I’m watching this mini-doc about the Tokyo Metro subway and they focus on customer service for a few minutes. They don’t explain why there’s a need to have so many staff at each station dedicated to customer service, aside from the plethora of passengers. I think one of the reasons is that the system is so vast and complex that so many people always have questions. Indeed I saw many Japanese confused or looking for where to go.
I experienced some of this great customer service myself. (In the video, skip to 14:00 to watch the segment on customer service training.)
I was at Ōmiya station in Saitama prefecture, north of Tokyo, and I wanted to ride the New Shuttle a short distance from Omiya to Tetsudō-Hakubutsukan to visit the Railway Museum, but I first wanted to get a “Suica” reloadable smart card so I didn’t have to keep buying single-ride tickets.
Oddly I noticed at least five different kinds of ticket vending machines at different stations. They all will display in English, and a sign above each lists some of its functions. There are many overlapping machines. After I tried to buy one with one machine I asked a worker how I can buy a Suica card.
He didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Japanese but his colleague understood my unaccented pronunciation of Suica, and informed him what I was looking for.
It turns out that the machines at the New Shuttle “side” (more on this later) of the Omiya station don’t sell new Suica cards. The man walked me over to the JR side of the station and introduced me and my problem to a Japan Railways East worker. This second man spoke English and guided me through buying a personalized Suica card; a card with my name printed on it.
What was impressive was that the first man walked with me 570 feet away to the other side of the station, where he doesn’t work, instead of trying to point me in a direction. Even if he could verbally describe where I should go, that still wouldn’t solve my problem of obtaining a card because I would still probably have to ask someone else.
This wasn’t unique in being “walked” to a destination. The next day in Chiba I bought a bento box “lunch set” (complete meal with veggies, meat, and rice) in the food hall of the Sogo department store, where there are dozens of independent shops selling fresh food.
After I bought the food I wanted to know where there was a place to eat it. Again, I didn’t speak Japanese and the woman who sold me the food didn’t speak English. I mimed my problem, by looking around, pointing, and making an eating motion. She nodded and walked me over to a small eating area at the edge of the food hall.
In Taiwan my host advised me that this would happen, and she also said to not hesitate asking someone for help. It happened one time in Taipei, but I don’t remember the circumstances. In a separate and similar occasion, however, a worker at the Taipei Discovery Center (which is similar to the city gallery in Singapore, Hong Kong, and many cities in China) approached me while I studied an exhibit. He talked to me about Taipei history, what I had seen so far during my visit (nothing, as this was my first stop on day one), what I planned to see (a lot), and then recommended more things for me to see (I checked out a couple things).
Station sides
I measured the 570 distance the New Shuttle worker walked with me to introduce me to a JR East worker who showed me how to buy a Suica card. Transit in Japan is privately operated and New Shuttle is one company (Saitama New Urban Transit Co., Ltd.) that operates one part of a station, and JR East operates the majority of the station. Tobu Railway also operates the station because it terminates a single commuter line here. Depending on how you look at it they are separate buildings but when you’re inside transferring from one to another there’s no distinction; the building connections are seamless.
A tram travels along the Danube river in Budapest, Hungary
I’ve posted a few articles about my trip to four countries in Europe over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, so this is purely a recap to link to them.
I visited Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Germany again, and Switzerland. It was a multimodal trip by train and plane, and some local transit buses. There are hundreds of captioned photos on my Flickr, but check out these three articles:
Five common “best practices” that every city with a high-use transit system in Europe has that the transit agencies in Chicagoland should adopt.
Day 1 in Switzerland on Mapzen’s Transitland blog – I discuss how amazingly interconnected Swiss public transport systems are, and how their single schedule data source makes it possible to get a route for a journey from Zürich to the top of a nearby mountain via four modes of public transport.
Day 2 in Switzerland where I spent a lot of time riding trams, buses, funiculars, and a cog railway to get around Zürich and visit a couple of museums.
I was taking pictures of the tram and when I got home I saw that all three people were staring at my camera. At Bellevue in Zurich.
The post for day 1, Friday, when I went to Mount Rigi, hasn’t been written yet.
Today was a busy day, which is expected when you travel Steven Vance-style: efficiently (meaning you see a lot of stuff without wasting any time), alone, with a very good sense of what you want to do, where they are, and how you’ll get around.
I’m staying at Hotel Bristol, which came up in an Orbitz search as being a decent place less than $100 per night – that’s hard in Zurich, and even harder if you want a place near the Hauptbahnhof (Hbf). I knew that’s where I would be coming and going a few times to get to Lucerne, the mountains, or to buy cheap (relatively) dinner.
This morning, after eating a continental breakfast in the hotel, I walked a couple of blocks from the hotel to the Hbf – I’m measuring blocks in a Chicago-sense. It was about 4-5 minutes to the nearest station entrance to buy the ZurichCard.
Getting the card was a no-brainer because for 24 CHF (Swiss Francs, about $25) you get a 24-hour public transit card and free entry to dozens of museums. It includes the city zone and the adjacent zones, including the airport. I have to leave for the airport tomorrow by 10 AM and I validated the card at 11 AM so I’m covered there.
After checking out and riding the city’s two funiculars and single rack railway, I visited the tram museum and national museum (Landesmuseum). Add to that the dozens of trams and buses I rode to reach the hill transport and two museums.
Consider that the cost of the train to the airport is 6.40 CHF, the tram museum is 12 CHF, and the Landesmuseum charges 10 CHF, I’d say I got more than my money’s worth.
What’s really great about the ZurichCard is that you can purchase it at any of ticket vending machine, including the ones labeled “SBB CFF FFS”* that also sell national railway and supra-regional tickets. You have to remember to validate the card right before your first use, either at a ZVV (Zurich regional public transport union) ticket vending machine.
My first transit trip this morning was on a fantastic double-articulated bus. That means it has three sections with five doors! These buses are only used on routes 31 and 33 in the city center, and they’re electric and silent, running on overhead trolley wire. The bus has the same priority and comfort as a tram, and multiple screens attached to the ceiling showing the next stop and its connections (transfers).
The front two sections of a bi-articulated bus. It’s normally not possible to bring a bike on a bus or tram in Europe, except when the bus has been specially outfitted for the bike to be on the inside. Buses in Europe aren’t allowed to have bike racks on the front.
The tram system in the city center is the perfect complement and support for having so little driving here. Some of the streets restrict driving, and other streets have only a single lane in one direction, or just two lanes, one in each direction. Many of the major intersections within a mile of the Hbf surprisingly have no traffic controls.
Trams and buses load and unload passengers very fast because you can board through any door. “Winter mode” is enabled on many of the vehicles to keep passengers already on board more comfortable by opening doors at the stop only upon request (you push a button on the door).
Driving in the city center is thus primarily for leaving your parking space for elsewhere in the city or region, or the reverse. Trips are extremely convenient by tram or trolley bus.
Motorists are obliged to stop for people who want to cross the road in zebra crossings, and trams which are turning across the lanes. Then, unless a road sign or marking dictates the priority of a lane, the rule “yield to the motorist on your right” reigns.
I never waited more than 7 minutes for a tram (I know because the countdown signs never exceeded 7 minutes for the route I was going to ride) and the average was probably closer to 4 minutes. It seems that a majority of the time trams run in exclusive right of way and traffic signals are set up to prioritize their movement.
Transit signal priority isn’t a given in all cities with trams; in Amsterdam and Budapest it seemed the tram waited just as long for a “green” light as adjacent, same-direction motorists did.
At the tram museum I talked to a staffer there who was pointing out features in a model created by a city task force which was investigating a potential U-bahn (underground) system for Zurich. He said that a couple of years ago the museum hosted an event to talk about whether the city was better off without the system.
The consensus amongst the attendees was that the city was indeed better off without a subway because the trams have a higher frequency than what the subway would have had. Another point made was that the connections between trams are easier and faster than between other modes.
Nevertheless, a few underground stations were built, but they aren’t subways. Two tracks, 21 and 22, carry the two routes of the Sihltal Zürich Uetliberg Bahn (SZU), One goes up the Uetliberg mountain in the city and the other serves the Sihl valley suburbs. There are also three underground tram stations away from the city center on line 7.
Traffic on the local transit was lighter than yesterday. Many riders I saw today were headed to a hill to go sledding. It might also be a coincidence that I rode all three hill-climbing funicular and rack railway lines, as well as the train that goes up “Mount Zurich” (870 meters; its real name is Uetliberg).
The Dolderbahn is a rack (cog) railway that heads up the Adlisberg mountain from Römerhof to the Dolder recreation area. At least half of the passengers today were children going with their parents and friends to sled down a hill there.
The last word on Zurich: It’s very expensive to eat here. I paid 11.50 CHF (about the same in USD) for a “döner box” which is something I paid about $5 in Rotterdam. A döner box is fast food. The cheap beer that went along with it was $5, which I could probably get for less than $2 in Rotterdam.
* “SBB CFF FFS” is a set of three acronyms that when expanded mean “Swiss Federal Railways” in German, French, and Italian, respectively. It’s normally abbreviated to SBB – German is the most commonly spoken language in Switzerland. Each of the acronyms plus dot “ch” has its own website that loads the organization’s website in the respective language.
Taking regional trains from a city of 12,000 to a city of 155,000 is a piece of cake
Trams and buses run frequently to and from the Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof (main station) in the German state Baden-Württemberg. In the story below, this is the origin of a trip by tram. And it’s one of the stations highlighted in an interactive map that you can learn how to make with Transitland’s API, the Tangram Play map style editor [which is no longer available], and a bit of QGIS too.
In June my sister and I traveled to Germany. I went to visit a friend I met in Chicago and it was my sister’s first trip in Europe. We stayed with my friend in Ladenburg, a village of about 12,000 people in the state Baden-Württemberg, and equidistant to Mannheim and Heidelberg.
Ladenburg has a train station with three tracks and two platforms. During our stay there the third track was under construction. We visited Heidelberg twice, taking trains from Ladenburg on both days.
We traveled at the same time each day – between 12:00 and 14:00 – so it caught my attention that the second journey into Heidelberg – a city with a large, well-known university – took a different route than the trip the day before.
On the second day the same trip – starting in Ladenburg and arriving in Heidelberg – had us taking a different route by requiring a transfer at the Mannheim-Seckenheim station.
For a city of 12,000, I was impressed that there was regional train service six times per hour between Ladenburg and Heidelberg. Back home, in Chicago, commuter trains come once an hour outside of rush hour periods.
Integrated transit service increases frequencies
The train service and connections were so incredibly well-timed and on-time that we waited less than eight minutes between trains. Overall the two-train journey took about 12 minutes longer than the single-train journey the day before, and, owing to good fare integration, cost the same. Two of the train services each hour are 15 minutes, non-stop. Our service, part of two other services each hour, was 27 minutes, including the eight minutes transfer, and the third service with twice-hourly trips takes 37 minutes because of a longer transfer in a different city.
To further illustrate the level of connectivity on this route, the first train was an inter-regional train of the RegioBahn (RB) class, and the second was an S-bahn class. Different companies operated each.
This kind of rigid, rider-friendly timing on a two-seat ride wasn’t devised by mistake. It’s often prohibitively expensive to run transit routes non-stop between every origin and destination. Airlines don’t do it exclusively, and though the Personal Rapid Transit system in Morgantown does that during off-peak hours, it has five stations and only the smaller, less-used PRT at Heathrow airport has been built since.
Running a transit system where vehicles, operated by one or more companies, as in Germany, “meet” each other is a hallmark of a well-integrated system.
How local & regional transit are organized
When we arrived in Heidelberg we took a tram from the Hauptbahnhof (main station) east to the edge of the historic city center and pedestrian shopping area at Bismarckplatz. Our regional train wasn’t necessarily timed with the tram because as a “rapid transit” service coming every few minutes, the need for a timely transfer isn’t as great.
The current organization of public transport in Germany lends itself to high-quality service characteristics like low headways (the time between vehicles at a particular stop) and high frequency, and short waits for a transfer vehicle. German local and regional transit operations are more complex because of the interconnected relationships among governments on all levels, public and private companies, and companies that are simply in charge of scheduling.
In the USA, there are typically two structures. The first, most commonly found in the largest cities, is that all transit service is provided by a governmental corporation created by authority of the state’s legislature. In Chicago, where I live, the Chicago Transit Authority, Pace, and Metra, are state-owned but independently operated corporations. They were created by the state legislature and can only be dissolved or merged by an action of the state legislature.
The second structure is for the transit agency to be a department of a city or county’s transportation or public works department.
In Germany however, there are multiple layers, and they start with regions, not states. Heidelberg, Ladenburg, and Mannheim, for example, are all in the Rhine-Neckar Metropolitan Region, named after the two rivers that converge in Mannheim.
Peeling back the layers of transit organizations in Mannheim & Heidelberg
The Verkehrsverbund Rhein-Neckar (Rhine-Neckar Transport Association, VRN) is a “network” that sets the fares and coordinates routes and timed transfers for transit in the region – including both public and private agencies that operate buses and trains in the area.
The VRN is singly owned by the Zweckverband Verkehrsverbund Rhein-Neckar (ZRN), a special purpose group specific to Germany that allows local government authorities to form an association. Other examples of zweckverbands in Germany include consortiums that run hospitals and ambulance services and monitor traffic. The three states, and 24 cities, city districts, and counties in the Rhein-Neckar region make up the ZRN.
The transit operator in this region is a separate company called Rhein-Neckar-Verkehr (RNV). RNV was created and is owned, jointly, by the five former transit operators in the region. On trams in Heidelberg you’ll see the RNV logo, but the logo for the old HSB, or Heidelberger Straßen- und Bergbahn, is also there!
RNV, the main transit operator, and the Unternehmensgesellschaft Verkehrsverbund Rhein-Neckar (URN), a union of over 50 transit operators, are members of the VRN network.
Trams and buses run frequently to and from the haltestelle (stop) at Bismarckplatz at the western end of the pedestrian shopping street. In the story, this is the destination of a trip by tram.
The RNV, like many other operators in Germany, has its own subsidiary company, operating buses in Viernheim, Hesse. John Pucher and Ralph Buehler wrote in their 2010 paper Making public transport financially sustainable that companies use new subsidiaries to control labor costs because employees of the new companies have new contracts, that may have different wages and work rules, but also to grow the company. “Transit agencies are planning to use these new subsidiaries to win bids in future calls for tender in other cities and regions—thus potentially increasing the company’s market share and geographic reach.”
Proof that we rode a tram in Heidelberg on the first day. We rode a bus on the next day because it departed first.
At the end of the day, this integrated web of companies, subsidiaries, operators, networks, and schedules doesn’t really matter to the rider: which company operates which route has no bearing on the rider. A single organization – VRN, the “network” company for Heidelberg – is in charge of the timetables, and in providing GTFS feeds for Transitland. VRN is in charge of standardizing fares across and between cities and operators, so costs are the same for similar distance trips, no matter which operator happened to be driving.
A pedestrian shopping street is common to (probably) all municipalities in Germany.
The three agencies in Chicago are moving slowly to have fare integration, but there are no visible efforts to coordinate transfers or consolidate fares. Last year it became possible to use a single online payment account to pay for rides on CTA, Pace, and Metra, although with two fare mediums. Riders use a chip card to ride CTA and Pace, but must have an app to buy Metra tickets using the same electronic fare money.
Using the Transitland API I can find which tram and bus routes would carry my sister and I from the Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof to Bismarckplatz, the start of the pedestrian shopping area. First I need to find the onestopId for the two stops.
Klokan’s BoundingBox website gives me the coordinates for any rectangular area on the earth, that I can use to call the API to return the stops in that area.
# Standard call: https://transit.land/api/v1/stops?bbox=8.66272,49.396005,8.704262,49.419237 # Return as GeoJSON: https://transit.land/api/v1/stops.geojson?bbox=8.66272,49.396005,8.704262,49.419237
I used QGIS, a free and open source GIS application, to inspect a GeoJSON file of those stops in Heidelberg I fetched using the bounding box
Once I have the stops’ Onestop IDs I can plug that into the route_stop_patterns API endpoint, like this:
# Standard call https://transit.land/api/v1/route_stop_patterns?stops_visited=s-u0y1j3y5c4-hdhauptbahnhof,s-u0y1jff1q1-bismarckplatz # Return as GeoJSON https://transit.land/api/v1/route_stop_patterns.geojson?stops_visited=s-u0y1j3y5c4-hdhauptbahnhof,s-u0y1jff1q1-bismarckplatz
That call returns an array of 38 route stop patterns, which are a custom identifer that are uniquely defined by a route, a stop pattern, and a line geometry. In the 38 RSPs there are three tram routes. Tram route 23 has two RSPs that service the trip between the Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof and the Bismarckplatz stations; route 9 has four RSPs, and tram route 5 has 32 route stop patterns (its onestopId is r-u0y1-5).
Those GeoJSON calls become the source data in my Play “scene” that tells the embedded Tangram map what and how to display it. The green line is tram route 5, and the blue line are the other two tram routes. All three carry riders between “HD Hauptbahnhof” and “Bismarckplatz”, the only two stops labeled. The tram lines don’t follow the rides because RNV’s GTFS feed doesn’t provide the shapes.txt file so Transitland has derived the route shape by drawing straight lines between stops.
Bonus thought on transit integration
DB is a singular authority on transit timetables and routing for the entire country. They have every regional transit operators’ schedules available on Bahn.com for routing within and between cities, and even on intercity trains across Europe.
This is a list of day trips that you can take from Amsterdam. We might have different ideas of what constitutes the duration of the day. Once I get to a city I “travel quickly”: I walk fast, bike fast, and don’t linger too often at a point of interest, so I can see lots of places. This advice assumes you’ll arrive into the city center (where the train stations are) between 10 and 11 AM.
Naarden and Hilversum
Visit “vesting” Naarden (Naarden fort) to see a star-shaped fortress from the 1600s. You can take a bus or bike there from the train station.
Hilversum is a richer city and has a lot of typically Dutch architecture, especially of buildings designed by Richard Dudok. Go here if you’re in the TV and radio industries. You’ll need a bike if you want to see even half of them. A lot of them are schools and apartment buildings.
These two cities are a <15 minute train ride away from each other, with trains every 15 minutes.
Haarlem
Haarlem is a short ride from Amsterdam and has a working windmill museum, near a panopticon-style prison. Perhaps stop here on your way to Zandvoort an Zee (beach resort).
Rotterdam
Get here early and leave late. Take the Intercity Direct to the city by 10 AM. That’s the high-speed train, and don’t forget to pay for or buy the “toeslag” (supplement) and you’ll get there about 30 minutes faster for a minor extra cost. Or, take the slower, scenic route there in the morning and the fast route back to your lodging in Amsterdam at night.
Rotterdam is a very large city and has a lot to do. Rent a bike from Zwaan Bikes in Groothandelsgebouw on the next block west of the train station (my favorite in the world).
Go on the 75-minute long harbor tour operated by Spido that starts on the northwest side of the Erasmusbrug (Erasmus bridge).
Delft is a very pretty city to walk around. It’s very touristic so you will see a lot of shops selling the local blue porcelain. I bought lavender goat cheese here, and it was delicious. Climb the steps to the top of the cathedral in the Grote Markt (main square). If you like architecture, head over to the university, TU Delft. You can walk there from city center in less than 20 minutes.
Eat at Huszár which is a couple “blocks” south of the train station.
The Hague – beach alert!
If you don’t go to the beach, you could do Delft and The Hague in the same day, providing you aren’t spending time at museums and you have a bicycle to move a little quicker. Walk through the royal palace, Binnenhof.
Take a tram or a bike to the beach at Scheveningen.
Zandvoort an Zee – beach alert!
This is a small beach resort town on the North Sea. Walk from the train station to the beach and keep walking until you find a beach lounge you like. Then grab a seat and order a drink (it’ll take a while for someone to come over, so find a menu yourself because it’s typical for a Dutch server to not bother bringing you one unless you ask for it).
Almere
This one’s only for people who want to see a New Town in the Netherlands, or are really curious to know and see how polder works, and how the Dutch reclaimed an entire province from a sea (which is now a lake). Research the history: IJsselmeer, Zuiderzee, Flevoland (the province)
