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.
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.
Can animation help people understand their transit options? The Rotherham Metro Borough Council in the UK has done some simple "map movies" that highlight the paths followed by buses and trains. Here's a still:
Watch the actual animation here.
As they stand, they're limited in usefulness, as the icons move along the routes with no indication of frequency. They certainly do advertise complexity, which is accurate; this looks like a very complicated network.
But it's easy to imagine taking this to the next step, showing by animation the scheduled paths of all the services in a transit system. This would be especially helpful in helping citizens understand pulse systems, where the integrated scheduling pattern is an essential part of how the network gets you where your going. Now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure this has been done, but I've never seen it on a public information website, which is the obvious next step.
The Frequent Network mapping campaign continues. Here's a Cincinnati map by Nathan Wessel, which can be compared to the agency's full map here. It reveals an intensely radial system, with not many chances to connect other than downtown. (Click pic to enlarge, or download sharper PNG file here.
Matt Lerner of WalkScore.com and I recently exchanged emails about WalkScore’s “Transit Score” product, which provides a two-digit score supposedly capturing the usefulness of transit at any address in the USA. It’s designed on analogy to the successful (if still controversial) Walk Score, a similar tool for summarizing how friendly a place is to walking. For example, 300 Turk Street, San Francisco is scored 100 (perfect) on both Walk Score and Transit Score.
Toward another extreme, here’s 7000 Lake Mead Blvd in the far east of Las Vegas. Walkscore is 52, Transit Score is 33.
Tools like these have huge potential relevance to the real estate industry, and more broadly to anyone who makes locational decisions about anything. To the extent that we encourage people who value transit to locate where good transit is viable, everyone wins.
Earlier, Matt’s team had created a “transit travel time tool” which can be used to show you the actual area you can get to in a specified amount of time. I used this tool as the core of my definition of mobility, in one of this blog’s earliest posts.
So which is more useful, the simple two-digit Transit Score, or an actual map of where you can get to in a given time?
Here’s what I wrote to Matt:
Dear Matt,
About a year ago I mentioned your transit [travel time] tool as a useful way to visualize mobility …
The first draft of the book I’m writing … praises this WalkScore tool in some detail, as a way for people to understand the degree of freedom that transit will offer them. I think it may be a crucial tool for helping people see beyond modal fetishes to understand how transit actually works and how to determine if transit can actually get you where you’re going.
… Transit Score is useless to me because it encodes an intrinsic bias toward rail modes, as though rail is intrinsically faster, which is utterly misleading in a world of 6.5 mph streetcars and 60 mph busways. [I’m referring to the Transit Score methodology’s use of a “mode weight” defined as “(heavy/light rail is weighted 2X, ferry/cable car/other are 1.5X, and bus is 1X)”. Note that unlike the travel time tool, Transit Score lacks a way to capture how far you can get how fast, so it uses mode as a proxy for speed, fatally in my view.]
In short, whereas the earlier tool presented raw information in a compelling way that the user could use for her own purposes, Transit Score contains value judgments (“we know you’d rather ride a slow streetcar than an express bus”) which the user may not share, and thus may be an obstacle to her ability to make transit meet her needs.
So I guess I will praise mapnificent.net instead.
This issue sits at the very foundation of my current book, so as an admirer of your work, I’d like a better understanding of why you abandoned the original accessbility tool. Was it a matter of the processing required to do what’s basically a massive search of trip planners? I can see that Transit Score is a much faster calculation, but wonder if that was the key issue.
All the best for ’11,
Jarrett Walker
Matt replied:
HI Jarrett,
Good to hear from you.
You’re right that we are promoting Transit Score over Transit Time Maps — but we haven’t abandoned the transit time maps. We are working on new ways to use them and they are still available here: http://www.walkscore.com/transit-map.php).
Here’s why we’ve been promoting Transit Score more heavily. Our mission is to promote walkable/transit friendly neighborhoods and we think the best way to do this is to have Walk Score / Transit Score on real estate listings.
As we developed Transit Score we looked at a few methods of calculating a Transit Score. The two finalists were our current method (detailed here) and a method where we summed the Walk Score under the area of the transit shed in our Transit Time Maps. In practice, the scores were very similar between the two methods so we chose the current method which is much easier to scale (we show millions of scores per day).
We want to boil down transit access into a score so that it can appear on real estate listings and people can compare locations. ZipRealty.com has added our Transit Score to millions of listings and we have some more partners on the way.
We did not see a lot of consumer/partner interest in the transit time maps — which is unfortunate because of course I love them. One scenario I’m hoping to promote with our Transit Time Maps (we just need a partner) is to allow people on real estate sites to search by transit time. E.G. find me an apartment within 30 minutes of work on transit. I’d also like to integrate the transit sheds into the standard Walk Score experience.
I like the simplification Mapnificent made which was to not include walking time in their transit sheds — this makes it much easier to compute.
So to sum up, I like your suggestion of avoiding any mode weight value judgments — it just turns out that in practice our current method was very similar and easier to scale. Anyway, would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Also, we’re launching a beta of “Street Smart” Walk Score later this month and we’d love your feedback on that too.
Happy New Year!
Matt
To which I replied:
Matt
Thanks! … Suppose, hypothetically, that you had the processing power and datasets to run a purely mobility-based Transit Score. Let’s call it a Transit Mobility Score. The algorithm would be something like: Identify the area reachable in 30 minutes on transit from the selected point (I choose this because it seems to have a long history as an acceptable commute time). Then, grab the MPO’s database of population and jobs by small zone and calculate the percentage of the region’s jobs and population that are in that 30 minute band.
That also gives you a 2-digit number, but now it’s a fact rather than a score. You’re saying: “If you locate here, you’ll have convenient transit access to __% of the region’s activity.” And that strikes me as something that a realtor could value, understand and explain. How far are you (or someone) from being able to do that kind of algorithm? Obviously you’d need to have the MPO on your side, so start with somewhere like Portland where they generally are.
Frankly, you’d probably want to do two such scores, one based on your mobility at 8:00 AM and another for your all-day mobility — say, at 1:00 PM. But I think a realtor could make sense of those too. Everyone understands that transit in the peak is different from midday, and that both matter. Suburban areas, especially those under the influence of commuter rail and commuter express buses would show quite a difference between the two.
I think this could be huge. Because the output is a fact, not a judgment. …
All the best, Jarrett
Matt replies that this “sounds like an awesome planning tool and one we could potentially pursue if we had a grant or something to fund it.”
I still think this could be huge. What if everyone making a locational decision could go to something like the WalkScore travel time tool or Mapnificent and see a map of where they’ll be able to get to in 30 mintues on transit? It would finally make our mobility visible.
And if we could measure our mobility so accurately, for so many hypothetical cases, we just might value actual mobility more, and be less distracted by unreliable symbols of mobility — like, say, whether there are rails in the street. Technophiles shouldn’t be too alarmed; many people will still have modal preferences. But meanwhile, those of us who just want mobility would be able to measure it, fast, for anywhere that we might be locating something, including our homes.
The populist frequent-network mapping continues. Here's very clear frequent network map for Seattle, showing where you can get to if you don't like waiting. It's by Oran Viriyincy via Seattle Transit Blog. He discusses his process here.
If you want to understand how transit works (and sometimes doesn't) in Seattle, you need a map like this on your wall.
Early in my career, I did a number of network designs for free-standing small cities in the American West. These cities, say populations of 30,000-100,000, tend to have a similar set of problems and opportunities, and could probably benefit from a little more theoretical focus. The same issues arise in most of these cities across North America, Australia, and New Zealand, including: Continue Reading →
A reader who works for a North American transit professional organization writes:
Often transit centers only provide access to one provider and exclude others, or only provide access to local providers but not to regional providers. That silo system carries over to the information that transit agencies manage or make available to their customers in most cases. Do you have some good examples where services and customer information is more regional ie all the options in the region whether public or private.
Quiz: When is service every 20 minutes worse than service every 30 minutes?
Answer: When it relies on a pulse, or what Americans usually call timed transfer, with routes that run every 30. Continue Reading →
Peter Parker of Melbourne on Transit recently sketched some frequent network maps for that city, the second largest in Australia. You can find a range of efforts for various cities using the Frequent Network category. My original post arguing for the value of frequent network maps is here.
Although Melbourne is mostly flat and its street network is mostly gridded, it’s striking how few crosstown or “orbital” services they are. Over the past few years the main government initiative in this area has been the SmartBus program, a set of new frequent orbital routes. Yet compared to comparably dense parts of Los Angeles, say, the grid is thin. Continue Reading →
Washington DC’s transit agency WMATA is preparing to publish a frequent network map, and wants your comments. To start, they’re taking the approach of showing frequency as a highlight on the main network map, as this makes it easier to show how multiple overlaid routes combine to form a frequent line. Continue Reading →
