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bicycle vs transit problems

Posted on January 19, 2011 in Cycling, Pedestrians, Portland, Seattle, Streetcars (Trams)

Bicycles have always had an anxious relationship with local-stop street-running transit, both bus and streetcar.  On a street without separate bike lanes, bikes and local-stop transit tend to end up sharing the "slow" traffic lane — typically a lane that's either next to the curb or next to a row of parked cars.  The difficulty lies not just in the obvious ability of rail tracks to throw a cyclist, but more generally in the fact that many cyclists like to move at something close to the average speed of local-stop transit — generally 10-20 mph.  With buses at least, the pattern is often for a local bus and a cyclist to "leapfrog," passing each other over and over, an uncomfortable and mildly risky move for both parties. 

Streetcars are much less likely to pass a cyclist than a bus is, and this, come to think of it, may be one of the many little reasons that streetcars often end up being slower than buses when you control for other differences (in right of way, fare handling, signaling, enforcement, etc).  Cyclist friends have often told me that they prefer cycling alongside streetcars rather than buses becuase streetcars don't make surprising lateral moves.  This is true, though of course the lateral motion of buses is a normal part of how they get through traffic, and how they often keep moving in situations where a streetcar would get stuck.

Mia Birk has a good article today arguing that bicycles and streetcars can be friends.  So far, though, the only examples she cites of really successful bicycle-transit integration are from streets where there's plenty of space to separate the two modes, such as Portland's King/Grand couplet.  She's involved now in a consulting team looking at how streetcars will interact with cyclists along a proposed line on Seattle's Broadway, and I look forward to seeing what they come up with. 

Birk is clear that the basic design of the starter streetcar lines in Portland in Seattle — operation in the right-hand (slow) lane next to a row of parked cars — didn't provide good options for cyclists needing to avoid the hazard of the streetcar tracks.  She wants to see better separation, but when looking at a dense urban street like Seattle's Broadway, it's hard to see how they'll deliver that without undermining either on-street parking or pedestrian circulation.  She notes one situation in Portland (14th & Lovejoy) where the streetcar-cyclist conflict was arguably resolved at the pedestrian's expense:

14th-and-Lovejoy
… and she's clear that this isn't the outcome she's after.  (This idea of a bike lane that passes between a transit stop and the sidewalk is common in the Netherlands.  It can work well as long as there's ample sidewalk width.  It's less nice in situations like this one where the remaining sidewalk is constrained.)

If I sound a little cynical about the prospects for harmony between local-stop transit and cyclists, it's because this is a geometry problem, and geometry tends to endure in the face of even the most brilliant innovation.  The examples in Mia's post seem to confirm that if the street is wide enough, it's easy to separate cycles and transit, but that if it isn't, it isn't. 

When the problem is this simple, it's not hard to reach a point where you're sure you've exhausted all the geometric possibilities.  At that point, you to make hard choices about competing goods, producing something that all sides will see as a compromise.  Hoping for new innovative solutions can become a distraction at that point, since no innovation in human history has ever changed a fact of geometry. 

Finally, if a streetcar ever does go down Seattle's Broadway, it had better be compatible with buses as well.  Broadway is an important link in the frequent transit network, with lines that extend far beyond the local area and thus make direct links that a starter streetcar line cannot replace.  What will happen to these buses?  If they share the streetcar lane, what will their role be in the streetcar-bicycle dance?

Photo: Mia Birk

email of the week: marketing a “bowl of tangled noodles”

Posted on December 20, 2010 in Branding, Frequent Networks, Marketing, Portland

Why do so many transit agencies not provide clear maps highlighting basic user-critical features such as frequency?  From a major transit authority located between the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, a planner proposes this explanation (links mine):

The current method [of designing marketing and information materials] is based on showing things to focus groups, and whatever wins the opinion poll seems to [get done].  Focus groups can kill good ideas.  [For example] if you show the Los Angeles 12-minute map [now a 15-minute map], it will probably be considered way too complicated.  However since the public’s image of buses [in my city] varies between zero and a bowl of tangled noodles, surely an effort like the 12 min map would be an improvement, despite the criticism re complexity.
 
Our marketing people are marketing people who work in transport, not transport people who work in marketing. So their knowledge of customers is probably better than mine, but their knowledge of the network (including its frequent service strength areas) would be inferior.
 
In contrast I take the view (influenced by the familiar themes on HT) that passengers worldwide pretty much have the same wants and needs.  So you can look at what works elsewhere, and apply it to relevant parts of the network here – no need to reinvent the wheel. You’d still have focus groups, but they would help with refining rather than saying yes or no.  I may grit my teeth at their lack of network knowledge; they’d probably think the same if I talk about marketing.

By “bowl of tangled noodles,” I’m guessing he means something like this (although this is not his city):
Wodonga
My experience is that good marketers and good transit planners have the same reaction to a bowl of tangled noodles — confusing piles of overlapping routes.  They hate them.  Both professions strive to reduce complexity, but often they don’t have the same notion of which fundamentals are most important. 

For example, as a planner I’d rather see a map that uses a strong color like red to highlight frequency, whereas many published maps use red to highlight speed — even fast services that run for only a few hours and are thus useful only to a narrow market.  San Jose’s VTA map, for example, uses red to mean “express, but maybe not all day, and maybe not in both directions.”  To me as a planner, this gives a misleading impression that the red lines are the underlying structure on which the network is built.  In fact, that structure lies more in the green and blue lines.
Vta

Others, as in this 2009 Portland map, prefer to use colors to differentiate the lines from each other, leaving little information bandwidth to convey other distinctions.  Portland’s 2009 map “highlights” Frequent Network lines by making the number bullet background yellow rather than white.  See?  Me neither.
Pdx

 

Also, on this Portland map, if you look at 39th Avenue (north-south a bit to the left of the center of the image) you’ll see a route 66 running for a little distance, clearly an exception to the overall all-day grid pattern.  This route is one-way and peak-only, just a few trips designed to handle commutes to the medical center.  To me, drawing it as such a solid line gives a misleading impression that it’s more important than it is, and partly obscures the grid structure of frequent all-day lines that’s most people are likely to find useful.  So my instinct is usually to render peak-only services as dotted lines, showing them but not letting them distract from the big picture.

 

UPDATE:  Fortunately, Portland’s map has been revised, effective September 2010, exactly along the lines that I’d have suggested!  (Thanks to Nathan Banks for the update.)
Portland 10
The near-invisible yellow dots are still there, but Frequent Network lines are now drawn slightly wider.  See the difference?

Thanks to years of diligent planning, and a high tolerance for connections, Portland’s network is not a bowl of tangled noodles, though the 66 is a step down that slippery slope.  Still, even in Portland, these differences arise between the planning perspective and a marketing perspective on what’s important to show on a map.

I would especially love to get comments from transit marketing professionals on this.  Confidentiality policy is here.  Feel free to use email, via the link under my photo –>
 

Basics: Finding Your Pulse

Posted on November 30, 2010 in Basics, Connections, Transfers, Maps, On-Time Performance, Portland

When transit services are running every 30 minutes or worse, you can’t assume they connect with each other just because they cross on the map.  Schedules need to be coordinated to make connections at low frequencies possible.  The only technique that does this comprehensively is called a pulse or timed transfer.  

A pulse is a regularly scheduled event, usually happening at the same time each hour, in which transit vehicles from a range of routes — usually running every 30 or 60 minutes — are scheduled to all meet together.  A group of hourly local routes, for example, might all come to the pulse point between :22 and :25 after the hour and leave at :30. That way, nobody has to wait more than 8 minutes for a connection even though the services in question are hourly.

The sequence of events at a pulse. Buses arrive, sit together briefly, and then depart. Drawing: Alfred Twu

Often, pulses are organized around a main transit line, such as a trunk bus or rail line that takes you to a nearby larger city.  In these cases, the main line vehicle usually doesn’t dwell as the local buses do, since it’s the most crowded service and hence the most speed-sensitive.   Instead, the locals arrive a few minutes before the trunk passes through, and leave a couple of minutes after.

Pulses are the only way to provide connection wait times that are much, much better than the frequency of the services involved.  A pure pulse is also equally convenient for connections between any pair of lines, and thus for travel in any direction.

For this reason they are used almost universally, in North America, in small-city networks where frequencies are low and often also in suburban areas of large cities.  If you’re in a North American suburb or small city and see a large number of buses hanging out together on a street corner, you’re probably watching a pulse.

I was introduced to pulse scheduling in Portland at a tender age.  I was a teenage transit geek then an undergraduate working part time at TriMet, the transit agency.  This happened to be the period (1979-85) when the lattice of suburban pulse networks was being constructed.

We spent a lot of time thinking about how the pulses interact with each other.  For example, if you have a pulse of buses at Beaverton Transit Center at :05 and :35 past the hour, and one route goes from Beaverton to Sunset Transit Center in 12-14 minutes, how do you schedule the Sunset Transit Center pulse?  Do you set it at :20 and :40, so that this connecting route can serve both pulses but with just a few minutes to spare?  When this route is late, a lot of connections will be missed and a lot of people stranded.  Or do we just set the Sunset pulse at :05 and :35, so that the bus linking the two transit centers has lots of spare time but now has too much time to kill and will tend to arrive inconveniently early for one pulse or the other.  Or do we just accept that this line isn’t going to hit one or the other of the pulses precisely?

In lattices of multiple pulses, the travel times between the pulse points become critical. In this example, if Lines 1 and 2 have different travel times between the two pulse points, the timing may not work well for both of them. Good network design thinks about this problem as routes are being designed.

To do pulse scheduling, we have to plan the pulse schedule as we’re designing the network.  In the two-pulse problem I outlined above, we will think hard about the line connecting the two pulses and ask if we can either make it a little shorter (so that it will get there more reliably in 15 minutes) or a little longer (so that it will get there in 30 minutes without so much time to spare).  I have designed some large networks with multiple pulse points, all designed to work harmoniously.  To do that, I’ve always designed lines between pulse points with the specific goal of making them a certain length.

Pulse scheduling requires an intimate two-way conversation between the planning and scheduling tasks, but not all public transit authorities are not set up to have this conversation.  Sometimes, planning and scheduling are too far apart organizationally and become structurally incapable of noticing and exploiting pulse opportunities.  In other cases, pulses may simply not be the prevailing habit; there may be nobody around who is in the position to suggest them.

The organizational challenge presented by pulsing is, to me, a positive feature of the concept.  Better integration of planning, scheduling, and operations management has many benefits, and if the pulse challenge helps motivate an agency to get there, so much the better.

But pulse scheduling does have some practical limitations.  In particular, it struggles in any environment where the running times are prone to vary a great deal.

Pulses are about managing a low-frequency network, so they aren’t generally needed in inner cities where frequencies are every 15 minutes or better.  Pulses are almost universal in small-city design in North America, because most such cities have little traffic congestion and can therefore run a pulse reliably.  The best big-city agencies also do some kind of pulse late at night, when their services are very infrequent.

But in the suburban areas of big cities, running times vary due to traffic congestion and pulse operations struggle.  I suspect that the difficulty of guaranteeing pulses in these settings is the main reason that big suburban agencies are reluctant to advertise their pulsing too much.  Small-city agencies, which don’t deal with such severe congestion, are more likely to emphasise that at the heart of their network, they have a pulse.

A lattice of interconnected pulse points, all beating as planned in unison or alternation in a pattern that repeats each hour, is a thing of beauty if you can visualize it, especially because if the motion of pulsing suggests the movement of blood through the heart.  It’s like watching the inner life of a large multi-hearted organism.  This can be a nice metaphor for other kinds of thinking about your city.

 

 

1 Ross R. Maxwell, “Converting a Large Region to a Pulsed-Hub Public Transport Network.”  Transportation Research Record, paper 03-4020, p 128.  Original paper here.  

Connections vs Complexity

Posted on November 20, 2010 in Basics, Connections, Transfers, London, Los Angeles, Portland, Sydney

In my first “basics” post on connections, I explained why a network that requires connections (or as North Americans call them, “transfers”) can actually get people where they’re going faster than a network that tries to avoid them.

But there’s another important reason to plan for connections rather than direct service, one that should be important to anyone who wants transit to be broadly relevant to urban life: Unless you welcome and encourage connections, your network will become very, very complex. Continue Reading →

A Field Guide to Transit Quarrels: The Recommended Video

Posted on August 28, 2010 in Events, Meta, Philosophy, Portland

It turns out that the excellent blog Portland Transport created a really clear video of the Portland version of my presentation, “A Field Guide to Transit Quarrels.”  Only tonight have I had both the time and the bandwidth to look at it.  Apart from the well-amplified sniffles from my cold at the time, it looks and sounds pretty good.  Thanks to Bob Richardson and everyone else at Portland Transport who made it happen. Continue Reading →

A Field Guide to Transit Quarrels

Posted on August 14, 2010 in Advocacy, Philosophy, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Technophilia

UDPATE:  New, easier links!

My presentation “A Field Guide to Transit Quarrels,” which I did last month in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, is here as a PowerPoint with notes on each slide describing its essence.

Powerpoint 2007 file   

High-quality PDF(10.2 mb))

Low-quality PDF (1.2 mb)

If you want a taste of what I sounded like talking about this stuff, the backlit but audible video of the Seattle presentation is here.  UPDATE:  The Portland video, which is much clear, is here!

As always with free stuff on the web, there has to be some advertising.  So:  If you’d like me to do a presentation to your group or organisation. The recent North American tour was the last time I’ll do this for free, but costs can often be figured out.

Look forward to comments, as always.  Thanks to Scott for the PDF links!

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