From Jeffrey Bridgman:
Google maps is showing me my freedom to stay a bit more and chat now.
It says that this route runs every 15 minutes from 5am to 11:30pm, which means if I get talking with someone, I don't care that I'm missing the 8:27pm bus since there'll be another one in about 15 minutes. That's a great improvement from the "Catch the next bus at 8:27" directions it used to tell you.
If you're hiding with your laptop in the laundry closet because an ancient family argument has broken out over holiday dinner, it's a great time to geek out on how fast mapping is changing. Go over to Atlantic Cities and explore Emily Badger's great overview of 10 ways that mapping has evolved over the past year.
My favorite: I usually try to be race-blind in my thinking about transit and cities, but I have to admit I was absorbed by Duncan Cable's Dot Map of Everyone in the US, which is color coded by ethnicity. Not really everyone: You can't zoom in to find your personal dot, but it's still a magnificent rendering of how dot-crowding conveys density on a map more naturally than shaded zones. Chicago, for example, displays pie-slices of single-ethnicity neighborhoods (blue is white, red is Asian, green is African-American, orange is Latino/Hispanic), but you can also see where the borders are soft, where they're hard, and where highly mixed areas exist or are emerging:
Houston, where I'm working now, is also made of pie slices, but the colors are more muted, indicating more mixture almost everywhere. Near the center of this image, the greater Montrose and Heights districts are rainbow pointillism. The Asian node in the south is student areas near Texas Medical Center.
And my home town, Portland, with downtown on the far left (as it is), showing the new concentric-circle pattern, as lower income minorities (because of income, rather than race) are forced to settle on the fringes of the old city (top edge and far right) or what we'd now call "inner ring suburbs." The bike-and-transit-friendly city you've seen pictures of is mostly white with small dashes of color. The exception is downtown, which still has a mix of housing types tending to both income extremes, and the continuing black presence in the neighborhoods straight north of downtown even as these gentrify. (As a small child in 1970 I remember seeing a cover of the local free weekly that showed a hand drawn line around this district with the title "Red-lining the Ghetto," about the impossibility of getting loans to buy or improve homes in that area. Now, it's on fire with higher-end redevelopment.)
Of course these are also fascinating simply as density maps. Did you know that Oregon cities have had Urban Growth Boundaries since 1972? The hard edges show around many Oregon cities … Here's the north edge of Portland's western suburbs (the "Silicon Forest"):
For contrast, here's a same-scale image of the north edge of Clark County suburbs, just over the river in Washington:
Washington loses farmland to development much more rapidly than Oregon does. It makes a difference.
In the end, what I love most about these maps is that they're beautiful. As in art, patches of a bright color are beautiful, but so are intense mixtures of color. So I look at these maps and feel good about both single-ethnic communities and mixed-ethnic communities, and my eye enjoys the patterns of density, hard edges here, soft there, even more. These maps take an emotive kind of diversity and render it as serene. The perfect geek-out for serene holidays.
In some agencies, it goes without saying that transit maps should be geographically accurate. Many agencies follow San Francisco Muni in superimposing transit lines on a detailed map of the city:
But research out of MIT suggests that we really need to see network structure, and that requires a degree of abstraction:
By putting alternate versions of the New York and Boston subway maps through the computer model, the researchers showed that abstract versions of the maps (as opposed to geographically accurate versions) were more likely to be easily understood in a single, passing glance.
Here's their example:
Geographical accuracy obscures network structure. Purely geographic maps show where service is but not how it works.
This is why a number of best practice agencies publish both kinds of maps, sometimes even presenting them side by side. The geographic map helps you locate yourself and points of interest in the city, but you need the structure map to understand how the system works.
All this is even more urgently true for bus network maps, where complexity can be crushing to the user. When we streamline maps to highlight key distinctions of usefulness such as frequency, we often have to compromise on geographic detail. Obviously the best maps fuse elements of the two, but you can always find the tradeoff in action. The new Washington DC transit maps, for example, highlight frequency (and show all operators' services together) but there's a limit to the number of points of interst you can highlight when keeping the structure clear:
One-way splits — where the two directions of travel are on different streets — are often the scourge of transit: on the map, for example, they appear to cover more area than two way service, but actually serve less. And they certainly make transit maps confusing:
Still, they're frequently mandated by one-way traffic couplets. Those, in turn, are usually mandated by the goal of flushing traffic through a city, though there are cases, notably Portland, where one-way couplets are perfect for creating an intimate and walkable downtown.
Transit agencies may not be able to avoid one-way couplets, but they can control how they describe them and think about them. WMATA (and its map designer, CHK America, have made a major step in their new network map. We covered the development of this mpa previously. Here's what it looks like today:
Red represents the most frequent bus lines, blue the infrequent ones, and black the DC Metro system. Other colors are used to depict services of other transit agencies. This basic, clear symbolization quickly communicates the relative importance and usefulness of each type of service.
Marc Szarkowski, who contributed his own frequent network map of Baltimore to the blog last week, asks: how do we show a single route that runs as a two-way couplet on separate streets, without introducing too much clutter or confusion?
Marc writes:
I think they can work if presented effectively, but overall I often find them confusing, especially if I'm taking an unfamiliar route to an unfamiliar area (all the more you have to remember, particularly if you take multiple such routes). For example, whenever I ride a bus to an unfamiliar area, I tend to assume that the stop I get off at in one direction is just as good for boarding in the other direction. It's frustrating to return to the stop just to discover that you have to walk a block over (or sometimes more: see the 10 in West Baltimore!) to catch the same route in the other direction.
WMATA's map uses one line to show both branches of route, and labels either side with the couplet streets. This effectively reduces the amount of clutter on the map, but also excludes which direction the bus travels on each street. This information is less crucial in the case of the B2 shown left, where no other routes travel on the same pair of streets, but where multiple routes use the same streets, in different patters towards different destinations, combining paired one-way streets can become very confusing. Marc's map does not employ this method of simplification for the same reason:
In Baltimore's case multiple overlapping routes were sometimes offset across a series of three or more one-way streets; i.e. Route 1 up on street A and down on B, Route 2 down on B and up on C, Route 3 up on C and down on D, and so on
Ultimately, desiging this type of a map is about balancing information density and comprehensibility. The user needs to know that line B2 runs on both 14th and 15th streets, but for a map at citywide scale, it may be more important to communicate that B2 is a frequent line serving a long, straight corridor on the eastern side of the city. The map already distorts direction and the exact shape of the streets in favor of a simpler visual effect. WMATA's map uses the same approach to one-way street pairs, downplaying accuracy in favor of ease of use.
Another unofficial frequent network map, this time via Human Transit reader and Envision Baltimore contributer Marc Szarkowski:
You can see the full size version here. This map uses color to differentiate between linear and loop routes, and line weight to denote frequency. Compare this to MTA's current system map, showing the same part of the city:
MTA's map uses a variety of colors to depict individual routes, but without assigning them significant qualities (though green and blue appear to be reserved for different kinds of commuter expresses). The seemingly arbitrary assignment of colors to local routes creates a cluttered, confusing visual effect, and obscures the quality of service provided by each route.
On the other hand, Marc's map distinguishes which routes on which roads provide which level of service, using a simple 5-color scheme differentiating linear and circulator routes, rail, rapid bus, and ferries. Frequent service is clear as a dark wide line, with its color indicating technology. This visualization is very information-rich, offers a clear improvement to the MTA map in its utility as a description of the service available to MTA riders.The image below is a snapshot of the legend from this map:
Marc writes:
The radial nature of the network is also why I decided to group services into a limited color palette, like the WMATA map. Originally I intended to assign each route its own color, as in the Leeds or Portland maps, but so many routes crowded together in so many areas as they headed downtown that it was difficult to fit the whole "spectrum" on certain streets/corridors. (I think this is why even the MTA regional map, which does use a wider color range, still has to resort to using a single line for all buses in central Balto.) If the network was more emphatically organized on a grid, as you advocate, assigning individual route colors would be a lot easier since the map wouldn't have to display as many redundancies.
In the image at left, for example, the visual prominence of the blue lines for Route 5 clearly communicate its higher level of service, compared to Route 91 several blocks north. The directional arrows attached to the route labels are also a nice, unobtrusive touch; transit maps can often become unecessarily cluttered with these symbols, particularly in systems with many looping routes. Marc's map does a nice job of providing this necessary information at a relatively low level in the visual hierarchy.
Intelligently designed maps like this one show opportunities for connection, and the relative importance and usefulness of the system's transit routes These maps work by exposing the degree of freedom of mobility available to a transit rider.
There seems to be no end to the uses creative people can find for NextBus feeds. This from Bostonography:
This map shows point-to-point speeds for MBTA buses across the Boston area. Like a stoplight, red lines are the slowest, green are the fastest. While the content of the map is unsurprising (freeways and tunnels make up the fastest segments, downtown streets and major intersections the slowest), this type of visualization is valuable because it takes the seemingly mundane function of a complex transit system and transforms it into a beautiful, comprehensible piece of art.
When we talk about beauty in transit, its easy to get stuck on the characteristics of the vehicles themselves: that shiny streetcar, or the sexy new buses for a branded express service. Properly displayed by someone with a sophisticated design sensibility, the mobility and access that a transit system can provide comes into focus as a dense latticework of possible trips. Local bus service might seem mundane when seen on the street, but visualized in terms of its utility as a system enabling people to get where they are going, it can be be a thing of beauty.
Many transit agencies subscribe to the idea of "Open Data", publishing bundles of information on the system. These feeds contain data on stops, routes, arrival times, fare information, headways, and other pieces of useful data. Even more interestingly, these feeds often have buried within them the ability to access vehicle GPS data, which provides the ability to find out where a transit agency's vehicles are in near-realtime (limited by the speed at which these location queries can be returned).
Developers have long used feeds published by transit agencies for trip planning applications, which are useful in the extent that they can tell you when you need to be at your stop to get to your destination. However, this information source has always contained within it the potential for much more emancipatory uses. Recall Nate Wessel's guest post here on the shortfalls of Google Transit.
Recently, an innovative new use of this technology has begun to be deployed. In Portland, Seattle, London, San Francisco, and perhaps elsewhere, developers have taken the data provided by transit agencies and done something revolutionary: drawn maps of where all the transit vehicles are at any time.
Obviously the image above is a still from a map whose utility depends upon its continual movement- I encourage you to visit the site to see for yourself. A consistent symbology seems to be emerging, where two colors represent inbound and outbound service – in this case red is going out, and blue in – with separate colors representing the different technologies present on the map.
Browniefed over at github explains how this all works:
Buses are using short wave radios to transmit there position. They currently send updates every 30 seconds, and TriMet sees the update about 3 seconds later. Each bus gets a turn sending it's position and works like a tolken ring network. Previously it took 90 – 130 seconds and if a bus missed it's turn then it would be double that time (meaning for 1-5 minutes they would not know the position of a bus)
Buses do not actually send GPS coordinates back, what they do send is distance traveled along their trip. They do use GPS but primarily they are using the odometer for tracking position. There is also a door sensor, to verify that a bus is at a stop. There are all sorts of calibration issues with the odometer and drivers have reported that the vehicle is not updating its schedule adherence until the door opens.
So this is cool, but is it useful? How does having access to the realtime position data improve the user relationship with the transit system? These maps don't give any indication of how soon a bus is coming, or how long you will have to wait for it. They don't tell you where the bus is going, beyond showing the position of the next bus up the line. Of course there is no way to determine the time interval between your stop and the position of the bus icon. As a trip planning tool, live bus maps are next to useless.
However, as a method of communicating the shape of the entire network, live bus mapping does something very interesting. It translates frequency into a very simple unit- number of buses. A map reader can see very easily which parts of the city have a lot of buses, and which have few; which places have overlapping services or an interlocking grid, and which are provided only infrequent lifeline routes. Perhaps this technology could someday be integrated or displayed alongside isochrone visualizations as part of a map of the freedom of mobility afforded by a system, but to my eyes, for the moment this is a very technically accomplished curiosity.
Google Maps is slowly unveiling a major update (sign up here), including an upgrade to the transit function of the map. There's been plenty to criticize in the existing trip planner Google has offered for years, which Nate Wessel's guest post here in April summed up well. In short, trip planners tell you how to get from an origin to a destination, but they don't do much to reveal the broad scope of your transit mobility in a city.
I haven't yet had the chance to test the update myself, but it looks as though Google is at least moving in the right direction. Ask the new Google Maps for transit directions, and rather then routing a hypothetical "shortest trip" which often relies on impractical connections between low-frequency services, you'll get several alternatives based on the best frequency over the longest span of service. It also (finally) accounts for lines whose paths duplicate service over a section of a trip. Not only are the alternatives put on the map, but there are some clever trip visualizations, too.
What's more, Google is also starting to understand the utility of giving users access to the universe of possible trips from a single origin. The screenshot below shows two lines available from a station in London, but its worth noting that plenty of other lines are also visible.
Bruce over at Seattle Transit Blog has a smart take on this:
Guidebook routing more closely reflects the way the vast majority of people actually use transit, prioritizing frequency and span of service on generally-useful routes over infrequent one-seat rides that just happen to provide doorstep service. Its works best, of course, in transit systems full of truly high-frequency, reliable all-day routes, but to the extent that we have such service here, the same ideas apply.
Google Maps is one of the most important methods people use to learn how to make trips using transit. To date, it has offered a bare-bones trip planner which might be somewhat useful in making an individual trip, but with very little information about the system beyond what its algorithms (sometimes seemingly arbitrarily) determine is the best way to get somewhere. While this isn't quite the automatically generated frequent network map I called for here, Google is finally incorporating frequency as a critical part of travel directions.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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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.