Tag: Metro

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Business News Transportation

Metro Has Begun Installing New 24-Hour Ticketing Kiosks Throughout City

Government Square Ticketing Kiosk [Travis Estell]

The Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority (SORTA) has made a new push to expand ticket and stored-value cards by adding new locations and options for riders to make their purchases.

The first announcement was that Metro would begin selling passes at Cincinnati City Hall, starting April 1, inside the city’s Treasury Department in Room 202. The sales office is open Monday through Friday from 8:30am to 4:30pm, and will offer Zone 1 and 2 Metro 30-day rolling passes, $20 stored-value cards and Metro/TANK passes.

The new location marks the twelfth sales office for Metro including three others Downtown and locations in Walnut Hills, Tri-County, Western Hills, North College Hill, Over-the-Rhine, Roselawn, College Hill and Avondale.

The region’s largest transit agency also installed its first ticket vending machine. The new kiosk is located at Government Square and is available for use 24 hours a day. The machine only accepts cash and credit cards, and offers Metro 30-day rolling passes including Metro/TANK passes, and $10, $20 and $30 stored-value cards.

According to Metro officials, this is the first of more ticketing machines to come with the stations in the Uptown Transit District to be the next locations to get them. Future additions, officials say, will be chosen based on the amount of ridership at given transit hubs throughout the system.

The new sales options come after Metro introduced a new electronic fare payment system in 2011. The new modern options of payment and ticketing proved so popular that after just one year, Metro officials cited the updated technology as one of the primary drivers for its ridership growth.

While the new initiatives show progress for the 41-year-old transit agency, they also show just how far behind the times it is.

The best fare payment systems in the world are tap and go systems that allow riders to charge their cards with whatever value they would like, thus eliminating any confusion of needing specific cards for certain time periods or values. Such cards also allow for perfect interoperability between various modes of transport including bus, rail, ferry, bikeshare and taxi.

In other instances, like Seoul’s T-Money Card and London’s Oyster Card, the systems even allow for the tap and go payment systems to accept credit cards and bank cards enabled with the technology – totally eliminating any barrier for potential riders wary of signing up for a new card they may not use all that often.

Similar to the fare payment cards, the new ticketing machines are outdated on arrival. Transit agencies throughout the United States that have had ticketing machines for years, like Chicago and New York, are currently in the process of transitioning to touch screen kiosks that are more user-friendly.

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Up To Speed

One Transit App to Rule Them All

One Transit App to Rule Them All

As more people are turning to smartphones to help guide them around cities, app makers are looking into ways to create a transit app that not only provides mass transit directions but also information about the nearest car sharing service and taxi services. This kind of app would serve as a “one-stop shop” for urbanites looking to ditch the expense of owning an automobile and rely entirely on transportation alternatives. More from the Atlantic Cities:

What all of these apps, including taxis, are essentially trying to convince users that they can get to and from work, run errands, meet people for lunch, get to appointments, and do all their other daily tasks without having their own car. RideScout is betting that aggregating all these new transportation options in one place is the best way to make that case to users — which is a win for all transportation disrupters. “If people aren’t pumping $50 into a tank when they fill up, they can transfer that money to taxis, public transportation, and these other options,” Kopser says. “When people make the decision to leave their car at home, we all win — the roads are less clogged, there is less smog, and money is staying in the local economy.”

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News Transportation

Expert Panel to Discuss Bus Rapid Transit, Bikeway Planning in Cincinnati on 4/19

The Cincinnati region is rethinking the way it moves people and goods throughout the region with major investments and studies taking place on bus rapid transit, bikeways, and multi-modal corridors. The Cincinnati region will evolve, for better or worse, depending on how these investments are planned.

To help further this discussion, we are proud to announce a new partnership between the Niehoff Urban Studio and UrbanCincy that will focus on the work produced by students at the interdisciplinary design center.

The exhibits produced by the students will be judged by those in attendance at the planned semi-annual events, and followed by an expert panel discussion. The best student project will then be profiled on UrbanCincy.

Metropolis & Mobility: Bus Rapid Transit and Bikeways

The first event of the new partnership, Metropolis & Mobility: Bus Rapid Transit and Bikeways, will take place on Friday, April 19, and will include discussion about how multi-modal transportation concepts can be applied throughout Cincinnati.

The expert panel will include Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority CEO Terry Garcia-Crews, Cincinnati Bike Center manager Jared Arter, and Parsons Brinckerhoff transportation planner Tim Reynolds.

“Bus rapid transit is a new form of urban transport, already in place in many American cities that can be modeled for Cincinnati to put us one step closer to a much-needed rapid regional transit system,” explained Niehoff Urban Studio director Frank Russell.

Russell goes on to say that the discussion regarding bikeway planning will focus on three new proposals for the Mill Creek Greenway, Western Riverfront Trail, and the Wasson Way.

The event is free and open to the public, and will include an open house session from 5pm to 6pm where visitors can view the student exhibits and mingle with the panel, and the panel discussion itself from 6pm to 7:30pm.

There will be a cash bar and complimentary light snacks provided for those in attendance.

The Niehoff Urban Studio is located at 2728 Vine Street in Corryville. The event is easily accessible via Metro bus service, and $1 parking will be available at the 2704 parking structure accessible from Vine Street.

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Business News Transportation

Nate Wessel aiming to change the way Cincinnati does maps

Maps are used in our everyday lives to help us navigate our cities, perform research, and visualize spatial data, but Nate Wessel has attempted to change the way Cincinnatians view such information.

In June 2011, Wessel started a modest Kickstarter campaign that would raise money to print a transit frequency map he had developed. Instead of using the typical approach to developing a bus system map, Wessel adjusted colors and line weights according to the frequency of service along each bus route.


Cincinnati Frequent Transit Map (Day Time). Image provided by Nate Wessel.

While he simplified the system map, he also added critical wayfinding information such as neighborhood business districts, parks, neighborhoods and natural landscape features.

“The maps used currently will put the 38X on the same visual level as the 17, but one runs three times a day in each direction, and the other runs almost 100 times a day in each direction,” Wessel explained. “In no way does the map indicate any more value for one over the other, but my map gives people an approximate idea of how long you’ll need to wait, in addition to how frequent the buses come and where they go.”

Wessel grew up in Northeast Ohio and said that his first experience with transit was biking a mile to an unmarked bus stop in Canton. Since then he has studied urban planning at the University of Cincinnati (UC) and worked with the U.S. Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

It was during his time at UC, when he realized something needed to change with the way transit information is visually presented.

“A friend of mine from China was basically saying that he felt trapped in his apartment, and didn’t know anything beyond campus and thought you could take transit, but didn’t know where it went,” recalled Wessel. “He lived in a transit-rich area, but many people like him didn’t know the correct routes to take to the right places, even easily accessible places like downtown.”


Hamilton County property values by square foot. Image provided by Nate Wessel.

The initial Kickstarter campaign raised far more money that Wessel was anticipated, and he was able to print and distribute 30,000 copies of his Cincinnati Transit Frequency Map. The map is now also featured on Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority’s (SORTA) website, but beyond that has not made significant inroads with regional transportation agencies.

Six months after Wessel distributed his new map, SORTA released a new regional transit map, for which they paid $20,000, that lacked the intuitive display and added information presented on the Cincinnati Transit Frequency Map.

While both SORTA and the Transit Authority of Northern Kentucky (TANK) were originally cooperative, and even contributed financially to the Kickstarter campaign, the follow-up, Wessel says, has been a bit disappointing.

Since the original release and distribution of the frequency map, Wessel has continued to improve upon it while also developing a separate night-time map, and one that focuses on center city transit service. To support those efforts, he launched a second Kickstarter campaign which funded the production of 20,000 additional maps in September 2012.

Wessel, however, has not limited himself solely to transit maps. He has released a number of maps this year that have highlighted property value data in Hamilton County, provided an exhaustive analysis of SORTA’s new transit plan, explained the theory of bus bunching, and is in the midst of an eight-part series critiquing the Cincinnati Streetcar project.

In the future he hopes to do a comprehensive map for bicycling to replace the existing one produced by the OKI Regional Council of Governments (OKI).

“In some way it’s a common interest in Cincinnati that I share with a lot of people that see the city not doing things as awesome as compared to other places, so I kind of want to do that with information about transit and cartography,” Wessel explained. “I also want people to make informed decisions about transit and planning in general, and I think that putting as much information out there in an attractive and useful manner helps.”

Nate Wessel was the winner of UrbanCincy’s first featured profile contest at the September 2012 URBANexchange. If you have a great idea we should know about, please contact the us at urbancincy@gmail.com. URBANexchange events are held on the first Wednesday of every month at the Moerlein Lager House.

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Arts & Entertainment News Transportation

Prize to be awarded for best idea at improving urban mobility at September’s URBANexchange

Due to the Reds home schedule, we had to adjust our regularly planned meeting time for this month’s URBANexchange at the Moerlein Lager House. Instead of being held on the first Tuesday of the month, we will be holding it on Thursday, September 13 from 5pm to 7:30pm.

This month we will be getting together just as we have been, but to jumpstart the conversation we thought we would give it a transit theme. We hope you come to discuss ideas that could help improve urban mobility.


Attendees enjoy the Moerlein Lager House and conversation at the August 2012 URBANexchange. Photograph by John Yung for UrbanCincy.

All of the ideas submitted will be reviewed by the UrbanCincy team. The person with the winning submission will then have their idea profiled in an UrbanCincy.com feature story. Will we also do a drawing, from the submitted entries, for a free Metro monthly bus pass courtesy of the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority (SORTA).

The themed transit discussion corresponds with the Metropolis & Mobility Seminar taking place at the University of Cincinnati, and we have confirmed that Paul Grether, Metro’s Manager of Rail Services, will be among those in attendance.

Other notable transportation experts are also expected to be confirmed within the coming days, so stay tuned for those announcements as we get closer to the event date.

Those interested in attending are encouraged to stop by the biergarten at the Moerlein Lager House (map) anytime between 5pm and 7:30pm. There is no entry fee, but we do strongly encourage you to support our host establishment by purchasing food or drink while you are there.

Due to scheduled events at the Moerlein Lager House, it is expected to be a bit more crowded than usual. As a result, we recommend that you arrive early so that we can reserve additional space as is necessary.