Human Transit

Did Sim City Make Us Stupid?

Posted on June 7, 2009 in Architecture, Education, Public Outreach, US Federal Policy

My post on the lack of good simulation games triggered this reverie from Peter, regarding the city-planning simulation game, Sim City:

Ah, SimCity. … As a youngster I spent many hours building fields of residential tract housing, industrial parks, huge blighted and substantially vacant commercial districts, mega-highways connecting them all, and Godzilla.

When I recently discovered that the original SimCity was released as open source, I had to download it and try it out. I knew that it was inaccurate, but it was nostalgia. Then I discovered exactly how inaccurate it was. “No mixed residential and commercial areas?!? WTF!” I did play it long enough to also notice that transportation was pretty much a capital expenditure with no operating costs. Sigh.

Yes, those are the two of the worst fallacies built into the original Sim City:

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Suppose Money is Like Water

Posted on June 3, 2009 in 2-Keepers, Simulation

Steven Strogatz has a intriguing column in the NY Times about a 1950s era “hydraulic computer,” which modelled the operation of a national economy using fluids flowing through a machine. As the water circulates it fills or empties tanks, trips levers, and occasionally plots a graph of the level of a particular tank through time. For example, when a tank called “Minimum Working Balance” fills up, it begins overflowing into a stream called “Income.” (Click to enlarge.) The thing has a series of input points where you can change something (modelling an external input of some kind) and see what happens as a result.

The commenters seem to focus on how charmingly obsolete the thing is, but my first reaction was: What a great teaching tool! Someone should create working online model of it, complete with all the rushing and gurgling sounds, that we can all play with on our laptops.

In a democracy, the greatest threat to national security is public ignorance. The same is true of a democratically governed city. That’s why as a transit planner, I’ve come to view explaining what I do as one of the most important parts of my job.

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Rail Rapid Transit Maps, to Scale

Posted on May 27, 2009 in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Maps, New York City, Paris, Rail Transit, San Francisco

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.)

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The Joy of High Ceilings (also called Low Floors)

Posted on May 25, 2009 in Architecture

The marvelous post at Light and Air on the recent history of ceiling height is mostly about architecture, but it resonated for me as a transit planner.*

Over the past century, U.S. citizens grew taller while ceiling heights shrank. Simultaneously, the U.S. lost world leadership in average height to the Netherlands and eight other countries, whose people grew taller faster. It is difficult to find people who prefer low ceilings. In wealthy western societies there seems to be no other time when ceilings and heads were so uncomfortably proximate. What does ceiling height tell us about our society …?
There is a reason that dark, low-ceilinged rooms are still commonly used in literature to describe spaces that symbolize poverty, danger and unhealthy conditions.

Ceiling height is interesting because it’s one of those things that strikes most of us subliminally. We aren’t always aware of why a high-ceilinged space feels better, but it does.

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Is Elevated Acceptable?

Posted on May 19, 2009 in Architecture, Honolulu, Rail Transit, Vancouver

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:

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Do We Really Want Fares to be “Fair”?

Posted on May 12, 2009 in Fares

Fares are a tough issue for transit agencies and the politicians they answer to. Environmentalists and people concerned with social inclusion want fares to be low, or even eliminated entirely. The financial bottom line of most agencies requires a certain level of fare revenue. Many agencies worry about their “farebox return” (sometimes opaquely called the “operating ratio”), that is, the percentage of operating cost paid for by fares. If it’s over 100%, you have a profitable business, but in the developed world it’s usually much less, which is why we have government subsidies.

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Chicken, Egg

Posted on May 5, 2009 in Connections, Transfers, Language, Philosophy

Well, I’ve been at this for almost two weeks, so it’s about time we had a whiff of conflict! From Vancouver-based transportation economist and blogger Stephen Rees, on my post about “transferring“:

What is
REALLY good for a city is when transfer points are made the centrepiece
of good urban design – or “development oriented transit” as Sam Adams
calls it. Talking about transportation as though it is a stand alone
topic and not one intimately involved in the urban fabric is a good
indicator that the writer has not taken the care to study the impact of
decision making on how people live. Transport is a derived demand – and
currently we demand far too much motorised transport because of our
disdain for urbanity. Transit systems need to be seen as part of a much
bigger picture of remaking our urban places. (emphasis added)

Nothing to argue with here, except the sentence I’ve highlighted. But that sentence raises a really important issue.

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Will a Busway Give Me Direct Service to Downtown?

Posted on May 3, 2009 in Brisbane, Bus Rapid Transit, Connections, Transfers, Ottawa, San Diego

In my post on Brisbane’s King George Square busway station, I emphasized that the service pattern was of few routes running at high frequencies. Michael Setty commented

What is
really happening in Brisbane contradicts the marketing pitch made for
so-called “Quickways” (grade-separated busways) by
www.movesandiego.org, which emphasizes so-called “world best practices”
focusing on the ability of buses to operate directly from origin to
destination …

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Brisbane: A Tour of the South East Busway

Posted on May 2, 2009 in Brisbane, Bus Rapid Transit

A basic duty of transit consultants like me is to show each city what other cities are doing, and help cities figure out which of those models are right for them. For example, most people have never seen Bus Rapid Transit done in a way that provides the complete “rapid-transit” experience that we expect from urban rail transit, with complete separation from traffic. So I thought I’d offer a tour of Brisbane’s South East Busway, which does exactly that.

When assessing your options for a particular transit market, it’s important to realize that many of the features that attract us to rail rapid transit can be provided in a busway setting, including an attention to design that’s too often absent from bus transit facilities.

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Be on the Way

Posted on April 29, 2009 in Basics, Be on the Way, Language, Transit-Oriented Development (TOD)

Be on the way One of the problems with discussions of Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) is that the term sounds much too specialized. We hear talk of TODs as a special class of developments with special requirements and possibilities, and perhaps requiring special expertise. We often hear that a certain development is or isn’t aTOD, as though transit-orientation were not — as it obviously is — a matter of degree.

Moreover, most of the urban development decisions that will determine the future viability of transit are not decisions about TODs. Most of them are not even conscious decisions about transit. The literature of “how to build TODs” is useless in these situations. What people need are simple guidelines about transit that they can keep in the back of their minds, and on their checklists, as they plan ALL kinds of urban development. The same principles could help institutions and individuals decide where to locate.

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