Commentary

Now it ain’t so neat to admit defeat

There are three kinds of attitudes towards the spread of a disease like COVID-19. You can be indifferent to the suffering of others, you can

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Commentary

We’re not in this together anymore

Do you remember the first couple of months of COVID pandemic restrictions? Here in New York, all “non-essential businesses” were closed, then some stores and

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Background, Better Buses, Commentary, News

Van Bramer, Nolan, Quinn, Gianaris call for Midtown Tunnel bus

The MTA is doing track work on the #7 line to improve speed and reliability. That’s good. As they have done for previous track work projects, they will be shutting down the line between Queensboro Plaza and Times Square for the next seven weekends. That’s bad.

The N, R and E trains will be running, and people coming from points east will be able to transfer. The MTA usually runs shuttle buses for people to get to and from the three stations in Long Island City with no service. That’s good. But the transfers can add five to ten minutes to a trip. Worse, the shuttle buses don’t go to Manhattan; they stop at Queensboro Plaza, where passengers have to change for the N. For the next several weekends, people who are normally fifteen minutes from Grand Central will spend fifteen minutes on the bus just to get to the N, which doesn’t even go to Grand Central. That’s bad.

What’s especially frustrating for LIC residents is that many of them live only five minutes by car from the Queens Midtown Tunnel. If they could walk through the tunnel, they could get to Manhattan faster than by taking the shuttle bus. Those who own cars can drive into Manhattan if they want to deal with the traffic and the hassle of finding parking. Those who don’t own cars are stuck with the shuttle bus.

Last year, in response to a previous service disruption, Councilmember Eric Gioia held a rally asking the MTA to run buses through the tunnel to Grand Central. Cap’n Transit took that a step further and suggested running the buses on the 34th Street bus lanes to Penn Station, so that travelers could switch to the subway at Penn Station, Herald Square or Park Avenue. He produced maps showing that, according to Google directions, when there is no traffic (as on weekends), buses can get to Penn Station in ten minutes from Ravenswood, Dutch Kills, Sunnyside or Greenpoint. In fifteen minutes they can get to Penn Station from the Triboro Bridge, Jackson Heights, Maspeth, Bushwick or Williamsburg. Of course, if they made stops in between it would take a little longer; the point is that lots of people want to go to Manhattan, and a bus could get them there pretty darn quick.

Bus routes through the tunnel
Map: Cap’n Transit

As far as I know, the MTA never responded to Gioia or to Cap’n Transit. They ran the inconvenient shuttle buses, and that was it. Now they’re planning to do it again. This morning, Gioia’s successor, Jimmy Van Bramer, held another rally asking for a tunnel bus. He was joined by Astoria Assemblymember Mike Gianaris (who has announced that he is running to represent this area in the State Senate next year), Assemblymember Cathy Nolan and Council Chair Christine Quinn.

WNYC’s Brian Zumhagen was actually able to get a response from the MTA. An unnamed spokesman says that “shuttle buses directly to Grand Central would create big traffic tie-ups in Long Island City and on the East Side of Manhattan.” It’s not clear why they would cause any more tie-ups in LIC than the buses to Queens Plaza, or why they would cause any significant tie-ups in weekend traffic. That comment shows that the MTA is looking for reasons not to accommodate riders.

At this point it remains to be seen whether all that star power will have the desired effect. If you care about this issue, I suggest that you contact Jimmy or Cathy and ask how you can help.

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Trolleys may return to the streets of Curitiba

Bondes podem voltar a circular em Curitiba. Parana Online, July 3, 2009.

Electric trolleys that plied the streets of Curitiba in the first half of the 20th Century may return to carry passengers in the downtown area. A city project aims to install a new streetcar line from Passeio P?blico to Pra?a Eufr?sio Correia, along Riachuelo, Bar?o do Rio Branco, Conselheiro Laurindo and XV de Novembro Streets.

This urban tourist attraction and cultural nostalgia project was developed by the Curitiba Institute for Urban Research and Planning (IPPUC) and forms part of the downtown revitalization work begun in 2005.

The return of trolleys to the downtown streets will be managed as a public-private partnership. “As with the revitalization of City Hall, the city government will not fund this out of the general budget, which is primarily dedicated to social programs,” said the Deputy Mayor for Special Projects, Maur?cio S? de Ferrante. “The proposal could be a big tourist draw and is environmentally correct, since the trolley is electric. We are currently in discussions with potential sponsors.”

The service to be offered by the Tourist Trolley would not compete with the regular mass transit system. It will allow passengers to get on and off along the way and will have a separate fare. IPPUC’s expectation is that the trolley will be more of a catalyst for economic development in the area, along the axis formed by Bar?o do Rio Branco and Riachuelo Streets.

Tourists approve

In 2007 IPPUC conducted a survey of tourists who had visited the city. They interviewed 1785 people, of whom 95.6% said they would use a tourist trolley. When asked why they would ride, 52.7% of those interviewed said they would use it to explore the city and out of curiosity.

Another 24.7% said they would use it to explore Downtown, get to know the city and see the tourist attractions, and 14.1% would choose the Tourist Trolley for the opportunity to relive the past and for nostalgia. Interviews were conducted in nine locations, such as the airport, bus station and city parks, and with passengers on the Tourist Line.

The planned trolley route can be seen on the map below:

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Coming soon to Bamako: a minibus ring and a busway

Lanes will be set aside for these mass transit modes in order to decrease congestion downtown.

Circulation ? Bamako : BIENT?T UN ANNEAU SOTRAMA ET UN COULOIR BUS. L. DIARRA, May 7, 2008.

The scene takes place in the area around the Finance Ministry. An argument breaks out between a driver and a motorcyclist. The two men come to blows after having exchanged harsh words. Police were forced to separate the two combatants. When a fight breaks out in the middle of traffic, the causes are not hard to guess. Lack of respect for the traffic rules brings about an angry reaction from others, and the gloves come off.

In a few months this kind of scene, today so common in the streets of the capital, should be just a bad memory for Bamakois. A new traffic plan named “Minibus Ring and Busway on the Boulevard du Peuple” is being prepared under the Transportation Sector Project Phase 2 (PST2). This ambitious project, which will be completed over the next four years, has a budget of 52.5 billion CFA francs [$114 million US], jointly financed by the World Bank and the government of Mali.

The plan was to the media by the Department of Infrastructure and Transportation last week in the conference room of DFA Communication. The press conference was led by the Minister of Infrastructure and Transportation, Hamed Diane S?m?ga, accompanied by National Highway Administrator Issa Assimi Diallo, Land, Sea and River Transportation Director Djibril Tall, and PST2 Project Coordinator Ti?moko Y?ro Kon?. Other notable attendees were the governor of the Bamako District, Ibrahima F?f? Kon? and representatives of unions and groups representing drivers and transportation companies.

The PST2 plan demonstrates the will of those in power to improve the transportation sector. It solidifies the common view that the government and the World Bank are coming to share with regards to the development of the transportation sector in our country. The PST2 will support the quality transportation services offered to rural and urban communities by improving key segments of the infrastructure.

The multifaceted approach of the PST2 brings in the agriculture, urban and rural development sectors. According to Minister S?m?ga, it has the potential to change the face of Bamako. “This project is dear to our hearts, given the frustration of traffic jams in the city,” he said. Some of the major avenues downtown will be rebuilt to accommodate demand. He indicated that the movement of private vehicles will be structured so as to limit its negative impact on quality of life.

According to the coordinator of the PST2, Ti?moko Y?ro Kon?, the project involves three major sections. Costing slightly more than two billion CFA francs [$4.3 million US], Section A will improve access to rural areas in order to promote rural development and agro-industrial activities.

Section B aims to develop part of the urban transportation system in Bamako in order to support urban activities and regional growth. Meanwhile, Section C targets all activities relative to logistical and institutional support for the completion of the project and the subsequent evaluation.

With more than six billion CFA francs [$13 million US], Section B will create a 1.2 kilometer exclusive bus corridor along the Boulevard du Peuple. The Sotrama minibuses will have access to a 3.8 kilometer ring that is already being presented on several informational signs around the capital. Sidewalks and passageways will be built to help pedestrians and minibus passengers reach the downtown area. Two overpasses will allow pedestrians to cross the main minibus routes.

The coordinator assured attendees that “There will be no demolitions, only improvements. In the worst case scenario, it will be public buildings affected. In all cases, the improvements will be made on existing corridors.” Land, Sea and River Transportation Director Djibril Tall explained that, “The goal we have in mind is the improvement of traffic in our capital. We have an obligation to show the drivers and transportation companies that the project is in no way designed to put anyone out of business.”

The department, in the context of its mission to extend its activities to other sectors, has begun to develop a set of complementary improvements for the 2008-2012 period that will involve road, rail, air and river transportation.

Background, Better Buses

The cama suite life

Photo by Craig James
Photo by Craig James
I was chatting with a friend today about long-distance travel. I mentioned how I’ve taken a number of overnight bus, train and ferry trips, and he told me about bus travel in his home country of Argentina. Turns out that there are several classes of bus travel there, and the highest class, “cama suite,” is pretty swanky. (Cama is Spanish for bed.) The overnight buses have seats that fold down completely horizontal, with lots of room (three across), attendants, full meals and “lots of alcohol.”

I went home and researched it, and everything I’ve found confirms Antonio’s account. There are lots of reports from English-speaking travelers in Argentina, complete with photos, like the one by American tourist Craig James, who took the photo of “full cama” service above. Craig’s daughter Caroline was less impressed by the “semi-cama” service on a subsequent leg of their trip.

More details can be found on the websites of the several for-profit bus companies, such as Expreso Alberino. That’s right, several for-profit bus companies: according to the handy Omnilineas website, the popular Buenos Aires-Bariloche route is handled by at least five different companies, with prices ranging from about $60 to $90 US.

I’m seriously wondering about the economic factors that allow companies to profitably run such luxurious bus service, but somehow prevent planes, trains and private cars from taking all the business. And how this fits in with the results of the National Geographic Greendex survey that ranked Argentines as some of the greenest people in the world (PDF), except for the amount of beef they consume.

Could we ever see something like that here in the US? Well, we do have the LimoLiner between New York and Boston. That has seen mixed reviews, but seems to be doing well, having recently added service to Hartford. However, it’s only a five-hour trip (max); as far as I know there’s nothing similar for overnight trips. Maybe someone should try a NYC-Chicago or NYC-Atlanta run?

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City selects a logo for the Curitiba Metro

Five teams are working on the alignment for the first line.

Prefeitura define a marca do Metr? Curitibano, Edson Fonseca, Jornale Curitiba.

The logo of the Curitiba Metro can already be seen on the streets of this city, on the uniforms and the security equipment of the city and the Novo Modal consortium, the contractor for the implementation of the core project. Five technical teams are working on the CIC Sul – Santa C?ndida alignment where the first line of the Metro, the Blue Line, will run. There are also teams conducting interference studies in order to locate the existing electrical, water and telephone networks on the site.

The Curitiba Metro logo contains an “M” surrounded by a “C” in a green cylinder representing the tunnel where this new mode of transportation will run, all in the city colors of red, white and green. The design is the work of Marcos Minini for the Master agency. To create the identity for the Curitiba Metro, Minini analyzed 169 metro logos from Brazil and other countries. 83 of these used the letter “M” – practically a worldwide standard for identifying metros.

The City of Curitiba plans to build 22 kilometers of the Blue Line between the Santa C?ndida and CIC Sul terminals. The system will be underground for 19 kilometers. In the section between Passeio P?blico and Pra?a Eufr?sio Correia, the metro will pass beneath Riachuelo and Bar?o do Rio Branco Streets in an old Expresso bus tunnel.

The line will have a 500-meter elevated section on Winston Churchill Avenue from the Pinheirinho terminal to Route BR-476. From there it will continue along the surface in the highway median to CIC Sul, the end of the line, where a complex will be built including a parking lot, control center and maintenance center, with a special access route for the metro vehicles.

21 stations are envisioned for the project, with an average of one kilometer between them. The vehicle used will have light rail characteristics and carry 1150 passengers in each four-car consist. The system will transport 650 thousand passengers per day.

The Novo Modal consortium is responsible for the preliminary studies of compatibility with existing projects and studies of topography, geotechnics, geology, hydrology, interference along the corridor, earthworks, various underpasses, rail superstructure, buildings (stations, terminals, control center and administrative building), fixed systems, rolling stock, and budget details.

Five teams will work from near the Pinheirinho neighborhood towards Santa C?ndida, collecting subsoil material to send for laboratory analysis. This phase is part of the geologic and geotechnic studies, which will be conducted by the consortium formed by the Trends, Engefoto, Esteio and Vega companies. As the project extends from Santa C?ndida to CIC Sul, the next phase will survey from Pinheirinho to CIC Sul.

Over the following days, the Ecossistema company, consultants for the Environmental Impact Assessment and Environmental Impact Report (EIA-RIMA), will begin their work, based on the data collected by the consortium responsible for the studies and engineering projects.

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Better Buses: Cutting Dwell Time

A few times a week, I get off the subway and walk one short block down a hill to catch a bus. The bus is going down the hill with me, and sometimes I see it when I get to the top of the subway steps. There are always enough other people waiting at the bus stop so that if I see it at the top of the hill I know I can take my time walking and still make it.

Until one day recently, when I was halfway down the hill and noticed that almost everyone was on the bus. They had all gotten on so quickly that I had to run to catch the bus. What changed? It was one of the new low-floor hybrid buses.

There are many things that make buses slow, and “dwell time” is one of them. I was mildly inconvenienced having to run to catch that bus, but I’d have been pretty happy if I were already down the hill waiting to board, or on the bus waiting for everyone else to get on so the bus could get going.

Level boarding is one of the “features” of BRT, but of course you can have level boarding without any of the other features. Prepayment of fares is another one, so that you don’t have to stand in line while everyone digs through their change or dips their metrocards. NYC Transit has level boarding on lots of buses now, and is testing prepayment on the Select Bus Service on Fordham Road. Maybe soon they’ll roll it out in other locations.

It’d be kind of lame if we had to wait for “BRT” to get pre-payment or proof-of-payment citywide, when bus systems around the world have had it for decades without any of the other “BRT” features. Kind of lame – like waiting for six people to swipe a metrocard before you can get on the bus.

Image: njt4148 / Flickr

Background, Better Buses

Oxford, England, Bus Rider’s Paradise?

Buses on Gloucester Green

(Photo from The Oxford and Chilterns Bus Page.)

I’m writing this from a bus. Nothing particularly special about bringing a laptop on a bus, but in this case my laptop has full AC power from an outlet under the window seat. I was hoping to be able to post it via on-bus broadband wifi, but that doesn’t seem to be working. I have been able to pick up wifi signals from nearby buses, however. The bus is new, comfortable and spacious – particularly spacious because I’m sitting near the wheelchair spot.

You may have heard of the Bolt Buses; this is not one of those, but one of its inspirations. I’m in Barton, Oxfordshire, on the Airline bus from Oxford to Heathrow. On the way here I took the train, but I figured I’d try the bus on the way back. The trip takes almost the same amount of time – an hour and a half – but is cheaper: eighteen pounds, or about thirty-six dollars, versus twenty-two pounds and change for the train. The bus is direct; for the train you have to go into London and take another train back out to Heathrow. After the central bus station there were three stops leading out to a park-and-ride on the outskirts of town.

I actually missed the 10AM bus, but I’m not worried about missing my flight; I just took the 10:20. The frequency of the buses is about the same as the trains: every twenty minutes in the mornings and evenings, every two hours from 10PM to 4AM, and every half hour in between. That’s seven days a week – but on weekends the morning service starts at 6AM instead of 5AM. There are also buses to Gatwick Airport, and express buses direct to London every 5-10 minutes – the latter operated by two competing companies. This bus is about three-quarters full.

While in Oxford I stayed in a room above High Street, one of the main streets in town. Unlike a similar room in the US, there were no honking cars under my window because that part of High Street is restricted to buses and bicycles, and there was a steady stream of them until late in the night. The buses were mostly hybrid, so I didn’t experience the noise and pollution that I used to associate with buses. There were the airport buses, express buses, long-distance buses and local buses. Now, here on the M40 highway, there are numerous buses traveling in both directions. As far as I could tell, they were all privately operated by for-profit companies.

I had come here expecting a fairly limited transportation system, based in part on Kingdom by the Sea, Paul Theroux’s Thatcher-era exploration of the United Kingdom by train, bus, foot and ferry. Judging by what I’ve seen this week, England seems to be recovering from some of that. It obviously has a long way to go – only a few of the eliminated train lines have been reactivated – but public transit in Oxford looks very healthy indeed.

Better Buses, Commentary

Prestige and buses

Despite what some may think, there is a certain amount of prestige attached to riding a bus in New York City. I’ve made that observation in blog comments before, on Streetsblog and more recently on the Overhead Wire, but I think it deserves its own blog post.

Contrary to the way that Peter Smith presents it, I am not claiming that riding the bus here is always a prestigious activity. What I am saying, based on my own observation, is that there are plenty of middle-class and even upper-class New Yorkers who ride the bus. I’m referring here specifically to local public buses; express and long-distance buses have their own idiosyncrasies.

The Upper East Side of Manhattan is one of the most wealthy places in the world. If you ride one of the buses that go through it, you’ll see lots of well-off, well-dressed people, including white people, older adults and women. Many people ride the bus who might be considered “elite”: for example, I once ran into former Parks Commissioner Henry Stern (who has his own car and an illegally reserved parking spot in the middle of Central Park) on the M57.

A middle-aged Asian female friend who lives on the Upper East Side once told me that she avoids the subway; my understanding was that it was because in her mind she has an association between the subway and crime that goes back to the graffiti-covered trains of the 1970s. In any case, she took buses (or sometimes taxis) everywhere she went.

As you get further from the Upper East Side, the prestige of local buses diminishes, and in most of Brooklyn and Queens until in Hempstead or Mount Vernon or Paterson they’re largely used by poor and working-class Black and Latino people – and college students. Further afield, in towns like Kingston and Hartford they’re mostly seen as welfare transportation for the homeless and the mentally disabled.

Let me be clear here: I’m not saying that the bus-riding experience here is necessarily any better (objectively, in terms of speed or comfort) than that in Garden City, or in Syracuse or Denver. I’m saying that here, better-off people are willing to ride the bus; any prestige that attaches to the bus is through association with these relatively prestigious riders. It’s not “bull shit,” and I’m willing to defend the validity of my observation against all comers.

Regardless, why might it be that upper-middle-class people are willing to ride the bus in New York? I think it’s all relative. In Manhattan bus service is pretty frequent, and owning and maintaining a car is an expensive and exhausting proposition. Why would they prefer it to the subway? Because of the daylight and the relatively low historical crime rate, but also because the subway doesn’t really work for travel within the Upper East Side or from Upper East to Upper West. The Second Avenue Subway, when it finally gets built, may change some of that.

This fact has strong implications for bus design and planning. The main one is that convenience, safety and reliability are much more important in attracting riders than any branding strategy. The branding on NYC buses is lame and always has been; the buses have “gotten people out of their cars” (more accurately, prevented them from shifting to cars) simply by being more convenient than a car – and that’s more due to the relative lack of car subsidies than anything the buses have done. Want successful buses? Tear down the bypasses and tear up the parking lots.

The other is that prestigious associations are the best marketing strategy, and we already have that in NYC. NYC Transit is wasting precious money and effort in branding its “Select Bus” routes. Forget the fancy paint job; people will ride the bus if it’s more convenient. They know it’s good enough for the rich folks on Madison Avenue, so why wouldn’t it be good for them? More importantly, don’t think you can skimp on real, honest improvements in convenience, safety and reliability and make up for it through branding. New Yorkers have seen it all.

Commentary

Spatial narratives

Jarrett Walker has another thought-provoking post up, this time on spatial vs. narrative navigators, linking to a magazine article that gives more background. In the comments, Russ links to a paper(PDF) about the effect that the Tube Map has on people’s mental maps of London.

The distinction between spatial and narrative navigation makes a lot of sense to me, but disagree with the way that Jarrett seems to set them up as a zero-sum game – either you’re good at mental maps, or you’re good at remembering narratives, or you’re mediocre at both. This portrayal is supported by the Maguire study discussed in the article that indicated that London cabbies who create too big of a mental map wind up with hippocampi that are shrunk in the front. But I feel like I’m relatively good at spatial navigation and not so bad at narrative navigation, so I think it’s possible to develop both – at the expense of whatever else you could be learning, of course, like how to pick up women.

An interesting point in that area: when I developed my prototype English to American Sign Language machine translation system (PDF), the biggest obstacle were phrases like “winds SSW 30 mph gusty near canyons.”

I asked a native signer and professional interpreter the best way to say “gusty near canyons” in ASL, and she drew a map of Albuquerque in the air, pointed to the canyons with a topic marking nonmanual, and made the sign for “wind” with emphasis. I asked her if it could be said another way, just with the sign for “canyon,” but she said that the map would be much more natural for a native signer.

To get a machine translation system to handle that would not only require a kind of sophisticated mapping subsystem that’s not usually found in these programs, but also a lot of background knowledge of geographic features – for every locale that has weather reports. It made me realize that not only is ASL much more complicated than I had given it credit for, but it’s a lot harder to write down than spoken languages. In the terms of Jarrett’s post, it seems clear that the National Weather Service was using narrative description, while the interpreter I consulted was using spatial description.

While I would agree with the comment left by Pantheon that spatial navigation is more effective than narrative navigation, particularly when it’s done by computers, I strongly disagree with his condemnation of narrative navigators, or of inferior navigators in general. Complaining about people who have difficulty finding their way across town is like complaining about bad spelling or malapropisms. In some cases you can make the case that people should develop these skills betters, but for a lot of them it’s too late to learn. There’s a range of ability along both axes, and a transit agency that only caters to riders within certain limits will run the risk of alienating riders.

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Gertrude Stein on Paris

I found this book in the library. To be honest I didn’t get into it enough to finish it before I had to bring it back, but there were a few good quotes. The first one relates to this post from the Streetsblog Network.

There are two things that french animals do not do, cats do not fight much and do not howl much and chickens do not get flustered running across the road, if they start to cross the road they keep on going which is what french people do too.
Anybody driving a car in Paris must know that. Anybody leaving the sidewalk to go on or walking anywhere goes on at a certain pace and that pace keeps up and nothing startles them nothing frightens them nothing makes them go faster or slower nothing not the most violent or unexpected noise makes them jump, or change their pace or their direction. If anybody jumps back or jumps at all in the streets of Paris you can be sure they are foreign not french. That is peaceful and exciting.

It turns out that the behavior Stein observes in the second quote is affected by economics:

Sarah Bernhardt made me see the thin arms of frenchwomen. When I came to Paris and saw the little midinettes and Montmartoises they all had them. It was only many years later when the styles changed, in those days they wore long skirts, that I realised what sturdy legs went with those thin arms. That is what makes the french such good soldiers the sturdy legs, thin arms and sturdy legs, if you see what I mean, peaceful and exciting.

That is what makes all the french able to ride up hill on bicycles the way they do, no hill is so steep but that slowly pedalling up and up they go, men and girls and little children, the sturdy legs and thin arms.

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