Bravo to Seattle's King County Metro for their new system maps, which finally reveal their Frequent Network. All can be viewed and downloaded here.
The wide blue line is light rail and the red lines are the new Rapid Bus product (both frequent and relatively fast). The rest of the bus network is clearly presented in ways that advertise its frequency and span, so that (a) the Frequent Network jumps out at you and (b) services that run only at rush hour recede from attention so that you can clearly see the network that runs all day. They do this by using black (numbers and lines ) for the Frequent Network, then solid blue for the other all-day service, then paler blue with blue-outlined white number bullets for the peak-only services.
Works for me. What do you think? If your transit agency hasn't figured out Frequent Network mapping yet, show them this map, and tell them to read Chapter 7 of my book, or this!
Here's a new Frequent Network Map for Melbourne, by Campbell Wright, showing where you can get around easily all day if you aren't willing to wait long for public transport. Download and explore it here: PNG. The image below is obviously illegible but the zoomed-out look shows us important things.
What I notice:
1. The inner north of Melbourne, immediate north of the CBD, should be a public transport paradise. It's historic, very dense and has a grid street pattern for easy walking to transit. It has frequent north-south trams on all the major streets, but it lacks the frequent crosstown services that would make a complete east-west grid for everywhere-to-everywhere travel. The routes are there, as you can see here and here , but except for the one Mr Wright draws, none are frequent enough to make adequate connections, so their role is largely symbolic. This is probably because there are too many overlapping infrequent routes, and they need to be considated into fewer stronger routes.
2. The inner east and inner north grids are poorly stitched together. There are frequent crosstown routes in both but it's hard to get from one grid to the other, except by coming almost downtown, to Hoddle Street, or going way out, to Bulleen where the blue 903 crosses.
3. Melbourne has lavished great attention for years on the four orbital Smarbuses, inverted U-shaped routes that are obvious as north-south bands across the far right of the map. What Melbourne really needed was a high-frequency grid, with crosstown (perpendicular to radial) lines concentrated in areas of high demand so that you could go from everywhere to everywhere with a simple L-shaped trip. The Smartbuses oversimplified the grid concept by insisting, for no reason I can discern and at great cost, that these services all had to be complete U shapes wrapped all the way around the city. regardless of the markets through which they pass.
You can see the effect. Parts of Melbourne that could support high frequency crosstown service, like the inner north, or the Port Melbourne-St Kilda corridor, don't have much of it, while a fortune is spent on a vast outermost U (the grey line) which creates no grid effect because it lies far beyond the end of most frequent radials. It's also far, far to long to be operated reliably, as are many of the Smarbuses. The reliability can be assured only by inserting substantial break time along the way for schedule recovery, which would mean that they don't really flow continuously in the way that the route number and brand would suggest.
4. Only with a Frequent Network map like Mr. Wright's can you see Melbourne's network in a way that would help you understand it as an instrument of freedom, something that you might use for many purposes as part of am empowered life. While the State of Victoria has recently taken over public transport information, their published maps still make it very hard to see the network this way. If you arrive at the website wanting to see a real map of your transit system, and you figure out that you need to click Maps / Metropolitan Maps, you're asked to choose between train, tram, and bus. Again, the assumption is that you must be looking for a particular transit technology, and that nobody would ever be interested in simply understanding how all public transport — with the technologies working together to form a network — might be useful their lives.
What's more, maps of local buses are chopped up by Local Government Area, arbitrary boundaries that slice up the map in ways that further conceal patterns of usefulness. And of course, there is no Frequent Network map, like you'll find in Brisbane, and like Mr Wright as sketched above, to help you figure out which services are coming soon and which require you to build your life around them.
So if you know how to get around Melbourne freely and easily all day, bookmark Mr Wright's map. For now, it's one of Melbourne's most important bits of public transport info.
From Jake Blumgart at GOOD, an important factoid about the decline in driving among young adults:
An April study by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group found that between 2001 and 2009 the average annual vehicle miles traveled by Americans ages 16 to 34 fell by close to a quarter, from 10,300 to 7,900 per capita (four times greater than the drop among all adults), and from 12,800 to 10,700 among those with jobs. At the same time, the amount of bicycling, walking, and public transit ridership increased. And these trends aren’t just among broke millennials. There was an 100 percent increase in public transit usage among young people with incomes over $70,000.
Would love to see some stats on what Millennials do when they start families, compared to those a generation ago.
It’s impossible to be heard when your whole position is quiet now that all public discourse has become a shouting match. Being an advocate of quiet in our society is as quixotic and ridiculous as being an advocate of beauty or human life or any other unmonetizable commodity.
Personal note: I have a slight hearing problem called hyperacusis which means that I hear some high-pitched sounds, especially sudden ones, as louder and more painful than others perceive. Kreider helps me understand why this little "disability", which prevents me from enjoying noisy social environments and thus has a self-isolating effect, will never carry any "rights" in the Americans with Disabilites Act sense. Nor am I sure that it should.
I used it in the earliest days of this blog, and it's in almost every presentation I do. It's from a tool that allows you to select a location in a city and see blobs (technically isochrones) showing the area you can get to in a fixed amount of time using transit plus walking. This one is for 9:00 am and the three shades of blue represent travel times of 15, 30, or 45 minutes. In essence, the software takes the point you select and runs the equivalent of Google Transit trip planning searches to find a points where the travel time crosses the threshold; these become the boundaries of the blobs. (For details behind this crude summary, see Aaron Antrim's comment on this post.)
I call this a map of your freedom. It's useful for two potentially transformative purposes:
Helping people and organizations understand the transit consequences of where they choose to locate, and thus to take more responsbility for those consequences. This, over time, can help people who value good transit to locate where transit access is good — something that's very hard to discern from a typical bus map but that becomes very obvious here. You can even assess access to specific things that you value, based on exactly where the blobs are.
Helping people visualise the benefit of transit — access to your city — as a freedom, and thus to understand more clearly what transit does for them. It broadens the narrow notion of travel time – which is often understood for only one typical trip — into a picture of your possibilities as a transit rider. The percentage of a city's resources (jobs, housing, retail etc) that is in the blobs for a particular location could also form the basis for a meaningful Transit Score that could replace the technologically biased scores now used by WalkScore.com.
Some timing of transfers is assumed, based on the author's experiences in Europe. So he uses an average transfer wait time of 1/3 of the headway instead of 1/2 of the headway, which would be appropriate for random transfers.
Here's the problem. Both assumptions mean that Mapnificent's assumptions undervalue frequency and overvalue vehicle speed. Since this conceptual bias is already very, very common (see Chapter 3 of my book), Mapnificent is seriously misleading in a way that can be really unhelpful. For cities that I know, especially area with lower frequency service, Mapnificent wildly overstates the convenience of transit, and fails to show how locating on frequent service will get you better access to the city.
In my network design course we talk about this. When figuring travel times in the course, I insist on using 1/2 of the headway as the intial wait time and the same as the transfer time (unless there's a pulse) so that frequencies weigh heavily into true travel times, as they do in life. This sometimes sounds silly: If a route runs once an hour does that really mean I wait an average of 30 minutes? Or do I just build my life around the schedule? I view the two as the same thing, really. We're not describing literal waiting so much as time when you're in the wrong place. We're describing the difference between when you need to arrive and when you can actually arrive. This could take the form of arriving at work 29 minutes earlier than your shift starts — consistently, every day. Effectively, you end up waiting at your destination.
So there are a range of judgment calls to be made in designing these things, but it's worth getting it right because the potential utility of this tool is so significant. The good news: I'm involved with people who are working on something better. Stay tuned!
This morning, Andrew Sullivan, whom I usually find intellectually engaging, featureda confused article about transit productivity from Eric Morris on the Freakonomics blog. It's the old line about how because buses are often empty, they're not a very efficient transit mode. I first rebutted it three years ago and the rebuttal hasn't changed at all.
I quickly wrote the letter below. But the big announcement is after the letter!
Eric Morris on the Freakonomics blog has fallen into the familiar trap …
To put my remarks in context: I’ve been a transit network design consultant for 20 years, and am also the author of the blog HumanTransit.org and the book Human Transit (Island Press, 2011) which rebuts many of the false assumptions in this article.
Morris's argument rests on the false assumption is that transit agencies are all trying to maximize ridership as their overriding objective.
In 20 years as a transit network design consultant working across North America, Australia, and New Zealand, I’ve never encountered a transit agency that pursues a ridership goal as its overriding purpose. Transit agencies are always required to provide large amounts of service despite predictably low ridership, for reasons including basic access for seniors and the disabled and the perception that service should be delivered “equitably.” While equitable is a slippery word that means different things to different people, its effect is to justify service spread all over an urban region, even into areas where ridership is inevitably low (usually due to a combination of low density and street networks that discourage walking).
In my own work, I refer to these predictably low-ridership servics as coverage services because they are tied to a coverage goal that conflicts with a goal of maximum ridership. Typically the coverage goal is stated in the form “__% of residents and jobs shall be within ___ feet (or meters) of transit.” This goal requires service to be spread out over areas where prospects for ridership are poor. I then encourage transit agency boards (or Ministers) to think consciously about what how their service resources should be divided between ridership goals and coverage goals.
If this method ever becomes common, it will be possible assess bus services that are trying to achieve high ridership. Only that universe of services is relevant to discussions about whether bus services provide ridership effectively.
A more extensive geometry-based discussion of exactly this issue, and how it needs to be managed in policy thinking is in Chapter 10 of my book Human Transit.
Regards …
The big announcement: I'm not going to do this much anymore. Here is my response, but hey, regular readers, any of you could have written this, right? After all, the rebuttal has been on this site for three years! Could everyone please bookmark that, or bookmark this, and just send a link whenever you see this same argument? Would save us all much time. Thanks!
Watch this video, and maybe you'll grasp the beauty of a great transit network, a beauty that has nothing to do with the technology it runs, but everything to do with the real life of a city and the feedom of its people. Public transit vehicles moving around Greater Vancouver, an entire day compressed into 2.5 minutes.
Long ago I posted another of these, for Auckland, New Zealand. It uses endearing tadpoles instead of white dots. It's also interesting because Auckland's is not a single unified network, as Vancouver's is, (although we're working on it!). You can see the difference if you watch closely, using the tips below.
So many people see public transit only as a vehicle on the street, or a thing they're waiting for. But when you watch this video of a well-designed unified transit network, you can see that it's a gigantic interconnected organism. And like all organisms, it's made up of complex but rhythmic motion.
Like your heart and lungs, the network effect of transit is quiet, ignorable, and yet the foundation of everything. The network is one being, moving to a beat. It's made of connections, little sparks of energy that you must imagine whenever two dots touch, as the dots hand off to one another like relay runners. For example, as you watch the video, watch this spot, especially toward the middle of the day:
That's Phibbs Exchange, an example of strong pulse scheduling. At a langorous pace (representing a pulse every half hour or even every hour) you'll see many white dots gather themselves into a single bright dot, shine brightly for a moment, then "pulse" outward again. What's happening is that many buses that run infrequently are converging on a point and sitting together briefly, so that people can transfer from any bus to any other.
I'm not sure I'll ever convey to my non-transit friends that regardless of what you think of buses, a pulse is a beautiful thing to watch. Phibbs is more spread out than I like, and I photographed it at a quiet time of day, but in an ideal one, like the ones in downtown Eugene, you see this gradual gathering of energy to a climax, then a release. Gradually the buses arrive, until finally they're all there. You see signs on the buses announcing different parts of the city, all the places you could go right now, from here. The drivers get off the bus briefly, chat with customers, point them to the right service. People meet by chance. It happens many times a day and yet there's always this sense of event: here, at this moment, you have service to all these different places, ready to go right now. Enjoy the banquet of choices, select your bus, and let's go. In a moment it's over, the buses all gone, the place quiet or even deserted, like a field after a storm has passed. And in half an hour or an hour it will happen again.
And it's not a random thing, like a storm, but part of a huge intentional network that (in Vancouver's case) is designed. This pulse is one of the network's many continuous, reliable heartbeats. It's one big organism, made of unconscious rhythmic motion and circulation as all organisms are. It's inseparable from the life of the city it serves. And you're part of it.
The Atlantic's Sommer Mathis argues that a major party cannot win again in the US without competing in the cities. Vindicated New York Times statistician Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) puts it even more baldly in a tweet: "If a place has sidewalks, it votes Democratic. Otherwise, it votes Republican."
And that's a problem.
Only in the US has the conservative party so totally abandoned the cities. In the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, conservative parties compete for inner city seats and sometimes win there. That's because these national parties understand the need for cities to function and that this requires a government role.
Conservative parties in those countries are also careful about managing elements of their base that thrive on the demonization and exclusion of some kind of demographic Other, such as racial, religous, or sexual categories. Messages that disparage these groups are now so unacceptable in major cities that they cut off voters who might otherwise support a conservative message. The daily experience of city life is all about sharing small spaces with people who are different from you, and prospering from creativity that arises from that mixture of perspectives and experiences, so demonizing diversity amounts to demonizing the very idea of the city.
All this is very related to public transit, this blog's core concern. I've argued in the Atlantic that transit thrives on thinking that embraces diversity instead of presuming fixed divides. To me, that embrace of diversity must include the richness of views, passions and human experience that are currently trapped and concealed inside the word "conservative."
Conservatives can help make good transit policy, once they are engaged in conversation about it. Conservative-dominated places like Alberta and Utah have made remarkably aggressive transit investments, justifed in part on sensible bipartisan understanding of what cities are, and what they need to thrive as engines of prosperity and innovation. When I've worked with elected boards or officials on difficult choices facing public transit in a city, I've noticed that self-identified conservatives are as least as likely as self-identified liberals to lead on the hard choices, by which I mean angering a core constituency or risking public complaint in order to meet some urgent large goal such as balancing the budget or establishing a clear policy.
The conservative-liberal or Republican-Democrat divide, as the media has constructed it, is not a real story. Delusional narratives are supposed to be entertaining, but this one is both delusional and boring. We will leave this story behind only when we start pointing out how searingly boring it is. The media are desperate to entertain, so only that message will get through to them.
Here is the real story: There is a polarization-vs-consensus divide, with large forces arrayed on the side of those who are terrified that people might begin listening to each other. There is an information-vs-ignorance divide, with large forces arrayed on the side of stopping the flow of information and rational argument.
Cities are places where, over time, the power of listening and information is most likely to prevail. They're not the only places; thanks to the internet, you can stay informed and immersed in conversation even if you're surrounded by 100 acres of sheep. But cities make the process involuntary; it happens to everyone to some degree. You cannot walk down the street (here's where sidewalks matter!) without encountering diversity and seeing how essential it is to city life. You cannot help meeting people of different races, religions, and sexual identities. That's what a city is. It's why polarizers and will always hate cities, and why tyrants will always find them hard to control. But it's also why they are such engines of growth and creativity in a world where information is power.
Still jetlagged from four absurdly busy weeks working in Australia and New Zealand, getting back just in time to vote in Oregon today.
As I've said on Twitter several times, eligible US voters who do not vote today have no right to complain about anything on my blog in the future. Declining to vote is a rejection of your democratic rights and an expression of consent toward those who would prefer a more oppressive state. It is also an expression of contempt toward those who have made sacrifices to protect democratic rights.
In short, I agree with Andrew Sullivan that this is a "secular sacred day."
I'm not telling you who or what to vote for, of course, nor telling you how I voted.
For a helpful rundown of US state and local ballot measures that will affect public transit mobility, see here, a the Overhead Wire. The Transport Politic looks like it's also setting up to cover transportation issues being voted on nationwide.
