NY _____.

Meet NY_____. (pronounced "NY Underscore"), Laura's latest. In her words, it's a magazine "about the things that make New York New York." She had been thinking about starting a new magazine (this is her third) for a while, and we tossed ideas around at my apartment one afternoon in September. We then brainstormed a miles-long list of themes for each issue (everything from nightlife to bodegas, transit, and sex) over ice cream, and the first issue launched last month with a fantastic party and reading. The theme of issue 1 is apartments.



The magazine features photography, art, creative nonfiction, short fiction, and poetry. I am so delighted and impressed by the design and layout of NY_____. and with all of the work within it. I stayed up well into the night reading it when I first got my hands on one.





One of my favorite parts is Laura's intro, which was printed in 5pt font, circling the back cover.

Everybody in New York has an apartment story. People who live in other places also have apartment stories, but like most other things, they aren't as good as the ones from New York. The great density of population that makes New York a place we want to live also makes our apartments, by necessity, bizarre. They are expensive little boxes of endearing idiosyncrasy, if we are lucky, and sorrow, if we are not. Our buildings are old; they have history and vermin. Our neighbors are weird and play the bass. We climb five flights of stairs without complaint. Our heaters scream like tea kettles; we lack a closet. People who are too fat can't fit in our bathrooms. We live next door to the ice cream truck dispatchery, or down the block from the sewage treatment plant. We live on parade routes. Our walls aren't real walls. Our walls have seventeen coats of paint of varying color and lead content. As we lay awake in our lofted beds, we hear rats running in the tin ceiling two feet overhead. It's awful but not nearly as awful as not living here. This is why I thought "apartments" would be a good first theme for NY_____. Sincerely, Laura.

You can buy a copy of NY_____. here. I urge you to do so! Something else you can do is submit for Issue 2; the theme is Jobs. As is the case with apartments, it's hard to find anyone in this fair little city without a strange or amusing story about making a living here.

Many excited congratulations to Laura for starting this. I love how it's turned out so far, and I can't wait for the next issue.

Laura Strangelove on buses

Laura is in the process of getting a Masters in City Planning with a focus on Transit. She's been into it for years, and has a soft spot for buses in particular. We recently realized that Urban Planning and Digital Strategy have so much in common that we're able to send each other articles, stories and links all the time that sit at the intersection of our respective interests.

Speaking of, Laura recently forwarded me a paper she wrote, and I found it so fascinating that I got her permission to post huge chunks of it here. It's called

Positive Public Perception of Bus Rapid Transit
as Dependent on How Unlike Conventional Bus Riding it Is
Or: How to Stop Worrying and Love the Bus
and talks about just that – a fairly new type of bus transit that could elevate people's general opinions of bus transit.

The bus is generally considered to be the most loathed form of public transportation. People, as a whole, do not like to ride the bus. A google search for “I love buses” turns up 217,000 results. A google search for “I hate buses” turns up 2,890,000 results. (...) Our culture’s hatred of buses even sneaks its way into our idioms—of late, to “throw [someone] under the bus” is a phrase that means to sacrifice another person for personal gain, even though throwing someone under a train or into the whirling propellers of a helicopter would almost surely result in more gruesome consequences.

To be fair, the bus has rightly earned some of its criticism. There is a plethora of reasons people do not like buses, and while all of them are not present all of the time, some of them are present most of the time. Buses can be unreliable and late, and when they do show up, they sometimes show up in pairs, or more insultingly, in groups of five. Waiting for a bus at a conventional pole-and-sign stop can be a cold, wet, and even dangerous adventure. A bus ride on a heavily-trafficked corridor with many stops is slow and lurching. Hardly any transit mode in the world can be considered more unpleasant than a standing-up ride on an overcrowded bus while carrying six shopping bags or an infant.

Enter Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). It's still a bus, but it's operationally different in a lot of ways. For one, dedicated rights-of-way: buses get their own lanes. One result of this is that they are seen as a unique form of transportation, rather than another vehicle sharing the road with everyone else. Dedicated bus lanes are also a lot more efficient (more on this soon).






images of current & proposed BRT systems in St. Petersburg, Florida; Changzhou, China; and Hamilton, Ontario

Another popular feature of BRT is pre-boarding fare collection: everybody pays (or swipes their card) ahead of time, like in the subway. When the bus arrives, everyone is "ready" and can board at once. Also results in more efficiency. Dedicated rights-of-way and pre-boarding fare collection reduce the likelihood of bus bunching, which is one of the most frustrating things in the universe.

Bus bunching occurs when one bus, due to traffic, a late start, or any other reason, is a little behind schedule, and as a result, arrives at each stop to see more people than usual waiting to board. Because it takes longer to board more people, the bus arrives at each subsequent stop more and more behind schedule. Meanwhile, the bus behind it—the next bus running the route—does not have a large number of passengers to pick up because any of those passengers who were early enough to be there when the earlier bus came by in all its lateness boarded it instead. By the end of the route, the second (or, when it’s really bad, third, fourth, or fifth[!]) bus will have caught up with the first bus, and the bus arrives very late and in multiple.

There are other factors that can set BRT apart from regular bus transit as well, to get commuters over the psychological barrier against them. The buses themselves look different, the stations are more sleekly designed (sometimes with modern logos and bright color schemes) and are built to accommodate pre-boarding fare collection. Here's an example from the RIT in Curitiba, Brazil, one of the most successful BRT systems in the world:


image from Wikimedia

A tubular station! That beats standing by a pole in the rain any day.

Does New York need this? Well, the MTA has dabbled in it with their Select Bus Service (SBS), which has a very limited run (bet you don't know where it is). Since the NYC subway system is so advanced & gets you almost anywhere you need to go, Laura sees the SBS as "an example of BRT used in the context of merely making bus service vastly superior" rather than its own, unique form of transportation.

In short, BRT is good for pulling buses out of their perceptual dead zones: the more they resemble – and are seen on par with – rail systems, the more psychologically accepted they will be, and the more passengers the system will attract. Of course it's not all shiny wonderfulness; Laura plays devil's advocate and raises some great questions (including cases of induced demand, which isn't always necessarily a "good" thing). She also writes about how BRT is so characteristically (and operationally) different from buses that people have even talked about removing the "B" from the system:

It is as though people are known to hate buses so deeply and thoroughly that the only way to trick them into riding one—even if it’s a bus with none of the problems of a conventional bus—is to disguise it with an Orwellian name change, a la 1984: But the Ministry of Love is still where people get tortured, and “Commuter Rapid Transit” is still, technically, a bus.

I recently spotted a PSFK article about the MTA investing further in more efficient bus transit, but the link seems to be dead (see? a sad, dead link). I did find This MTA page on their SBS Project that explains BRT really well, and explains how they envision BRT fitting into New York's transit system in the future. Exciting! Maybe it'll turn bus riding reluctance in NY around?


tweet by James

There is a chance that I may have butchered some of Laura's reasoning, as I just tried condensing 18 pages into a single post in just an evening. Stay tuned for edits, as (and if) she corrects me. Thanks, Laura!