Maps

seattle reveals its frequent network

Posted on November 22, 2012 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Seattle

Bravo to Seattle's King County Metro for their new system maps, which finally reveal their Frequent Network. All can be viewed and downloaded here.

The wide blue line is light rail and the red lines are the new Rapid Bus product (both frequent and relatively fast). The rest of the bus network is clearly presented in ways that advertise its frequency and span, so that (a) the Frequent Network jumps out at you and (b) services that run only at rush hour recede from attention so that you can clearly see the network that runs all day. They do this by using black (numbers and lines ) for the Frequent Network, then solid blue for the other all-day service, then paler blue with blue-outlined white number bullets for the peak-only services.

Works for me. What do you think? If your transit agency hasn't figured out Frequent Network mapping yet, show them this map, and tell them to read Chapter 7 of my book, or this!

melbourne: updated frequent network map reveals grid gaps

Posted on November 21, 2012 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Melbourne

Here's a new Frequent Network Map for Melbourne, by Campbell Wright, showing where you can get around easily all day if you aren't willing to wait long for public transport. Download and explore it here:
PNG. The image below is obviously illegible but the zoomed-out look shows us important things.

What I notice:

1. The inner north of Melbourne, immediate north of the CBD, should be a public transport paradise. It's historic, very dense and has a grid street pattern for easy walking to transit. It has frequent north-south trams on all the major streets, but it lacks the frequent crosstown services that would make a complete east-west grid for everywhere-to-everywhere travel. The routes are there, as you can see here and here , but except for the one Mr Wright draws, none are frequent enough to make adequate connections, so their role is largely symbolic. This is probably because there are too many overlapping infrequent routes, and they need to be considated into fewer stronger routes.

2. The inner east and inner north grids are poorly stitched together. There are frequent crosstown routes in both but it's hard to get from one grid to the other, except by coming almost downtown, to Hoddle Street, or going way out, to Bulleen where the blue 903 crosses.

3. Melbourne has lavished great attention for years on the four orbital Smarbuses, inverted U-shaped routes that are obvious as north-south bands across the far right of the map. What Melbourne really needed was a high-frequency grid, with crosstown (perpendicular to radial) lines concentrated in areas of high demand so that you could go from everywhere to everywhere with a simple L-shaped trip. The Smartbuses oversimplified the grid concept by insisting, for no reason I can discern and at great cost, that these services all had to be complete U shapes wrapped all the way around the city. regardless of the markets through which they pass.

You can see the effect. Parts of Melbourne that could support high frequency crosstown service, like the inner north, or the Port Melbourne-St Kilda corridor, don't have much of it, while a fortune is spent on a vast outermost U (the grey line) which creates no grid effect because it lies far beyond the end of most frequent radials. It's also far, far to long to be operated reliably, as are many of the Smarbuses. The reliability can be assured only by inserting substantial break time along the way for schedule recovery, which would mean that they don't really flow continuously in the way that the route number and brand would suggest.

4. Only with a Frequent Network map like Mr. Wright's can you see Melbourne's network in a way that would help you understand it as an instrument of freedom, something that you might use for many purposes as part of am empowered life. While the State of Victoria has recently taken over public transport information, their published maps still make it very hard to see the network this way. If you arrive at the website wanting to see a real map of your transit system, and you figure out that you need to click Maps / Metropolitan Maps, you're asked to choose between train, tram, and bus. Again, the assumption is that you must be looking for a particular transit technology, and that nobody would ever be interested in simply understanding how all public transport — with the technologies working together to form a network — might be useful their lives.

What's more, maps of local buses are chopped up by Local Government Area, arbitrary boundaries that slice up the map in ways that further conceal patterns of usefulness. And of course, there is no Frequent Network map, like you'll find in Brisbane, and like Mr Wright as sketched above, to help you figure out which services are coming soon and which require you to build your life around them.

So if you know how to get around Melbourne freely and easily all day, bookmark Mr Wright's map. For now, it's one of Melbourne's most important bits of public transport info.

the need for maps of your freedom

Posted on November 19, 2012 in Access, Maps, Mobility, Modeling

Remember this map?

I used it in the earliest days of this blog, and it's in almost every presentation I do. It's from a tool that allows you to select a location in a city and see blobs (technically isochrones) showing the area you can get to in a fixed amount of time using transit plus walking. This one is for 9:00 am and the three shades of blue represent travel times of 15, 30, or 45 minutes. In essence, the software takes the point you select and runs the equivalent of Google Transit trip planning searches to find a points where the travel time crosses the threshold; these become the boundaries of the blobs. (For details behind this crude summary, see Aaron Antrim's comment on this post.)

I call this a map of your freedom. It's useful for two potentially transformative purposes:

Helping people and organizations understand the transit consequences of where they choose to locate, and thus to take more responsbility for those consequences. This, over time, can help people who value good transit to locate where transit access is good — something that's very hard to discern from a typical bus map but that becomes very obvious here. You can even assess access to specific things that you value, based on exactly where the blobs are.
Helping people visualise the benefit of transit — access to your city — as a freedom, and thus to understand more clearly what transit does for them. It broadens the narrow notion of travel time – which is often understood for only one typical trip — into a picture of your possibilities as a transit rider. The percentage of a city's resources (jobs, housing, retail etc) that is in the blobs for a particular location could also form the basis for a meaningful Transit Score that could replace the technologically biased scores now used by WalkScore.com.

The original tool is a beta buried deep in WalkScore's archives. It's basic and very, very slow.

The other main alternative is mapnificent.net, by Stefan Wehrmeyer. Available for many cities, Mapnificent.net looks good …

… except that it contains two fatal assumptions:

Initial wait time is excluded.
Some timing of transfers is assumed, based on the author's experiences in Europe. So he uses an average transfer wait time of 1/3 of the headway instead of 1/2 of the headway, which would be appropriate for random transfers.

Here's the problem. Both assumptions mean that Mapnificent's assumptions undervalue frequency and overvalue vehicle speed. Since this conceptual bias is already very, very common (see Chapter 3 of my book), Mapnificent is seriously misleading in a way that can be really unhelpful. For cities that I know, especially area with lower frequency service, Mapnificent wildly overstates the convenience of transit, and fails to show how locating on frequent service will get you better access to the city.

In my network design course we talk about this. When figuring travel times in the course, I insist on using 1/2 of the headway as the intial wait time and the same as the transfer time (unless there's a pulse) so that frequencies weigh heavily into true travel times, as they do in life. This sometimes sounds silly: If a route runs once an hour does that really mean I wait an average of 30 minutes? Or do I just build my life around the schedule? I view the two as the same thing, really. We're not describing literal waiting so much as time when you're in the wrong place. We're describing the difference between when you need to arrive and when you can actually arrive. This could take the form of arriving at work 29 minutes earlier than your shift starts — consistently, every day. Effectively, you end up waiting at your destination.

So there are a range of judgment calls to be made in designing these things, but it's worth getting it right because the potential utility of this tool is so significant. The good news: I'm involved with people who are working on something better. Stay tuned!

washington dc: new network maps, with frequency!

Posted on September 19, 2012 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Washington DC

The Washington DC transit agency WMATA has now released drafts of its new network map, which highlight the frequent network very dramatically with wide red lines:

Finally, it's possible to quickly see where the next bus is coming soon, rather than getting lost in a confusing tangle in which all routes look equally important. The map is by the excellent firm CHK America. Get the full story, with many more samples, at Greater Greater Washington, and remember, if you like these, don't take it for granted. Transit agencies need to hear positive feedback where it's deserved.

adelaide: a frequent network diagram, but only if you’re going downtown

Posted on August 29, 2012 in Adelaide, Frequent Networks, Maps

Monday (in Australia) I shared a new frequent network diagram for Sydney, done not by the government but by a community transport organisation. In Adelaide, meanwhile, the governmetn released a new frequent network diagram in July. Here it is. (Original PDF here.)

Locals are discussing it here.

Adelaide is a very centralised city, but still, it's extraordinary to notice that you literally can't go anywhere at high frequency without going through the CBD. Only the stations of the O-Bahn, where routes converge from several directions to flow into the O-Bahn busway, is there any opportunity to make a frequent connection without going downtown.

Adelaide readers and citizens should think about the question: Do we really want it to be impossible to get around spontaneously — i.e. without much waiting — anywhere other than to and from the CBD? Since former Portland transit general manager Fred Hansen is now in Adelaide, I hope he is pitching the virtues of grid networks — which Portland has had since 1982. A full grid is probably not appropriate for Adelaide's geography and resources, but radial systems with grid elements — which I've been designing for years — could open up vast new all-day travel markets.

sydney: a new frequent network diagram

Posted on August 26, 2012 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Sydney

As the state government that rules Sydney begins rethinking the public transport network, a new Frequent Network diagram has appeared just in time. (For more examples of this blog's frequent network mapping campaign, see the Frequent Network category.)

Download the whole thing, which covers all of greater Sydney inside the national park ring, here. If you work on transport in Sydney, or just want to understand how to get around spontaneously, print it and put it on your wall! I believe this is the only diagram in existence that can help you find your way around Sydney via frequent services, or understand their current structure. (Yes, a geographic version would be helpful; perhaps, inspired by this, somebody will draw one.)

Below is the portion covering inner-city Sydney. That's the largest continuously dense area of the region, and the one you are most likely to know as a tourist. The CBD and Harbour Bridge are at the northern edge of this diagram, the airport is in the south, and the beaches are in the east.

The artist is Kevin McClain, who has just moved to Seattle to join the Accessible Services section at King County Metro. He tells me it's to be published on the Easy Transport website – a North Shore organisation devoted mostly to special-needs services. It's odd that such an organisation has produced the most useful diagram of Sydney for people who just want to get around all day without waiting long, but that's exactly what this is.

The maps published by the bus operators — download here – emphasise the complexity of the network by making all the routes look equally important, thus concealing patterns of frequency that would show the customer where they can move freely and easily. In this it's like most transit maps from before the advent of frequent network mapping. (For many great examples of frequent network mpas, see my Frequent Networks category.) The Government deserves credit for fostering the Metrobus product, which is meant to be the future frequent backbone of the network, but there are still many frequent corridors that don't carry the Metrobus logo and M-number, so a Metrobus map is not quite a frequent network map. The branding of Sydney services is still a work in progress.

The map reveals many issues that are hidden on the current public maps (download here). Those maps make all the routes look equally important and thus give the impression of intimidating complexity.

Public transport in Sydney has historically functioned in modal silos, with rail, bus, and ferry planning largely unrelated to each other and sometimes even seeing each other as competitors. That's meant to change under the new integrated transport authority, Transport for New South Wales, which has begun thinking about all the modes together. I hope this diagram will help them visualise the problem and conceive new solutions to it.

If you care about people who move around all day, who are inclined not to drive, but who value their freedom and won't stand for being stranded for long stretches of time, this is your public transport network. The gaps in this network are the gaps in people's freedom. Can Sydney do better?

washington, dc: a subway-style frequent bus map

Posted on August 14, 2012 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Washington DC

Dan Malouff at Greater Greater Washington has sketched a schematic (not geographic) Frequent Bus Network map for the city, and separate maps for each suburban county. See the original to enlarge and sharpen.

Obviously I recommend Frequent Network maps that show all the modes that run frequently, in some legible way. In this case that would include the subway. Otherwise, you seem to imply that there is a huge audience of bus people who want to travel only by bus. Of course, such a map would need to be at a much larger scale and would have required a lot more work (and tough design choices) to draw. This bus network is obviously discontinuous because the missing links are in the rail system.

greater seattle: loving the new sub-network maps

Posted on August 2, 2012 in Frequent Networks, Legibility, Los Angeles, Maps, Seattle

Now this is a clear map! It's by the Seattle area agency King County Metro. First the legend:

RapidRIde is King County Metro's new rapid bus product, with widely spaced stops, high frequency, special stations, but usually no exclusive lane. Note how cleanly this legend distinguishes services that are useful for different purposes. Note too that it omits peak-only commuter express services, because if they were present they would be lots of confusing overlapping lines that would make the basic network impossible to see.

So here's a piece the map. Click to enlarge, but more important, go here (that's an order) to see the whole thing.

The distinctions on this map are entirely about what matters to the customer, especially the person who wants to see the all-day transit network that is ready to liberate your life, not just your commute. Red means fast and frequent. Blue means frequent. Green means all day but not frequent. And if you want to see peak commuter express services, which would obliterate the legibility of this map if they were included, see another map or individual timetable.

To be fair, many good maps do show peak only services and visually de-emphasise them as faint dashed lines. That works too, but the key design principle is this: The network of any particular layer in the hierarchy of service should be clear without being obscured by lower levels of service. This map does that perfectly: You can see just the red Rapid Ride line, or you can focus easily on red plus blue to see the frequent network, or you can notice the paler green and see the all-day network. All in one map.

To get to this kind of customer-centered clarity, note what they had to omit: Two transit agencies' services are presented here with no differentiation at all. Bus routes numbered in the 500s belong to Sound Transit while the others belong to King County Metro. Most multi-agency regions would focus on highlighting this distinction first, on the assumption that the customer's loyalty to a transit company is much more important than their desire to get where they're going. The distinction should arguably be at least a footnote if you don't have integrated fares between the companies, as it could imply fare penalties and different fare media.

Some multi-agency maps do show all operators, but still visually distinguish them, as the Los Angeles Metro map does, for example. But if you want a really simple map, reduce the transit company's identity to a footnote, or something that can be inferred from a route number*, or don't even show it at all. Instead, show the customer what matters to them: frequency, speed, and duration of service.

*Can you spot the one place on the LAMetro map where they do that? The answer is in "Joseph E"'s comment below.

guest post: a reader’s struggle to map tel aviv’s transit network

Posted on July 17, 2012 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Tel Aviv

Alan Tanaman is a transit planning enthusiast who is working to help redefine the perception of public transport in Israel as a service to be used by everyone. Alan was an advisor on transport policy for the Israeli Labour Party during their 1998 election campaign, and more recently has been assisting the Israeli Public Transport Passengers Organisation (an NGO). He is also one of the moderators on the Tapuz Public Transport forum, but his primary interest is in trying to make transit more simple to understand and use.

This blog was the prime motivator for my attempt to produce a frequent-network map for the Tel Aviv Metropolitan region. The area lacks a rapid transit system, but the slack is generally taken up by a fairly frequent bus system, albeit lacking in priority measures. Although frequent, the network has grown sporadically and without method, and it was decided in 2004 that a complete overhaul of the network was needed, one that would be based on free transfers.

Only in July 2011 did the first major reorganisation phase take place, but it was shrouded in secrecy until about 10 days before the change. Once the change did take place, there was mass confusion. Suffice to say that the information was insufficient and the implementation was poor.

People resented having to make changes, but in this case the change was poorly explained; the benefits of the new system with high-frequency core sections were unclear. It is incredible that one of the missing pieces was a complete network map. The government website www.busline.co.il included only individual line maps along with maps of individual areas. But if you wanted to get from one end of the city to the other, it was pretty difficult to work out the best way to do so.

I wondered if some of Jarrett Walker’s principles would work – was there a clear network of high-frequency lines running all day? During that month, curiosity got the better of me, and I put together a map of the highest frequency routes. These were to be called ‘fork routes’: Routes with a high-frequency trunk, forking out into two or three branches at each end. I also added a few of the other high-frequency routes and published the map on a public transport forum. The reaction was very positive, but the network coverage was sparse, so I was urged to add lower frequency routes.

At this point I decided that the map was going to become a mission to produce a complete network map, excluding only the very lowest frequency routes. This seemed impossible – the network is so complex and there are far too many line numbers to fit. Worse still, the agency was now backtracking on some of the changes that had simplified the network, and had announced that it would bring back some cancelled routes, and revert some to their old meandering ways.

But by combining two bus mapping systems, often known as French and Classic, it could be done. The French system uses coloured lines for each route, whereas the Classic (or British) system marks route numbers along the streets. By using coloured lines for groups of high-frequency routes and marking the rest of the numbers along the streets in black, everything fitted in, and the high-frequency routes were still clear enough to follow.

The first network map was released on 23rd August. You can see this archive map in Hebrew at http://telaviv.busmappa.com/p/blog-page_22.html. Here is a slice:

Only a week later a bunch of (bad!) route changes took place, which led me to release a second map as soon as I could. This map included routes every 20 minutes or better (in black) and 15 minutes or better (in colour). Routes running every 10 minutes or better got thicker lines and solid coloured number discs.

For the final map, in English map see here: Here is a slice of it.

In the final English version, I also decided to incorporate some high-frequency commuter lines, but only when they were similar to the coloured lines that were already on the map. For example, route 166, which branches off route 66 at its eastern end, and also runs slightly differently for a short portion within Tel Aviv. Unfortunately, this does have the effect of making the all-day frequent network rather less clear.

apple maps vs google maps

Posted on June 17, 2012 in Maps

One of the most disconcerting thing about being a tech customer these days is that the Apple-Google rivalry can be expected to create more grief for people who like both, as each punishes its customers for liking the products of the other. It is already very laborious, for example, to sync the (Apple) MacBook's standard Calendar and Address Book with (Google) Android's — a big problem for me as both a Mac and Android user. Now we're going to see Apple smartphones that don't want us to use Google Maps.

Yes, Apple thinks it's going to improve on the most transformative automated mapping tool of all time. By all evidence they've decided that a cool, slick look is so important that it doesn't matter whether the map gives you the information you need. Gizmodo has an excellent comparison, including this graphic:

That's a slice of Lower Manhattan: Google on the left, Apple on the right. Yes, the Apple map is pleasing on the eye, but do you turn to mapping software for serene imagery or to see the layout of your city and how to do things in it?

While everyone can pick nits with Google Maps, Google has done an amazing job at massing large amounts of useful information in compact and legible ways. Their maps are aesthetically cluttered, but the clutter is accurate: Lower Manhattan is a cluttered place and we love it that way! A great city is full of opportunites and we want to know about all of them. I like feeling a little overwhelmed by a Google Map, especially as compared to the illusory cool — also known as lack of content — that Apple is trying to convey.

The official reason for a transit blog to complain, of course, is that Google has done a lot of work on integrating transit data into its maps, while Apple, to judge from its beta, thinks of this as a detail that can be added later. It will be interesting to see whether people really give up Google Maps for a slicker but more impoverished tool. If not, this could start driving transit users toward Google's Android, where the variety of third-party hardware designs already mean a tool much better suited to your hand, and your taste.

Christina Bonnington in Wired takes down Apple Maps here.

H/t: Daryl de la Cruz

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