The BusGraphs Project

As I was running the access analysis supporting Of Buses and Ballot Boxes, I encountered something that fascinated me. It wasn’t relevant to the piece itself, so I didn’t emphasize it there, but I knew it had to be the next thing I investigated.

I needed a way to test my suspicion that the ballot box designated by King County Elections as serving downtown was far less transit-accessible than other points in the downtown core. My analysis would divide Seattle into a grid of 80 meter by 80 meter sectors, and score them using a transit access measurement. Sorting the sectors by their score would allow me to compare the one containing that ballot box to others in downtown Seattle, which I knew, for sure, would dominate the top of the list.

I’m a last-minute voter, so I avail myself of King County’s ballot drop boxes. In the waning days of an election cycle, a ballot dropped in a mailbox might not get postmarked in time to count. Last election day, I was looking for a drop box near my place of work in downtown Seattle. I was surprised to find none in what I would consider the core of downtown. The walk down to South King Street and 2nd Avenue South wasn’t onerous, but it left me with a question.

In 2015, I became fascinated by King County Metro’s efforts to restructure its bus network in anticipation of the opening of two new Link Light Rail stops. At the same time, I found out about isochrone maps and the larger idea of access in transit. While I was creating software to measure the latter, the former served as a motivator and test case. I hoped that I’d be able to evaluate Metro’s proposed alternatives, come up with some on my own, and present objective measurements of which was best. As Metro’s plans proceeded through a series of revisions, I followed along through the outreach materials that they produced. The process never felt very scientific, and that frustrated me, but I dreamed of a day where tools like the one I was building would make that so.

“What if we planned public transit with the goal of freedom?” asks public transportation consultant Jarrett Walker in a blog post from this March. A little over five years ago, a presentation that he gave planted this question in my mind. Having a background in software, and unaware of anyone else who was thinking about this question¹, I started creating the tools that I would need to measure the freedom conferred by public transit systems. Within a year, I had sold my car and quit my job to focus full time on transit. I envisioned myself as establishing my own consultancy that would guide transit agencies through network redesigns using my software for generating measurements of transit network quality.