transit network designers go about their task? Surprisingly little has been written about this. You can pick up books that appear to cover the “network planning” or “network redesign” process and find examples of good and bad networks but rarely a description of how to do the design thinking itself. Continue Reading →

grids and the short diagonal (comment of the week)

Posted on July 7, 2011 in Frequent Networks, Urban Structure

Eric identifies an important issue for high-frequency grids, like those of Vancouver, Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland's eastside, etc … The short diagonal trip may be not much faster than walking. Here's how he describes it, complete with clever 1980s-style computer graphics:

When discussing grids, it is important to think about trips like the following:
Start
|
| (1/4 mile)
|
|********(1 mile)************
A—————————-B
*****************************|
*****************************|
*****************************| (1 mile)
*****************************|
*****************************|
*****************************|
*****************************|
*****************************C—–Finish
*****************************(1/4 mile)***
(please ignore the '*' – they exist only to make the vertical lines go in the proper place).
The grid's approach to this trip would be to walk to A, then take a bus to B, then take another bus to C, then walk to the end. However, since each bus segment is so short, even with frequent service, the waiting time still becomes a huge deal.
For example, if we assume that the buses each run every 15 minutes the expected travel time might look something like this:
Time =
5 minutes (walk to A)
+ (0-15) minutes (wait)
+ (5-10) minutes (ride bus to B)
+ (0-15) minutes (wait)
+ (5-10) minutes (ride bus C)
+ 5 minutes (walk to destination)
= (20-60) minutes
The average 40 minute travel time is just 3.75 miles per hour, equivalent to a brisk walk, while the worst-case travel time is a mere 2.5 miles per hour, equivalent to a slow walk.
With the slow speeds and huge travel-time uncertainty in the above calculations, before you even consider the possibility of bunching leading to 20-30 minute waits, if the goal is simply to get to the destination quickly and reliably, transit can't even compete with walking, let along with driving.
This relegates the use of transit for these trips to people can't walk or bike and also can't afford to drive or spend $10 on a taxi ride.
Trips like these are not edge cases. I make trips like this quite frequently. Usually, I end up either biking or jogging the entire way or walking half way and taking a one-seat ride for the other half.
My personal opinion is not that the poor handling of such trips is a failure of transit, but rather that there are certain types of trips that transit is optimized for and short L-shaped trips isn't one of them. Short L-shaped trips are simply better accomplished by some other means, such as walking, jogging, skateboarding, bicycling, or even riding a taxi, while longer trips, especially trips in a straight line, allow transit to work more efficiently.
If anybody else has opinions on the matter, I look forward to hearing them!

Eric's point connects to a bunch of intersting issues:

What other solution is there? Look at the overall mobility outcome from straight, fast, frequent lines in a grid pattern, and ask: OK, yes, this is not so convenient for the short diagonal, but what exactly can or should we do about that? In some cities, notably Los Angeles, you'll often find little circulators that serve some of these diagonals where there is a specific market for them, such as a link between two key local activity centers. But these are always going to be specialized because they are so much less efficient than the main grid lines.
Note how much this outcome depends on the overall quality of the straight grid lines. Eric assumes they're pretty poor. In fact, the diagonal grid trip usually has a choice of two L-shaped paths ("over and down", or "down and over") so there's an opportunity to choose the better of these two, which will the the one that uses more frequent or faster services.
Eric's assumptions are for a standard local-stop grid. Frequencies are assumed to be never better than 15 minutes, and travel speed, for example, is 5-10 min to go a mile, an average speed of only 6-12 mi/hr. Some urban lines are down in this range, but such performance should be considered a problem in urgent need of attention. Stop spacing and a range of minor infrastructure can have large impacts, and will yield benefits that are much greater than you'll get by dissipating your service over countless little diagonal shuttles. So there's much that can be done to improve the short-diagonal problem simply by focusing improvements on the grid lines.

In short, I agree with Eric's conclusion. Because I tend to live in urban places where most of my trips are short, I encounter the short diagonal problem all the time. It's a drag, but I deal with it because I'm pretty sure that it's geometrically impossible to "solve," except by undermining far larger benefits of a network that serves the whole city, and that moves fast enough to compete with cars, not with walking.

reims: the “strong lines” of the “bus-tram network”

Posted on June 29, 2011 in Branding, Frequent Networks, Halifax, Marketing

The opening of a new tram (streetcar) line is usually the occasion for lots of hype and celebration about trams. But Reims, France is using the opening day of a new tram to pitch a newly integrated network, the "Réseau Bus-Tram." The term clearly invites us to stop thinking of buses and trams as separate things, and forming attachments to one or the other.

Their description of it in their timetables [PDF] shows a focus on promoting a network of main lines (Lignes fortes), which consist of two tram lines and five bus lines, all very frequent and designed to complement each other. The name lignes fortes suggests not just main lines but also (more literally) strong lines, strong enough to be the structure that supports all the other transit lines in the city.

(Just home from Halifax. More on that soon, though come to think of it, this post is about Halifax too, and about a lot of other cities …)

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