General

David Marlor writes:

Thought you’d like to see this.

http://www.edmonton.ca/transportation/ets/transit_news/ets-december-24-and-27-service.aspx

Every year, Edmonton Transit reduces costs by reducing service during the Christmas holiday season. I’ve no problem with that, but the way it is done is totally user-unfriendly. When you look through that list of changes you quickly realize you have no easy way of knowing when buses are running and if the connections work. Yes, you can use the trip planner, but this kind of thing just defeats the idea of an easy to use network. My eyes glaze over and I think I’d just say “forget it, I’ll drive”.

Personally, I think Edmonton is too surgical with the reductions at the expense of losing the ease of understanding the network. I’m not sure it’s even worth it.

Edmonton Transit certainly has made it complicated, but I respect the imperative behind it.  Transit operators are under such constant cost-cutting pressure that they often can't justify running regular schedules on unusual holidays where when demand is higher than a typical weekend day but lower than a full weekday.

Most of the approaches to network planning that I recommend are based on the notion that we need to make networks simpler.  Part of that is grouping services into brands of similar usefulness (based on distinctions such as rapid vs. local, peak-only vs all-day, frequent vs not).  Doing this, however, requires that a transit agency give up some of its ability to micro-adjust service to its perception of demand.  For example, if we specify that the Frequent Network as a whole must be frequent until 9 PM, a few lines that we've included in that category may have to have their evening frequency expanded evne though their ridership then doesn't seem to justify it.  That's right: we spend a little and in return we get a network and schedule that we can describe succinctly, and that our customers can remember.

The same principle should ideally apply to these unusual days, though I respect that it's hard to get there.  But this kind of standardization, and the clarity that results, are an important frontier for transit if we're going to substantially increase its usefulness, and make people who value freedom choose to rely on it. 

Two housekeeping items:

• My request for illustrators and mapmakers for my current book project got a good response, but I suspect there's room for one or two more.  See the original post for terms and conditions.
• I recently sent a brief survey to North American professionals in transit planning/marketing and urbanism who read Human Transit regularly.  If you are in that category but didn't receive the survey and would like to respond, please email me and I'll send you one.  Use the email button under my photo.  —>

Human Transit welcomes guest posts. Guest posts are usually from people who are very familiar with this blog and/or have some proven expertise in the area to be discussed.   Explore the Guest Post category to see examples of others that have been accepted.  

This blog assumes readers have decent critical thinking skills.  They don’t need happy talk or vagueness; they need information and clear argument that explores real issues and trade-offs.  Continue Reading →

Recently I posted on the importance of frequency mapping in network maps.  Most transit network maps, I argued, show all the transit lines but make it impossible to sort through them to figure out, quickly, which are likely to be useful.  The bottom line:  A map that makes all the lines look equally important is as useful as a road map that makes a freeway look just like a dirt road. Continue Reading →

If you want a vivid map of what our friends in Christchurch, New Zealand have been going through, here’s a simple animation of the size, location, and intensity of the ongoing series of earthquakes.  It comes by way of friends at NZ in Tranzit, who are also on top of the local transit news.

Yikes. 

Quite a bit of damage in the historic urban core.  7.1 was about the magnitude that caused my 1989 near-death experience in Stanford’s Memorial Church, so I can only imagine what it must have been like in Christchurch’s many historic buildings, such as the Art Centre (pictured here in 2005).

HT has a number of readers in Christchurch, including Dave Welch who writes NZ in Tranzit blog, and who may now be regretting his recent over-reliance on earthquake metaphors.

It’s a beautiful city.  If you’ve never been there, you should visit.  But probably not today.

Hope everyone’s OK, and bravo to everyone’s who’s keeping the city functioning during the emergency.

… where your job is to give two inspiring presentations to a large group of bus operations and scheduling managers.  You want to help them feel that the fairly mundane work that many of them do is important for the future of the world.  What do you tell them?

Re the argument “I need cheap parking in the city because I have to have my car for my job.”

If my job required me to have a personal elephant, I wouldn’t think it
reasonable to keep it in the city and park it on the street at night.

— Commenter Anonymouse.

Sometimes automated customer service is so bad that it becomes a kind of modern art.  Today, arriving at Paris’s Gare de l’Est to pick up my pre-booked electronic TGV ticket, I discovered that the machines for this purpose didn’t like my credit card, so I was told there was no choice but to wait in the general ticketing queue of the SNCF (the French national railway), which took about an hour.

The queue gave me plenty of time to study the row of ticket windows, mostly unstaffed, and the convenient electronic signs above each one.  As often happens at airports, these signs were mostly saying irrelevant things.  One sign, for example, specified international sales, and another domestic sales, even though we were clearly all in one queue and they were just taking whoever was next.  The faux-order conveyed by these signs is harmless enough, as long as nobody takes them seriously. Continue Reading →