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How Chicagoans commute map: An interview with the cartographer

January 24, 2014 / / 0 Comments
Chicago Commute Map by Transitized

A screenshot of the map showing Lakeview and the Brown, Red, Purple and Purple Line Express stations.

Shaun Jacobsen blogs at Transitized.com and yesterday published the How Chicagoans Commute map. I emailed him to get some more insight on why he made it, how, and what insights it tells about Chicago and transit. The map color-symbolizes census tracts based on the simple majority commuting transportation mode.

What got you started on it?

It was your post about the Census data and breaking it down by ZIP code to show people how many homes have cars. I’ve used that method a few times. The method of looking up each case each time it came up took too long, so this kind of puts it in one place.

What story did you want to tell?

I wanted to demonstrate that many households in the city don’t have any cars at all, and these residents need to be planned for as well. What I really liked was how the north side transit lines stuck out. Those clearly have an impact on how people commute, but I wonder what the cause is. Are the Red and Brown Lines really good lines (in people’s opinions) so they take them, or are people deciding to live closer to the lines because they want to use it (because they work downtown, for example)?

The reason I decided to post the map on Thursday was because while I was writing the story about a proposed development in Uptown and I wanted  information on how many people had cars around that development. As the map shows, almost all of Uptown is transit-commuting, and a lot of us don’t even own any cars.

What data and tools did you use?

I first used the Chicago Data Portal to grab the census tract boundaries. Then I grabbed all of the census data for B08141 (“means of transportation to work by number of vehicles available”) and DP04 (“selected housing characteristics”) for each tract and combined it using the tract ID and Excel’s VLOOKUP formula.

Read the rest of this interview on Web Map Academy.

Wayfinding signs at Van Buren Street Metra station are incomplete

January 13, 2014 /
New RTA interagency transfer signage near Van Buren Street Metra Electric station

“B” marks a new bus boarding area near the Van Buren Street Metra Electric station.

The Regional Transportation Authority has spent $2 million to improve wayfinding between CTA, Metra, and Pace train stations and bus stops in a needed effort to connect newbies and long-time residents to their next transfer.

Some of the signs need to show better information, though. The RTA installed signs at the Van Buren Street Metra Electric station at Michigan Avenue that create “bus loading groups,” similar to bus bays at suburban park & rides.

It works like this: you come across the nearest bus stop – I happened upon boarding area B – hoping to find the route you need. Instead, though, that route stops at boarding area A. The sign at boarding area B points you in the direction of A and from where you stand you can see a sign that identifies A.

RTA’s signs have two issues. First, they don’t tell you that boarding area C is across the street – unless you inspect the small map – and instead point you in the direction of A (from B). If you walk in the direction of the arrow from boarding area B you will not run into boarding area C or a sign that tells you where to cross the street in order to access C.

The first issue creates the second problem: by reading and relying upon the sign’s text you can’t know at which boarding area, A or C, you should board a bus route that stops at both boarding areas. (Those who also study the maps on another side of the sign will have better luck.) That’s because the same route operates in both directions and if you’re not familiar with the route, you won’t know which direction takes you towards your destination.

New RTA interagency transfer signage near Van Buren Street Metra Electric station

Both boarding areas A and C will get you on the 3, 4, J14, and 26, but only the map on the other side tells you which direction they go. Also, while the arrow points in the direction of boarding areas A and C, only the map tells you that A is across the street.

The fix seems an easy one. First, point the arrows on A and B across the street instead of north or south towards B or A, and add an intermediary sign along the walking path that communicates that “boarding area C is across the street.” Then, update the signs to indicate which direction the bus routes are going so that travelers are assured they need to visit C across the street for King Drive buses going towards Bronzeville or A for King Drive buses going toward Streeterville.

The RTA has installed other signage in this program at 95th and Western (CTA & Pace), Joliet Union Station (Metra & Pace), and Davis Station in Evanston (CTA, Metra, & Pace).

Why are children getting hurt in the street because of “looming”?

January 10, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Adults are better than children at detecting the speed of a car that’s traveling faster than 20 miles per hour and are more likely to avoid crossing, thus not getting hit. 

Director of New York City-based Transportation Alternatives Paul Steely-White asked on Twitter for a plain English translation of this three-year old journal article about vehicle speeds and something called “looming”.

The article is called “Reduced Sensitivity to Visual Looming Inflates the Risk Posed by Speeding Vehicles When Children Try to Cross the Road”.

Skip to the end if you want the plain English translation, but I’ve posted the abstract below followed by excerpts from Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic.

ABSTRACT: Almost all locomotor animals respond to visual looming or to discrete changes in optical size. The need to detect and process looming remains critically important for humans in everyday life. Road traffic statistics confirm that children up to 15 years old are overrepresented in pedestrian casualties. We demonstrate that, for a given pedestrian crossing time, vehicles traveling faster loom less than slower vehicles, which creates a dangerous illusion in which faster vehicles may be perceived as not approaching. Our results from perceptual tests of looming thresholds show strong developmental trends in sensitivity, such that children may not be able to detect vehicles approaching at speeds in excess of 20 mph. This creates a risk of injudicious road crossing in urban settings when traffic speeds are higher than 20 mph. The risk is exacerbated because vehicles moving faster than this speed are more likely to result in pedestrian fatalities.

The full text is free to download, but I think Steely-White needs to learn more now, so I pulled out my favorite book about driving, Tom Vanderbilt’s “Traffic”.

Page 95-97:

For humans, however, distance, like speed, is something we often judge rather imperfectly. Unfortunately for us, driving is really all about distance and speed. Consider a common and hazards maneuver in driving: overtaking a car on a two-lane road another approaches in the oncoming lane. When objects like cars are within twenty or thirty feet, we’re good at estimating how far away they are, thanks to our binocular vision (and the brain’s ability to construct a single 3D image from the differing 2D views each eye provides). Beyond that distance, both eyes are seeing the same view in parallel, and so things get a bit hazy. The farther out we go, the worse it gets: For a car that is twenty feet away, we might be accurate to within a few feet, but when it is three hundred yards away [900 feet], we might be off by a hundred yards [300 feet]. Considering that it takes about 279 feet for a car traveling at 55 miles per hour to stop (assuming an ideal average reaction time of 1.5 seconds), you can appreciate the problem of overestimating how far away an approaching car is – especially when they’re approaching you at 55 miles per hour.

[Here comes the keyword used in the journal article, “looming”]

Since we cannot tell exactly how far away the approaching car might be we guess using spatial cues, like its position relative to a roadside building or the car in front of us. We can also use the size of the oncoming car itself as a guide. We know it is approaching because its size is expanding or looming on our retina.

But there are problems with this. The first is that viewing objects straight on, as with the approaching car, does not provide us with a lot of information.

[…]

If all this is not enough to worry about there’s also the problem of the oncoming cars speed. A car in the distance approaching 20 miles per hour makes passing easy, but what if it is doing 80 miles per hour? The problem is this: We cannot really tell the difference. Until, that is, the car gets much closer — by which time it might be too late to act on the information.

[the topic continues]

Plain English translation

However, nothing I found in Traffic relates children and “looming”. The bottom line is that children are worse than adults at detecting the speed of a car coming in the cross direction and thus decide wrongly on when to cross the street.

Update: Based on Vanderbilt’s writing, it seems that humans cannot really be taught how to compensate for looming, to build a better perceptual model in the brain to detect the difference between cars traveling 20 and 80 MPH. If this is true, and I’d like to see research of pedestrian marketing and education programs designed for children, it may be that we should stop trying this approach.

Smartphones replace cars. Cars become smartphones.

January 6, 2014 / / 10 Comments

Teens’ smartphone use means they don’t want to drive. Car makers’ solution? Turn cars into smartphones.

The Los Angeles Times reported in March 2013, along with many other outlets, that “fewer 16-year-olds are rushing to get their driver’s licenses today than 30 years ago as smartphones and computers keep adolescents connected to one another.”

Smartphones maintain friendships more than any car can. According to Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd, who’s been interviewing hundreds of teenagers, “Teens aren’t addicted to social media. They’re addicted to each other.” (Plus not every teen needs a car if their friends have one. Where’s Uber for friends? That, or transit or safe cycle infrastructure, would help solve the “I need a ride to work at the mall” issue.)

Driving is on the decline as more people choose to take transit, bike, walk, or work from home (and not unemployment).

intel cars with bicycle parts

Marketing images from Intel’s blog post about cars becoming smartphones.

What’s a car maker to do?

The first thing a car maker does to fight this (losing) battle is to turn the car into a smartphone. It’s definitely in Intel’s interest, and that’s why they’re promoting the story, but Chevrolet will soon be integrating National Public Radio – better known as NPR – as an in-dash app. It will use the car’s location to find the nearest NPR affiliate. Yeah, my smartphone already does that.

The second thing they do is to market the product differently. Cars? They’re not stuck in traffic*, they’re an accessory to your bicycle. Two of the images used in Intel’s blog post feature bicycles in some way. The first shows a bicycle helmet sitting on a car dashboard. The second shows how everyone who works at a proposed Land Rover dealership is apparently going to bike there, given all the bikes parked at an adjacent shelter.

The new place to put your smartphone when you take the train.

* I’m looking at you, Nissan marketing staff. Your commercial for the Rogue that shows the mini SUV driving atop a train full of commuters in order to bypass road congestion (and got a lot of flack) is more ridiculous than Cadillac’s commercial showing a car blowing the doors of other cars, while their drivers look on in disbelief, in order to advertise the 400+ horsepower it has (completely impractical for driving in the urban area the commercial showcases).

Chicago Crash Browser, miraculously, has 2012 bicycle and pedestrian crash data

January 4, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Screenshot shows that you can choose your own search radius. When researching, be sure to copy the permalink so you can revisit your results. 

I’ve upgraded the Chicago Crash Browser, my web application that gives you some basic crash and injury statitics for bicyclist and pedestrian crashes anywhere in Chicago, to include 2012 data. It took the Illinois Department of Transportation eight months to compile the data and it took me four months to finally get around to uploading it into my database. While I spent that time, I made some improvements to the usability of the app and output more information. Since the last major changes I made (back in February 2013) I’ve gained two code contributors (Richard and Robert) making this my first communal project on GitHub.

I know that it’s been used as part of research in the 46th Ward participatory budgeting process for 2013, and by residents in the 26th Ward to show Alderman Maldonado the problem intersections in the Humboldt Park area. Transitized recently included pedestrian crash stats obtained from the Crash Browser in a blog post about pedestrianizing Michigan Avenue in Streeterville.

The first change I made was adding another zoom level, number 19, so you can get closer to the data. I made some changes to count how many people were injured and total them. You can now choose your search distance in multiples of 50 feet between 50 and 200, inclusive. As is typical, I get sidetracked when I notice errors on the map. Thankfully I just fire up JOSM and correct them so the next person that looks at the map sees the correction. Future changes I want to make include upgrading to the latest jQuery, LeafletJS, and Leaflet plugins. I’d also like to migrate to Bootstrap to improve styling and add responsive design so it works better on small screens.

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