Maps

fictional city seeks reality check

Newport for blog
Did you draw maps of fictional cities when you were 8 years old?  If so, you and I are part of a near-invisible, uncounted minority. 

If that's you, I dare you not to be interested in this!  Even if you just enjoy maps of other cities, here's a chance to study a city you've never seen before.

For the transit planning course that I'm developing, I've created a fictional city that's designed to present a range of major transit issues, while also being an interesting place.  I considered using a real city, but in my experience, planning for a real city slides too quickly to details that obscure the big picture of how a good network works. 

My introduction to the fictional city is here:  Download Game Newport intro (.doc)

A rich set of map layers, created in Excel, is here:   Download Game data backsave  (.xls)

Both documents are covered by the assertion of copyright that covers all of this blog's material. 

I'd love feedback, especially about these questions:

  • Is the city realistic?  Does it contravene what you perceive to be "facts" of geology, hydrology, urban economics, bird psychology, or post-1800 urban history?
  • Have I omitted information that seems relevant to the basic task of designing a transit network?  Note that I'm not asking "have I omitted anything that might be interesting?"  The austere novelist and dominatrix who sells rare Asian herbs out of her Craftsman basement at 3315 W 43rd St while also being the invisible brains behind a top eco-fashion label is extremely interesting, but I only had a day to put this together.

Have fun!  The premiere of the transit planning course is in Surrey, British Columbia near Vancouver on June 9-10.  Last I checked there were a few places left.  Details here.

UPDATES:

  • Please do not try to comment based only on the illustration above.  I'm getting many comments that indicate you've only looked at that image.  You would need to download the files and look at the whole thing.
  • Apologies to those who had trouble with the .docx and .xlsx versions; these old formats should be more widely compatible and convertible.
  • The newest version now has layers for income and existing rail infrastructure.

Finally, I'm surprised at early comments that I don't have enough freeways!  It's not a freeway dependent city, by choice.  (See the .doc file above for more on the freeway wars.)   But freeways that run only on the periphery and don't connect into the core are common enough in cities of this size class.  See:

  • Victoria, British Columbia, metro pop 330k.  Two small shreds of freeway, created only as traffic required.
  • Halifax, Nova Scotia, metro pop 372k.  Fragments of an outer ring freeway, nothing into the city.
  • Christchurch, New Zealand, metro pop 390k at least before February's earthquake.  One 5-km shred of freeway approaching from the north (Kaiapoi to Belfast), but it's really just an extended bridge.
  • Palm Springs-Indio, California, metro pop 365k.  The area is bypassed on the north by Interstate 10, far from most of the urban cores.
  • Gold Coast, Queensland, metro pop 591k.  A massive highrise hotel/retail core (30-60 storeys) at Surfers Paradise, a highrise business core in adjacent Southport, but the only freeway bypasses 7 km to the west.

The last two of these are not, by any stretch, leftist car-hating enclaves.  In fact, they're exceptionally car-dependent.  Still, no freeways near the core.  It's possible!

    great american “metro areas”

    When any US study or journalist refers to “metro areas,” they probably mean this:

    KaweahGap

    DSCN1102

    DSCF3808

    Mantanuska

    Melakwa_Lake

    DSCF4221

    These are all photos of US Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs).  Many, many national studies — most recently the Brookings study on “transit and jobs in metropolitan America” — mean “MSA” when they say “metro area.”

    MSAs, however, are aggregations of counties. They’re the red patches on this map:

    Core_Based_Statistical_Areas
    Counties come in all kinds of weird sizes, and are usually irrelevant to anyone’s lived experience of a metro area.  Eastern US counties are mostly small, so MSAs there are often credible.  But western counties are often huge, so MSAs have to be huge too.  Almost two-thirds of California’s land area is a metro area by this defintion, including the “Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario MSA,” which contains most of the Mojave Desert.  Metro areas in America include the Grand Canyon,  a big chunk of the Everglades, and the vast Voyageurs wilderness of northern Minnesota, accessible only by canoe or snowmobile.

    So when the Brookings Institution, for example, declares that Riverside-San Bernardino is doing poorly on transit travel times to work, they’re referring partly to travel times from Needles to Riverside, a distance of about 230 miles (370 km) over open desert.  They’re also implying that there ought to be intense transit service between the Riverside area and the Palm Springs area, even though locals largely experience these as two different metro areas.  (Their centroids are 50 miles apart, the towns between are mostly semi-rural in nature, and if those facts don’t convince you, there’s also a 10,000-foot mountain in the way.)  What matters to the MSA is that the two metro areas are in the same counties as Riverside-San Bernardino, so nothing else about their lived geography can possibly matter.

    A deeper problem arises when all the demographic statistics of an MSA are declared to be features of a “metro area.”  Consider the Visalia-Porterville MSA, site of the top photo above.  The MSA, identical to Tulare County, has a 2000 population of 368,000.  All of these people are counted in MSA-based statistics about “metropolitan America,” but only about half of them live in a city over 50,000.  The other half live in much smaller towns and in rural areas.  (The rural areas also have high labor needs, so they support semi-mobile populations, validly picked up by the census, that have no relationship to any city.)  A fundamentally rural and small-town culture, indistinguishable from many other entirely rural counties, is being described as metropolitan whenever the Visalia-Porterville MSA is referenced as part of generalizations about “metropolitan America.”  This culture is not just small and easily dismissed statistical “noise.”  It’s half of the population of the MSA.

    This is one of those absurdities that we’re trained to think of as eternal.  Many weird and misleading boundaries (e.g. some counties, city limits etc) are going to persist even if they have no emotional or cultural meaning, simply because influential people are attached to them as a matter of self-interest.  But how many people are really attached in this way to MSAs?  And is it really impossible, with all the increasingly detailed information in the census, to describe metro areas in a more subtle and accurate way?

    Even if we’re stuck with them, is it really appropriate to keep saying “metro area” when you mean MSA?  It’s statistically convenient given how much data is organized by these crazy units.  But are you really misleading people about what a metro area is?

    In the sense that usually matters for urban policy, “metro area” means “the contiguous patch of lights that you can see at night from an airplane or satellite.”  You can approximate this with census blocks.  Their technical definition is something like “any agglomeration of contiguous census blocks that all have a non-rural population or employment density.”  Census blocks are small enough that they can aggregate in a way that follows the geography, connecting what’s really connected and separating what’s really separate.  Defining “metro area” in that way would finally mean what ordinary people mean by “metro area.”

    What’s more, it would really cut down on bear attacks in “metropolitan America.”

    Photos:

    1. Kaweah Gap, Sequoia National Park, Visalia-Porterville MSA, California.  Credit: Davigoli, Wikipedia.
    2. Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Las Vegas-Paradise MSA, Nevada.  (my photo)
    3. Duck Lake and High Sierra, John Muir Wilderness, Fresno MSA, California.  (my photo)
    4. Matanuska Glacier, Anchorage MSA, Alaska.  Credit: Elaina G, via Google Earth.
    5. Melakwa Lake, Alpine Lakes Wilderness, Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue MSA, Washington.  Credit: Wikipedia.
    6. Joshua trees in open desert southwest of Las Vegas, Las Vegas-Paradise MSA, Nevada.  (my photo)

     

     

     

    washington: what makes a great subway map?

    Washington metro What should Washington Metro's next subway map look like?  Greater Greater Washington is running a map contest where you can compare a number of designs, and choose your favorite.  Can you improve on the existing one, pictured here?

    Even if you're nowhere near Washington, perusing these maps will help you articulate your own views.  For example:

    • Should a subway map be largely to scale, so that you can see the distances invovled, or distorted so that complex areas are easy to see?
    • How much detail about the surrounding geography should be shown?
    • Should it show non-subway services that also provide important links between stations?  In Washington, for example, all the subway lines go downtown, so many other services (bus, future light rail) are useful for connecting between outer parts of different lines.  Should the whole web of those possibilities be shown?

    Go vote!  GGW has done a great job cultivating public interest in transit details, and steering the public debate toward clearer thought about these practicalities.  Help them out!

    vancouver cartographers and map geeks!

    I have a fast, fun project for a cartographer or map-geek adept at making maps that are both beautiful and accurate.  The project is to help me create a map of a fictional city, for use in my transit planning short course.  The final product will be a map about 1×1.5m, showing arterials, landforms, and shadings to indicate density.  There’s lots of opportunity to interact with me in refining the ideas and helping me make choices that speed up the process while improving the product.

    If interested, please hit the email button under my photo in the next column, and send me a quick note about your experience, relevant samples, and some sense of rates.  If desired, free registration for the course could be part of the package.

    Tough part: Fast turnaround.  Final final needed by June 9, which means complete draft needed by June 1, which means we need to get started next week.  Probably not fulltime, but certainly some focused work. 

    45th century transit information (quote of the week)

    I'm unsuccessfully trying to go to sleep reading Iain M. Banks's science fiction novel Matter.  His heroine is thinking of making a trip:

    Even without consciously thinking about it, she was there with a diagrammatic … representation of this section of the galaxy.  The stars were shown as exaggerated points of their true colour, their solar systems implied in log-scaled plunge-foci and their civilisational flavour defined by musical note groups …

    An overlay showed the course schedules of all relevant ships and a choice of routes was already laid out for her, colour-coded in order of speed, strand thickness standing for ship size and schedule certainty shown by hue intensity, with comfort and general amenability characterised as sets of smells.  Patterns on the strands — making them look braided, like rope — indicated to whom the ships belonged.

    — Iain M. Banks, Matter, p 95

    If you've ever tried to make a clear and informative transit map, look up at the night sky!  Maybe somewhere out there, right now, unimaginable aliens are debating whether "schedule certainty" should be a hue, a pattern, or a smell.

    basics: branching (or how transit is like a river)

    A short draft chapter from the book, overlapping the content of this recent post but with an extended BART example that I hope readers will enjoy and have comments on.

    In 2011, cartographer Daniel Huffman thought it would be interesting to draw river systems as though they were subways.  Figure 1 shows part of his sketch of the Lower Mississippi.[i] Continue Reading →

    tadpoles of new zealand: an auckland transit animation

    There's a lot of potential for animation of Google Transit data, and we're just starting to see it explored.  Some results will be rich with information, differentiating various kinds of service so that you can see how they dance together.  Chris McDowall's animation of a day's transit in Auckland is less informative but correspondingly more meditative.  Buses, trains and ferries are all rendered as earnest little tadpoles (or comets, or sperm, or viruses, depending on your sense of scale).

    (An animated map of Auckland's public transport network from Chris McDowall on Vimeo.)

    It nicely illustrates the point that frequency is what makes a route into a line.  The line that goes really solid during the peak is the Northern Busway, which is far more frequent than any of Auckland's rail lines. 

    UPDATE:  Commenter "numbat" points out that on the island at the east edge of the image (Waiheke Island) you can see local island buses pulsing with ferries that link the island to Auckland's CBD.

    london’s northern headache

    London underground_map crop Commenter David M on what rivers teach about transit:

    It's interesting to note that in London the newest Underground lines have no branches (Victoria, Jubilee). In fact, when Jubilee was originally opened it took over one of the Bakerloo Lines branches, reducing the Bakerloo to a branchless line also.

    For real complications, look at Camden Town [top center] on the Northern Line [black on this classic map] in London, England. Just south of this station is a complex deep underground junction that lets trains from any two of the branches south of Camden to simultaneously run on any two of the branches to the north. It is a marvel of engineering, but it is also an operational nightmare with trains run from any branch to any branch – one train runs late and it can cause problems on all of the branches.

    London has wanted to simplify the operations by spliting the line into two and requiring an interchange at Camden Town. There are four platforms at Camden Town but the interchange passages are insufficient to handle the expected interchange traffic – so for now, it is cheaper to suck it up and deal with the operational issues.

    There is an interesting effect of this interchange. Going south, both branches serve Euston Station before heading off to cross London on two different lines serving different areas of the core. You can get on one train at Camden, stop at Mornington Crescent and at Euston. You could get on the following train at Camden and arrive at Euston without passing through Mornington Crescent. The reason is that Mornington Crescent is on only one of the two branches, the other just bypasses the station. It makes for fun time when trying to get to Mornington Crescent.

    The other night a Sydney rail expert was telling me that when the North West line is built, creating a four-way junction at Epping similar to the one at Camden Town, they will spend a number extra millions on the tunnelling to create the ability to route trains from any segment to any other.  A similar decision has already been made about a similar junction at Glenfield in Sydney's southwest.  I wonder how much could be saved if we let lines cross without connecting track, and required connections, where that pattern makes sense as part of a larger grid.  It's not the right answer everywhere, certainly, but it sounds like London transit experts aren't very appreciative of all the flexibility that their great-grandparents gave them with the design of the Northern Line.

    sydney: it’s 10 pm, do you know where your buses are?

    This won't amaze readers in places like San Francisco or Boston, which have had Nextbus.com for years. But it's an important step for Australia.  Realtime locations of Sydney's buses, via a new app by Flink Labs of Melbourne.

    Syd buses realtime

    Not sure what the colours mean.  They need to be colour-coded for inbound vs outbound, which otherwise can't be distinguished. 

    Thanks to Chris Loader, who blogs about Australian public transport at Charting Transport, for the tip.