Human Transit has another “must read” blog post about the importance of getting the way in which you “map” your public transport system right. In particular, Jarrett notes the importance of distinguishing on your route maps the difference between a service that operates every 5-10 minutes all day long (such as the Dominion Road buses) and a service that might operate only once a day (such as the weird 018 route between Herne Bay and Otahuhu). Here’s a useful extract from the blog post:
If you look at almost any street map, a map designed for motorists or to give people a general sense of the shape of the city, you’ll see clear signals that the lines on the map are not all equal. A Google street map of this same area, for example, uses simple line-weight and color to visually distinguish three classes of road: (a) freeways, (b) local arterials, and (c) other lesser streets. We all use this hierarchy to organize our understanding of the city, regardless of our means of travel.
If a street map for a city drew every road with the same kind of line and label, so that Interstate 5 looked no different from the smallest gravel cul-de-sac, we’d say it was a bad map. But it’s not wrong, the mapmaker would say! No, it’s not, but it’s misleading. If we can’t identify the major streets, we can’t see the basic shape of the city.
The process of learning any network — roads or transit or any kind of geography — begins with identifying a few features as major, and then understanding how the other features fit around those. If you’re looking at a highway map, you’ll understand the big highways first, and later, only as needed, you’ll study how lesser roads connect with those main highways. Transit customers and potential customers need the same ability to sort the mass of detail presented by a transit network.
So a transit map that makes all lines look equally important is like a road map that doesn’t show the difference between a freeway and a gravel road.
I like this analogy, as it hammers home the stupidity of giving all public transport route the same label – rather than making some lines thick, others thinner and others perhaps dotted. If every road on a streetmap was simply given the same level of emphasis I would struggle to make much sense out of it at all – yet that’s what we see for every single map of bus routes in Auckland. For example, bus routes in the central area:
An example of how the map above is completely illogical is to compare the Dominion Road buses (in light green) with the yellow 011 route. Both are given equal weighting in the mapping, with the only clue that more buses might run along Dominion Road being that there are three routes listed. However, in reality there are probably around 40 or 50 times as many buses along Dominion Road as travel the 011 route in any given day. So the above map ends up looking incredibly complicated and difficult to understand, with perhaps the only sense that could possibly be made out of it being “wow, there are a lot of different bus routes!”
Jarret at Human Transit explains why we might not want our maps to look like this:
What do we achieve by putting all of these lines on the same map, and making them look the same? Well, the most powerful message seems to be: these are all buses, and all bus services are alike. A key secondary message is: This map is complicated because bus service is intrinsically complicated…
…The message seems to be the same across these multiple media: Buses are for people who like to sort through lists of three-digit numbers, and look at piles of numbers on maps. If you can’t handle that kind of complexity, don’t use the buses.
Is that really the message transit agencies want to send?
I think a major problem with public transport in Auckland is that it’s all a bit too complicated, and the maps that we’re churning out seem to be adding to the problem, rather than looking to fix it.
Of course this doesn’t mean we have to do away with the complexity of the system, as some aspects of this complexity are useful: such as the ability to run peak time express services that provide what people want at that time of the day – a fast, reliable and comfortable journey to and from work. There are also other elements of complexity that may be necessary, such as less frequent all-day services that are required to operate for social reasons: to provide a basic level of mobility for those without cars. But these markets are relatively limited, and to make public transport something that people can live their lives around, the “Frequent Network” must be easy to understand and easy to use.
A key part of making this frequent network easy to understand and use is by putting it on a map of its own, or by clearly distinguishing those routes on a more complicated map. Minneapolis has its frequent network put onto a separate map, part of which is shown below:
As well as clearly and simply showing where high-frequency routes operate, showing a network in this way can also have some longer term benefits as the network and its associated map becomes more and more well known by city residents. The Human Transit blog post describes this:
Frequent Network mapping is also important for its secondary audiences. If everyone who wanted good transit had access to this map, they could make decisions about where to locate that would gradually re-organise the city so that people who valued transit were close to good transit, thus making better use of the transit system’s finite resources. The Frequent Network is potentially useful to anyone deciding where to live, where to shop, or where to start a business, and also the land use planners and developers who make the same location decisions. If you just show such people the map of all services, with no differentiation, they won’t be able to identify which services would really be useful to them, and will thus be less likely to make good location choices.
I have done quite a bit of work on this topic over the years, and have contributed to Frequent Network mapping decisions in several agencies, including Metro Transit in Minneapolis – St. Paul. The idea encounters a lot of resistance, and isn’t done in most of the places where I’ve proposed it. But I have yet to hear a clear argument for why it’s a bad idea to highlight and market the network of high frequency services. I would love to hear such an argument, and perhaps a marketing and mapping expert will provide one in the comments.
I certainly sense that ARTA’s b.line idea is trying to implement this concept, with the “better than 15 minute” frequency guarantee. Hopefully we will see that idea rolled out to more than just the Mt Eden Road and Dominion Road routes (where frequencies are already much better than the “four buses and hour” promise).
My wish is to see something like the network in the map below become the Auckland isthmus’s “high frequency service network”, with a map of its own something like what I have put together.
That would really show that we have a fantastic “anywhere to anywhere” type network that people can live their lives around, not a whole mess of routes – many of which only run once a day.
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