Inspired by my post on the urgent need for frequency mapping, Vancouver’s transit agency TransLink, via its blog The Buzzer, has been encouraging map enthusiasts to draw their own ideas for what a frequency-coded map might look like.
The most nuanced so far is this one by David M. He’s sketched a bit of southern Vancouver and Richmond as an example. Look at the original and note all the distinctions he’s tried to draw. Continue Reading →
Eric Fischer wondered how fast San Francisco’s transit system really was, so he asked the transit agency’s realtime data feed, and drew a picture of the answer:
As several commenters have mentioned lately, Boston’s transit agency recently published a new network overview map, part of an overhaul of the information system. The new map is similar in function to a subway network map but with some key bus lines added. Here’s a slice, but you can get the whole thing, in much better resolution, here.
Most large transit agencies with extensive rail transit publish a map of just the rail transit services. These tend to be the fastest, most frequent, and highest-capacity services in the network, so it makes sense that if you zoom out to a full-system overview, these are what you should see. Continue Reading →
At the Urbanophile today, a fantasy transit map of Columbus, Ohio by Michael Tyznik. This fuzzy image will show you the general shape: For the very detailed map, click here.
Most large transit agencies have a map that shows just their rapid transit services, which are usually rail. One good test of how an agency thinks about bus rapid transit is whether they include it on their rapid transit maps. Los Angeles County MTA’s rapid transit map, here, does include the Orange Line, which is exclusive right of way but is hampered by signal delays. But they don’t show their non-exclusive Metro Rapid product at this scale, which makes sense to me. Continue Reading →
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:
If you know San Francisco at all, take a look at Steve Boland’s new map of its high-frequency “main lines.” It’s quite deservedly copyrighted, so I’ve shown just a taste of it here.
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.)