Subway entrances are always a great challenge opportunity for transit architecture. Should you present a consistent systemwide look or blend into the surrounding urban texture? (The same debate happens about lots of other transit infrastructure too, right down to the bus stop sign.)
Rail Transit
Vienna: Life Without Loops
Vienna offers a really nice example of the perils of short downtown shuttles in general, and loops in particular.
Vienna: Do the Wires Ruin It? (contd.)
Continuing from my last post on the overhead wires of Vienna, here are some additional images. (Click to enlarge.) Decide for yourself when and where they’re unacceptable.
Vienna: Do the Wires Ruin It?
Next time someone tells you that a light rail or streetcar or trolleybus would ruin the beautiful streetscape with their overhead wires, show them a picture of Vienna, where I am now.
Rail Rapid Transit Maps, to Scale
Neil Freeman recently posted a great collection of rail rapid transit maps, all drawn to scale, and all at the same scale. The image at right, of course, is New York City,
He calls them subway maps, but of course that term suggests that the service is all underground, which few “subway” systems are. What matters is that they’re rapid transit. In this case, they’re specifically rail rapid transit, which is why Staten Island’s rail line in the lower left appears disconnected from the rest. In reality, it’s just connected by rapid transit of a different mode: the Staten Island Ferry.
(By “rapid transit” this blog always means transit services that run frequently all day in an exclusive right of way with widely spaced stations — linking centers to each other, for example, rather than providing coverage to every point on the line as local-stop services do.)
Is Elevated Acceptable?
The Transport Politic has an excellent post on the debate over the plan to build Honolulu’s proposed light rail system elevated through downtown, as opposed to at the surface as a group of architects wants.
Everyone is prone to reduce the complexity of urbanism to a problem solvable by their own profession, and risks being dismissive of the expertise of other professions’ points of view. (See here, for example.) When a group of architects proposes that a major new transit investment should be made slower and more expensive to operate in order to foster a better streetscape, as is happening in Honolulu, one hopes that they have thought through the urbanist consequences of all the people who’ll be in cars instead of on transit because the transit is too slow, infrequent, and unreliable. Let me clarify each of those words: