A short draft chapter from the book, overlapping the content of this recent post but with an extended BART example that I hope readers will enjoy and have comments on.
In 2011, cartographer Daniel Huffman thought it would be interesting to draw river systems as though they were subways. Figure 1 shows part of his sketch of the Lower Mississippi.[i] Continue Reading →
The Metropolitan Council in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul is taking customer suggestions on how to name their rapid transit network, which until now has consisted only of a single rail line, the Hiawatha between Minneapolis and Bloomington via MSP airport. They are now adding Bus Rapid Transit and, in 2014, the Central light rail line. So they're starting to think about the whole system, and what to call it.
This is one of those moments when two competing impulses tend to diverge.
I lean toward the latter message. I've seen plenty of systems with sexy marketing but incoherent information, so I tend to say that clear information is the best marketing.
If you want "new and exciting and transformative," check out Boulder, Colorado, which has excellent transit, and where most of the bus lines have names like Hop, Jump, and Bound. They seem to be happy with it, and that's great. But I'm relieved to see that this impulse isn't becoming the norm. To me, things that like to hop, jump, and bound don't seem especially reliable; these names are asking me to entrust my commute to a bunch of hyperactive rabbits. They're trying to get my attention, which basic infrastructure doesn't do. And transit's role is really established only when people think of it as basic infrastructure.
Obviously, there are early stages in transit development where you do need to get people's attention. So cute names can have a place — on new shuttle buses, for example, that are trying to get a foothold in car-dependent suburbs. But in the Twin Cities we're talking about naming the basic rapid transit infrastructure that will be the backbone of the entire system. By the time such expensive projects get built, you usually already have people's attention.
So I hope that after an excellent outreach process, with lots of great suggestions, they pick a name like "Twin Cities Rapid" or "the Metro." Even Los Angeles — a city built on industries that sell excitement, enchantment, and novelty — calls its transit system Metro, and its elements Metro Rail, Metro Rapid etc. Boring. But you can count on it.
In solidarity with the people of Christchurch, New Zealand, I offer these memories of their beautiful city and its people, over on the personal blog. If you've never been there, it may help you visualize.
The planning professions work in a grey zone between expertise and activism, and managing these competing impulses is one of our hardest tasks.
As a transit planning consultant, I don’t worry much about being perceived as an advocate of transit in general. Experts in any field are expected to believe in its importance. But I do try to keep a little distance between my knowledge about transit and the impulse to say “You should do this.” A good consultant must know how to marry his own knowledge to his client’s values, which may lead him to make different recommendations than he would do as a citizen, expressing his own values. Continue Reading →
There's a lot of potential for animation of Google Transit data, and we're just starting to see it explored. Some results will be rich with information, differentiating various kinds of service so that you can see how they dance together. Chris McDowall's animation of a day's transit in Auckland is less informative but correspondingly more meditative. Buses, trains and ferries are all rendered as earnest little tadpoles (or comets, or sperm, or viruses, depending on your sense of scale).
(An animated map of Auckland's public transport network from Chris McDowall on Vimeo.)
It nicely illustrates the point that frequency is what makes a route into a line. The line that goes really solid during the peak is the Northern Busway, which is far more frequent than any of Auckland's rail lines.
UPDATE: Commenter "numbat" points out that on the island at the east edge of the image (Waiheke Island) you can see local island buses pulsing with ferries that link the island to Auckland's CBD.
(If you've found your way here from my article inside the Sydney Morning Herald's "debate" on congestion pricing, welcome! There's a category of articles on Sydney here, but I hope you'll poke around more widely. The "about the blog" and "about the author" are the place to start.)
In the Herald's congestion pricing debate today, I tried to make the general case, but Professor David Henscher seemed to nail the policy angle that's needed, one that would respond even to the car advocate's complaints.
Congestion pricing, if and when it happens in Sydney, needs to start by replacing other fees associated with driving, especially those that affect rural areas where there's no alternative to driving and never will be. This won't be enough to build all the public transport that Sydney needs; we ran the numbers on that last year for the Herald inquiry. But it makes both political and practical sense as a way to start.
The NRMA [Auto Club]'s line about needing better public transport before you charge for roads is one I agree with, but of course NRMA has no idea how to pay for that, nor is it really their priority. Realistically, any congestion charging scheme would need to start with the places where public transport is already abundant, which means for travel into and out of the City of Sydney. That's the one thing that seemed missing from the four articles.
I certainly objected to the punitive tone of the framing question: "Should motorists pay for the congestion they cause?" No, motorists should have the option to pay to get out of congestion.
UPDATE: By the way, One reason that the Sydney car vs transit debate is so polarized is that both have major projects in mind that require expensive tunnels. NRMA (the auto club) recently proposed that they would support turning a surface street into a "transit boulevard" if transit advocates would just support a multi-billion dollar road tunnel underneath it. I doubt there's a deal there.
Commenter David M on what rivers teach about transit:
It's interesting to note that in London the newest Underground lines have no branches (Victoria, Jubilee). In fact, when Jubilee was originally opened it took over one of the Bakerloo Lines branches, reducing the Bakerloo to a branchless line also.
For real complications, look at Camden Town [top center] on the Northern Line [black on this classic map] in London, England. Just south of this station is a complex deep underground junction that lets trains from any two of the branches south of Camden to simultaneously run on any two of the branches to the north. It is a marvel of engineering, but it is also an operational nightmare with trains run from any branch to any branch – one train runs late and it can cause problems on all of the branches.
London has wanted to simplify the operations by spliting the line into two and requiring an interchange at Camden Town. There are four platforms at Camden Town but the interchange passages are insufficient to handle the expected interchange traffic – so for now, it is cheaper to suck it up and deal with the operational issues.
There is an interesting effect of this interchange. Going south, both branches serve Euston Station before heading off to cross London on two different lines serving different areas of the core. You can get on one train at Camden, stop at Mornington Crescent and at Euston. You could get on the following train at Camden and arrive at Euston without passing through Mornington Crescent. The reason is that Mornington Crescent is on only one of the two branches, the other just bypasses the station. It makes for fun time when trying to get to Mornington Crescent.
The other night a Sydney rail expert was telling me that when the North West line is built, creating a four-way junction at Epping similar to the one at Camden Town, they will spend a number extra millions on the tunnelling to create the ability to route trains from any segment to any other. A similar decision has already been made about a similar junction at Glenfield in Sydney's southwest. I wonder how much could be saved if we let lines cross without connecting track, and required connections, where that pattern makes sense as part of a larger grid. It's not the right answer everywhere, certainly, but it sounds like London transit experts aren't very appreciative of all the flexibility that their great-grandparents gave them with the design of the Northern Line.
Cartographer (and artist) Daniel Huffman is drawing river systems as subway maps. He insists it’s just for fun, but these maps push an important button for me. Continue Reading →
More under-the-radar cleverness from the country that commercialised the bungee-jump:
YikeBike is a statement about using smart technology to solve the problems of our increasingly congested, polluted, stressful cities. It is the first commercial expression of the mini-farthing concept, created up by a bunch of successful entrepreneurs, engineers and dreamers. We sat down to try and answer:
- What is the simplest way to get from A to B with the aid of a machine?
- What is the smallest wheel you can have to get a stable, safe, comfortable ride?
- Can you make something small enough to be able to go with you anywhere in a city?
- Wonder if we could make a unicycle dramatically easier to ride and fold?
We were intrigued by creating something that could dramatically change urban transport, enabling city dwellers a fast, safe and easy way to navigate their environment.
The result was the mini-farthing concept and its first expression, the YikeBike. It employs state-of-the-art technology, engineering and industrial design to create a new class of personal transport.
I continue to wonder whether we might see a technology so lightweight and reliable that it would become universal for short-distance travel to the point of eliminating the need for local bus services — at least in low-density markets. I'm not sure this is it. Recycling a 19th century idea, though, is certain appealing.
Downside: It starts at US $3595, so we're a bit away from mass production.
I'm a big believer in clear policies, so now, in addition to the comment policy, there's a new guest post policy. I could use some good guest posts in the next few weeks, because the book is taking some time!