DenverUrbanism Blog

RTD has a great network of frequent bus routes that are much more convenient than the average bus line. Unfortunately, most people can’t tell the frequent routes from the regular ones. A map highlighting the best lines can help, but combining the map with a special brand for the routes shown on it would be even better.

Something like this, perhaps:

Conceptual branding scheme for RTD’s frequent bus network, by Dan Malouff. Click image for larger version.

Buses are such natural advertising tools that we frequently cover them in ads. Sometimes we even use buses to advertise for light rail. Why not advertise which bus lines are the best ones?

After all, the only people looking at bus maps are people who have already decided to take the bus. To convince new people, you have to show them how easy it is.

That’s the concept behind Boulder’s fabulously successful Community Transit Network. Instead of giving each bus route a hard-to-remember number and a paint scheme identical to every other bus in the city, the most important routes get unique names and paint jobs, like DASH and JUMP.

As a result, Boulder’s best bus lines visually stand out, which makes them easy to identify, and therefore much less intimidating to new riders. Since Boulder started switching over to this system in the late 1990s, ridership on its bus network has shot up.

Likewise, Denver already has one great example of this: the 16th Street mall shuttle. There are thousands of people in Denver who never ride any bus except that one. They’re willing to ride the shuttle because it’s easy to understand where the shuttle goes, and the shuttle is unmistakable compared to other buses. There’s no ambiguity, no possibility of accidentally getting on the wrong bus and ending up in an unfamiliar part of town.

Of course there are other factors at work in both Boulder and on 16th Street. Free fares for CU students in Boulder and for everyone on 16th Street are obviously a huge incentive. Nobody would say unique branding is the sole reason the mall shuttle or the SKIP are so popular. But part of their success is clearly how easy they are to use, and branding is part of that.

Lots of other cities around the country use special brands in a similar way.

Los Angeles has red premium buses, versus orange regular ones. Washington, DC has blue premium routes, versus red normal ones. Charlotte, NC uses white and blue for both, but gives its express buses a slightly different look than its regular ones. The list goes on and on.

The point of special branding isn’t so much to help existing bus riders, but to educate non-riders about the system. It’s to show the guy sitting in his car on Colfax how convenient the bus is. Instead of being forced to memorize its route number, figure out the difference between the 15 and the 15L, and then look up its schedule, all that guy has to remember is to catch the special-looking bus, which comes every few minutes.

Sometimes transit agencies with special brands have to use a non-branded bus on a branded route, or vice versa. That’s OK, because once people start riding the system they quickly become sophisticated enough to identify which routes work for them, regardless of how they’re painted. The key is that advertising special routes with their own brand teaches new people where to start.

There are tons of things RTD could do to improve transit service, but most of them are expensive. Things like bus lanes, signal prioritization, and streetcars are all great, and should all be on the table in Denver, but in the mean time, simple and effective improvements like better branding for the best routes could also help, and are essentially free.

RTD buys new buses every couple of years. Starting with their next order, they should have some of them painted with a new brand. Over time, as the bus fleet turns over, all the frequent routes can be given the newly branded buses. If rolled out over time, cost to RTD above its normal operations would be zero.

Even if the benefit were small, the fact that this can be done for free makes it worthwhile. But in all probability, the benefit is sizable.

Do you know which RTD bus routes come often enough to take without worrying about a timetable? This new map illustrates exactly that, by adding bus routes that come at least every 15 minutes all day to the well-known FasTracks rail map.

Denver rail and frequent bus map, by Dan Malouff. Click map for larger version. Many sizes available via flickr.

Big city bus systems are complex and hard to use. With scores of infrequent routes going every conceivable direction, RTD’s buses are no exception. Rail systems, by contrast, are comparatively easy. Simple maps make it easy to remember where rail lines go, and trains come often enough that riders can simply show up any time and trust a train to be nearby.

What if we thought of buses the same way? We can, through the magic of frequent service mapping.

Most big bus agencies, including RTD, have a few key routes serving the most important corridors with buses that come as often as trains. Most potential riders don’t know which routes those are, because they’re hidden amidst the clutter of complicated bus maps that show every route. When bus lines that come every hour are illustrated the same as those that come every 10 minutes, people have to assume the worst about all the routes they don’t personally already ride.

But if riders are educated about those key high quality bus routes, and think of them as practical options just as easy and convenient as the train, more people are willing to ride. Frequent service maps like this one are geared towards that purpose. They don’t show every conceivable transit service. Rather, like RTD’s light rail map, they focus on teaching riders how to use a limited but high quality portion of the overall system. More detailed information, including the less frequent routes, would still be available via other, separate maps.

Los Angeles pioneered frequent service mapping with its 15 minute map. Other cities have followed, including Washington, DC and even Salt Lake City, which still shows every route but uses different colors to indicate frequency.

For this Denver map, I wanted to show the frequent routes in as simple and uncluttered a way as possible. So I eliminated complications like one-way couplets, where a route uses parallel one-way streets, and clustered similar routes into similar colors. Light rail is blue, heavy rail red, and buses gray.

I tried to show FasTracks lines as they will exist when finished, although some of that is still up in the air, and doing so does result in some peculiarities. For example, my best guess about the Central Corridor through Five Points is that a streetcar will eventually replace light rail, but that isn’t how the line functions as of 2013.

When RTD opens the West corridor light rail line in April they will pair the rail opening with a series of bus improvements aimed at feeding ridership to the light rail. When that happens, buses on Sheridan and Wadsworth will begin to come often enough to qualify for this map, so I went ahead and showed them. Future FasTracks rail and BRT lines are shown, but stations that still won’t be open as of April are colored black instead of white. When those lines open RTD may well improve the buses around them too.

In the mean time, hopefully this map will help current bus riders identify other useful lines, and maybe help some non-bus riders take the leap.