Buffalo Rising Online

Oct 4th, 12:11am By Sbrof

As a user of the NFTA system as one of my main methods of transportation for more than a decade now, there are many things that I have thought about to improve the system and make it user friendly. Some of which would come at little to no cost to the NFTA. I will not go into all of them at once, but will instead discuss one small but crucial part of the system here, the maps.

The maps that the NFTA employs to display their route and give spatial locations to their schedule are woefully out of date. Not only do they appear like the nineteen seventies but their method of representation is confusing. Often the maps get in the way as much as help portray of the information to the user. Simple things like scale and distance are awkwardly stretched and skewed to fit each route on a printed page and results in a misrepresentation of the distances that people will encounter between streets or destinations.

There is also the problem with how destinations are shown or left off. If the NFTA feels it is a big enough draw or important enough, they locate it on the map, examples being ECC, Dunn Tire Park, Univera Healthcare etc. Why these specific choices and not others, is unclear, and over the whole system fails to show the true potential that the system has. There is also little information about how to get to these destinations from the route. Is that dot 1 block away or 1 mile away? Based on the rest of the map no one knows.

There are two directions that the NFTA could go to make it easier for everyone and perhaps a combination of both formats is the real answer. Either full abstraction, like what is seen in other major cities and transit systems, or reality with context.

Full abstraction has the benefits of being crisp, clear and to the point. Lines, dots and names, it would leave more room on the map to locate more stops from the schedule. The clarity of these schedules would make them portable in print form. There is now a need to inspect the map and try to locate the name of the stop you are at. This is not always that easy, the point is to relate location to the schedule, so one can determine the time which the bus is supposed to arrive. Sometimes this is easy as in finding Kenmore & Colvin. Sometimes it is not. Take the Route 34 - Niagara Falls Boulevard route for example, where is the Creekside & Preview stop on the map? It’s on the schedule but I cannot locate it and I have been using the system for many years. How is someone new to this system, or Buffalo, supposed to make heads or tails of some of these stops?

This leads me to question the logic behind many of the stops or destinations the NFTA chooses to locate on the schedule and which ones they do not. I do not want to go off on a tangent for too long here but this needs a little attention. Take the 23 Hertel-Fillmore Route for instance. The destination going west is called Vista. Does anyone know what that means, where is that? Well, it is in reference to the Marine Vista Apt on the Niagara River in Riverside. Not very many people outside of Riverside or the city proper know that. It adds confusion, just like the Delaware bus heading towards Orchard. It is a useless description.

Also, the only stop they locate, therefore give you a time, on the entire length of Hertel is at Parkside Ave. This is problematic because it leaves off Elmwood, Delaware, Colvin, Main among others, which are important transfer points. How come the NFTA chooses an obscure, systemically irrelevant place like Parkside, and leaves it up to personal knowledge about when the Bus might reach Elmwood or Main from there… Trying to plan for transfers in this way can be maddening. The NFTA drives these routes everyday all day. They know how long it takes to get from A to B to C… label them, so people know how long or short a wait might be. That way people can schedule what works best for them.

Ok, back to the maps, the other form of representation possible here is tracing the routes and stops in the real world. Doing this is much easier than ever before. The NFTA already uses a GIS system to plot and maintain these routes. It is time for this level of detail to be opened up to everyone. I have personally converted a couple of NFTA’s routes, with a little help from Google, to create a map that literally provides a world of contextual information to their system.

A couple easy clicks of the mouse and now users have access to the exact route that the buses travel. See routes 30 Kenmore, 25 Delaware & 23 Hertel-Fillmore. They can add information themselves, measure distances to their house, their favorite restaurant or just about anything else. No filtering, full context. This gives people a much better understanding of what the route is and more importantly, what they could access from it.

The true beauty of using a system like Google for this kind of mapping is that there are already other transit systems that have built their transit systems around it, Boston, NYC, Atlanta just to name a few on the list. See Google Transit’s website for a full list and description of their project. They have created interactive maps with schedules so that users can, with confidence and personalization, search for routes and times. The potential here is huge.

Any of these steps could take away much of the learning curve associated with using the NFTA’s system. Our system, even with its flaws, is a real asset to the community. It has become the haven for people looking to save money from gas. Ridership is up across the board approximately 12 percent or 2,270,000 million additional boardings on the bus and 717,000 additional boardings on rail compared to last year. (Sept06-Aug07 to Sept07-Aug08). That is approximately 73k trips per day on the Bus and Rail system in WNY. It also provides a vital service for many needy residents by giving them the freedom and ability to reach far off jobs and resources. I feel it is time that it starts to not just be an ok system but really live up to its potential as a service for everyone.