Mental Effort

For this Christmas Eve, I'm thinking about how travel takes effort. Not just physical effort, but mental: you gotta figure out how to go places, what the best places to go are, how to get there from here, all that jazz.

And superficially the car looks like an ideal tool for that: it will take me where I want to go when I want to go along signposted roads or with a GPS calling out every turn. 

Conversely, public transit puts me on someone else's schedule, with someone else's stops.

So how do we make the mental effort of taking transit go down?

1. Signposting 

Clear, good wayfinding and labeling both within transit spaces and about the relation of that transit to the larger area it serves is key.

The announcement on this bus for the stop is good, and probably helps clarify where you are to people familiar with the route. Better yet are announcements that always give both streets (this is a rare thing the Davenport CitiBus does well, though it doesn't announce all the stops because literally every intersection is a potential stop). This is because it makes it a) harder to miss your stop or misunderstand where you are and b) clearer if a bus zigzags exactly where it is intersecting a particular road.

Signposting isn't just important when you get on the transit, though. It's even more so when you're in a station, or approaching one. Where do I get that train? What routes actually depart from here? How do I even enter the station?

Make these as clear as possible or people won't (and can't!) use transit.

2. Consistency 

Run the buses every day. Run them often. Don't stop running them unless there's a clearly communicated good reason.

Same for trains, trams, ferries, gondolas, whatever you're running. 

Ideally run them on a predictable schedule too: clockface time, or so frequent that it doesn't matter.

To reduce the mental effort of taking transit, make it turn up and go.

3. Flexible Routings

The more interconnected and flexible your system--the more robust--the better. If taking one train wrong or missing one bus means I lose hours or cannot complete a trip, I will end up not taking transit for that trip sometimes, and worrying about it other times. If the train or bus doesn't even go where I want, then I'll ignore it entirely.

Make it so that if I took the "wrong" route there is some kind of alternative--even if it's "get off, turn around, the next train is in 2 minutes anyway."

If you don't, people start having to plan everything out perfectly, and that's a taxing mental load they just won't do.

Make transit easy, and people will realize it costs a lot less than a car.

Make it hard, and they won't care.

Speaking of mental effort, I'll be taking a vacation from this as well as everything else over the new year, so until then, stay safe and take whatever transit mode fits your needs and your own mental capacity at the moment.