Tag Archives: Transit

Olympic transformations

The 2010 Winter Olympics kick off today in Vancouver, British Columbia. Design Observer has an excellent interview with Vancouver’s planning director Brent Toderian. These kinds of major sporting events can be a huge opportunity to re-shape areas and integrate larger planning projects into the public support for the games. Salt Lake City’s first light rail line was built in advance of their hosting of the 2002 Winter Olympics, and that starter line has since proved popular enough to warrant massive expansion, even in a fiscally and socially conservative state.

Vancouver’s Olympic Village. Images from City of Vancouver.

Vancouver has seized the opportunity to shape the city through their host duties. Those include the Olympic Village, the Olympic Streetcar pilot program (mentioned previously here), and the rapid transit expansion of the Canada Line. Toderian discusses the physical transformations possible with the focus from events such as the Olympics:

NB: From an urban planning perspective, what impact do you think the games will have on the city?

BT: We’re going to have significant physical legacies of the Olympics, not the least of which is Athletes Village. And on top of that we have our new Canada Line subway that connects the airport to downtown, and a number of athletic facilities, either new or upgraded, that will be sport legacies for the city. But there’s also physical infrastructure and what we call “look-of-the-city” legacies that will make Vancouver more livable. In fact, we’ve spent over 6 million dollars on public art pieces scattered across the city, integrated into the urban realm, that will make the city more attractive long after the Olympics are over. So from a physical city-builder’s perspective, the legacies will be powerful. From a policymaker’s perspective, we have a legacy of new attitudes and standards and policies that have fundamentally changed business as usual for Vancouver. Almost everything we learned in the development of Athletes Village has been translated into new approaches in our citywide zoning, citywide policies and guidelines, or just new attitudes.

When you’re doing a place like Athletes Village, and you very much want it to be a model, our perspective is: What good is a model of it doesn’t change business as usual, if it doesn’t make everything that comes after it better? So in our case, even before the Athletes Village was completed, it was substantially influencing the regional discussion on city building. Many of the exemptions we built into the development approvals have now been built into our citywide zoning bylaw — even before the Olympic buildings were open. Our learnings on passive design have been translated into a passive design toolkit. Our urban agriculture learnings have been translated into urban agriculture guidelines. Our learnings about district energy — we did our first neighborhood energy utility using sewer heat recovery to heat and cool the Athletes Village — has already raised our bar with other major projects. We’ve emphasized that these new projects have to be even better than Athletes Village, and that’s being translated into a new district energy policy for the city. So you see the point of the power of a model. Unfortunately, too many cities do model developments, but years after nothing’s really changed. That’s something we very much wanted to prevent here.

NB: A lot of people think of these big events — Olympics, World Cups — as being a spur for development and physical infrastructure creation, but it seems like you’re taking it further and using it almost as a lab for urban policy.

BT: You have to remember that the second most important moment in Vancouver’s city building history was Expo ‘86. That event changed the way we do things as city builders and really sparked what is now called the Vancouver model. I say the second most important moment because the first most important moment was the refusal to put freeways in Vancouver, particularly through our downtown. But Expo ‘86 was a turning point. It gave the city a huge amount of confidence and started an era of city building that has really defined the Vancouver model. So we’re well aware that this is our second great event, that the Olympics, like Expo ’86, will be transformative not only in our attitudes, but in the way we do business.

We set out from day one to make sure that we were positioned for that transformation. The fun of this challenge is that Vancouver is the most populous urban destination ever to host the Winter Olympics. Our population is about 600,000, in a region of about 2.1 million. And even for most Summer Olympics, the event areas for the Olympics are often on the urban outskirts. Much of the activity of the Vancouver Winter Olympics is in the middle of our most urban environment. So it’s a huge operational challenge to accommodate an Olympics and the huge influx of people.

All too often, the legacies of these games quickly fade into memory rather than physical transformation. Both Athens and Beijing have been saddled with seldom-used venues. Even more frugal Olympic implementations, such as the 1996 Atlanta Games, lack the kind of physical legacy. Perhaps most disappointing was the lack of emphasis on transportation and infrastructure in Chicago’s failed bid for the 2016 Olympics.

However, as Salt Lake City has shown (and Vancouver is positioned to show), these kinds of events can galvanize the kinds of civic investments that will pay dividends for the city long after the last event concludes.

Jarrett Walker at HumanTransit.org is also planning a series of urbanist posts on Vancouver and the Olympics:

What’s special about Vancouver? It’s a new dense city, in North America.

Vancouver is the closest North America has come to building a substantial high-density city — not just employment but residential — pretty much from scratch, entirely since World War II. I noted in an earlier post that low-car North American cities are usually old cities, because they rely on a development pattern that just didn’t happen after the advent of the car. In 1945 Vancouver was nothing much: a hard-working port for natural resource exports, with just a few buildings even ten stories high. But look at it now.

Now, if they can only get some snow. We’ve got lots of extra here in DC.

Things we can take from Detroit

Spirit of Detroit, from Maia C

…and I’m not just talking about salt, even though the Eastern Seaboard could use a lot of extra road salt right about now.

There are a couple of very interesting bits up on the net recently about Detroit and the lessons it has for the rest of America, for our infrastructure, and for our industry and our economy.

The New York Times has a review of the PBS ‘Blueprint America’ series.

There’s much more to the 90-minute program than simply cataloging Detroit’s woes. It offers a history of national transportation planning in the United States — yes, it ends with the Interstate System — and presents the counterexample of the Spanish AVE system, which in less than 20 years has linked the country from north to south and fostered economic development in the cities it serves (at a cost of increased national debt and higher taxes).

The Times criticizes the PBS piece for veering too far afield from Detroit itself to the larger issues of infrastructure and development, but I think this deviation is both necessary and well-timed. These are systemic issues across all of the United States – Detroit’s economic malaise only exacerbates the same symptoms that have affected just about every American city.

“Beginning in the 1980s, in the United States it was perceptible that things were beginning to deteriorate, that the maintenance of those infrastructures was getting worse and that the network didn’t evolve in any way to keep pace with the country,” a former Spanish economy secretary says by way of a coda. “And in the 1990s, in terms of infrastructure, it was a country that had fallen behind the standards of any European country.” O.K., maybe not Albania. But we get the point.

The Blueprint America video itself is well worth watching. Unfortunately, their website does not have html embedding code, but please take a look (particularly if you’ve got 90 minutes to kill during today’s snowpocalypse III). On a personal note, it’s always a pleasure to see Robert Fishman talk about urban history, and that of Detroit in particular. Fishman was a professor of mine in grad school.

As the Times review notes, the piece tackles just about every conceivable issue for urban transportation and infrastructure – industry, highways, high-speed rail, urban farming, planning, sprawl, density, transit, divestment, reinvestment, policy (local and national) and anything else you might be able to think of.

The Transport Politic looks specifically at the proposed light rail project along Woodward Ave in Detroit, filling the gap of local focus the Times points out. Yonah notes that the ability for light rail and transit investments to focus grow, of course, requires economic growth to begin with – and the macro factors for Detroit’s economy might just be too far gone for any one light rail line to really have an impact.

Additionally, there’s a very real concern that Detroit’s serious mobility issues won’t be solved by such an intervention at all, given the depopulation of the city and the huge pockets of emptiness, even if aggregate residential densities in parts of the city remain fairly high.

The real issue, then, is both obvious and daunting – for such a proposal to work, you need some big, audacious ideas – and you need to implement them:

On the other hand, Detroit could pursue a radical change of direction in which it closes off sections of the city to housing and compels to move into newly built housing along transit corridors and in the downtown core — basically, artificially altering the city limits to the exclusion of most of the city’s residents. This approach, which would require making it illegal to build or even live in many areas of the metropolis, would increase land prices substantially near transit stations. It would only be possible, however, with enormous subsidies from the state and federal governments to pay for the construction of tens of thousands of affordable housing units. People would have to be implored to stay in the city despite being kicked from their homes.

Because of the cost of such a strategy and the political infeasibility of shuttering whole neighborhoods, such focused growth seems unlikely to occur. But without a well-planned reconfiguration of the city’s built form, Detroit may have difficulty surviving.

Detroit represents the extreme case, but these concepts can translate to any city in the US. It might be dealing with suburban redevelopment and transit-orientation, but the idea remains the same – big change is necessary. It’s going to happen one way or another, and the question is now about form and function.

On profitability and privatization

CC image from AMagill on Flickr

Given Metro’s current and future budgetary issues (and the plethora of ideas to fix them amongst various comment threads at GGW and other places), discussions of profits and priorities are certainly topical. With that in mind, Jarrett Walker has an excellent post up on the fundamental goals of transit service – the public good we planners try to achieve.

In fact, high-ridership transit services are almost always the result of aggressive government investment and policies, including the pricing of car travel, the planning of dense centers around stations, and a huge range of other actions. A democratic government must care not just about the bottom line of the transit but also about the quality of the community it serves. In this role, it may advocate low-ridership services to serve other sustainability goals. For example, when opening a new “transit oriented development,” the long-term health of the community may require a lot of public transit service just as the first people are moving in, to help them establish transit habits, own fewer cars, etc. This service will be “unprofitable” but can be a rational part of a long-term sustainability strategy.

Thatcher’s formulation, swallowed whole by Judt, is that service is either “profitable” or “social.” Judt will go on to make “social inclusion” arguments for why service to low-ridership markets, such as rural towns, should be retained. Fine, but he’s already given away the revenue that could pay for much of that service — the “profits” gained by the private operating company running the “profitable” services. He’s also given away funds that could be used to fund new infrastructure investments for the next generation of profitable services — investments that should be government-funded not because they’ll be profitable, but because they’ll be intrinsic parts of a humane, sustainable, and livable city — all valid criteria for government attention.

Walker describes the definition of profitability (and the relentless focus on cost effectiveness to the exclusion of other considerations) as a “conceptual trap” that does not truly capture the reality of transit benefits or the complexity of how cities and urban places function. Defining the debate in these terms automatically puts transit on poor footing.

“Social” and “economic” are just two legs of the three-legged stool that has come to be known the “triple bottom line,” a useful scheme for thinking about all of the possible valid outcomes of public policy. The missing third term is “environmental.” Judt is so attached to the “social” dimension of the question that the other two terms, “economic” and “environmental,” have collapsed in his mind into a single opponent, the “economic.” We are all used to thinking in binary (us/them, this/that) terms, but the triple bottom line requires us to hold three points of view in the mind at once — which, to be fair, is much harder than it sounds.

Indeed.

Walker’s piece is excellent food for thought, particularly as our transit agencies and other municipal entities are facing huge budget problems and often turning towards privatization (see Chicago’s parking meters) – we must make sure we consider all of the potential outcomes, as well as all three legs of the stool.

Metro snow operations

Given the heavy (and ongoing) snowfall, Metro is only operating rail service in select underground locations, in order to prevent trains from getting stranded as accumulating snow makes it difficult to maintain contact with the third rail, and also to use existing tunnels to keep rail cars dry and operable, rather than buried in snow and exposed to the elements in Metro’s rail yards.

The adjusted service map looks like this:

Metro's snow map. Image from WMATA.

Riding the trains today, the service is essentially single-tracking in the underground portions of the system. The segments of each open line in the middle have both tracks open, with each line essentially having two trains to cover the entire length of a line – they shuttle back and forth on a single track, passing each other on the double-tracked stretch in the middle.

Waits for the trains are long, and as is usual during single tracking operations, the PIDS aren’t all that reliable for train arrival times:

PID at U St, during snowpocalypse

In the single-tracked areas, the extra track is being used for train storage so that there are rail cars ready to enter service as soon as tracks are cleared:

Storage train riding out the storm at U St.

Metro did a good job of getting the system up and running again after the December 19th storm, opting to prepare the entire system for Monday’s rush rather than restore service immediately. They’ll likely do the same this time around.

Subway architecture – world tour

Several sources have linked to a great photo compilation from design boom on avant garde subway station architecture from around the world. The images come from:

stockholm tunnelbana
munich u-bahn
bilbao metro
shanghai bund sightseeing tunnel
dubai metro
tokyo – iidabashi station
prague – line a
moscow – komsomolskaya station
toronto – museum station
barcelona – drassanes station

Some of the stations are quite striking – and no, DC did not make the list.

The question it raises for me is the value in having a coherent design language for the system – providing ease of use for passengers – and sparking visual interest and making great spaces. DC’s vaulted stations fit into its federal, monumental role quite nicely, but the uniformity of the system (despite the small differences and details) can also be monotonous and dull.

In the event that more underground Metro stations are added within the District (perhaps with the New Blue line, or other core expansions), it’s interesting to think about new station architecture that would maintain the same design principles of the current system (volume, open train rooms, common materials – concrete, brass, red tile, etc, indirect lighting) while also allowing some variability that could provide unique identification for certain stations without sacrificing design unity.

Stockholm Metro Escalators - CC image from flickr

Stockholm Metro - CC image from flickr

Many of Stockholm’s stations, for example, use the look of exposed rock tunnels (a look considered for DC by Harry Weese, incidentally – to show the differences in construction methods for the stations drilled into the rock, versus those crafted with cut-and-cover methods), providing unity between stations while still allowing for unique designs.

Perhaps future expansions to the Metro could swing more in the direction of unique station designs and public art installations.

Let there be light

Following up on recent discussion of Metro’s lighting, it’s important to understand how much the surface that’s to be illuminated matters in Metro’s indirect lighting scheme. Earlier, I noted that Metro is currently going though a process of deep-cleaning several stations in the system – replacing light bulbs, cleaning the walls, etc. The Washington Post had a great article in March on the process for each station:

Blasts of steam from the hoses they carry scour dust from train brakes and concrete away from the panels. Sensitive equipment, including pylons on the platform, is protected from the spray, but the station is warm and misty.

Once the station is cleaned, the crew will re-bronze rails, paint kiosks and repair tile, among other tasks.

A station gets enhanced about every three and a half years. The crews do two dozen stations a year, focusing on indoor stations during cold weather.

“We’ve got it down to a science,” says Tom Morrison, Metro’s superintendent of contract maintenance and station enhancement. The job begins with a lot of prep work after the Red Line shuts down at midnight. Power to the third rail must be cut and station equipment protected.

The crew must wrap up about 4 a.m. The workers will need to be gone, the equipment stored at the end of the platform or hauled away and the station dry by the time passengers arrive and trains start running at 5 a.m.

It’s not easy adjusting to the schedule — five overnights in a station and two off days trying to have a real life — but workers at least get a direct view of what they’ve accomplished. “We can see the before and after,” says craft supervisor Andre Jordan.

Steam cleaning the walls makes a huge difference. This process is currently underway at my nearest station, Potomac Avenue. Dr. Gridlock noted earlier in the year each of the stations scheduled for a “station enhancement,” as Metro describes the process:

Major Enhancements: Dunn Loring, East Falls Church, Eisenhower Avenue, Forest Glen, Medical Center, Potomac Avenue, Twinbrook, Wheaton, White Flint, U Street, Vienna, West Falls Church.

Mini Enhancements: Ballston, Bethesda, Brookland, Court House, Foggy Bottom, Franconia-Springfield, Friendship Heights, Rockville, Shady Grove, Smithsonian, Virginia Square, Woodley Park.

The majors and the minis involve different types of work. A major takes about three months. A mini takes about 25 percent less time. I watched some of the overnight work for a “major” at Cleveland Park. During the hours the station was closed, crews on lifts power washed the station’s concrete ceiling and walls. I could see the before and after, and the difference was remarkable as they removed the tunnel dust that gathers in the station.

To get an idea of how much dirt and grime accumulates over the years, have a look at the process in action:

Potomac Ave deep cleaning, Dec 2009

Metro initially ‘painted’ several stations in order to lighten them up a bit – but the painted surfaces don’t quite have the same warm feeling that the original concrete does. They also show the dirt and grime more than their concrete counterparts.

Compare, side by side, the clean side of the station to the uncleaned one:

It’s not just the grime accumulating on the lower portions of the vault – there’s a huge difference in the dirt on the bottom edges of the coffers – that’s not just shadow (despite my crappy camera).

Links – All the pieces matter

Brands matter

JD Hammond looks at the importance of rail liveries in the transit brand.
GGW looks at Metro’s proposed redesign and unification of bus stop signage.
Multiple sources (GGW, BDC, DCist, PoP) noted the shipping of DC’s first streetcars from the Czech Republic to DC.

A common theme amongst the streetcar commentariat – Hey! That thing looks like the Circulator!

No doubt. Obviously, this spurred JD Hammond’s post. One commenter on one of those sites (I can’t keep track) noted that the stripped down base paint job for the livery, missing the graphics and text, looks awfully similar to a Jesus fish.

Commute flows matter

Matt Johnson (at GGW and Track Twenty-Nine) has a fascinating graphic looking at Metro’s commute flows, also determing which segments of the system are the busiest during the AM rush hour.

Very interesting to look at. Well done. Also, an excellent case for more investment in the core. Discussions in GGW’s comments thread hints at the impacts of the Silver Line on current Orange Line crowds – and the inescapable conclusion is that more core capacity will be needed – sooner rather than later.

All in the game, yo.

Apropos of nothing in particular, this video of The Wire‘s 100 greatest quotes is fantastic. Those with virgin eyes/ears or those that haven’t seen all 5 seasons (there are spoilers) might not want to watch.

Lester Freamon’s last quote is the one that hits home for me when thinking about cities and the series – “all the pieces matter.”

Around the horn

Minneapolis

Back in my hometown, yesterday marked the first day of revenue service for the Northstar commuter rail line between Big Lake and downtown Minneapolis. This is Minneapolis’ first heavy rail commuter line, which will look for a quick expansion to the originally planned terminus of St. Cloud, MN.

Yonah Freemark offers his assessment at The Transport Politic.

The $320 million would have been better spent on promoting transit that can be used round-the-clock by people who have a choice not to use cars — something that’s made virtually impossible by the design of Northstar’s schedule and stations. With several other peak-period-only commuter lines under consideration, however, Metro Transit will likely spend more on projects such as this before it decides to pull back.

One note – that capital cost number also includes the money to extend the Hiawatha Light Rail line from the previous downtown terminus at the Warehouse District to the new terminus at the new Target Field. When all is said and done, that will be a great transit hub for the city, and considering that the project’s cost includes this LRT extension, the numbers look more favorable.

Service can always be increased at later dates. Given the line’s terminus at the Minnesota Twins’ new stadium, I’m sure we’ll see ballgame service in the relatively near future. Commenters also note that Minneapolis has a much stronger downtown employment core than other cities with new, struggling commuter lines.

MinnPost‘s excellent article (as per usual) from Steve Berg also notes the history of rail in the area:

“As far as I can tell, the Twin Cities probably had the largest commuter rail network in the U.S. to totally disappear,” said Aaron Isaacs, Minnesota’s foremost railroad historian. During the peak of local railroading in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as many as 15 commuter lines spread outward from the two downtowns, most of them from St. Paul’s Union Depot or Minneapolis’ Great Northern and Milwaukee Road stations. By the mid 1880s, three competing railroads offered trains over three different routes every hour between the two downtowns, Isaacs said, 74 trains in all.

Commuter trains also ran on a dozen suburban routes:

• From downtown St. Paul to White Bear Lake, Lake Elmo, Stillwater, St. Paul Park, South St. Paul, Inver Grove, North St. Paul, St. Anthony Park, New Brighton, Inver Grove and Taylors Falls.

• From downtown Minneapolis to Mendota, Wayzata, Hutchinson, St. Louis Park, Hopkins, Excelsior, Edina, Savage, Lakeville and Northfield.

At one point, four companies competed for passengers between both downtowns and Lake Minnetonka. Special trains to the State Fair and Fourth of July celebrations were also offered.

By the 1890s, electrified interurban streetcars began displacing the steam-powered commuter trains. Still the trains lasted through World War I and into the late 1920s before the Great Depression spelled their demise. A few stragglers lingered into the 1940s, Isaacs said, notably the gas-electric powered Dan Patch trains between Minneapolis and Northfield and the Luce Line trains between Minneapolis, Wayzata and Hutchinson. But by 1948, commuter trains were all gone.

Welcome back to the fold, Minneapolis. With all that old right of way sitting around, there should be more commuter lines in your future.

Denver

The crown jewel of Denver’s ambitious FasTracks project will be a revitalized and repurposed Union Station.

Denver Union Station - Photo by Author

Recently, they’ve released the 60% design for the transit hub and redevelopment project. A PDF of the presentation is available here. The project will link LRT platforms and Commuter Rail platforms via a 2 block long underground tunnel that will also serve as the regional bus concourse.

General Development Plan

Transit Infrastructure

Transit Architecture

It’s a cool document, well worth a look to see what a city with a developing transit system (not just line-by-line on a piecemeal basis) is thinking of for a hub.

Los Angeles

Out in LA, they’ve opened up the Gold Line extension into East LA. Jarrett Walker notes many of the line’s shortcomings, and how they’ll inevitably be blamed on the “planners.” Why is this line not a subway?

Ah, those nasty cruel “transportation planners”! Sorry, but the answer to “why” is not “the planners decided …” unless your main goal as a journalist is to instill feelings of ignorant helplessness in your readers. Planners and political leaders made these decisions for a reason, and that reason is the real answer to the question.

Us planners can never seem to do anything right in the minds of some, however, and Jarret put out another post talking about the nexus of planning ideals and political realities:

In the end, I completely understand the frustrations surrounding this project, and agree that it probably will not really begin to show results until it’s flows through downtown as part of the Regional Connector plan. It may be that the political pressure to put some kind of rail transit into East Los Angeles led to a project that will turn out to be premature and inadequate. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a rapid transit subway extension proposed into this same area, perhaps under Chavez, in the next few decades.

Still, understanding how difficult rail transit development is in Los Angeles, I do think MTA and their partners in city and county government deserve a few days of good feeling for having gotten something done.

Nothing’s ever easy. It’s worth remembering that. The warts of the two newly opened projects show that here. Even Denver’s Union Station has had to scale things back, with FasTracks facing some financial problems and the Station’s plans scrapping underground Light Rail and Commuter Rail platforms in favor of cheaper alignments.

Any Colour You Like

From mindgutter on flickr

(Post title with apologies to Pink Floyd)

Matt Johnson, over at Track Twenty-Nine, noted that with MARTA’s official conversion over to a color-based naming system for their rail system, more than half of America’s rapid transit systems (including Metro) use a color-based system.

Starting in 1965, Boston started referring to lines by color. When Washington’s system opened in 1976, line colors indicated the route of trains. Cleveland renamed their lines to colors two years later, in 1978. When Los Angeles’ rail system started opening, lines were referred to by colors – the first heavy rail line opened in 1993, the same year that Chicago started calling trains Red, Orange, and so on. Baltimore renamed transit lines after colors around 2002. Finally, just last month, Atlanta added their Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue lines to America’s transit repertoire.

There are still 6 systems that don’t use colors to identify lines by names. However, four do differentiate lines using different colors on a map: BART, NYC Subway, PATH, and SEPTA. Miami and PATCO each only operate one heavy rail line, so color is not an issue.

In any transit system, the diagrammatic understanding of the system (often represented by the system map) is a vital element in the user’s understanding of where they are. Colors offer an intuitive means of understanding this – as evidenced by the numerous systems using color identifiers for their maps, even if not in their overall nomenclature systems.

There are a couple of shortcomings in using color as the main identifier of lines and services, however. One is the limited potential for expansion – Chicago has the most lines of any system using colors (8 – Red, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Green, Pink, Brown, Purple), and there aren’t a whole lot of extra options for system expansion. Silver? Gold? But would that be too similar to Yellow?

That leads to the other limitation – differentiation between the lines depends solely on color, and when those differences are not evident enough (i.e. differentiating Yellow from Gold, or for a person who is colorblind), you need some sort of alternative. Metro accomplishes this with the use of words on the trains – spelling out the color on the front LEDs, as well as the destination on the side LEDs and a two-letter color abbreviation on the PIDs.

It’s also worth noting that many airports used to have color-based naming systems, but have switched to letters and numbers for their terminals and concourses. Growing up in Minneapolis, MSP Airport used to name their concourses with colors, but switched to letters. The letter/number provides an easier identifier to the colorblind and those that are unfamiliar with English.

Eventually, converting to a system where color is a secondary identifier, especially as DC adds more lines, will be necessary. Particularly if DC adds track connections that enable more services, equating a line of track with the service that it operates on is limiting. Eventually, DC should consider changing to a naming system similar to that of Paris – where the Metro lines are all assigned numbers and colors, while the regional RER lines all have letters and colors, with numbered suffixes for branch lines in the suburbs. Jarrett Walker delves into the details of the Parisian system:

Actually, there are FOUR tiers of information here in a clever hierarchy, all designed to ensure that you don’t have to learn more information that you need to do what you’re going to do:

A Métro route number signifies a simple, frequent line that doesn’t require you to learn much more, apart from riding it in the correct direction.

An RER route letter such as Line A identifies the common RER segment across the core of Paris and invites you to use it exactly as if it were any other metro line, without caring about its branches.

Odd vs. even numbered branch numbers on the RER indicate different directions on the common segment. On Line A, for example, odd-numbered branches are all in the west, even numbered ones in the east, so as you get to know the service, the branch number tells you which way the train is going on the central segment. Even if you’re not riding onto a specific branch, this can be useful, as redundant ‘confirming’ information, to assure you that you’re riding in the correct direction. This is important as it’s very easy to lose your sense of north (if you ever had one) in the warrens of underground stations.

Finally, the individual branch numbers are needed ONLY if you’re headed for a specific suburb beyond the branch point, such as Marne-la-Vallée.

The principle is that this is a progression from simple to complex. The point of this hierarchy is not to lead customers all the way through, but exactly the opposite: to enable them to “get off,” ignore the remaining layers, as soon as they have the information they need.

Eventually, as DC aims to better integrate the commuter rail systems and further expands Metro, integrating brands and fare structures with Metro, a re-organization of the entire naming system might be in order. With Silver and Purple lines on the way, there aren’t a lot of other options left. When David at GGW looked at turning DC’s commuter rail lines into a sort of express Metro system, his naming system ran head up against the limitations (lime? teal?) of the color-based systems.

Hopefully, we’ll eventually have to deal with this issue. It’ll mean that we’ve expanded and integrated our systems beyond what we have today. More immediately, DC’s streetcar system presents some nomenclature challenges as well – and that will be a nice problem to have.

Linkages

Image from Rakka

Car Sharing

Yonah Freemark and Ryan Avent have some discussion on the urban benefits of car sharing services.

Yonah:

The end result, at least theoretically: fewer cars on the road, more efficient use of each automobile, and fewer parking spaces needed. It has proven a cheaper alternative to taxis and car rentals and has been quickly adopted.

The problem, of course, is that many of the people using car sharing programs once weren’t using any cars at all, meaning that the easy access to vehicle actually means an increase in overall car use. Zipcar’s campaign earlier this year to convince New York City pedestrians that they could be getting around more quickly in an automobile suggests that the service’s best market is among people who are currently walking, biking, or taking transit to get to work. Should cities be encouraging car-share programs if the end result is to convince people who don’t use automobiles today to use them in the future?

Ryan:

In cities where a carless lifestyle is somewhat more marginal (like Washington) the existence of a zipcar service is a huge comfort to those thinking about giving up their automobiles.

And I don’t think there is anything wrong with acknowledging the fact that for some things, the availability of an automobile is hugely advantageous. Carrying around big or bulky loads on foot is hard and unpleasant. The ability to use a car for, say, a trip to the hardware store or to the market in preparation for a big dinner party significantly increases the convenience of city life.

There’s nothing wrong with cars, per se. My personal ZipCar use in DC is quite limited for personal trips. I don’t really use it much as a replacement for walking and transit errand trips – my uses are for trips that require a car, regardless. Another case where ZipCar is quite useful has been for business trips. Previously, working in downtown DC but with frequent client meetings in non-transit accessible areas of Northern VA, ZipCar enabled me to take transit into the office, grab a car within a very short walk of the office, use the car for a meeting, and return to the office without worrying about parking.

One instance actually involved using ZipCar for a longer, overnight business trip up to suburban New York. Given the ability to pick the car up right at the office and drop it off the same, as well as the inclusion of gas, the rates for the trip were similar to renting a car from a ‘regular’ outlet.

To me, there’s no doubt that car sharing presents a net positive. I predicate that notion on the idea that car trips are not inherently bad.

Hill East, baby.

DCmud offers thoughts on living in Hill East, my ‘hood. It’s a thorough description of the area, including the neighboring retail options in Eastern Market. Unfortunately, the comments on the piece devolve into some back and forth, denigrating condo-living gentrifiers and other newcomers to the area. It’s unfortunate that residents don’t see any role for different housing options in their neighborhood, as these new options would certainly make the area stronger. It’s also not the first time these sentiments have arisen in the area.

Transit and Land Use

There have also been some good posts on the Corridor Cities Transitway – The transport politic offers an explanation of the possible alternatives, as does BeyondDC. The ‘better’ routes (at least in terms of serving potential users) are undoubtedly more snake-like, due to the locations of the various transit nodes.

Jarrett Walker notes how the land use in the area puts transit in a poor position – either option isn’t exactly how you’d like to draw it up if given a blank slate.

As a result, Maryland now has to choose between a direct yellow line that misses key destinations and a blue line that serves them but is maddeningly circuitous, especially compared to the freeway that this line would compete with.

There is no clearer example of this basic principle: Public transit’s usefulness is determined by land use planning more than by transit planning. Once you’ve arranged your major land use nodes to form a squiggle, you’ve pretty much prohibited efficient public transit.

Indeed. Once the basic patterns are put in place, there’s only so much that fixed guideway transit can do. There’s not a universal solution for simply adding rail lines to make everything better.

City Block

a work in progress…