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.)
Vienna: Life Without Loops
Vienna offers a really nice example of the perils of short downtown shuttles in general, and loops in particular.
Vienna and the “Style of Youth”
One of the joys of Vienna’s transit system is that some key pieces of it were built in 1898, mostly designed by Otto Wagner. It was the era of Art Nouveau (called Jugendstil in Vienna) which later grew into full-blown Deco. A few examples are over the top, such as the Karlsplatz station house:
Vienna: Weaving A Total Network
In talking about transit planning I’m constantly stressing the need to think in terms of interconnected two-dimensional networks, not just the one-dimensional “corridors” that are the focus of so many transit studies. It’s a hard point to convey because (a) interconnectedness implies connections, also called “transfers,” which people supposedly hate, and (b) networks are complicated and abstract and hard to think about, which is why I’m always trying to create and promote tools for making them simpler.
What’s more, network effects are really hard to photograph. The closest you can come is a photo of a really smooth cross-platform connection, such as this one I observed in Vienna:
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.
Environmentalist Critiques of Strategic Transit Planning
How should environmentalists engage with long-range transit planning studies? What should you focus on? What should you object to?
On Monorails
On my apparent disapproval of monorails, J. D. Hammond comments:
Every planner hates monorail by default, but can never articulate what, exactly is wrong with monorails. I imagine my exasperation with this is not unlike your exasperation with BRT opposition.
I wouldn’t make the claims that monorail partisans do that it can somehow be “profitable” in ways other transportation modes cannot. However, it’s demonstrated that it’s at least cost-comparable with LRT and provides higher levels of service. And the public, moreso than the planning community, is predisposed to like monorail. What’s wrong with that?
I think I can answer most of J.D.’s challenge, but first, a caution. This is not an “anti-monorail” post. This is a post by somebody who values abundant access outcomes and who views transit technologies as tools for delivering those outcomes. I have found Bus Rapid Transit useful in a number of situations, so I tend to say good things about it. This doesn’t mean I’m attached to buses as a technology, merely that they do seem to be the best tool for the job in a wide range of cases. I’m still focused on the abundant access outcome, not the technology that delivers it.
Having said that, we’re all shaped by our own experience, so I should confess that my view of the potential usefulness of monorails is probably shaped by my experience around the Seattle Monorail Project (1996-2005), the only voter-approved effort North America has seen to develop monorail as a high-capacity rapid transit mode rather than as a circulator or fun-ride. The project failed after consuming a decade of advocates’ sweat and tears, because (a) its costs kept escalating and (b) its all-elevated profile was unacceptable to many people who care about the urban landscape. Another factor (c) may have been that the monorail’s inability to branch limited ability to branch constrained the range of future extensions that could be contemplated, thus the range of neighborhoods that could believe they’d get monorail service someday.
Cost escalation is a common problem in transit generally, but the other two problems are quite specific to monorails.
The need for completely grade separated and usually elevated guideway is, in my experience, a huge practical and political limit to the use of monorail technology. Light rail can be elevated but doesn’t have to be. Monorails are the lightest form of elevated rail transit in existence, so when you elevate them you get a less looming structure than other modes require. But the need to be elevated everywhere — even at points where light rail would run at ground level — is a limitation affecting both cost and visual impact. If you require a means of emergency evacuation, you need a walkway alongside the beam that makes this impact even greater.
The inability to branch was a small problem in Seattle because one of the desirable “monorail Phase 2” projects (the Delridge corridor) would have been a branch from partway along the planned Phase 1 monorail, rather than an extension off the end of it. Because of the way monorail trains wrap around their single guide-beam, branching is hard to do. On standard rail, it’s no problem.
But the current generation of urban designers is pretty passionate about the supreme importance of the pedestrian experience at the ground plane, and resistant to putting any substantial structure directly over a street. Even networks of overhead pedestrian crossings, such as the Skyway networks of Minneapolis and St. Paul, are rarely if ever proposed today on such a comprehensive scale.
You can credibly argue that we’ll get over any phobia about structure above the street once our need for rapid transit is urgent enough and we don’t have any other options for where to put it. You won’t win many such arguments now in any European, North American, or Australiasian city I can think of, especially in the dense parts of those cities which are (a) precisely where the transit is needed but also (b) where people are the most anxious about loss of sunlight and the effects of looming structure in general.
I should add that I have both ridden and walked under many of the commonly cited examples of cool monorails, including the circulator/funride monorails at Disneyland, Las Vegas (pictured here), and Sydney, as well as the old two-station Alweg Monorail in Seattle. In Sydney, the monorail is fun for tourists but widely despised by the locals because of its impact on the streetscape, and because, as a one-way loop, it doesn’t offer much useful mobility. [Update: the Sydney monorail was torn down in 2013]
Monorails may have more of a future in Asia. For example, a new monorail system proposed for Delhi will snake through a very sensitive and congested area between the Red Fort and Old Delhi — two of the most significant and touristed historic sites in the city. Here, the relative lightness of the monorail structure, compared to other elevated modes, might be a very good fit given that (a) some kind of rapid transit just has to be built, (b) underground construction would raise huge archaeological and practical issues in such a touristed spot, and (c) the aversion to elevated structure is less total in India, right now, than it seems to be in Europe, North America, and Australasia. So the monorail may continue to find some specialized situations where it really is the best solution.
If it’s the right tool for the job, they should use it.
Like a Cheetah
Last night, on the treadmill at the gym, I watched a bit of a National Geographic Special on the maglev train that connects Shanghai’s airport with its city center. Most of it was about the engineering challenges of the project, and the many small dramas of solving them. At the end of the piece, we viewed the train from above as it rushed away on its elevated guideway, while the narrator said something like: “But the future of the maglev train is very much in doubt.”
And I thought: “Like a cheetah.”
Words I Deleted Today
A client has asked me make the following deletions in a report I’d prepared for them on a public transit planning issue:
“… serious issues of bus access …”
” … to flow through these critical points …”
” … without extreme and circuitous deviations …”
The deleted words are all “emphatic adjectives,” words that mean nothing more than “Hey! This bit here is important!” Serious, critical, and extreme are all-purpose emphatic adjectives, while circuitous becomes emphatic if it’s used redundantly as I did here, “circuitous deviations,” because of course all deviations are circuitous.