2012-04-03
post/20390081930
Produced for the SPUR magazine The Urbanist, two maps of the current and possible future public transport in the San Francisco Bay Area, by Brian Stokle (via).
I’m often a critic of London-style transit maps, even when they’re in London. Unfortunately, I feel the need to do the same here. As with the current BART map, Stokle’s designs don’t pick a set of angles, but instead preserve the rough geography of the Bay Area and then use a series of straight lines which are often parallel to nearby ones, but which bear no relation to others.
Meanwhile, the use of large interchanges makes it far from clear how the Muni streetcar/LRV lines in San Francisco proper interrelate- if you didn’t know how the K, L, and M branch at West Portal, this map isn’t going to tell you. Perhaps that’s OK as a base map for showing expansion, but for an actually usable map, that’s not good.
Speaking of expansion, the use of grey for all existing lines on the future map is a little jarring, but at least I can see why it’s been done that way. On the other hand, giving bus rapid transit schemes such thick lines when the existing Limited routes on the current diagram are almost missable with their thin lines seems odd. I know it’s a relatively cheap way to increase speed and capacity, but do they need that much emphasis? (Outside of SF, it seems that they are depicted more narrowly: look at the 35R from Pleasant Hill to Hacienda at the right of the Future map. Strange.)
That said, there are some elements of the maps that I was going to quibble with, but then decided to praise instead. The outlined boxes for interchanges that “require leaving the station to transfer” actually do a great job of showing how inter-county, inter-agency politics could (can? does?) cripple public transport in the region. Even changing between BART and Muni in the Market Street subway is a minor nightmare.
For all my criticism, I’m glad that there are people trying to fight for decent, joined-up thinking in the field here. I hope that this is a step in the right direction, even if it is flawed.
2012-04-02
post/20353506787
In 1920, the B line, replaced by the busy 38-Geary in 1956, departed from the spot where the Ferry Building stands today and zoomed out to near Ocean Beach in 35 minutes. The fare was a nickel.
Today a similar $2 trip on the 38-Geary takes 54 minutes, while the 38 Limited, which makes fewer stops, takes 43 minutes.
”After 100 Years, Muni Runs Slower at The Bay Citizen.
As the article notes, there are reasons for this. Even with a bus not a streetcar, there’s an obvious way to get the speeds back up: cut car traffic back to 1920 levels. (Of course, that’s far more easily written than done.)
(Also, a minor nitpick: the Ferry Building was already over a decade old by 1920.)
2011-06-07
post/6288213570
An axonometric drawing of the new Tottenham Court Road ticket hall, complete with art by Daniel Buren, from the page for the project on Art on the Underground. (thanks, Chris.)
2010-11-04
On Transport Planning
It seems to me there are three major components to planning a journey using public transport.
1. The Systematic Overview
When you arrive in a city, or if it’s a new journey, this is often what you’ll refer to first. The classic is the London Underground tube map: looking at it gives you the broad scope of the system. The NY subway map performs a similar role.
However, usually such a map only goes so far. For large cities, it tends to fail for buses and other surface transport. London distributes five geographic maps, one for the centre, and four (huge) ones for the suburbs. Meanwhile, London Connections is an admirable, but complex, diagram of the above-line railway lines. I have no idea if there’s a comprehensive map of New York’s bus system, but somehow I doubt it.
For smaller cities, such as San Francisco, the entire system (buses, light rail and all) does fit on a map, and in fact bus stops here have a system map with a downtown enlargement. The flipside to this is that there’s also a metro map, which is somewhat sparse. Looking at that, you can easily imagine the rest of the city doesn’t exist.
Nonetheless, this is something that’s often desired, but it can be hard to provide even with plenty of poster space, let alone on a small screen. (One notable example that’s been pushed into trying is the KickMap redesign of the New York subway map.)
2. Route planning
If you know your destination, you can skip the overview and ask a transport planner. Most transport agencies provide one on the web, like TfL’s Journey Planner. In some places, Google Maps has been given data to enable route planning. Either way, these services are usually also available on (smart)phones.
Route planning also takes you from “where I am” to “where the transport is”. That can be harder in some places than others, but it’s still a potential hurdle - there’s rarely a bus stop outside your door.
Unfortunately, route planning without access to the right technology is hard (although it has been tried). This partly explains why so many Londoners use the Tube: the map is right there at the station entrance, platforms and even in the carriages. By contrast, knowing where a bus route goes is either learnt (which takes time) or has to be looked up (which takes technology). Nonetheless, my guess is this will become a much more common as time goes on.
3. Service availability
Somewhat related to route planning is when the next train or bus is actually available. Again, part of the draw of the Tube is that this isn’t much of a concern: you can go down to the platform and be fairly sure that within 10 minutes at most - and more usually two or three - a train will be along to carry you off.
Unfortunately, elsewhere in the world (and on other modes of transport) that’s not true. Metro and bus frequencies are more often measured in threes or fours an hour than the twenties or forties that the Tube enjoys at peak. When there’s the chance you’ll be waiting in the rain for twenty minutes, you’d really like a way of looking up when the next bus is.
In San Francisco, NextMuni (and the apps that use its API) serve that need pretty well, as does the UK’s National Rail Live Departure Boards. Unfortunately, London’s improved Countdown bus prediction service is not yet available (it’s meant to launch next year). However, both SF and London do have bus arrival data at some stops, so even without personal technology you can just look to see what’s going on.
It’s possible to get by without service availability data, but if a system is either low-frequency or low-reliability (and traffic means that buses can be both) it’s a good way to get people happy with the system.
Summing up
There’s still something of a divide here. System overviews are most readily visible in the physical world, while route planning is best served electronically. Service availability is a mix of the two. Nonetheless, all three (or a combination thereof) provide plenty of room for experimentation on mobile devices and the real world.
2010-09-02
High Frequency Maps: A London Perspective
Human Transit has recently published a call for public transport systems to use frequency as a base for mapping, which I noticed from this post on Chicago (via mattb on the daily chump).
As a European and a Londoner, the first thing that strikes me is that, for a major city, Chicago has what seems a very poor transport network. The only line that can claim a wait of less than 7.5 minutes on weekdays is a 79th street bus. By contrast, the entire Tube network in London has typical expected waits of about three to eight minutes, dropping as low as almost one train a minute for busy lines at peak.
In fact, the Tube (and, from what I’ve seen, Berlin U-bahn and Paris Metro services) appears to have such little variation that it’s questionable whether such an approach makes any sense. The only thing I think tourists may gain from it is a sense that the Circle line is less frequent than the District and Metropolitan services that it shares tracks with; the deep tube lines would be much of a muchness.
That’s not to say that service variations don’t matter. There’s been a to-and-fro in the tube diagram design ever since it was invented, with dashed lines and, more recently, crosses indicating peak-only lines and interchanges. Currently the map has dispensed with the detail, relegating it to footnotes, but in-car diagrams on the Northern line (one of the most fiddly) do a good job of conveying the way interchanges at Kennington and to Mill Hill East work.
There might be more of a call for it on buses, but one of the most egregious failures noted in the original post (mixing night and day buses) hasn’t been done in London for years, as far as I know. There is a fair bit of variation between very high frequency buses (like the 38 and 73, which should be every minute or three) and those further out in the suburbs which are only every fifteen minutes. On the other hand, putting the entire London bus network on paper takes five maps, four of which are vast; there might not be the room to do it effectively.
One place where frequency is already indicated in London, though, is the Oyster Rail Services map (PDF). However, this used to be done nicely with thin lines for infrequent services and thicker ones for those with more than four trains per hour; now the dreaded cross marks those stations. Still, it does work. (I also recall seeing a map, perhaps by National Rail, that showed the number of trains per hour calling at each station; Clapham Junction and Vauxhall were both up in the 20s, if I’m remembering it right).
Having said all that, I’m still mildly tempted to do something with the idea for London. I can also see that it might well be necessary for US cities; can anyone make one for San Francisco, please?
