Serving Shakes / Supporting Students

This is a slideshow created for a class project.  It’s about the owner of a Rainer Valley Baskin Robbins store, and his philosophy about preparing employees for the future:

Serving Shakes / Supporting Students

Video: The Seattle Center Monorail

Here’s a quick video with the Seattle Center Monorail as the subject.

I struggled with the initial close-up shot since there isn’t really any access from the platform for a decent shot, but I’m fairly happy with the overall result.  It would have been possible to get one from the other platform, but then the sequence and direction would have been out-of-order, so I decided this was the best way to go.

Wanamaker’s Christmas Light Show and the Grand Haven Musical Fountain

Here are two examples of old-school multimedia spectacles.  Although neither examples is accessed from behind a computer, both are computer-controlled systems that use recorded audio as a key component for producing unique experiences for their participants.

Wanamaker’s (now Macy’s) Christmas Light Show

Wanamaker's Christmas Light Show

The Wanamaker department store in Philadelphia has had an animated Christmas show set to music with audio narration since 1956.  It is hard to believe that such an animated, computer-controlled show existed in 1956 – but it is the kind of thing that would have made me giddy as a child.

The show has gone through several iterations with and without an animated “magic” Christmas trees and a synchronized “Dancing Waters” fountain, the updated display features a new, larger tree and energy-efficient LED lights.  The store itself has gone through numerous owners and names, and now exists as a Macy’s – but even in the era of 3D IMAX films, the show continues to attract and enchant Philadelphia shoppers.

The Grand Haven Musical Fountain

Grand Haven Musical Fountain by Flickr user Adam 【Rez】

While fountains choreographed to music have been around for quite awhile, this one is particularly interesting because the community that owns and maintains it opens the selection of the audio track and the choreography to anyone.  The pubic can visit the fountain’s website to request songs, download the software needed to generate new choreography, or to upload newly choreographed sequences which rotate through the fountain’s season of evening shows.

Wouldn’t it be great if the Seattle Center’s International Fountain used crowd-sourcing to achieve a similar level of community participation and content, as opposed to rotating through five different programs?

【Rez】

Landlord/tenant wordcloud

This is my first wordcloud, created with Wordle.  I copied and pasted a series of emails and letters that I have sent to my landlord in the past few months, primarily concerning issues with the heat and laundry appliances.

Enjoy!

Editorial: RapidRide fare collection – Not so Swift

The Central Puget Sound is sort of a transit wonderland.  We have traditional bus service, a monorail, vehicle and passenger ferries, a couple streetcar lines, Sounder commuter rail, Link light-rail in King County and Tacoma, the nation’s only combined bus and train tunnel, a downtown Seattle ride-free area, and now the latest addition to the mix: Community Transit’s new Swift service.

Boarding Swift at Aurora Village TC - Oran Viriyincy

Swift is Washington’s first implementation of “Bus Rapid Transit” or BRT.  Unfortunately, BRT  isn’t a very descriptive term.  The idea behind BRT is to offer most of the benefits of rail service without the high cost of purchasing trains and installing tracks.  It is a sort of enhanced bus service, but no well-defined criteria exist to determine if a given system qualifies as BRT.

BRT can include anything from dedicated roadways, reserved HOV/bus lanes, bus signal priority at intersections, expedited fare-payment and boarding systems, greater stop-spacing than standard bus service, unique branding and improved passenger information.

In Swift’s case BRT includes almost all of the above except for dedicated roadways.  While Aurora has bus lanes in many places, Swift merges with traffic in some locations and buses have to wait behind cars in turn lanes at some intersections.   Swift has only 14 stations spaced at one to two mile intervals at major transfer points along its 17 mile route.  As opposed to simple bus stops, each Swift station is distinguished from regular local bus service with bright blue, green, and white signage and the distinctive Swift logo.  Stations have a passenger shelter, seating, a ticket vending machine, and an ORCA reader.

One difference between Swift and traditional bus service is that all passenger fares are collected prior to boarding the bus.  Cash customers purchase tickets for $1.50 using ticket vending machines and ORCA passengers tap their cards on readers located at every station.  This allows passengers to board and exit quickly since there is no need to wait for fares to be collected.

So what is riding Swift like?  After boarding, Swift is remarkably like riding any other bus.  After waiting for two or three minutes at a southbound Swift station in Lynnwood, I boarded the bus and realized that while Swift buses are clean and bright, the ride itself is nothing special.

Swift’s key difference isn’t because of new buses or unique branding; the difference is that Swift actually moves more quickly.  Limited stops and off-board fare-payment mean buses stop less often and for shorter intervals.  Access to priority lanes mean buses can pass traffic during congested periods – and the bus I rode did pass traffic along congested areas of Aurora Avenue.

These are the types of changes I would love to see on Metro – and Metro plans to launch their own version of BRT in 2010 under the “RapidRide” brand.  Unfortunately, RapidRide will lack a key difference of Swift.

Instead of all fares being accepted before boarding, RapidRide will have four possible boarding and fare-payment scenarios depending on if the stop being boarded is equipped with an ORCA reader and if the customer is paying with cash, a transfer, or ORCA.  Since RapidRide will not use ticket vending machines, cash customers will purchase fares from the driver.

As anyone who has ever ridden the 358 “express” bus between downtown  Seattle and Aurora Village can attest, a limited-stop route along the southern part of the Aurora corridor would be most welcome – but since RapidRide won’t have off-board payment at every station, the time savings will be significantly reduced and the lack of a standard system will be confusing.

Metro should consider the benefits of ticket vending machines and the confusion resulting from four possible boarding scenarios.  Short of installing ticket vending machines, Metro planners should consider partnering with Community Transit to extend Swift service to Seattle (replacing RapidRide’s future E line) and througuout the region, instead of creating a watered-down version of BRT that causes RapidRide boarding to be less swift than its neighbor system to the north.

Greetings!

This is my first attempt at doing anything blog related, other than an occasional comment on someone else’s blog.  Anyhow, I haven’t decided exactly where this will be going but it will likely contain a healthy dose of armchair analysis and observations from the transit and travel industries, specifically about central Puget Sound transit systems and airlines.

Things may change around here in the coming weeks and days as I get familiar with WordPress, themes, etc. but I hope you’ll find something of interest in the not-too-distant future.