Posts about Massachusetts

Dunn previously made a travel time Metro map, and then when we talked about "spider maps" on Greater Greater Washington, put together one of those for the H Street neighborhood:

Transit maps generally lay out the lines and stations either geographically, based on their actual location, or diagrammatically, which shows the connections in the network and organizes the lines to be simple and straight.

But there is more information which riders need to know. They include service frequency (how often trains or buses come), span of service (is this a rush hour only line? does it run on weekends?) and travel times. Frequent network maps, like Metro's geographic map or Dan Malouff's schematic version for Washington area buses, are one way to highlight frequent routes. This time travel map is a way to give more information about times and distances.

Transit maps shape the way people see a city, and affect people's choices of how and where to travel. Experiments which add new information to maps or present information in a different way enrich our understanding of transit and create ideas which could make it into future generations of maps.

The image color-codes bus trips by their average speed. Buses are fastest on freeway segments, slower on most city streets, slowest in the dense neighborhood cores. Some of this is road speed, but buses also move more slowly in areas where there are more stops and more people boarding and alighting.

Since buses only report their location every few minutes and can't report inside tunnels, the bluest lines show up as fuzzier sets of spread-out lines.

WMATA created a similar, but more diagrammatic and less artistic, set of maps for DC buses:

This is just one of the many applications people can create on their own, thanks to having open data publicly available. The more transit agencies provide, the more useful tools people can create, whether very practical mobile apps or beautiful and informative visualizations like this one.

Want to see generous sidewalks, safe bicycle options, local retail, and avoid enormous big box parking lots? Whether you live in a big city or a small town, participate!

Via Patch.

You put your BRT in HOV lanes or regular travel lanes instead of dedicated lanes, or you build "stops" rather than more luxurious "stations", or you leave out pre-pay, or you don't give buses signal priority, or you don't give your BRT unique branding, or whatever. There are a thousand corners like that you can cut that individually may or may not hurt too much, but collectively add up to the difference between BRT and a regular bus.

In the US, BRT creep is a big problem. Generally speaking the main reason American cities opt to build BRT instead of rail is to cut a corner and make it less expensive. Once you've adopted that view of your transit system—that cutting corners to save money is OK—it's too easy to keep going and cut a lot of other corners as well. Once you've made the decision to cheap out and go with BRT rather than rail, then your priorities are clear and the temptation to cheap out in other ways is too strong to pass up.

It happens all the time. The four leading examples of recently-built BRT in the United States are in Boston, Cleveland, Eugene, and Los Angeles. Boston's Silver Line BRT was built with curbside bus lanes like the one on 7th Street in DC, and is perpetually stuck behind car traffic using the lane illegally. Cleveland's Euclid Avenue BRT spends half its time stopped at red lights because it doesn't include signal preemption.

Eugene's EmX BRT doesn't even have its own lane for much of its route. LA's San Fernando Valley Orange Line BRT is probably this country's most successful "rail like" bus line, but even it was forced to repave its running way after barely a year of operation because the originally-constructed running way was substandard. So far, every example of BRT built in the United States has cut at least one extremely damaging corner.

And then there's Northern Virginia, where the HOV lanes on I-395 and I-95 that the state wants to convert to HOT lanes were originally built as a bus-only facility. Here, we built a pretty good busway and have spent the years since opening it up to more and more use by cars.

And why not? After all, if your goal is to substitute a less expensive but less effective alternate mode, why should anyone be surprised when you make the same sort of substitution when it comes to details of running way engineering or signalization?

If BRT is just a way to avoid spending a lot on transit so more can go to highways, why be surprised when BRT lanes are converted to car lanes? If decision makers were actually interested in spending the money to produce a transit line as good as rail, well, why not build rail?

I don't mean to suggest that BRT alone suffers from these problems, or that it's useless. Certainly rail projects can suffer from creeping cost reductions as well, and certainly good buses—including rapid ones—should be a part of every major transit system.

Still, as long as US planners think of BRT as a cheap replacement for rail, then the US will be very unlikely to ever produce BRT that is actually rail-like (as much as it can be anyway), because that mindset inherently undervalues many of the specific features that are needed to produce a high-quality transit line, regardless of mode.

Most of all, such a deal would force the MBTA to keep its parking garages as parking for the life of the contract. If they want to develop mixed-use transit-oriented development (TOD) instead, their hands will be tied.

Though it's not clear the MBTA has much interest in pursuing TOD at all. In my hometown of Acton, which has a commuter rail stop, the MBTA wants to build a parking garage on their current surface parking lot. Residents, understandably, are concerned it will just draw traffic. The MBTA rejected other ideas about making a connection to the nearby bike trail and improving pedestrian accessibility.

Absent from this discussion is anything about possibly putting housing and jobs on the site, which is one of Acton's relatively walkable nodes.

This increase in parking was actually partly environmentalists' idea:

The MBTA must add 1,000 new parking spaces along its commuter rail lines by the end of 2011 under an agreement with environmental groups to mitigate the impact of the Big Dig.

In fairness to the environmental groups, that settlement also includes a number of other, non-car-oriented provisions, like building the Green Line in Somerville. But while adding parking to commuter rail could improve ridership in the short run, it would generate more car trips in the long run as new sprawl farther out would just replace any car trips on the major highways that switch to commuter rail.

Better to pursue housing within walking distance of transit, both in the suburbs and city, which has the added benefit of not making the MBTA add even more money-losing parking facilities and further strain the budgets of the next few decades.