Tag: mapping

Buses and buses

On December 18, 2018

A simple bus route typology

To help think about bus network planning, I’ve sorted buses into two broad types; the buses we choose to catch and the buses we have to catch.

The former run frequently, along direct routes, have clear signage and, ideally, priority infrastructure such as bus lanes. The latter run infrequently, zig-zag back and forth and the bus stop is often no more than a sign nailed to a telegraph pole.

A photo showing a double decker B-Line Bus with a display reading 'City Wynyard B1' at the Spit Junction B-Line stop on Spit Road, Mosman. — The B-Line at Spit Junction, a bus we choose to catch.

The first type is the domain of, well, everyone. They’re just a step down from metros, heavy rail and trams on the transport hierarchy. Onboard you’ll find people that are leaving the car at home and people that choose not to own a car because with a bus service this reliable, why would you bother? In Sydney, these bus routes are typically found running radially out from the CBD, although there are a few suburban outliers.

The second type of bus service can usually be found hanging out at your local railway station. Don’t expect to have any difficulty getting a seat. Typical passengers include those excluded from automobility for one reason or another.

Now don’t get me wrong, both types of services play a crucial role in providing accessibility. The problem is that what makes a good bus we choose to catch and what makes a good bus we have to catch, are completely different things. In the first instance the most important considerations are things like speed, reliability, frequency, capacity and hours of operation. For the latter we value all kinds of accessibility; low floor buses for wheelchair/pram access, frequent stops to maximise coverage, a one-seat ride to all local destinations and door to door service, especially immediately outside hospitals and shopping centres.

An screenshot from tumbr reading "to catch a bus you have to think like a bus" — How to catch a bus

Jarrett Walker, world famous transport blogger, describes this as a problem of ridership vs coverage. He starts with a thought experiment. If a transport agency was a business it would want its services to attract as many patrons as possible. It would focus its resources on the corridors with high demand. Transport agencies do (usually) want that, but they also need to meet minimum standards of service. This draws rolling stock, staff and other resources away from the services that are designed to attract patronage, making them less desirable and thus less successful in their goal.

How this plays out in Sampletown

Here you can see a simple schematic of Sampletown. Each circle represents a neighbourhood with a mixture of housing, employment and other destinations. A large circle has three times as many residents, jobs and other destinations as a small circle. The travel time between two adjacent neighbourhoods is 5 minutes by bus. Sampletown Transit Authority (STA) has 2 buses. Let’s have a look a few different ways they could organise their service.

With good stop infrastructure and operating hours the green option could be a bus we’d choose to catch. It takes 30 minutes to run the route in both directions, so with two buses the STA could run a bus every 15 minutes. This option serves a third of the neighbourhoods, providing a high frequency, direct service to 55% of the population of Sampletown.

The red option is a bus we have to catch. This is what Jarrett Walker refers to as a coverage service. In Christchurch they’ve been referred to as ‘dropped noodle bus routes’, in Melbourne they’ve been described as ‘spaghetti-like’ and in Sydney most people would know what you mean if you mention the 370¹ . The red route serves every neighbourhood; 100% of the population. It takes 1 hour 50 minutes to run the route in both directions and so with 2 buses this service could run every 55 minutes.

Trips on the red line take 3 times as long as they would’ve on the green line and thus are probably not competitive with driving, cycling or possibly even walking. On the other hand, in this option every resident of Sampletown can enjoy a one seat ride to anywhere else in town.

The $64k question

So, which is best?

Well it depends on the goals of the STA and the needs of residents. In small towns, the suburban fringe, areas with very high car dependence and small public transport budgets, coverage is usually the goal and so we see a lot of bus route maps that look an awful lot like the red line². In big cities, areas with congested roads and lower car ownership we might see systems that look more like the green line. In Sydney, good examples include metrobuses (check out how stoked everyone is in this promo video), the 333 (Bondi Beach to Circular Quay) or the B-line B1 service that runs a limited stops, high frequency service from Wynyard to the Northern Beaches.

Public transport agencies are often between a rock and a hard place in deciding which to focus on. Too few coverage routes and the service is inaccessible; people are stranded. Too few direct, frequent routes and the service is unusable, those who can opt for other modes will do so.

A small portion of the Newcastle bus network map centred on Waratah. More frequent bus routes are marked using a thicker line than less frequent services. — Newcastle’s new(ish) bus network map gets it right. Frequent (at least every 15 minutes 7am-7pm weekdays) services we *choose* to catch are numbered in series beginning with 1 (eg. route 11) and are marked with a noticeably thicker line. Most other services operate hourly.

There is a third way. Provided a transport agency has enough resources to provide both kids of service, they can do so. In this instance it is important to highlight which routes meet which goals. Good stop infrastructure, such as we see on the B-line, is a great way to do this. So is Newcastle’s 2018 bus network map. Without labeling services by what goal they seek to achieve we can end up with two bus routes with similar route numbers and branding that serve completely different purposes. They might appear the same on the network map and bus stop display but in actual fact one is a high frequency all day service and the other runs twice a day. This is not user-friendly.

A section of the Sydney Buses Eastern Region Bus map centred in Woolahra. The map shows a lot of different bus routes mostly labeled in the same way. — State Transit’s Eastern region bus map gets it wrong. By sight it’s impossible to tell that some routes such as the 333, 324 and M40 run all day at high frequency and other bus routes such as the 200 (peak only), 300 (late night only) and 388 (literally one trip per day) do not.

Unfortunately for Sampletown with only 2 buses they can’t effectively employ this strategy. In order for a route to be the sort of bus we choose to catch it really needs to operate at least every 15 minutes. Ideally they could expand their public transport budget and run 3 or 4 buses, providing both coverage and ridership services. But perhaps that’s not politically tenable.

What they definitely shouldn’t do is attempt to have a single service meet both coverage and ridership goals because, chances are, it will end up doing neither.

Footnotes:

Pedestrians left at the kerb by Google Maps

By Jed C

On December 12, 2018

In Transport

It’s 2018; when you’re in an unfamiliar part of town and you’re figuring out how to get to where you’re going, what do you do? You certainly don’t ask for directions or to borrow someone’s street directory. If you’re navigationally minded you might get a bearing from the sun or, if you find yourself in Melbourne or Adelaide, a known street that forms part of a grid. Chances are though, you’ll whip out your phone and open Google Maps.

We’re all used to the type of map that Google Maps, Apple Maps, or OpenStreetMap present to us. They look more or less like the street directory of yesteryear. Roads are emphasised with width and colour indicating how busy they are. Parks are green, water is blue. The main difference is that now shops are marked and, if you zoom in, you get greater detail.

If you’re navigating by road, this is just fine. They’re colour-coded by type of road in the familiar orange-yellow-white hierarchy and if you input your destination none of that matters anyway as a blue line appears to guide you effortlessly to your destination. This tool even works (to a point) for public transport navigation. Worlds away from the days of carrying multiple timetables and optimistically standing at windswept bus stops.

These maps, however, are not made for pedestrians. The colour coding of roads tells drivers something, it tells them if a road is designed for high traffic volumes or not. But it doesn’t tell pedestrians much. Sure, a yellow road will be busy, but will it have regular safe crossing points and accessibility ramps? A thin white road probably won’t have too much fast moving traffic, but are there footpaths?

It’s easy to look at these maps and think that they simply show us what is there. It’s easy to forget that there is a hidden bias to these maps, that they’re designed to be used in a specific kind of way.

When was the last time you used Google’s directions while driving and it suggested you take an illegal right turn? Or told you to continue through onto a street that is blocked off to cars? When Google, Tom Tom and their ilk were first introducing this software they had their fair share of bugs. Over time we became more dependent on and trusting of these directions, often with, errr, unforeseen consequences. But nowadays they’re connected to extremely accurate databases that know not only when a right turn can be legally made, but when the traffic conditions are conducive to making one turn as opposed to another.

This data just doesn’t seem to exist for pedestrian trips. Try using Google Maps to navigate as a pedestrian and you’ll be sent the long way around, advised to walk along roads with no footpaths, across car parks or industrial lots. Why is it that walking directions on Google Maps include the disclaimer “Use caution–walking directions may not always reflect real-world conditions” and yet public transport directions and driving directions don’t? It’s like the pedestrian directions are in beta. But they’re not. Pedestrians just aren’t considered to be an important user group.

A screenshot from Google Maps showing walking directions between Prince Alfred Park Pool and the Powerhouse Museum near Central Station, Sydney. Google Maps walking directions suggest a long way around primarily using Cleveland Street, Regent Street and Harris Street. A much more direct and pedestrian friendly route using the Devonshire Street Tunnel and the Goods Line has been marked in Red. — Google Maps suggested walking route across Central Station involves walking alongside a series of high volume, high speed roads. The red line is my suggested route, through the Devonshire Street tunnel and along the Goods Line. This route is not only much more direct but involves no interaction with vehicular traffic. Notice on the left that users have the option to avoid ‘Ferries’ for some reason, but not stairs, steep sections, busy roads or an absence of footpaths.

Have a look at the layers you can choose to populate your map with:

Default – Yep, that’d be your car-centric map.
Transport – In Sydney this means all the train lines are marked in orange. Buses and ferries aren’t shown. This would be the equivalent of having a ‘Driving’ option that only showed major freeways.
Traffic – Another useful layer if you’re driving
Cycling – You’ll want to have a pretty good idea of what you’re doing before you rely too heavily on this

Despite the fact that drivers, passengers, public transport user and cyclists are almost always pedestrians at the start or end of their journey, there’s no layer available that helps to convey information in a way that helps someone navigating on foot.

A pedestrian layer could show pedestrian crossings and traffic signals with crossing points. It could highlight intersections that have long average wait times for pedestrians or force to you to double-cross, like City Road at Broadway. It could show off-road walking tracks in the manner of the cycling layer. (Use the cycling layer as a pedestrian at your own risk, you could easily find yourself ambling along a bike only route getting sworn at in much the same way as if you decided to wander onto a freeway.) It could use information from the terrain layer to show steepness, it could show footpath availability, protection from the elements and it could integrate internal pedestrian accessways through train stations and shopping centres.

Much of this sort of information is presented on fixed signage installed by local councils, the City of Sydney taking pedestrian navigation particularly seriously. Yet increasingly we turn to our phones for such directions, as a tool that most of us have on hand 24/7. A platform like Google Maps has the capability to take all of this data and present it in a highly customisable and user friendly format, just like it does with driving directions.

This post was originally published on WalkSydney.