Sidewalk tape and stanchions: Transit planning in real time

A local story in Atlantic Cities:

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TransLink … wanted better control of the queue to avoid safety hazards (with the 99 Broadway B Line) to avoid safety hazards and keep riders from blocking the sidewalk. But past efforts to manage long bus lines had not always turned out well. …

This time the planning firm Nelson\Nygaard took a different approach: they decided to intervene with the 99 Broadway lines in real-time. So they brought a few basic tools to the site — some sidewalk tape, a few stanchions, chalk — and over the course of a few morning rushes tested out which queuing methods got the best rider response. The situation made for a perfect testing ground, because every few minutes brought a new experimental sample of riders. …

Time-lapse videos made from 6 to 9 a.m. during one morning of the project offer a glimpse into the process. The eastbound video shows riders emerge from the train station (behind the camera) and form three bus lines. They do a decent job organizing themselves, but still block the sidewalk until the planners tape down three separate lines. That splits the sidewalk into four even sections, leaving plenty of room for walkers to pass. When the tape gets pulled up, the blocking problem returns (see the 3:50 mark).

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The westbound video, filmed the same morning, shows an attempt to get riders to form switch-backs for the rear door. Switch-backs extend a line by looping it back (think: airport security); in this case they could increase line capacity by about a dozen passengers. Vertical stanchions did the job, especially when aided by arrows on the ground showing the first person where to stand, but riders didn’t abide switch-backs guided by sidewalk tape alone.

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“Sometimes it’s easy for us to be armchair planners and look at maps and data and this other stuff and attack a problem,” says Paul Supawanich, senior associate at Nelson\Nygaard, who worked with colleagues (as well as Liana Evans from TransLink). “But this is one of those cases that just by being there and observing over the course of a couple hours how people react to something, it became clear what was going to work and what wasn’t.”