Sydney’s phenomenal new metro takes only ~100 seconds (1m40s) to travel from Central Station to the new Waterloo Station.

However, you could be stuck waiting up to ~111 seconds (1m 51s) to cross Botany Rd just outside the Waterloo metro station when you arrive! (see the signal timing map at Better Intersections)

Don’t believe me? Here’s a video in realtime showing both journeys: one 11 metres across a 4 lane 50km/h stroad, one about 1.7 kilometres underground:

That is, the time between the start of the flashing red pedestrian signal and the next green (between which you would be crossing illegally if you started walking) is measured on Better Intersections as 93 to 111 seconds. There is no open government data on traffic signal timing in Sydney or NSW. Signal programming can be purchased for AU$200 per intersection (in a proprietary format and under a restrictive license) or AU$400 for historical signal timing. Better Intersections currently includes crowdsourced measurements for over 420 intersections.

This Tuesday, the Sydney Morning Herald published Dr Christopher Standen’s excellent letter which linked to Better Intersections. Dr Christopher Standen is a research fellow at UNSW Sydney specialising in health and urban/transport planning.

Sydney Metro certainly does make you feel like a VIP (“May Sydney’s future citizens never know pain of sitting in soul-crushing traffic”, August 20). But that feeling quickly dissipates when you step outside the stations. To access our local station, Waterloo, we must cross four sets of traffic lights, each with a waiting time of up to two minutes. These can almost double the time needed to walk to or from the station. And no one likes waiting next to a noisy road inhaling fumes. Transport for NSW sets these excessively long waiting times to allow for more road traffic, but this means thousands fewer residents can access stations within an acceptable walking time. Metro has put a massive dent in the state’s finances, so you’d think Transport Minister Jo Haylen would want to maximise its benefit by making station catchment areas as large as possible. Prioritising road traffic over people using public transport shows she still wants the latter to feel like second-class citizens, not VIPs.
Chris Standen, Erskineville

Finally, an end to a 50-year wait for a metro line, Sydney Morning Herald, August 20, 2024. https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/finally-an-end-to-a-50-year-wait-for-a-metro-line-20240820-p5k3qi.html (Archive.org link)

This got me thinking – perhaps you can travel to the next metro station faster than you can cross the adjacent road. I noticed the Waterloo Station to Central Station trip duration is timetabled as 2 minutes (120 seconds), however in reality is even faster. There are plenty of traffic signals in Sydney that have a maximum wait time (start of flashing red to next green) or cycle times around this duration.

A world-class metro, but dangerous streets

What use is Sydney having a world-class metro system when our streets are so hostile to people exiting it? While our new metro is genuinely cutting edge, our streets are falling behind best practice cities around the world.

Traffic signal cycle times

While this Botany Rd intersection has a measured cycle time between 100 and 120 seconds and maximum wait times between 93 seconds and 111 seconds, the City of Sydney’s excellent ‘A City for Walking’ strategy and action plan advocates that TfNSW set a maximum pedestrian wait time (flashing red + red signal duration) of 45 seconds with a target of 30 seconds.

Copenhagen has a 70 second cycle time as the maximum, and high pedestrian usage areas have cycles of 48-60 seconds (Gehl Architects, Public spaces & public life: Sydney 2007 (part 1), page 142).

The London Cycling Design Standards states that “junctions with pedestrian crossing facilities, signal cycle times should only exceptionally be longer than 90 seconds.” and The Urban Street Design Guide by the (USA) National Association of City Transportation Officials recommends cycle times of 60-90 seconds in urban areas.

Urban speed limits

This Botany Rd intersection has a 50km/h speed limit. According to TfNSW – who sets speed limits on state roads – there is a 90% probability a car crashing into a pedestrian at this speed will kill them. This drops to 10% at 30k/h.

While international cities like London and Paris have reduced urban speed limits to 30km/h (or 20mph) boosting local business and cycling, and the City of Sydney’s ‘A City for Walking’ strategy and action plan recommends speeds of 30km/h on city centre and high streets (among others), the NSW Premier Chris Minns recently said increasing the number of 30km/h roads in Sydney was over the top. He falsely claimed: “You could walk quicker than that.” and that the Sydney CBD “shouldn’t be treated as if it were a country town”.

Transport for NSW however assumes an 85% percentile pedestrian speed of 1.2 metres/second (4.32km/h) when designing signal crossing timings (Traffic Signal Design – Section 2 Warrants, Version 1.4, PDF page 9, Roads and Traffic Authority, 2008). This would be comedic if the stakes weren’t so high: the NSW Government’s goal is zero deaths on NSW roads, however there were 352 lives lost in the 12 months prior to this article and 10,555 serious injuries to Dec 2023.

The Waterloo estate project isn’t expected to start until 2027 and could take up to 15 years – that’s 8 years shy of 2050. We’re supposed to be at net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050! Better, safer streets suitable for walking and active transport can’t wait until then, and our urban speed limits and traffic signal design can’t either. Installing new speed limit signage is relatively low cost, and reprogramming signals is free.

Is this the only case of long pedestrian wait times next to a metro station?

Likely not! The Victoria Cross to Crows Nest trip is timetabled as 2 minutes, however the traffic signal crossing the Pacific Highway is even worse than this one, with a measured cycle time of ~130 seconds and maximum wait times of 125 seconds! To add insult to injury, the pedestrian traffic signals crossing the Pacific Highway just north and south of Hume Street (at the other end of the station) are completely shut down due to nearby construction works, requiring a long walk to nearby intersections.

How can I contribute traffic signal measurements?

Know of other dangerous crossings near metro stations? Contribute some measurements!

Head to betterintersections.jakecoppinger.com, and follow the Contribute Measurement link under the ‘read more’ menu! There are over 420 intersections with a measurement as of August 2024. Thank you to all those who have contributed measurements so far!

Preliminary analysis of this data is published at https://betterintersections.jakecoppinger.com/analysis, and all the data can be downloaded as a CSV or JSON at https://betterintersections.jakecoppinger.com/about.

The post Why Did the Chicken Catch the Metro? Because It Was Faster Than Crossing the Road… first appeared on Jake Coppinger.

The above poster is an orthographic (ie. no perspective) render of a 3D model of the underground train station.

I created a 3D model by walking around the station holding an iPhone 14 Pro running the 3D Scanner App, combining the segments in the 3d modelling software Blender and rendering it out as an image.

Aren’t the escalator and staircase crossovers a beautiful symmetrical pattern? I had no idea that’s how they were arranged. I think it’s a wonderful way to visualise architecture.

If you would like to download and print your own A3 poster, here are some high resolution copies. All are licensed CC BY-NC 4.0.

• 9921 × 7016, 600dpi JPEG, ~32MB: files.jakecoppinger.com/town-hall-station-poster/town-hall-station-poster-jake-coppinger.jpg
• PDF optimised for computers (RGB, interactive, ~4MB): files.jakecoppinger.com/town-hall-station-poster/town-hall-station-poster-jake-coppinger.pdf
• PDF optimised for printing (CMYK, marks & bleeds, ~50MB): files.jakecoppinger.com/town-hall-station-poster/town-hall-station-poster-jake-coppinger-print.pdf

Enjoy!

Read on if you’d like to learn more about how to create a model of your own local train station or a multi-story building.

Table of contents

Behind the scenes

Overview of method

• install the 3D Scanner App on an iPhone that supports LiDAR (iPhone Pro 12 or later, 2020+ iPad Pro)
• slowly walk around with the app to generate a 3D LiDAR model
• importing the 3D models into Blender
• align the models
• cleaning up any “noise” and chopping off half of some objects
• render the model to an image
• create a nice poster in Adobe InDesign!

Detailed method

Setting up your iPhone

These instructions are similar to those for my blog post on Generating aerial imagery with your iPhone’s LiDAR sensor.

I recommend using the app titled 3d Scanner App as it allows considerable customisation of the scan settings, though other scanning apps like Polycam would also work. It allows finishing a scan and extending later, though this can be buggy. I haven’t had a crash during capture – I’ve had Polycam crash halfway through a large scan losing all data.

Download 3d Scanner App and use the LiDAR Advanced mode. I recommend the using the following options for scanning streets:

• Confidence to low if you need the maximum 5 metre range for the sensor, otherwise set it to medium for a less noisy model
• Range to 5.0 metres
• Masking to None
• Resolution to 50mm (the lowest – for large models like buildings or streets)

In the app settings, make sure to set:

• Units to metric
• GPS can be turned on but likely won’t help you underground!

Capturing the model

Note that any commercial photography in a train station will require paperwork and special permission. Amateur/hobbyist/student use of a hand-held mobile device appears to be permitted in Sydney train stations, just treat it like taking a photo/video for Instagram or Tiktok – don’t photograph people and keep an eye on your surroundings.

The safety precautions are common sense, but have a read. Be careful not to cross over the yellow line when scanning. People will introduce artefacts into the model, so go in off peak or on a weekend to minimise crowds. The resolution and accuracy of the LiDAR scanning is not high enough to present any security concerns (any more than an Instagram photo).

When scanning, walk slowly with a sweeping motion to increase the maximum scanned width. If the area is wide enough to require a grid pattern, follow the same shape as a drone survey (an S-shape with considerable overlap). Not enough overlap or higher speeds mean the linear passes don’t connect correctly due to (I assume) inertial measurement unit drift.

Aligning and cleaning the models

You will likely need to do multiple takes of your desired building, and then combine them together.

Share your models from 3D scanner app as OBJ via Airdrop (or your preferred method), decompress the ZIP file and then import the OBJ into Blender (File -> Import -> Wavefront (.obj)).

Some basic Blender skills come in handy here – it’s not an easy program to use, and I am no expert. If you haven’t used it before I recommend following a beginner blog post or video tutorial. A few specific tips:

• Make liberal use of the numpad preset views: 1 for front on, 3 for side view, 7 for top, and 5 for toggling perspective
  • If you don’t have a numpad you will need to enable numpad emulation, see instructions at https://www.hack-computer.com/post/how-to-emulate-a-third-mouse-button-and-keypad-for-blender
• To remove noise or parts you don’t want, select the object, change into edit mode (tab key), and then change the Viewport Shading to Wireframe (with the globe button in the top right). Dragging with the left mouse button will select areas, or click c to drag a circle to select vertices (with +/- keys enlarging the circle).
  • Changing the shading to Wireframe means that you can select vertices “hiding” behind others that may not be directly visible
• I couldn’t figure out how to disable perspective and get the framing I wanted in a proper render, so I did a Viewport render with the background set to white, Material Preview as the Viewport Shading mode and Toggle X-Ray to remove the grid
  • The background still wasn’t perfectly white even though I set it to be, I had to use levels in Photoshop to get the background #FFFFFF. This may just be an error on my part!

Possible future improvements

• Capturing pointclouds instead of meshes, aligning them in Cloudcompare (I believe there are tools for aligning pointclouds), then either rendering straight to an image or generating a mesh and rendering only faces/normals facing the camera
• Reducing drift in capturing models. This would be algorithm heavy; maybe utilising survey markers or just known positions in a station, using Record3D, exporting sequences of .obj models (1 per frame), then constructing offline.
• A cross section from the north or south would be interesting! (this view is from the west looking east)
• Is it possible to create an accurate model with less takes? This would require less stitching in Blender
• Are there ways to create a full 3D model, then just not render faces/normals that aren’t facing the camera?
  • Better yet, not rendering faces/normals that are less than x degrees incident to the camera to reduce noise for flat surfaces
• How to handle glass surfaces better (LiDAR isn’t great with glass out of the box)
• 3D printing models

Please let me know if you use this as inspiration for modelling stations elsewhere!

Related/further reading

• Catharia O, Richard F, Vignoles H, Véron P, Aoussat A, Segonds F. Smartphone LiDAR Data: A Case Study for Numerisation of Indoor Buildings in Railway Stations. Sensors (Basel). 2023;23(4):1967. Published 2023 Feb 9. doi:10.3390/s23041967: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368448078_Smartphone_LiDAR_Data_A_Case_Study_for_Numerisation_of_Indoor_Buildings_in_Railway_Stations

• Great tips for better 3D scans: https://docs.3dscannerapp.com/

• 3D maps (orthographic projection) of every London Underground station

• https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/maps_of_public_corridors_on_larg
• https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/3d-maps-of-every-underground-station-ab-14630/

The post Subterranean Sydney: A cross-section of Town Hall Station made with iPhone LiDAR first appeared on Jake Coppinger.

It’s open source on Github, however I am no longer hosting it due to server costs.

The web app displays a map side by side with a Marey diagram. When you move your mouse across the horizontal (time) axis of the diagram, the locations of the buses are displayed at that point in time. The colour of the line represents the occupancy (warmer colours -> higher occupancy) of the service.

Sydney Transit Graph uses a Marey diagram to view bus congestion in Sydney – showing the current (and historial) location of every bus.

Clicking on a line on Sydney Transit Graph highlights the position of that particular bus on the map.

The slope of the line indicates how fast the bus is going (distance verses time). A shallow line can be read as bus congestion.

Long headways

A large vertical gap between lines indicate a large distance gap between buses, and a large horizontal gap means a large time gap. Usually these are equally big or small!

In this example, there is a bus heading north-west that doesn’t have a service behind it. More people accumulate at the bus stops in that time, leading to the occupancy of the next bus being higher (orange means higher occupancy). The next bus after that also appears delayed, leading to…

Bus bunching

When the lines are bunched together, there is bus bunching – the phenomenon of multiple buses on the same route arriving at the same time (see the bus bunching Wikipedia article for an explanation on why this occurs)

Why does bus congestion matter?

Less bus congestion results in faster trip times, which in turn reduces labour costs, decreases bus headways (or reduces need for new buses) and improves passenger throughput.

Possible future work

Further analysis that would be interesting would be:

• Correlating congestion hotspots with OpenStreetMap lane data to better inform bus lane implementation policy
• Analysis of pre/post COVID-19 transit patterns
• Including train data in the pipeline (it’s the same API)
• Improve interpolation of routes on the frontend so it’s not just a straight line average between dots (interpolating along the route instead)

I’m not sure if I’ll have the time to get to this, but please let me know if you’re interested in analysis with this tool! I’ve been busy with life and other side projects so I haven’t made updates in a little while.

How it works

The web app is built with vanilla JS (TypeScript), p5.js for the graph, and Mapbox GL JS for the map (which uses OpenStreetMap data).

Data is sourced from Transport for NSW via OpenData. Realtime data is ingested every few seconds via an service running on AWS EC2 to store Protocol Buffer files on AWS S3.

When requested via an API, a service on AWS Lambda retrives these Protocol Buffer files and computes the trip progress and occupancy of every bus in a specified time window.

I adjustably quantise the number of Protocol Buffers requested (and thus the number of results) via looking up available timestamps.

Trip progress is calculated by comparing positions against bus route shapes. These route shapes have been precomputed from GTFS database dumps (via Sqlite) and stored on AWS S3 as JSON.

It’s definitely not the cleanest or most efficient architecture, however I haven’t had the time to make a big refactor recently.

Known issues

• There are some line rendering issues in Safari

Prior art

• Visualizing MBTA Data: An interactive exploration of Boston’s subway systemMike Barry and Brian Card: https://mbtaviz.github.io/

Conclusion

Contributions are very welcome! If you have ideas on a project or analysis I’d love to hear. Feel free to contact me at jake@jakecoppinger.com or leave a comment.

The post Visualising Sydney bus congestion with Marey charts first appeared on Jake Coppinger.

The first piece of rail infrastructure in the Eastern Suburbs since the 1979 Bondi Junction line, the CBD & South East Light Rail received funding in 2012 and started construction in 2014, with the line opening on 14/12/19 (to Randwick).

I undertook a four-year project to document the construction over 6 focus trips at various stages of development, as well as after the opening of the Randwick segment.

The UNSW/Kingsford segment is due to open in March 2020.

The route is about is good at it can get for a transit corridor with bidirectional peak flows of students to UNSW, office workers to the city, and health professionals to the hospital.

That being said I do think it should have been heavy rail. It’s slow, like slowest in the world, 50 minutes Randwick to Circular Quay , 11.16km/h average, slow. Off peak buses run that in 35 min! Chances are they’re running to a “fat” timetable with long station dwell times to judge passenger behaviour, and should be able to get to 40mins end to end, but it’s always going to be slow. The line will be over crush capacity in the near future, with little ability to increase throughput. Trams already run attached together in 67m long monsters to reduce traffic light cycles required.

Was it worth building? While unbearably slow, the stations are literally level with street footpath, making it ridiculously accessible, and it seems to be well used already. I would have rathered a pedestrianised George St, with rapid bus corridor all along Anzac Parade, and built the rumored Maroubra Metro sooner.

Historical context

In the 1950’s Sydney had the largest tram network in the Southern Hemisphere. With the postwar shift in transit planning to the US mindset of prioritising private cars, the state government closed all lines, removed overhead wires overnight, tarred over tracks and burned the trams in Randwick (at the depot north of the racecourse) to ensure they could not run again.

The 1979 Bondi Junction train line was originally planned to continue to Charing Cross, Frenchmans Road, Randwick Junction, University of NSW and Kingsford, however was shortened in 1967 for budget reasons.

Leaked government documents suggest a 2036 Metro line to Randwick, Maroubra Junction & Malabar, which would probably open up the gun range near the national park to development and serve the huge new developments in Maroubra Junction.

Moore Park Tunnel

It would be an amazing cycle route into the city, however the government decided against a foot/cycle path citing safety concerns of it being long and without sightlines around the corner.

Note: It’d be a really bad idea going in the tunnel now. When I shot these there was no rail traffic, the tunnel was fully illuminated and I noted the overhead wires were grounded.

The entire tunnel was built cut and cover. Anzac Parade (and the bike path) was duplicated with a slight curve while the tunnel was dug under the original road, and then traffic was switched back. Note: This isn’t the diverted Anzac Parade, it’s the busway.

Albert Tibby Cotter Bridge

Eastern Tunnel Entrance

Moore Park ripped oven for cut and cover construction. Most of the tunnel had been built at this point, this is the access segment.

Moore Park Cut & Cover

Moore Park Tunnel Eastern Portal

George Street

Probably the best thing to come out of the project in my opinion is the pedestrianisation of George Street. It feels a lot more lively. There are people eating on the street, buskers playing without road noise, children playing. There was a lot of opposition at the start due to changing bus routes, and the huge amount of disruption to local businesses. I think the result is similar to Martin Place; it’s unimaginable to go back now.

George St & Market St

Surry Hills

Devonshire St and Crown St

Devonshire St & Bourke St

Circular Quay

The CQ junction is beautiful and functional. Interchange between light rail, heavy rail, bus and ferry is possible with a short walk at street level. The large public square (closed to cars) means crowding isn’t usually an issue.

It’s really slow (at least for now) on the George Street section, but this shot highlights just how accessible (for those in wheelchairs, the elderly and the lazy) the trams are from the street footway.

Other Infrastructure

From what I could guess after watching closely, the accelerator/throttle chooses a speed and then software chooses the acceleration curve to apply.

17/12/19

Similar to the door cameras used in Sydney Trains

At Town Hall station you’ll see the trams dropping their pantographs as they transition to battery/switched third rail

Shot 15/12/19 at 17mm, thanks Dean for letting me borrow your lens!

My most trusted designer friend reckons these copper roofed stations will date really quick!

Shot 3/11/19 from Harry Seidler’s Grosvenor Place during Sydney Open.

Originally the Randwick terminus would be in High Cross Park, however after a campaign to save the park TfNSW and Randwick Council moved the terminus to High Street just past the Prince of Wales Hospital.

A hidden electricity substation was still built in the park with a concrete surface covering it

Shot 17/12/19. Prior to the opening, Transport for NSW’s coordinator general Marg Prendergast was concerned about pedestrian behaviour around the trams leading to near misses. This intersection east of Central Station is possibly the busiest pedestrian intersection in Sydney. The addition of a cycle path and extremely narrow island between the road and the light rail crossings, along with the lights not being coordinated between those crossings, leads to large crows with nowhere to go when the trams are coming. In my perfect world the street would be closed to cars, but it’s a pretty major bus thoroughfare due to the large railyards blocking access further south.

The post Construction of the Sydney CBD & South East Light Rail first appeared on Jake Coppinger.