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The Map's The Thing

You're looking at the official map of Seattle's Downtown Ride-Free Area.

mini-seattle_map.gifYou may not know it, but this kind of thing makes Seattlest mad as hell. We have a dysfunctional relationship with Metro where we just suffer silently. Today we're publicly asking who would like to keep their job and earn praise by accomplishing an essential but heretofore-ignored responsibility of Seattle public transit:

Where's a useful freaking map, guys? For god's sake, we just want to know where the buses go! Why is that information confidential?

Let's pretend we're addressing Kevin Desmond, General Manager. Kevin, we assume you're not a crazy person. Are you embarrassed at all that Seattle Bus Monster can provide a map of the transit system with estimated times -- keeping in mind this is one guy who asks for a $1.00 donation to support his work -- while your official site's Trip Planner doesn't? It's true, your site does offer frequently fictional route times and absurdly unreadable route maps.

But when Seattlest is standing at a bus stop, we're always mystified to find that Metro believes we should only see a route map after we've boarded the bus. This particular Seattlest pod has lived in Seattle for fifteen years and we are regularly unable to discern where a bus goes from outside. It could say Grover's Corners in the window, we wouldn't know. We need a map. A readable map. Observe that this sort of thing exists elsewhere.

It's intriguing to us that your Metro-At-A-Glance page doesn't reveal such mundane figures as percent of population served, or percent of riding capacity, both of which seem like good indicators of how well you're doing. It's fascinating that you're so concerned with informing us about the hybrid buses. What wealth of detail!

Could you just address the map thing first? We know you think there is some valid reason you can't. We just want to point out that you're wrong. So do a much better job and put it up just about everywhere. Think of how exciting it would be to use a solar-powered bus shelter's light to study a really helpful map!

We don't want to overwhelm you, so we'll just wait for you to get back to us on this map thing. Later we can talk about whether it's easier to dig into your pocket and come up with a dollar bill or a dollar bill and a quarter. We'll talk about removing "barriers to entry." It'll be fun.

Contact the author of this article or email tips@seattlest.com with further questions, comments or tips.
By MvB in on August 22, 2005 1:18 PM

Comments [rss]

  • Ian

    Fantastic post, Michael!

    I haven't lived in Seattle for more than six years, but reading about map-free Metro, I was suddenly, and palpably, angry all over again. The healing has, apparently, only just begun...

  • Mike

    I'm only responding to your scurrilous accusation, Courtney, because it boosts the comment count by one more.

    For the record, I have no official or unofficial relationship with Ken Schramm.

  • you might be surprised how affordable we are courtney! for the low, low price of a double-latte at victrola, you too could have loads of flattering comments!

    :)

  • Um, Michael are you paying people to comment again? I thought you were supposed to cut that out...This 5 comments business seems very out of place.

  • let's kick it up another notch ––> seattle is home to some of the worst signage and environmental graphics of any city I've ever been to. this Metro map is a perfect example of one of this city's most glaring shortcomings. and how many college-level, graphic design programs are there is seattle? (I count 5 off the top of my head, art institute, UW, SVC, SCCC, shorline, but I'm sure there are many more...) so what is our excuse?

    I remember the first time I came to this realization, reading a general safety/evacuation map on the Bainbridge island ferry a week after having seen Titanic. (with genuine concerns – the WSFerries carry 1,000 more people a trip than the Titanic sank with!) on one map they showed a dark profile of the floor plan with red areas indicating where passengers should congregate in the event of an emergency. great, except that right next to that map was an a graphic explaining what the different alarm whistles meant – and it was a dark silhouette of the boat with red squares indicating the different whistle patterns. hmmm. which also looks a lot like another view of where to congregate in the event of an emergency. in a real emergency, I'm going to guess that this graphic would be confusing at best, deadly at worst. welcome to seattle.

    even the airport signage is bad enough to have to think about it Every time you go. I never knew how bad it was until I had to get my way around airports in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Rome (all in one trip) and had less trouble in all of them collectively than I did getting around seattle's international wing when we returned home.

    do you think they're just trying to keep us on our toes? is this just a top level city program to keep uneducated people out of seattle? maybe city officials have numbers to meet. maybe that bus map is a high performer. can you just see the meeting ––> "we're confident that with this map we can meet and exceed our Q2 goals for 1,286 stupid people moving out of the downtown area."

  • Michael Baker

    Unitarian conspiracy is funnier. See, you take the original joke and kick it up a notch. Something about how Unitarians believe it's all basically the same bus anyway.

  • I was joking about a referance to the Monorail post.

  • Hell, I'm just as mad as you are

  • "Where's a useful freaking map, guys? For god's sake, we just want to know where the buses go! Why is that information confidential?"

    It's a Jewish Conspiracy.

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