What Makes a Route “Good?”
Simple routes that fit our everyday needs, endear themselves, and make themselves easy to understand are the ones we love.
A local bus runs between my grandparent’s home and a train station in Chicago. It’s one of my favorite bus routes and I ride it almost every time I visit my family back home. It’s easy to get to, takes me where I need to go, and makes my commute to downtown quicker. But there’s a question of why I “like” this route – it’s just a bus route, one of hundreds in Chicago.
There are a lot of technical reasons a transit route would be considered “good.” The frequency of the route, its proximity to points of interest, and the density of the corridor it runs on. However, I don’t want to focus on that. Instead, I want to look at more tangible reasons why a transit route would be good or bad.
The Speed and Timing
While this one sounds a lot like “frequency,” there’s more to a route than just the time in between the arrivals of the bus or train. You want a route to come very often – it’s not fun to wait a long time out in the cold or heat. But you also want a route to be tailored time-wise to when you need to get where you need to go. For example, a bus route I ride at college goes from downtown to the airport and to job sites. But the bus only comes every 45 minutes. Not very ideal, right? You’d be surprised.
Because it’s timed to accommodate work and flight start times, the bus has early morning and late night departures, along with more frequent departures by overlapping with another bus that connects to other worksites people go to en mass, like factories and shipping facilities.
Because of this, it’s easy to use this bus to get to work on time or catch a flight while still having time to get through security. Would it be better if the time in between each bus was faster? Yes, but with timing planned to accommodate how people are using it, more people can make use of the bus.
It Fits In
Every community is different, and as a result, everyone’s transportation needs will be different. If your transit routes don’t match what makes sense for the community, then it’s unlikely that people will want to use them.
So transit needs to “feel” right to people – it has to be named right, be tailored to the interests and hobbies of people, and be a seamless fit. For example, let’s look at the Pace PULSE bus in suburban Illinois.
This is a frequent service bus using elements of Bus Rapid Transit, or BRT. The bus is specially branded to a purple color with elements of motion or speed like arrows and lines denoting where the two PULSE lines go. This bus is a frequent go-to for suburban commuters who need to get to larger communities in Northern Illinois, like Evanston and Niles.
Obviously, a frequent bus bringing people to places they need to go is a good thing, and people would ride it regardless of fit. But Pace didn’t just slap a name on an old bus and run with it. Instead, they used eco-friendly new buses with branding and naming conventions that communicated that it’s a fast, frequent bus bringing people to places they need to go for work and shopping. It fits in with the community demographics the PULSE routes serve – middle to upper-class families and individual workers who value things like speed, reliability, and environmental impact.
When agencies fit routes to the needs of the community and communicate how it meet those needs – you endear the work that route does to the community.
It’s Simple
A good route is simple – it goes on a main road, circulates people around an area, or helps you connect to other transportation easily.
When routes get confusing – with weird new lexicons, more detours and changes, or naming conventions switching – you lose people and the plot. No one wants to play a guessing game to get around, it’s about going from A to B simply.
When routes have easy-to-recognize names, a straightforward plan for the route, and a simple way to transfer, they do better.
There are technical ways to describe all of these, but I like to believe that by making it feel simple, we make improving the things we care about simple. If you have terms, theories, or systems in urban planning, transit, or sustainability that you think should be broken down more easily, let me know.