Maps

vancouver publishes frequent network map

Posted on May 21, 2012 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Vancouver

The Wayfinding team at Vancouver's TransLink has finally unveiled their new network map, with Frequent Network designations. In this case … orange:

Download the whole thing here: regional transit map

The term "FTN" (Frequent Transit Network) also appears on the map here and there. This term has already been used for several years in TransLink policymaking. In fact, four years ago in Transport 2040 TransLink committed to this goal:

The majority of jobs and housing in the region are located along the Frequent Transit Network (frequent, reliable services on designated corridors throughout the day, every day).

Now, finally, the public can see it too! Disclosure: I had a review-and-comment role in a few stages of this process, but it's definitely TransLink's work, led by their excellent Wayfinding team.

heatmaps of service intensity

Posted on April 26, 2012 in Maps, Simulation

Does it make sense to represent service intensity as as heatmap? Is the result at least cool to look at? Xavier Jacques Côté, a programmer the Québec open-data advocacy group Capitale Ouverte, gave it a try with his hometown, Québec City.

HeatMap_RTC_BETA

More on the origins of this map, and other cool things Xavier did, in French here.

Hat Tip: David Duval, Ville de Québec.

some questions on frequent network mapping

Posted on April 4, 2012 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Portland

@CityBeautiful21 tweets this question about Frequent Network mapping (explained here, examples here and here):

@humantransit In a place that is improving its transit but cannot yet draw a [Frequent Service] map by your ["every 15 minutes all day, seven days a week" requirements], how would you draw the map?

When a transit agency first sits down to do frequent network mapping, this always comes up. Not all services are frequent over the same exact span. Many are frequent all day but not evening or weekend. This the the normal outcome of a history of route-by-route and hour-by-hour service analysis.

[A Frequent Network policy will gradually enhance those analysis methods by bringing your focus to (a) the entire independent network instead of each route individually and (b) the entirety of the day rather than each hour individually. Hour-by-hour analysis of routes is especially misleading because ridership at each time of day depends on service availability another time of day; you won't use transit in either direction unless it's available in both directions at times you expect to travel, and if you're not sure when you come back, you care about the abundance and extent of the whole evening service pattern. This is why cutting evening service — which may have low ridership when analyzed trip by trip — can damage a route's usefulness throughout the service day.]

Meanwhile, how to draw the map?

1. Start where you are. If your current frequent service offering is only weekdays all day, then say that. The map will still be useful. If you can come up with some kind of minimum evening/weekend service commitment for those route segments (every 30?) then say that as part of the definition of the frequent product. Meanwhile, you can use your long range planning process to articulate the need for a more robust service span on the Frequent Network, over time.

2. Consider the larger principle, which is this: Service that is more likely to be useful to lots of people for lots of purposes, and that are designed to work together as a network, should be more visually prominent. Service that is highly specialized to a limited market should be less visually prominent, including peak-only services and any service that runs less than once an hour (or even every 30). It's these occasional service patterns that make transit maps unbearably complicated — a problem easily fixed by ensuring that your map shows those ephemeral route segments but that they recede visually so that the more frequent network stands out.

It never makes sense to draw a route that runs three times a day in the same line that you'd use for service every 30 minutes all day. The problem of such maps is the same: you weaken the meaning of a line on the map by using that line to refer to something so ephemeral and specialized, thereby implying that any line on the map may be equally ephemeral and specialized. So use a different, weaker line for those services.

For some good examples of maps showing all routes in a network, but using this principle that more frequent routes should stand out and less frequent routes should recede, see the full network maps for Portland and Spokane, discussed further in this post. Here's a slice of Spokane's, where the red lines are frequent and the fainter pink lines are peak-only:

… and of Portland's, where a wider line is Frequent and peak-only lines are dashed with a white number bullet:

Full maps here: Spokane. Portland.

In both examples, more broadly useful services are more visually prominent. Peak-only services recede (a thin pink line vs a wide red one in Spokane, a dashed line in Portland) so that you can see them but won't be distracted by them when you want to see the all-day network. Both maps also highlight the Frequent Network in different ways. Overall, I prefer the clarity of the Spokane map, because Portland introduces much complexity by trying to differentiate every route by color. But both are good design responses to the basic problem, which is: Show me the services that are most likely to be useful!

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.

redistorting maps: the virtue of cartograms

Posted on January 5, 2012 in London, Maps, Marketing, Washington DC

M. V. Jantzen has designed a fun tool that let's you rearrange a subway map to show actual travel times from where you are. It's featured today at Greater Greater Washington. Here's Washington DC Metro viewed from Ballston station in Virginia:

Jantzen calls this a "distortion," and with that I would disagree. It's a redistortion, because as Mark Monmonier explains in his classic book, all useful maps are distorted. Here's a whole page of Washington Metro maps, including the classic diagram …

and a spatial one …

Spatial maps are about spatial distance, and that's often, but not always, what matters. The classic London Tube map is useful as a diagram, for example, but it can also undermine people's actual mental understanding of the geography of London.

Source: Transport for London

Of the above image, Kerwin Datu writes:

Bayswater and Queensway are 190 metres apart on the same street, Regent's Park and Great Portland Street 230 metres apart on the same street. But anyone going from Oxford Circus to either Bayswater or Great Portland Street would be persuaded that they had to take two trains to complete their trip. … This is unacceptable in a low-carbon age, and with trains packed to the gills in peak hour …

Back to the biggest picture point:

Maps that show one useful geography correctly seem so naturally authoritative that we can easily overvalue them when we really care about something else.

Consider the way spatial geography is misused — by almost all media — to represent population. If you think this is a useful map of the recent Iowa Republican caucuses …

… then you're misreading space as population. The visual impression of dominating such a map arises from appealing to sparse rural voters who influence large spaces on the map. Winning an election is something else. The guy who won the orange counties did as well as the guy who won the purple ones, because the orange counties are where most people live.

(Updated) Back in the 2004 election, some smarter cartographers attempted maps (technically cartograms) in which each bit of area represented a fixed number of voters. (Thanks to Niralisse for finding them for me!) The US was reshaped into something looking like an angry cat wearing a corset, the mountain states reduced to almost nothing while the West and Northeast were enormous blobs.

It took a while to get into, but it was an accurate visualization of what voters did. It was a useful redistortion, arguably a net reduction in distortion, because when describing population-based data, a spatial map like the Iowa caucus map above is a distortion too.

Inevitably, as technology customizes everything around our individual narcissism perspectives and preferences, we'll get more used to "just for me" maps, maps that show how the universe really does revolve around ourselves. These are crucial for their purpose. I've especially praised this one, which shows where you can get to on transit, in a given time, from a point that you select.

Ultimately, a clear vision of your city, your transit system, and your place in the world can only come from being able to move quickly between different kinds of maps, so that you're reminded at each moment that no map tells the whole story. We must be able to redistort for ourselves, in real time. If everyone had the tools to toggle quickly among different kinds of diagrams, they might even get over the notion that a spatial map tells you anything about an election.

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].

walkscore’s new apartment search functions

Posted on November 11, 2011 in Access, Maps, Mobility

Walk Score, an admirable Seattle company that invented the "Walk Score" now widely used in the US real estate business, now has an improved app for their transit travel time tool. That tool, which I use in my own definition of "personal mobility," shows you how far you can travel on transit from a chosen point in a fixed amount of time. For example, here's how far you can go in 15, 30, or 60 minutes from San Francisco Civic Center, at least on agencies that participate in Google Transit:

You can find something similar at Mapnificent.net.

Walkscore now has a fine new set of presentation tools that combine this information with real estate listings, so that you can search available apartments based on commute time to a destination of interest. Couples can even search for locations that optimize both of their commutes. For example, if one of you works in downtown Seattle and the other across the lake in downtown Bellevue, Walk Score discovers that if you want to equalize your commutes, you should live in the University District, where the blobs of access from the two workplaces overlap. Walk Score will even show you available apartments there.

(Of course this service needs to be expanded beyond rentals. Some people who are buying a home may care about similar criteria.)

All this is a step toward a more universal use of this tool that allows anyone (people, businesses, institutions, government services) to see the transit access consequences of where they choose to locate. Many places are simply inaccessible by any efficient form of transit, so people need tools for avoiding those places if they want transit to be part of their lives, or that of their employees, customers, or clients. That's especially important because some of these places are cheap, but may not be as cheap as they look when you consider the transport costs they impose.

I'm also interested in using this tool to generate a more factual two-digit "Transit Score" than the one Walk Score currently promotes. More on that here.

Transit Planning for Fictional Universes: It’s Serious Business

Posted on November 8, 2011 in Amusing, Maps

As longtime readers know, I would reject the claim — repeated today by Benjamin Kabak at Second Avenue Sagas — that “in fictional universes, subway systems do not have to make much sense.” So I would not be as quick as he to excuse the incoherences of the newly announced Gotham Transit Authority Map:

While Batman himself has other transport options, many fictional people are going to need transit to assemble the necessary crowds and populate the alleys and crevices of his plots, and those people certainly need better than this.

Perhaps I nitpick because I was raised on higher-grade science fiction and fantasy, in an era when authors felt compelled to think about every relevant dimension of their world. In those days, you didn’t worry so much, while exploring the fictional world, that if you leaned on a tree it might collapse like a flimsy cardboard set, revealing a blank space that the author hadn’t seen fit to imagine. J.R.R. Tolkien knew all the personalities and travails of every king for the last several millennia, and of many mythical ages before that. You could at least expect an urban imaginer to be sure the transport system made credible sense.

Even more important than the fictional universe, of course, is the hypothetical one, where even more care is required!

Are you an aspiring science fiction writer or screenwriter? If so, have you hired a transit planner yet?

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!

the metro as metaphor

Posted on September 18, 2011 in Maps, Meditations, Rail Transit

Now and then, advertising seizes on the image of a classic subway map, using it to organise some other set of ideas. From the Metro Wine Map of France:

The Metro station stands for some distinct thing that we should learn to distinguish from other things nearby — fine-grained appellations in this case. The brightly colored subway lines are categories that we should also understand — in this case, the wine regions of France. Somehow this metaphor seems to satisfy, over and over, as a way to bring a certain je ne sais quoi to a topic.

(Absentmindedly, I begin to sketch a radial metro network converging on a central station complex called "Plants in my garden." A bright blue line called "Heather Family" departs from the Cassiope platform and heads outward via stations called Vaccinium (blueberries/cranberries) and Gaultheria before swerving toward a terminal loop of scenic Rhododendron stations. A bright red line called "Rose Family" departs from a platform called "Rosa" and heads outward via stations called Rubus (alight here for blackberries and raspberries), Fragaria (strawberries), Pyrus (pear) and Malus (apple) [those last two stations too closely spaced, really] before reaching its terminus: Prunus, the cherries, plums, apricots and peaches.)

Why does the metro line serve as such an excellent selling or organizing metaphor? Conjecture: it suggests speed, order, power, reliability, a larger design that gives meaning to experience, and an urban(e) sense of excitement (as opposed to the rural excitement of the "open road").

Of course, a true transit network functions only through the interdependence of its lines, like the lines of Daniel Huffman's transit-map of the Mississippi River system.

But the metro-as-metaphor doesn't seem to need that. The "wine-metro" map at the top of this post is all disconnected but still seems to sing, at least to its intended crowd.

What is it about the rail transit as a metaphor? How could we corral this metaphorical power to get some of the real thing built?

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