Quick — when is the next bus scheduled to arrive?
Recently, I visited the San Francisco Bay Area. My friend Andrea, who lives in Berkeley, pointed out the inconvenience of transit timetables that separate all the scheduled departures by line. If there are multiple lines that travel to some of the same locations, the passenger just wants to look up ALL of the next opportunities to catch a bus, not just those for one particular line (to see an example of why you’d want to look up information this way, look at Lines 52L and 51 around the Downtown Berkeley BART in the AC Transit system map). Andrea says that in Germany, information posted at a stop lists all arrival/departure times in order, with the line shown in the next column.
Here's how AC Transit shows arrivals and departures on a stop pole.
I believe this is a Indian timetable that gives a bit of a taste. The colors indicate day of service here, but they could also indicate line.
Trillium experimented with a similar approach for Redwood Transit System online. However, RTS is not really a multi-line system.
Can anyone help me find examples of German timetables?
More details on the timetable in India here. See more on how Trillium implemented this format for timetable information for Redwood Transit System in the blog post “Avoid information overload with schedules for riders’ favorite stops”.
Customer information: not a side dish but part of the main course
Since the fundamental purpose of a transit agency seems to be putting transit vehicles on the street, it’s easy to assume that basic service provision is a much more important than providing information about that service.
Inspired by More Riders, I would argue that service provision and providing customer information are equally fundamental to serving a community and providing mobility options. “Customer information” is the term transit agencies use for their public-facing information — route & system maps, timetables, etc.
Even if an agency offers a great system from a planning and operations perspective — frequent, on-time service on a dense network of well-connected routes — if their customer information doesn’t do the job of helping people use and benefit from this system easily, then the system is under performing its potential in crucial ways — in rider satisfaction and the number of passengers transported to jobs and services, for example.
Consider software as an analogy. Even if you offer powerful, feature-rich software, if it’s difficult to use most people won’t benefit much from it. With software and with transit, ease-of-use is crucial to overall usefulness.
SF Bay Area Ferry routes, schedules and walkshed map
This week, an interactive map of San Francisco bay ferry routes and schedules became available on the baycrossings.com homepage. The map shows schedules for all services departing or arriving at a particular ferry terminal if a user clicks it. In addition, the interactive map has three other map views to help travelers plan their trips. These show connecting transit services (BART and SF Muni) at the San Francisco Ferry Building, ferry gates (so you know where to catch your ferry), and a map that shows a few of the amenities in the ferry building.
Here’s what the map looks like before any buttons have been clicked:
And, after a route is selected, here’s a schedule:
The schedule data in this map comes out of information managed with Trillium’s WebSchedule application. One change in WebSchedule changes the schedule information shown in this map view, and in expored Google Transit Feed Specification information for Google Transit.
Trillium worked as a team with Viewpoint Geography to deliver this map for Bay Crossings using the flash Google Maps API. Bay Crossings maintains a shop that sells transit and ferry passes at the San Francisco ferry building, and publishes a monthly publication that features articles of interest on San Francisco Bay cultural, environmental and maritime issues. Bay Crossings, and this project in particular, are great examples of efforts to make transit information easier to use, reach new customers, and build and publicize a lifestyle brand around transit.
So, check out the map on the Bay Crossings website, and tell me what you think!
Conventional schedules and maps harder to use than you think
Rising gas prices are sending people who formerly drove to seek out other options. On Saturday, the New York Times reported that some public transit systems are seeing ridership increases of up to 10 and 15 percent or more over last year in Gas Prices Send Surge of Riders to Mass Transit.
While ridership is up, I hypothesize that even more people are interested in riding public transportation but that not all of them make it onboard the bus or train. Why? Hard-to-use schedules.
Imagine the experience of someone who has never rode their local bus or train but decides to give it a try. The third most common internet activity for Americans, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, is to “search for a map or driving directions,” (87%) behind only email and using search engines, so it’s natural to look online for public transportation information. If a transit provider’s website doesn’t offer a trip planner, the prospective rider will need to find the nearest stop to their home on a map, find scheduled service times for the stop, and, most likely, figure out where and how to transfer, by consulting maps and schedules for their destination and transfer point. The information-finding task is more complicated if it involves multiple agencies.
To someone who is unfamiliar with public transportation, this entire process may be sufficiently daunting to keep them driving. Consider a study conducted by the National Center for Transit Reseach at the University of South Florida, Design Elements of Effective Transit Information Materials (109 page PDF).
The study investigates how the general public (not necessarily existing transit riders) perform at planning a transit trip using conventional printed materials. For the purposes of the study, the trip planning process was considered as five stages. Most study participants were successful at identifying origin and destination points on a map, and at identifying nearby bus stops, but almost half of participants were unable to correctly identify bus times using the tabular schedules.
Good online information and Google Transit, a transit trip itinerary planner, can make a frustrating 5-step process that many new riders fail at (get one of the steps wrong, and the whole trip planning process is derailed) into a convenient 15-second experience. New bus riders have even told me that they spend a lot more time entering queries for trips to various destinations, not just their commute to work. Since it’s so fast, easy, and fun, they take the opportunity to explore and get to know the public transportation system, which means they will be much more inclined to get on the bus or train.
Every time someone goes to look for transit information looking for relief from high gas prices, but is frustrated by hard-to-use transit maps and schedules, public transportation misses a great opportunity. Partner with Trillium to reach the surge of people shifting from driving to public transit.
Read more
PDF schedules make unhappy riders & web-surfers
MetroRiderLA has a post on the PDF schedules on Metro’s website. The blogger, Fred Camino, expresses his frustration with the PDF format when used as the exclusive means to present transit schedule data. He calls PDF schedules “obtrusive, annoying, and unwieldy.”
An expert on web usability also cautions against misuse of PDFs online. PDF schedules are frequently difficult or impossible to use for sight-impaired user.
Trillium can help offer schedules in formats that make riders happy, like these user-customizable timetables in a stem-and-leaf format, or just a simple and usable grid. Read more
Avoid information overload with schedules for riders’ favorite stops
Many bus riders have a routine that only involves a few stops — one near their home, and another near work, for example. Looking at a complicated schedule grid that shows stop times for every other stop on the route or in the system, then, is an experience of information overload, making riding the bus more complicated than it has to be.
Recently, Transit Information Solutions worked with Redwood Transit System to build a new feature that that generates custom at-a-glance transit schedules for stops. The timetables list all the hours in the day, with the scheduled service for each hour in a stem-and-leaf table design (see left).
This approach has the advantage of helping riders immediately identify hours with the greatest service opportunities as well as service gaps. All of the stop times function as links to a complete schedule for the trip they are part of, so riders can quickly see when they will arrive.
Since most regular bus commuters predominately use two stops, one near home and another near work, for example, the feature allows two timetables to be displayed alongside each other in a printable view. This makes it possible to produce a personalized transit schedule that can be tacked on a bulletin board or kept handy. Click here to see the feature in action.
One of the great things about the new feature is that it’s built over the same database and information management application that publishes Redwood Transit System’s schedules to Google Transit, and which produces schedule grids and downloadable schedules for iPods, mobile phones, and PDAs on their website, so it was not necessary to enter any new data, and it will be updated automatically with schedule changes.
This new feature was inspired by a blog post on Information Design and Public Transit at the Goodspeed Update, Rob Goodspeed’s website about urbanism and Washington D.C.
Rob Goodspeed wrote a follow-up post noting this feature as implemented on redwoodtransit.org.
