Portland

“Uncaptive Rider”: Download my Chat with Colin Marshall …

If you’d be interested in the sound of my voice, ruminating broadly about transit and cities in the serenity of my own livingroom, there’s now quite a good podcast by Colin Marshall in the Notebook on Cities and Culture series.  You can download an mp3 from Colin’s site here, or get it from iTunes here.

Colin’s a brilliant interviewer, asking great and often surprising questions.  He draws me out on my own living arrangements, my complex relationships with Portland and with Los Angeles, some notes on my global transit travels, and finally onto really substantive topics about what transit is and how it relates to the larger question of what cities are.  It’s all feels very public-radio …

Colin’s whole series of downloadable podcasts looks like it’s worth a look, as he’s put me in some impressive company …

the opportunities and dangers of incomplete bus rapid transit

One of Bus Rapid Transit's great virtues is that unlike rail, you don't have to build a complete, continuous piece of infrastructure if you really only need segments of one.  

Here in Portland, for example, the Barbur corridor — now being studied for BRT or rail — features a series of congested chokepoints with generally free-running traffic in between them.  Here, a BRT facility that got transit through the chokepoints reliably probably wouldn't need an exclusive lane in the free-flowing segments, because traffic in those segments would continue to be metered by the chokepoints and thus remain uncongested.  (Congested chokepoints meter traffic just as ramp meters do: they limit the rate at which cars can enter a road segment and thus reduce its chance of becoming congested.)

Unfortunately, Bus Rapid Transit can also be implemented in exactly the opposite way.  Severely congested chokepoints are generally expensive places to design transit priority for, especially if you're unwilling to simply take a lane for transit.  So we often see BRT projects that are missing where they are most needed.  The Boston Silver Line 4-5, like the Los Angeles Silver Line, can get stuck in traffic downtown.  New York's supposed BRT is so compromised that many refused to call it BRT anymore.  Even the world-class Auckland North Shore Busway disappears as it approaches the Harbour Bridge. 

Now we have the example of Seattle's RapidRide D, highlighted today by Mike Lindblom in the Seattle Times:

While the new RapidRide bus mostly lives up to its name in West Seattle, passengers on its sister route to Ballard are routinely stuck in traffic.

The service to Ballard, called the D Line, is d

2019776700

elayed 10 to 15 minutes by late-afternoon car congestion leaving Belltown and winding through the crowded Uptown neighborhood, near Seattle Center.

That bottleneck is aggravated by traffic signals that haven't yet been re-timed by King County Metro Transit and the city of Seattle, to give the buses a longer or quicker green light. Metro acknowledges the D Line is just one minute faster than the local bus it replaced Sept. 29; the advantage is supposed to be six to eight minutes.

Transit managers hope to make gains by early 2013 after signal and road-lane changes are finished.

"We have a ways to go based on our early experience, but it is still too early to know whether the projection will be achieved," said Metro spokesman Jeff Switzer.

M674_0Just one minute faster than the bus it replaced?  Then the question arises: Why was it called Rapid Ride prior to the improvements that would make it Rapid?  There are some plausible if grim answers to this question.  Getting multiple big bureaucracies to move on the same timetable to the same deadline is hard.  The transit agency has to commit to a date months in advance, without being entirely sure whether its partners (typically in the City and the state Dept of Transportation) will be done with the improvements that are their responsibility.  So sometimes, the brand appears before the product does, causing this understandable blowback and also, more critically, tarnishing the brand.

RapidRide D raises a larger problem though.  Even when planned priority is completed further south there is still the problem of the congested Ballard Bridge.  Like Barbur's chokepoints in Portland, the Ballard Bridge is a familiar chokepoint that affects speed and reliability for all transit services forced to use it.  You can imagine the difficulty of demanding that RapidRide have an exclusive lane over the bridge, when that would leave only one for other cars.  (But what about a lane for buses + carpools + carshare cars + electric cars + etc. until you get a reasonable but uncongested lane volume?)

Sometimes, too, bridges can be metered, much the way the San Francisco Bay Bridge toll plaza meters traffic on that bridge.  At the approach point pictured above, a signal could have been placed at the bus merge point which meters traffic so that northbound congestion piles up south of the bridge rather than on it, and enters the bridge only at an uncongested rate.  That would have allowed buses uncongested operation without really slowing down cars much.  I'm not an engineer; there may be valid reasons why this wasn't possible, but it's the sort of solution that comes up when congested traffic is the reality anyway and the goal is to protect transit from it.

Transit agencies sometimes compromise BRT for their own reasons of budget.  Issues of boarding time associated with the lack of on-street ticket machines are coming up on RapidRide, as are concerns about reliability arising from the fact that two RapidRide lines are through-routed, transmitting delay from one to the other.  These are familiar struggles within transit agencies who are under pressure to spread a product over many corridors and can't afford to deliver every aspect of the product in all those places.  The result runs the risk of becoming symbolic transit; a bright red line appears on the map, but without the investment needed to make good on the promise that the red line implies.

I've received emails from Seattle friends on several sides of this issue, and sympathize with all of them.  I don't mean to criticize either the City or the State DOT or the transit agency, because what was done here is fairly typical historic American practice and the pressures involved are so routine.

But if there is a desire to aim higher than historic American practice, the question remains.  How much can we compromise BRT — tolerating its absence precisely in the congested chokepoint where it's most needed — and still call it BRT?  Might be better for transit agencies to refuse to implement BRT until the relevant traffic authorities have delivered the facilities it requires?  

portland: a local alternative to the columbia river crossing

Many cities have eternal debates about a Massive Transportation Project, debates that can go on for so long that the debate itself feels like a piece of infrastructure.   In Portland, it's the Columbia River Crossing, a $4b proposal to build a massive new bridge and freeway expansion to replace the old, narrow and congested I-5 bridge at the state line.  Most sustainable transport advocates that I know hate the plan with a passion, and it's increasingly an issue in the current mayoral race.  A number of small-government types are equally unhappy about the $4b pricetag.

The issue with the CRC is that the interstate freeway is really the only way of getting across the river, for any mode except freight rail, for miles around.  Since both sides of the river are urbanized, that's obviously a recipe for congestion.  If you define the problem as freeway congestion, of course you'll think of a freeway solution.  But what if you focus on the challenge of providing alternatives so that local traffic doesn't need to use the bridge, and so that transit competes effectively with cars to reduce future traffic growth?

That's the premise of a "Common Sense Alternative":

The basic idea of getting local traffic (including local freight) out of the bridge congestion, and creating transit alternatives, makes all kinds of sense. It's also a set of small projects that can happen in phases instead of one massive one.   Smaller budgets are demanding incremental solutions, not massive do-or-die projects.  Given the opposition to the CRC from both ends of the spectrum, I wouldn't be surprised if the answer doesn't end up being something like this. 

portland: the grid is 30 years old … thank a planner!

Thirty years ago next week, on Labor Day Weekend 1982, the role of public transit in Portland was utterly transformed in ways that everyone today takes for granted.  It was an epic struggle, one worth remembering and honoring.

I’m not talking about the MAX light rail (LRT) system, whose first line opened in 1986. I’m talking about the grid of frequent bus lines, without which MAX would have been inaccessible, and without which you would still be going into downtown Portland to travel between two points on the eastside.  (Full map here.)

Portland grid\

What did it look like before 1982?  Here’s a bit of the 1970 network (full map here).

Portland 1970

The 1970 network consisted of bus routes radiating from downtown across the gridded eastside, which constitutes about 3/4 of Portland.  If you were anywhere on this network, you had a direct bus downtown — a slow, circuitous, and infrequent bus.  Very few routes ran better than every 30 minutes during the day.  Only two routes ran north-south across the east side, and both were too infrequent to transfer to, so you couldn’t really use them unless both ends of your trip were on them.

How did the 1982 network transform the possibilities of mobility in the city?

  • The old network was solely about going downtown.  The new network was about going anywhere you wanted to go.
  • The old network was infrequent.  The new network required easy connections, so it was designed to run at high frequency (most lines every 15 minutes or better all day).  Remember: Frequency is freedom!
  • The old network was wasteful, as many overlapping lines converged on downtown.  The new network was efficient, with little overlap between lines, and with lines spaced further apart to the extent that the street network allowed.  This is how the resources were found to increase frequency so much.
  • The old network was complicated, with routes often zigzagging from one street to another.  The new network was simpler, easy to keep in your head.  Many streets that were formerly served by a patchwork of overlapping routes, such as Division, now had a single route from end to end, so that you needed only remember “the Division bus.”  Transit became an intrinsic part of the street.

If you’re in a hurry, skip to “Thank a Planner!” below.  But if you have a couple of minutes, let’s explore more deeply how the grid transformed Portland, and why it was so controversial at the time.

In both maps above, that wavy line across the middle of eastside Portland is the Banfield Freeway, where the first and backbone line of the MAX light rail system runs today.  In the 1970 image, look for the line marked “1” extending north from the Banfield in the middle of the image.  This is NE 42nd Avenue (a bit of which is labeled 41st, but don’t let that distract you).

In the old network the bus line along 42nd came from the north edge of the city, once an hour.  Partway down it merged with another branch, to form 30-minute frequency.  When it approached the Banfield, it turned west and zigzagged into the city via the Lloyd district.  Once it turned west off of 42nd, it was duplicating other routes the whole way.  If you wanted to go somewhere else on the eastside, the bus was not much use.   Frequencies were poor so it was very hard to make a trip involving multiple routes.

If you lived on NE 42nd in 1982, you were confronted with massive change, the sort of change that makes people scream.  Never again would you have a direct bus to downtown Portland.  Now you would be on the new 75, which would run continuously north-south all the way across the city.  And if you wanted to go downtown, you would have to transfer (as we called it in those days).

But on the bright side, the 75 would run every 15 minutes, so transfering wasn’t hard.  And in return, you got all the other benefits of a frequent routes that would let you connect quickly to reach destinations all over the east and north sides of the city, without going downtown.

This is always a tough sell, because many people value transit only for the commute downtown.  These people tend to complain when the network is optmized to serve many kinds of trip at once, which is exactly what the grid does.  A frequent grid is the ultimate in versatilityequity and freedom.  It does not pick favored destinations for favored markets. Instead, it delivers anywhere-to-anywhere mobility for wherever you might want to go.  Today, the non-downtown elements of the grid, especially 72 and 75, are among TriMet’s most productive lines.

The grid redefined the role of transit in serving Portland’s livability objectives.  When you think of everything that makes Portland both livable and culturally distinctive, you’re probably thinking about the historically dense and gridded part of the city.  This is where almost every cool urbanist outcome of the last 30 years — from food carts to bike lanes to office-over-retail — has sprouted and thrived most successfully. Rail gets all the press, but the MAX light rail line would not have worked without this grid to connect with it.  (The reverse is not true: the grid worked well for four years before the MAX line opened, though MAX was certainly an improvement that achieved further ridership payoffs.) As Gregory Thompson and Jeffrey Brown put it in a recent paper :

If the 1983 and 1986 restructurings had not happened, LRT would have been a competitor with the CBD-focused, poor quality parallel bus routes that already were there, and there would have been no high quality bus routes intersecting the LRT at right angles. Portland would have enjoyed much less patronage than it has since experienced on both its LRT and bus routes.

Where did all the money for the new high-frequency crosstown lines come from?  Removing duplication. Look again at the your ride on 1970’s route 1.  Once it turned west off of 42nd, it duplicated other routes the entire way into downtown.  Now look closely at the routes approaching downtown from further south in the old map.  They ran on so many closely-spaced parallel streets that they were effectively duplicating one another as well, wasting service.  The grid plan found many resources by removing these duplications and moving to wider and more consistent spacing of lines across the whole city.  In the same process,the grid introduced the idea that it’s OK to walk further to a more frequent and useful service — the foundation for transit’s link with walking (and with all of walking’s public health outcomes) today.

The grid was also a radical simplification, making it easier for people to keep the network map in their heads.  Now, bus lines would often follow the same street from end-to-end, so you could remember easily that there’s a Division Street bus, say, and an 82nd Avenue bus.  In the old network, if you wanted to go from 20th & Division to 82nd & Division, you had to go downtown and back, because these two parts of Division were covered by different routes.  The beauty of the grid is that your transit directions are sometimes as simply as walking or driving directions:  “Take the Division bus out to 82nd, then take the 82nd bus south.”  The transit lines are just part of the street.

Imagine, in 1982, the struggle involved in implementing this.  Vast numbers of people lost their direct bus to downtown, at a time when going downtown seemed like the only purpose of transit to many existing riders.  Transit agencies tend to listen most to their existing riders, who have adapted their lives to the system as it is, so it takes real courage for them to seek new markets instead of just catering to the existing ones.   Imagine the disruption, the rage, the recriminations, not to mention the apathy from people for whom buses just don’t matter, no matter what they’re achieving.

Thank a planner!

If you can imagine how hard this was, consider thanking the planners who took all this abuse and persisted in pushing the plan through, because they believed in everywhere-to-everywhere networks and knew this would work if it were tried.  I’m especially thinking of:

  • Ken Zatarain, who was a TriMet service planner at the time and who is still at the agency.  Thank him at:  ken dot zatarain at wsp.org.
  • Thomas G. Matoff, the single most important mentor in my own transit career, and probably the critical player in pushing the grid through.  Tom, who was service planning manager and thus Ken’s boss, was an eloquent, passionate and persistent advocate for the grid both inside and outside the agency.  He was the first person I’ve met, and one of the few I’ve known, who could convey how essential network design is to the life, joy, and prosperity of a city.  Tom went on to be General Manager of Sacramento Regional Transit and is now working on the Sonoma-Marin rail project in California.  Thank him at:  tmatoff at ltk dot org .

I’m dead serious:  If you value being able to get around Portland in all directions, thank them.  In other words, do one of these things:

  • shoot emails of appreciation to the three emails above, copied to me (jarrett AT jarrettwalker DOT net), with “Thanks for the grid” in the subject line, or
  • leave a comment here, or
  • say something on Twitter with the hashtag #PDXGrid .

You might also ask the two mayoral candidates about how important the frequent grid is to their vision of the city, and whether they think it should be enhanced.

Why does this matter?  Because even today, there’s disagreement in Portland about important the frequent grid is, or even whether a complete everywhere-to-everywhere network (which requires high-frequency buses as well as rail) should be a priority at all.  Some view the grid as unimportant, for example, because they view bus service as unimportant.

Purists might argue that the grid never made it to its 30th birthday, but rather perished at 27 in 2009.  That was the year that TriMet cut all-day frequencies below the 15-minute threshhold that is widely accepted as the definition of “frequent enough that you can use it spontaneously, without building your life around the timetable.”  Since the grid relies on easy connections to achieve its goal of easy anywhere-to-anywhere access, the 2009 cuts began to undermine the whole idea of the grid. TriMet avoided doing this in its first round of cutting after the crash, but felt it had no alternative in the second 2009 round.

Will the grid ever be restored to its necessary frequency?  Will it ever be expanded and enriched (as regional land use planning generally assumes it must be) with even better frequencies?  Not everyone in Portland thinks this is a priority, so you might want to express your view.

More on the history and spectacular outcomes of the grid if you click below.  But even if you don’t click, thank a planner!

Continue Reading →

seeking a portland-based assistant!

My very little firm, Jarrett Walker & Associates, is ready to add some support.  It will be six months before I decide whether to cross the hurdle into formally becoming an employer, but meanwhile, I have a range of support tasks that can be a great learning experience for someone trying to get into the field. 

So I'm looking for someone (maybe more than one) who's comfortable with being a subcontractor without benefits for up to six months, until we get to that decision point.  I envision you working around 25-30 hours/week, with frequent visits to my Portland home office but no obligation to work onsite all the time.  (If you are available only part-time, but at least 20 hours a week, that' s also possible.)  I envision paying you something in the range of $15-40/hour, depending on your experience and skills.

You do not necessarily have a graduate degree or transit planning experience, though I'll pay you more if you do.  You probably do have a BA.  You absolutely need to have:

  • Passionate enthusiasm about public transit and its role in building a better civilization.
  • Strong organization skills — i.e. organization of documents, information, calendar etc.
  • English fluency and readable writing in English.
  • Ability to use basic software, including all parts of Microsoft Office on Macs.
  • A willingness to pitch in on whatever needs to be done at the moment.
  • Ability to work with visualizations, such as graphs and maps, and make connections between this information and other data forms.
  • Evidence of ability to learn new material and concepts rapidly.

In addition, it's highly advantageous if you have:

  • Some transit planning or policy experience.  (Intelligent volunteer advocacy counts.)
  • IT troubleshooting skills and confidence.  (Macs with Microsoft Office, plus online tools including Google Apps, TypePad, and key social media.  This is especially valuable because I'm very bad at this myself.)
  • Strong ability to write, and to customize writing style to different audiences.
  • Ability to design compelling visuals, including document formats, PowerPoint presentations, and graphs and diagrams that tell a story clearly.
  • Advanced data analysis skills, which could include advanced uses of Excel, database programs, and GIS.

Again, I do not recommend that you move to Portland just for this opportunity, though I won't discriminate against out-of-town applicants if you're sure you want to take that risk.  In six months, if I'm ready to build a larger staff, I will be more enthusastically seeking staff interested in coming to Portland to work with us.

If interested, please hit the email button under my photo, over on the far right of this page –>

Email me your questions about this opportunity, and if you are interested, send me:

  • A resume
  • At least three references I can call who have some experience with you in the skill areas I've described above.
  • Optionally: the hourly rate, without benefits, that you think best matches your skills, supported by a history of past compensation if relevant.  If you have a bottom line minimum hourly rate, state it.  If not, we'll figure this out if we're a match.
  • Preferably: A sample of some past project you've done that displays both your ability to write and your ability to interpret data, ideally including visualisations (graphs, maps, diagrams) that you've designed.

If this sounds vague it's because I'm intentionally casting a wide net here.  It is the nature of working in a very small firm that you have to do many kinds of tasks — both professional and clerical — so there are several possible backgrounds that could be good qualification.  I may also add more than one person to get the complete skillset I need.

The application deadline is July 20, but if you've missed that go ahead and send me something.  I am likely to make decisions based on what I have on July 20, but I may not meet all of my needs then.

Please spread the word, especially in Portland!

portland’s southwest corridor: get involved at the beginning!

Portland Inner SW CorrPortland's regional government Metro has just launched a public feedback period on its Southwest Corridor Project.  This is the most important time to be involved. For details on upcoming engagement events, and online feedback opportunites, see here.  (Scroll to bottom for public meeting info.)

Most people won't pay attention to this project until a final transit project is proposed and the federal funding process is well underway.  At that point, when there's little option to revise the project, everyone will be stuck in a binary support-or-oppose debate that is often angry, boring, and frustrating to all sides.  At that point, too, some people will be saying that "the fix is in," that Metro was always going to build the project a certain way and that the whole public process was just window-dressing.

When we get to that point, people who were engaged in this process back in July 2012 will need to pipe up and say, no, actually there was quite an extensive public conversation before any hint of a transit line was drawn on map.  The public and advocacy groups had ample opportunity to shape the entire definition of the project and its priorities, before Metro had done much planning.

The study area [Download PDF] consists of all the suburbs lying generally southwest of downtown Portland, and a large swath of southwest Portland itself.  Portland's part of the corridor is shown at right.  Download the PDF to see the full extent.

Even if you're not in Portland, you might want to poke around the project website just to get a sense of how broadly Metro defines its corridor studies.  At this stage, the project is presented in such an inclusive way as to barely hint that it may lead to some kind of rapid transit line.  This is the right tone for this point in the process.  The Portland area's style with these things is to start from the question "What kind of community do you want?" — and gradually build a case from the answers to that question toward a transportation improvement, in the most transparent way possible.  The tone of these processes is always that the transit line isn't an end in itself, but a tool for a wide range of outcomes that citizens value.

This corridor has understandably been a relatively low priority in the past three decades of rapid transit development.  Its catchment is relatively small as corridors go, density is low, topography is relatively difficult, and all the options for bringing any rail or BRT project into downtown Portland look likely to be very expensive.  Look at the map above:  The only alignment that won't involve tunnelling will approach alongside the already-level Interstate 5 and Barbur Blvd, which are right next to each other.  This alignment briefly turns due east and then makes a 90-degree turn to the north — locally known as the "Terwilliger curves."  The east-west segment exploits a break in the continuous ridge of hills running north-south, and after you turn northward you're running laterally across the steep face of these hills all the way into downtown.  Barbur and I-5 are flat through here only because of continuous restraining walls and viaducts, all of which will be expensive to refit for rapid transit.  

Portland has already built one long tunnel to cross these hills — the dashed red line that you see heading west from downtown.  That tunnel, though, is part of the westside line, which has a much larger catchment including all of Beaverton, Hillsboro, and the so-called "Silicon Forest".  A tunnel for the smaller southwest corridor will probably be difficult to pencil.

All Portland rapid transit studies are land use studies, and are ultimately about what kind of community citizens want.  Still, this one will call for some spectacularly clever engineering options — more than enough drama to engage infrastructure geeks across the continent.  Stay tuned, and if you're local, get involved.

some questions on frequent network mapping

@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:

Spokane slice

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

Trimet slice

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!

More on this in Chapter 7 of my book.

portland: balance the budget yourself

Portland's Tri-Met faces another horrible funding shortfall this year, but they've come up with a good survey tool to engage the public in their decisions about what services to cut.  It's one of those "balance the budget yourself" tools that's becoming increasingly necessary to bring voters into contact with reality about government budgets.  

If you live in Portland, you should definitely work through the survey and send them your own balanced budget and comments.  If you're not in Portland, is your transit agency communicating about its trade-offs this well?

welcome, readers from portland’s willamette week

If you've come from today's interview of me in Portland's free weekly Willamette Week, please note that while I certainly stand by my own words, my work on "rail vs bus" questions is easily misunderstood.  In fact, my work is all about giving you better ways to frame the question, ones that focus on the outcomes that we want.

For a quick intro to my work on the issue, see especially these articles:

And there's a lot more in the "Streetcars (Trams)" category.  A full list of categories is in the next column –>

… but above all, buy the book, after first reading the introduction!