As I noted in this post a couple of days ago, there are some really useful pieces of technology that are starting to be developed that can aid us in understanding how our PT networks work, and where their strengths and weaknesses are. Let’s compare this video of Auckland’s public transport network, with a similar one of Toronto’s network:
Toronto’s video has the useful addition of distinguishing between the subway lines and the surface level transit (buses and trams). It also shows us how many vehicles are on the road at any particular hour of the day – interesting to see the pretty high level of all-night service that’s offered, and also the fact that there remains well over 1000 vehicles in operation until after 7pm in the evenings. It’s also a lot less CBD-focused – meaning that the PT system is useful for people other than those working downtown, while also operating efficiently by avoiding expensive long-haul services.
But perhaps the most obvious thing that comes through is the logic you can see with Toronto’s network. It’s not a bunch of ants crawling all over the place – as the Auckland network looks like. Instead, there’s a clear gridded network – something easy to understand, easy to intuitively know where your bus is going to take you and easy to connect to both other bus routes, and also to the subway system. This just reinforces the importance of getting our street patterns right when designing new urban areas.
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Another really funky way to look at the interaction of PT and the physical environments in which they are built is via Shortest path trees, which Look at what physical routes are the most used by a hypothetical person wanting to get to each point in the network in a city from a known departure point.
There are some really funky one for some US cities here
http://graphserver.sourceforge.net/gallery.html
It includes Seattle, which I think is a really good comparison to Auckland as it had large areas of the city that are separated from other parts by water and require a number of key crossing points,
While you know I stand all the way behind you in terms of PT, I remain unconvinced by your insistence that the chess grid is a beneficial element for urban life (maybe urban traffic, but certainly not life). I think it only ensures that we end up with more lifeless, less differentiated areas. Boring is the colloquial word for it. And any benefits gained from reduced complexity in understanding it are lost by the fact that everything looks the same on the map, in my view.
For me, the grid network is the hallmark of a car city, not a people city, and only Auckland’s geography (gullies, hills, shorelines) prevented us from getting one.
Also, as Auckland Transport (and you in your many posts on the subject), have shown, one can certainly streamline PT even without a rigid grid network. And one can have interconnectivity without a chess grid.
As I said last time we had this discussion, I think a grid of main streets is highly desirable, especially in terms of making it easier to operate bus routes. At the local street level a grid is not necessary, but what is necessary is good connectivity.
The street patterns of Balmoral, Sandringham & Mt Eden show this perfectly. Good main street grid, good local street connectivity but not the endless repetitive grid of many American cities.
Grid doesn’t necessarily mean right angle chessboard, the roads can follow hills and valley, curve and climb, it need not be regular or even to function as a grid. Haussmans layout for Paris and L’Enfants Washington are both grid typologies that are much more interesting than just NS and EW.
A grid network is most certainly the hallmark of a pedestrian city, the Babylonians invented it and the Romans institutionalised it thousands of years before the car was created. The hallmark of the car city is the cul de sac and ‘tree’ topology which we have really only seen develop since WWII.
I’d challenge that. Many older cities are strongly pedestrian focused (because they didn’t have much else except the odd rider or cart) and have a grid network only in the sense that everything is connected with everything (and in that regard, I agree with Nick R that such a network need not be boring). But the connectivity was that of a rabbit warren, rather than the ruler-straight lines of a centralised government led planning process. The fact that the Babylonians and Romans didn’t have high-speed cars filling up the road canyons of New York doesn’t mean that the chess grid network isn’t a network very conducive to private cars. It creates a permeability for private cars that is as great as the pedestrian permeability of the ancient, unplanned cities AND it does so on every single street.
About the only benefit of the chess grid in my book is that the situation is similarly good or bad on every single street, rather than the Auckland-type mix of some “good” (quiet, tree-lined) and some very bad (motorways) streets.
If you look carefully, Toronto DOES have the sprawl streets, but they are confined within a grid ‘box’ of arterial roads.
It is quite possible to have terrible public transport and a grid street pattern- just look at Adelaide, Australia. 🙂
If we consider the grid debate to be a matter of preference, then it depends whether one chooses to measure the heterogeneity of a city on the layout of it’s streets or the actual substance within it’s blocks. Mayoral drive is a banger example. It cuts a unique and intriguing path through the city, but to what avail?
Speed Levitch, perhaps like Ingolfson to some degree, views the grid as a metaphor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9awJCyjt550
I believe a basic grid merely acts to provide a simple, functional foundation for a fledgling city to be able to construct and express itself upon.
“[Speed Levitch’s] thoughts on the grid plan seem much more apropos to the winding suburban streets and cul-de-sacs that purposely avoid the grid in an effort to disguise their homogeneity. To me the grid is like the alphabet, a standardization that allows an otherwise heterogeneous crowd to communicate with each other.” – A Youtube response.
Nice JB, what are those wiggly subdivisions trying to prove? That the life extraordinary will take place automatically within them simply by their curviness? Or is it really an attempt to conceal the dreary repetitiveness of the forms there? The cul de sac, is this not anything other than the final resting place of western ambition? The physical representation of the life insipid. But yet, there’s always Morrissey:
‘in my bedroom in those ugly new houses, I danced my legs down to the knees’
Redemption is possible anywhere: the grid works gloriously in Manhattan, but miserably suburban in Adelaide…