#ohioi

Stone & Silence

People love to talk about it. Maybe that's because it's so much easier to talk about than experience. But now there is a body of research that is all about the experience of public transit through the eyes of, get this, the customer.

Recently a friend, Meredith Joy (Yay Bikes and How We Roll) shared with me Zen in the Art of Travel Behavior: Using Visual Ethnography to Understand the Transit Experience. It's a body of research from UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies that uses photos, travel logs, and notes along the way to document the transit experience Las Angeles.

In Columbus, and in other mid-sized midwestern towns, citizens are quick to compare local transit to the experiences in larger cities, and in a not-so-hot way. What I like about this ethnography is that it's research from a big city, and yet when you click on the experiences, you see that some transit experiences, both positive and negative, are universal.

Take the entry entitled, "Big Blue Bus 12/Big Blue Bus 5" for example. The caption reads "the bus hasn't arrived yet still waiting."

And yet, in the very next slide he makes a simple observation; transit brings people together. People that we would never meet otherwise, with interesting lives and stories.