Public Transit and Urban Planning

The Power Broker by Robert Caro

I've been making my way through The Power Broker for just about a year now, and I'm a little over 700 pages in (out of about 1200 total). It's obviously long, and pretty dense, but it's just really fascinating. I can completely see why it won a Pulitzer Prize. The amount of time it must have taken just to do the research behind this book, let alone actually structure it in an engaging way and write it well, scares me to think about. If you enjoy nonfiction or are interested in writing your own, I feel like this should be required reading. It doesn't hurt that Moses' rise to power is just a ridiculous series of events, and the scope of his control never stops shocking me no matter how far into the book I get. Hopefully I finish it soon!

High and Mighty by Keith Bradsher

I used to not like non-fiction very much, but I randomly stumbled on this book in a thrift store in Monterey a few years ago and it really pulled me in. It's kind of ridiculous just how much worse things have gotten since it was written, too. Once you read it, you won't be able to look at any car the same again. It's a shame that Bradsher went down a weird anti-China rabbit hole, because I'd be interested to see a follow-up or sequel to this taking the past twenty years into account.

Metro Maps I Designed

In my free time I sometimes do some graphic design work, so I figured it would be a fun challenge to design some transit maps. Most are based off of a real transit system but sometimes I also make maps for the transit networks in my Cities Skylines cities.

VTA Globe Map

This is the first map I made, which lays San Jose's VTA network out in a circular pattern, with the connections to Caltrain and BART also included. Getting everything to line up took a really long time, as did getting the stop markers to look right, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. If I were making this now, I'd probably change the colors - I tried to match the desaturated VTA line colors but I think it would look better if I came up with a new color paletter. I would also include Amtrak and ACE, which are pretty obvious exclusions.

SF MUNI Globe Map

I learned a lot from making the VTA map, so I was able to put this together much more quickly - even though I completely changed how I was mapping the contours of the city partway through. I'm also much happier with the color palette on this - it uses the MUNI line colors but they are very readable against the lighter background, and the black emphasis on larger stations makes them stand out better. I've never actually ridden MUNI, though, so I can't say how accurate or usable this map would actually be. Looking back on this, I don't remember if those tickmarks on the lines are stops, or just decorative, so that's definitely a problem with the design. Overall, though, I'm pretty happy with it.

LA Metro Globe Map

This one is a very different approach. It's obviously much simpler, both in the graphics and the actual information: it just shows the basic layout of the system, without any stops marked. It also became outdated pretty much as soon as I finished it - the line colors are different now (was the E line ever actually blue??) and tons of construction has been finished recently so the lines are different - the E Line extends all the way to East LA and the K line should be opening soon! I do think the circular layout fits the LA metro system really well, though. Even just sticking to 45 degree angles for all the diagonals, This matches the actual layout of the system pretty well, maybe with the exception of the 90 degree turns in the E and L lines. I'd love to redesign this at some point and update it with the new line setup.

Bay Area Transit Map

This is another very zoomed out, broad view of a transit network. I started with the intial goal of including every transit agency, but there are a ridiculous amount so I mostly just stuck to the ones that I think are interesting. This is a tough scale to work at, and you can see that the straight lines and consistent turns on the east side of the bay sort of fall apart as soon as I started to include MUNI. The line weighting is also really strange, I'm not sure why I did it like this. Overall I'm not that happy with this one, and I think there is a lot of potential for a map that actually shows the scale of the transit system around the bay.

Cities Skylines Transit Map

This is a map of the transit network in one of my more successful Cities: Skylines cities. It actually took a ton of time to lay out even the basic sketch of this one, because it's a pretty dense network. It works really well in-game, but from a map perspective like this I don't think it really resembles a believable transit network. There are a lot of neighborhood loops, so actually traveling across the city would involve a bunch of transfers. The cims don't seem to mind, though - this city has the least traffic of any I've ever built in the game. They love taking this transit network!

Amtrak

Coast Starlight

This is probably my favorite transit service in the US. I've taken it quite a few times, and have so much to say about it that I made a whole page for it!

Pacific Surfliner

I don't feel like I can fully comment on the quality of the Surfliner, because I've only taken it one time, when I was transferred onto it after the Coast Starlight train I was riding hit someone on the tracks. That was obviously not a neutral viewpoint to try and judge the Surfliner from - but, based on that very limited experience, I'd say I prefer the Coast Starlight. Not only are the amenities better (the Observation and Cafe Car alone make it my preferred way to get around CA), but it's generally cleaner and more comfortable than the Surfliner. The Surfliner bathrooms were pretty nasty, the fluorescent lights were a little overbearing, and it was a lot more cramped than the Coast Starlight. But I suppose it is more of a regional line than a long-distance line, so that's to be expected. I'm planning on taking the Surfliner to San Diego sometime soon, so I'll update this section with my thoughts then.

LA Metro

The LA Metro gets treated as a joke, but I genuinely think people need to give it a second chance. When your destination is near a station, which is a big caveat, it's genuinely a really useful way to get around. I take the E Line very often to get right into the heart of downtown, and that's almost always a comfortable and safe ride. I think a lot of people's dislike for the system comes from a visceral dislike of being around unhoused people, which in my opinion is a very cruel outlook on the world. They need a place to live and a way to get around, and you just existing around them for a ten-minute ride does not make your life anywhere near as hard as what they experience every day.

With that said, LA Metro does have its problems. I think the headways are one of the biggest - it just takes such a long time to wait for the trains. Once you get on, they're usually pretty fast (with the exception of some of the grade crossings, which are really egregious on the E line and almost always cause delays). If headways were in the five-to-ten-minute range, including delays, I would be a lot more willing to ride Metro regularly. But with the long waits on either end of a ride, it's usually faster just to take the bus.

Metro is getting better. The progress on the K line has been really exciting to watch, and I can't wait to have a faster way to get from Expo Park to LAX and the South Bay. Plus, Metro is continually adding more trains to try and cut down on headways, and more employees to the stations to make people feel safer. I think there's a reason that LA Metro now has the second most riders of any transit agency in the country!

LA DASH

I live closer to a couple DASH bus stops than I do to a metro station, so if I don't feel like walking all the way to the metro or the timing for the next train won't work out, I usually just take the bus instead. And honestly, it tends to be more comfortable and just as fast (if not faster) as the metro. It also doesn't hurt that it's free!

I will say that I've only had the opportunity to ride one line: the F line, which basically just runs parallel to the Metro E Line between Expo Park and downtown. So it's possible that service on the other lines is not quite as good. But, at least for the F line, it's generally pretty good!

... with some caveats. Going north, towards downtown, I never have any problems on the Dash bus. But for some reason I can just never find it when I need to go south. I know where the stops are, I can see the signs that say Dash Bus F line at the stops, but I'll wait and wait and the busses never show up. Even though Google Maps says when the next one is arriving, including delays, very accurately going the other direction, when I need to go south it says that they've come and gone without any bus ever showing up.

Caltrain

I feel like I am not familiar enough with Caltrain to comment on its quality, nor am I really the target audience. The only time I've ridden it was a special service train from San Jose to San Fransisco for Pride, so I'm not sure how representative that is of the usual commuter service. I will say that, while I love Diridon station, the signposting on the Caltrain platform was extremely unclear, and the "NOW ARRIVING" / "DEPARTING" signs were not functioning properly, so I nearly missed my train heading into SF. And, on the way back, there was a huge line to buy tickets, stretching all the way around the station building, so I very nearly missed the train back, too, and would have had to wait an HOUR for the next one. Now, this was obviously not a typical day of commuting, but considering the heavy push that Caltrain is making towards special event ridership, with the stop at Levi's Stadium and the special event stop at Stanford, I just wasn't impressed with their organization and communication. I can't imagine trying to make that same trip at night, drunk after a football game, without any prior familiarity with Diridon Station or public transit in general (which is, sadly, probably the case for a lot of people in the Bay).