Latest on twitter:
Vancouver Transit Ad-space Re-appropriation Project (V-TARP)
Some great pictures from a neat project — and, dare I say, much better executed than some of the supposedly-subversive ham-handed stuff that got accepted to be displayed for the Canada Line stations (not that any of my 2nd-year undergraduate work was necessarily any better). Thanks for sharing. User Brissa also noted, “the Manager of Customer Services and Marketing at TransLink sent an email claiming that it cost $3,000 in “labour charges” to remove about thirty pieces of cardstock that were placed in empty adspaces.” “The Vancouver Transit Ad-space Re-appropriation Project, or V-TARP, intends to reclaim the highly sought after mindspace used by corporations to communicate with the public, by collecting artworks from across the globe and installing them in the transit adspace.”
Redesigning the New York City subway map - O'Reilly Radar
An intriguing under-the-hood look at the challenges of (re-)designing the MTA Subway map.
A shout out to photojunkie Rannie. He has a special place in my heart for being the first transit photographer I met when I started getting my transit-geek on heavy with Toronto Transit Camp. Unlike me, he takes great pictures of not only infrastructure but people too, and some people I like to call friends are featured in his 140characters portrait series. (And now, he’s also on Tumblr at photojunkiemobile.)
Right next to my warm fuzzy feeling for Rannie is St. Patrick station — when I first moved to Toronto I stayed at the Metropolitan Hotel for 3 days and St. Pat’s was the closest subway. In those first few weeks of navigating the city, it was my starting reference point for looking at apartments in North York, Bloor West Village and the Portuguese District. Good times.
St. Patrick Subway Station #panorama
Buses that cars drive UNDER. Sure gives a new meaning to the phrase, “grade-separated rapid transit.”
(I’m guessing BRT-style elevated platforms.)
Glad to see someone’s thinking outside the box. I wouldn’t want to drive under it though.
China to build enormous buses that cars can drive under | Engadget
via joshmohrer, davereed
THIS.
Tiles in subway stations. A distinguishing feature of east coast subways.
(via dashesofwhite)
SF's Clipper: a cautionary tale for TransLink?
As an early adopter of the Bay Area’s transit fare system, Clipper (formerly TransLink), I am familiar with its flaws. My least favorite is being questioned by overzealous transit cops when a Clipper card reader fails to read my card. This morning, one of the card readers on my train informed… Having had the chance to try out the Clipper when I visited San Francisco last month, I can attest that some things about its implementation really leave a lot to be desired when I compare it to, say, the experience I had with Hong Kong’s Octopus card back even in 2004. For one thing, it’s completely unfathomable to me that there isn’t a machine outside the gates of every station through which I can check what the value on the card is. It’s also a little nuts to me that I can’t add value to it at all stations. If I hadn’t been a tourist carrying cash with me all the time, I might’ve actually been stuck once or twice. The funniest thing? When I actually did run out of value on the card, the machine had no way of actually telling me this. I asked for help from a station attendant. And it took them another 3 or 4 minutes (and several additional repeated attempts to enter) before they could even pinpoint insufficient funds as the reason I couldn’t enter! Having worked in technical support, I can say with some confidence that if the people providing support don’t have the right tools or skills to diagnose any issue from the spectrum of obvious to obscure, customer satisfaction is going to take a tumble. There were a couple of other incidents that were not related to the Clipper and somewhat but not entirely my fault (mistaking a MUNI entrance for the BART, as an example), but even more important than just talking trash about Clipper, is the question of whether the Smart Card implementation here in Vancouver will suffer the same flaws. Our transit system, regrettably, doesn’t have a great track record on the design end of things: if the design of its experience and user interaction stripped as far back down to the bone as the Canada Line stations were, this story about the Clipper may soon be a story about TransLink (in Vancouver, where the regional transit authority is called what SF’s smart card used to be called).
Wheels
8226:
I’ve noticed that transportation is, by far, a surprisingly emotional topic of conversation for people. Bikes, cars, trains. Why are we so passionate about our wheels? Why do we love, hate, envy, despise them so much?
What do you think? I think it boils down to pure us-versus-them. Those people, we figure, that aren’t in my shoes, aren’t traveling the way I am, don’t know the pain of my plight. Traffic is hard for everybody, but we mostly care about how hard it is for us.
One of the thing I notice about having become a cyclist in the last few years is how, even though as a driver I considered myself fairly laid back, I still felt frustration much more than I do as a cyclist, and there’s something about the direct interaction with the elements that makes me both more generous and more assertive on a bike. I’m willing to brake and stop, though I’m not able to do it every time; and I’m not shy about thanking people for their brake, because they do that for me too. It solidifies my belief that traffic is a system operating best when everyone is assertively pursuing their self-interest while expending the least effort to act predictably. Unnecessary risk is counter to this. (But I will cross that blinking green if a gap emerges before the walk sign comes up if it’s a small intersection. Now I have to work on not squirming to cross on the blinking hand. Countdowns would be spectacular.)
Fail Whale bus and train
They got the cuteness but missed the association. Lost in translation, oops! Taking a cue from Twitter thought: could we make service outage advisories on actual transit as cheerfully helpful as Twitter’s fail whale? Could we imagine an alternative to that muffled, barely audible “what are they saying?” feeling followed by the customary, “aww, crap” of finding out about a delay? Surely there’s an academic study on how to break bad news to people in ways that softens the blow, that can be worked into the script on dealing with these things…
