Links & tidbits for October 18, 2012
Links & tidbits for October 18, 2012
Links and tidbits is our semi-regular roundup of interesting stuff around transportation from the last week or so. If you have links to contribute, put them in the comments, or email us!
- Check out the video above: it traces one day of transit service in the Lower Mainland, using info from our public data feeds! I talked to the video’s creator, Andrew Walker, and here’s what he said:
My usual work involves software for satellite missions, including some visualisation software (www.stltracker.com) for orbiting satellites. There are some similarities between visualising the locations of buses and satellites, so I thought I’d investigate what approach transit companies took with their data.
After learning about the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), putting together videos from the data seemed like an interesting challenge, which led to the creation of the videos you saw on youtube.
I started with TransLink as I live in Vancouver, but once you’ve done one city the others are simply a case of plugging the data in to the program. I thought these might also help to promote transit in some small way.
- A colleague sent us this video describing the design of the bicycle network in Malmo, Sweden’s Cycling City of the Year!
- Eugene Wong sends along this link – a spreadsheet is blamed for a rail bidding fiasco in the UK. He also includes a link to a Slashdot discussion on the topic.
- Data from the TomTom GPS company rates Vancouver the second worst for traffic congestion, second only to Los Angeles. Thanks Sheba for sending this in!
- Slate has a great article on L.A.’s transit revolution, calling it America’s next great mass transit city
- Over in New York the MTA proposes four ways to increase fares next March, for its scheduled fare increase.
- From the National Post: “Talking about Toronto transit funding is a step forward, even if these ideas aren’t any good.” (Their words, not mine!)
- Here’s a discussion in the Ottawa media about just how expensive it is to run transit in Ontario (as it is everywhere!)
- From Taras Grescoe: “If elected next year, Montreal’s Richard Bergeron pledges to build 38-km tramway network, first trains rolling in 5 yrs.”
On the TomTom data: it thinks of congestion as a measure of peak compared to off-peak. So a city where off peak times are 10min and peak times are 20min, gets 100% congestion, while a city where off peak times are 20min and peak times are 30min gets only 50% congestion. In large part, this favours big, sprawling cities where oversized freeway networks are underused for most of the day, relative to cities like Vancouver with road networks that are busier throughout the day.
For a more articulate statement of this, see: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/10/17/the-problems-with-measuring-traffic-congestion/
When I saw the video of the all those dots scattering Vancouver, “I was like that’s really TransLink buses?” I was totally amazed! Looks cool. :)
The video is incredible! It’s also pretty cool seeing the “pulse” timing of the night buses leaving downtown at the end.
About the “Tom-tom” study- I also read we have a road system much more resilient than highway dependent ones where one blockage means the a quarter of the population is stuck. For us, we just take parallel roads. Of course we also have reasonably reliable rapid transit for a few corridors- which makes road congestion irrelevant to total travel times for the 400,000 ish daily trips that happen on them.
What an amazing video. One of the things I like the most about it is watching Phibbs Exchange. All the buses converge there at around the same time, the disperse like a bomb. Looks very neat.
Well done to the creator of the video. I wonder what LA’s would look like, or another high-population city.
Very cool stuff.
User.
Just noticed, that after you watch the video more like this will pop up in the recommended. For those that are interested, there are ones for LA, Chicago, Toronto and other cities.
User.
I saw a couple of the videos when they were posted on Twitter and wish we had a system more like Toronto’s… *sigh*
@Sheba,
REALLY? I hated toronto’s system- with their mixed traffic streetcars plagued by unreliable service and even their subway less reliable than ours. Basically none of their suburbs with comparable densities to our city proper have high frequency grids.
So basically my observation is that factoring in density, they have much worse transit than us.
Those videos don’t show what type of transit it is, and the Toronto one has a nicely space grid. While that is true of Vancouver, as you move out from the city that becomes really rare. Places like Surrey are a car city because of the lack of transit.
I was going to say that we could learn a thing or two from LA, but it seems Burnaby already has, with new condos going up by Brentwood and Metrotown Skytrain stations. The first one at Metrotown (5 towers scheduled for Station Square) sold out on presale and they won’t even be ready for move-in for years.
[…] Tired of the way transit looks on your daily commute? This video will definitely give you a different perspective: it traces one day of transit service in the Lower Mainland, using info from our public data feeds! Jhen talked to the video’s creator, Andrew Walker – read about it here. […]