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Halifax Transit has a new roadmap for success, but figuring out how to get around this city on anything other than a smartphone is still something of a paper chase.
On Tuesday HRM regional council tentatively approved an overhaul of the municipality’s transit network. The Moving Forward Together plan from Halifax Transit will begin dismantling and rebuilding the bus system later this year—barring 23 amendments requiring another staff report.
Five years from now when it’s fully applied, the new plan will modify virtually every aspect of the current transit system. That will include redrawing routes on a transfer-based network, and creating 10 new high-frequency corridor buses. But even with that simplified transfer-based system, Halifax Transit’s printed route map isn’t going to be the easiest way to navigate this city. So says Halifax Transit, anyway.
“Even now, I use Google Transit most often if I want to figure out where I’m going,” says Dave Reage. The acting director of Halifax Transit calls paper maps somewhat of a dinosaur. “The digital tools are far more powerful than a map would ever be.”
The city’s current public transit map, with its rainbow roads and overlapping routes, was designed in 2014 by LucidMap (formerly MapMobility) at a cost of $150,000. An updated map by the Toronto company included in the Moving Forward Together plan cost a far more humble $20,000. Both versions had to contend with neatly visualizing HRM’s sprawling transit network.
“Halifax is a city that is spread out over a vast geographic area,” says Carl Nanders, president at LucidMap. “It has a very small, highly-concentrated downtown and almost every route in the transit system goes downtown. So there’s an incredible concentration of routes moving through a very small number of streets in the city.”
Nanders says that despite all the talk of extinction, paper maps and printed signs are seeing a resurgence in public transit systems across Canada.
“We’re coming out of a decade where, because of the birth of all this technology, there was an idea within transit and within government that actual physical signage, things like maps or signs, were no longer necessary because everything could be done on a Google map or whatever,” he says. “What we’re seeing in our clients…is that there’s a bit of a step back.”
He points to the Toronto 360 strategy as one example of analog over digital. That 2014 initiative installed way-finding monoliths around pedestrian-heavy streets to better orient the public and improve the big smoke’s walkability.
“Again, after a decade of assuming no one would ever need to consult an actual map,” says Nanders.
An illustrative, intuitive map is also useful for the many bus riders who can’t afford a smartphone, or don’t want one—not to mention those who can’t speak English.
Currently Halifax Transit is in the midst of technology upgrades to provide better service for some of those passengers. A new automated stop announcement system, along with a clear naming system for the city’s 2,700 numbered bus stops, should provide easier navigation for the novice bus rider when those improvements come online later this year. That will hopefully help HRM convert some new transit users, instead of just relying on a system best suited for current riders.
“I would wager too, though, that probably most of your regular riders don’t ever use a map because they know where they’re going,” says Reage.
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This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2016.
All I hear is cheep-cheep-cheep and all I see us money being wasted. In the meantime, we pay an enormous amount to travel on buses that compete with the one-person car.
Wake me up when this best-ever plan fails so I can mock that too. 😴😴😴
Dear David Reage: yes, many people have smart phones and frequent users have come to know it well. But you still have a job to do to make it legible. So that someone who decides to try it for the first time will have a positive experience and try it again. So that it’s useful to visitors to the city. So immigrants will feel less overwhelmed when they get here. So that people can plan their whole day at a glance. So that even people who have never used it will intuitively understand the network that is available to them, in case they ever need it.
The lack of commitment Mr. Reage has shown to excellence in this article is deeply concerning.
The fact the new transit map is still mostly illegible speaks to two major problems with how we look at transit:
1) Many think it should take nearly everyone to Downtown Halifax without a transfer.
2) We still haven’t decided which routes are really priorities. Some routes – 1, 10, 7, etc. – should jump out on the map because they offer more service than other routes. Until we sort out our core routes, this will be a problem way beyond the transit map.
The same mediocre effort is shown in many transit decisions, big and small: the new bus stop signs don’t tell you what direction the bus goes in; no schedule information or route maps at 99% of shelters; a lack of shelters and concrete pads; picking a poor location for the Lacewood Terminal; the generally brutal experience of transferring at Mumford (good luck with that signage).
We can’t have a Metro system like a big city, but go to Montreal and see how carefully they use signage, maps and colour in their stations to guide riders to the right trains, especially when transferring. On the trains route maps are everywhere, showing connections to the commuter rail system. In the Metro stations and at bus terminals there are maps everywhere, helping you find your platform and explain where buses go. It is a very large system, but incredibly easy to navigate for the casual rider. We have much to learn from other cities in their approach to branding and wayfinding.