How to get to the library by bus - scoring the public transit system

I'm talking to the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority's transportation subcommittee this week, and one of the things I have in mind for that discussion is how the bus system gets people to and from the libraries in town - not just the downtown library, but also the various branches around town.

I see the bus and the library as two key parts of a system that has to work together - if you hope to have a kid who doesn't have to be driven around town everywhere and who has some way of planning out their own day to get from place to place, then the combination of bus and library gives them a place to go and a way to get there.

What I did with my older son last week might be a good case in point.  I picked him up after school, and we walked to the downtown circulator bus (Link Bus) to take it to town.  We were lucky since it arrived just as we got to the stop, but there might have been up to a 15 minute wait to get it.  It dropped us off 10 minutes later about a block from the downtown library, and we had about 50 minutes downtown to pick up books before we caught my regular route home.

There's some set of plausible libraries for each location that you live where you can reasonably get to them by public transit.  When I look at Google maps transit routing from my house, I see this kind of distances projected for the various branches:

Downtown: 15, 20, 15 minutes
U Michigan undergraduate: 11, 13, 14 minutes
Mallett's Creek: 10, 11, 10 minutes
Gerald Ford Presidential Library: 35, 48, 52 minutes
N Campus libraries: 42, 47, 55 minutes
Traverwood: 43, 46, 56 minutes
Old Plymouth Road branch (replaced by Traverwood): 41, 47, 50 minutes
West: 38, 49, 52 minutes
Pittsfield: 46, 60, 46 minutes
Ypsilanti downtown: 38, 38, 47 minutes
Ypsilanti Whittaker Rd: not on a bus line

That matches up with intuition reasonably well: I never have taken the bus to any of the libraries where the route time is 30+ minutes.    Pittsfield here is even a bit of an outlier, since the bus line does not go directly to the library, and each of the routes listed include 30+ minutes of walking and transfers to get there.  The U of Michigan north campus is actually a bit closer than these numbers suggest, since there are U of Michigan free buses that go there frequently but which are not included in Google Transit so it's hard to plan to take them blind.

Real estate people have put together a measure called a "walk score", which looks at neighborhoods to see what kind of density of interesting things are in walking distance.   One simple measure of a community's friendliness to transit and to libraries is to "library transit score" which runs this set of measurements for where you live and the libraries you might go to.

If you look at the public transportation literature you get articles like this one on screening transit investments via a transit score which uses time from home to work as the proxy for transit quality. 

Here are some libraries that have put public transit information on their web sites:

Baltimore County Public Library "Get to the library by bus"

Route information for libraries in the system; all but one of them have transit access.  No links to real time information, no schedules, no links to Maryland Transportation Authority web sites.

New Jersey State Library Directions and Hours

Route information for the library on the same page as driving directions, at the bottom of the page.  Links to PDF (only) of the transit schedule, which does not include the library as one of the stops.

Gerald Ford Presidential Library

Mentions bus service at the bottom of the page below extensive driving directions; lists telephone numbers, but no web site links, for U of Michigan campus and Ann Arbor Transportation Authority routes. 

U of Michigan Art, Architecture, and Engineering Library

Mentions bus service at the bottom of the page below driving directions.  Description of and link to campus bus service, no mention of city bus service.

There is a whole genre of directions page design that is as old as the first online map.  Here's some discussion of using Google Maps as your directions page and some of the usefulness and difficulty of that tool.

Comments

[Bryan]

Your post caught my attention because I was curious to see what public transportation literature you hit upon. You might also be interested in playing around in TRISOnline (http://ntlsearch.bts.gov/tris/index.do)
If you want to get deeper into transportation research, check out the Transportation Research Institute at The University of Michigan (UMTRI) at http://www.umtri.umich.edu/news.php, assuming you have not already. You might also be interested in a project that one of our researchers here is working on: Development of a Methodology to Measure Mobility in Urban Transportation Corridors (http://vtrc.virginiadot.org/ProjDetails.aspx?id=386).

Bryan Campbell
Library Assistant
VDOT Research Library