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Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
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What I do is I organize information.
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I'm a graphic designer.
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Professionally, I try to make sense
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often of things that don't make much sense themselves.
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So my father might not understand what it is that I do for a living.
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His part of my ancestry has been farmers.
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He's part of this ethnic minority called the Pontic Greeks.
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They lived in Asia Minor and fled to Greece after a genocide
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about a hundred years ago.
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And ever since that, migration has somewhat been a theme in my family.
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My father moved to Germany, studied there and married,
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and as a result, I now have this half-German brain,
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with all the analytical thinking and that slightly dorky demeanor
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that come with that.
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And of course it meant that I was a foreigner in both countries,
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and that of course made it pretty easy for me to migrate as well,
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in good family tradition, if you like.
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But of course, most journeys that we undertake from day to day
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are within a city.
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And, especially if you know the city,
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getting from A to B may seem pretty obvious, right?
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But the question is, why is it obvious?
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How do we know where we're going?
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So I washed up on a Dublin ferry port about 12 years ago,
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a professional foreigner, if you like,
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and I'm sure you've all had this experience before, yeah?
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You arrive in a new city,
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and your brain is trying to make sense of this new place.
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Once you find your base, your home,
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you start to build this cognitive map of your environment.
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It's essentially this virtual map that only exists in your brain.
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All animal species do it,
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even though we all use slightly different tools.
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Us humans, of course, we don't move around marking our territory by scent, like dogs.
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We don't run around emitting ultrasonic squeaks, like bats.
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We just don't do that,
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although a night in the Temple Bar district can get pretty wild.
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(Laughter)
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No, we do two important things to make a place our own.
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First, we move along linear routes.
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Typically, we find a main street,
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and this main street becomes a linear strip map in our minds.
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But our mind keeps it pretty simple, yeah?
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Every street is generally perceived as a straight line,
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and we kind of ignore the little twists and turns that the streets make.
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When we do, however, make a turn into a side street,
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our mind tends to adjust that turn to a 90-degree angle.
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This of course makes for some funny moments
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when you're in some old city layout
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that follows some sort of circular city logic, yeah?
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Maybe you've had that experience as well.
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Let's say you're on some spot on a side street
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that projects from a main cathedral square,
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and you want to get to another point on a side street just like that.
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The cognitive map in your mind may tell you,
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"Aris, go back to the main cathedral square,
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take a 90-degree turn and walk down that other side street."
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But somehow you feel adventurous that day, and you suddenly discover
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that the two spots were actually only a single building apart.
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Now, I don't know about you,
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but I always feel like I find this wormhole
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or this inter-dimensional portal.
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(Laughter)
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So we move along linear routes
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and our mind straightens streets and perceives turns as 90-degree angles.
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The second thing that we do to make a place our own
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is we attach meaning and emotions to the things
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that we see along those lines.
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If you go to the Irish countryside and you ask an old lady for directions,
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brace yourself for some elaborate Irish storytelling
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about all the landmarks, yeah?
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She'll tell you the pub where her sister used to work,
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and "... go past that church where I got married," that kind of thing.
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So we fill our cognitive maps with these markers of meaning.
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What's more, we abstract repeat patterns and recognize them.
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We recognize them by the experiences and we abstract them into symbols.
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And of course, we're all capable of understanding these symbols.
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(Laughter)
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What's more, we're all capable of understanding the cognitive maps,
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and you are all capable of creating these cognitive maps yourselves.
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So next time, when you want to tell your friend how to get to your place,
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you grab a beermat, grab a napkin, and you just observe yourself
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create this awesome piece of communication design.
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It's got straight lines.
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It's got 90-degree corners.
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You might add little symbols along the way.
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And when you look at what you've just drawn,
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you realize it does not resemble a street map.
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If you were to put an actual street map on top of what you've just drawn,
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you'd realize your streets and the distances -- they'd be way off.
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No, what you've just drawn is more like a diagram or a schematic.
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It's a visual construct of lines, dots, letters,
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designed in the language of our brains.
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So it's no big surprise
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that the big information-design icon of the last century --
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the pinnacle of showing everybody how to get from A to B,
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the London Underground map --
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was not designed by a cartographer or a city planner;
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it was designed by an engineering draftsman.
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In the 1930s,
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Harry Beck applied the principles of schematic diagram design
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and changed the way public transport maps are designed forever.
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Now the very key to the success of this map
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is in the omission of less important information
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and in the extreme simplification.
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So, straightened streets, corners of 90 and 45 degrees,
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but also the extreme geographic distortion in that map.
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If you were to look at the actual locations of these stations,
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you'd see they're very different.
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But this is all for the clarity of the public Tube map.
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If you, say, wanted to get from Regent's Park station
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to Great Portland Street,
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the Tube map would tell you:
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take the Tube, go to Baker Street, change over, take another Tube.
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Of course, what you don't know is that the two stations
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are only about a hundred meters apart.
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Now we've reached the subject of public transport,
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and public transport here in Dublin
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is a somewhat touchy subject.
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(Laughter)
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For everybody who does not know the public transport here in Dublin,
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essentially, we have this system of local buses that grew with the city.
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For every outskirt that was added, there was another bus route added,
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running from the outskirt all the way to the city center.
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And as these local buses approach the city center,
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they all run side by side and converge in pretty much one main street.
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So when I stepped off the boat 12 years ago,
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I tried to make sense of that.
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Because exploring a city on foot only gets you so far.
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But when you explore a foreign and new public transport system,
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you will build a cognitive map in your mind in pretty much the same way.
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Typically, you choose yourself a rapid transport route,
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and in your mind, this route is perceived as a straight line.
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And like a pearl necklace,
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all the stations and stops are nicely and neatly aligned along the line.
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And only then you start to discover some local bus routes
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that would fill in the gaps,
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and that allow for those wormhole, inter-dimensional portal shortcuts.
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So I tried to make sense, and when I arrived,
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I was looking for some information leaflets
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that would help me crack this system and understand it,
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and I found those brochures.
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(Laughter)
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They were not geographically distorted.
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They had a lot of omission of information,
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but unfortunately, the wrong information.
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Say, in the city center --
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there were never actually any lines that showed the routes.
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(Laughter)
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There are actually not even any stations with names.
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(Laughter)
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Now, the maps of Dublin transport have gotten better,
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and after I finished the project, they got a good bit better,
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but still no station names, still no routes.
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So, being naive, and being half-German, I decided,
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"Aris, why don't you build your own map?"
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So that's what I did.
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I researched how each and every bus route moved through the city, nice and logical,
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every bus route a separate line.
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I plotted it into my own map of Dublin,
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and in the city center ...
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I got a nice spaghetti plate.
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(Laughter)
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Now, this is a bit of a mess,
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so I decided, of course,
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"You're going to apply the rules of schematic design,"
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cleaning up the corridors,
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widening the streets where there were loads of buses
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and making the streets at straight, 90-degree corners, 45-degree corners
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or fractions of that,
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and filled it in with the bus routes.
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And I built this city center bus map of the system,
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how it was five years ago.
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I'll zoom in again so that you get the full impact
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of the quays and Westmoreland Street.
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(Laughter)
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Now I can proudly say --
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(Applause)
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I can proudly say, as a public transport map,
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this diagram is an utter failure.
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(Laughter)
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Except, probably, in one aspect:
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I now had a great visual representation
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of just how clogged up and overrun the city center really was.
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Now, call me old-fashioned,
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but I think a public transport route map should have lines,
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because that's what they are, yeah?
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They're little pieces of string that wrap their way
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through the city center or through the city.
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If you will, the Greek guy inside of me feels if I don't get a line,
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it's like entering the labyrinth of the Minotaur
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without having Ariadne giving you the string to find your way.
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So the outcome of my academic research,
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loads of questionnaires, case studies and looking at a lot of maps,
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was that a lot of the problems and shortcomings
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of the public transport system here in Dublin
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was the lack of a coherent public transport map --
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a simplified, coherent public transport map --
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because I think this is the crucial step to understanding
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a public transport network on a physical level,
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but it's also the crucial step to make a public transport network mappable
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on a visual level.
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So I teamed up with a gentleman called James Leahy,
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a civil engineer and a recent master's graduate
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of the Sustainable Development program at DIT,
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and together we drafted the simplified model network,
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which I could then go ahead and visualize.
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So here's what we did.
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We distributed these rapid-transport corridors throughout the city center,
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and extended them into the outskirts.
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Rapid, because we wanted them to be served by rapid-transport vehicles.
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They would get exclusive road use, where possible,
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and it would be high-quantity, high-quality transport.
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James wanted to use bus rapid transport for that,
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rather than light rail.
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For me, it was important
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that the vehicles that would run on those rapid transport corridors
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would be visibly distinguishable from local buses on the street.
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Now we could take out all the local buses
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that ran alongside those rapid transport means.
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Any gaps that appeared in the outskirts were filled again.
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So, in other words, if there was a street in an outskirt
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where there had been a bus, we put a bus back in,
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only now these buses wouldn't run all the way to the city center,
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but connect to the nearest rapid-transport mode,
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one of these thick lines over there.
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So the rest was merely a couple of months of work,
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and a couple of fights with my girlfriend,
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of our place constantly being clogged up with maps,
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and the outcome, one of the outcomes,
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was this map of the Greater Dublin area.
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I'll zoom in a little bit.
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This map only shows the rapid transport connections, no local bus,
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very much in the "metro map" style that was so successful in London,
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and that since has been exported to so many other major cities,
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and therefore is the language that we should use
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for public transport maps.
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What's also important is, with a simplified network like this,
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it now would become possible for me to tackle the ultimate challenge
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and make a public transport map for the city center,
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one where I wouldn't just show rapid transport connections,
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but also all the local bus routes, streets and the likes,
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and this is what a map like this could look like.
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I'll zoom in a little bit.
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In this map, I'm including each transport mode,
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so rapid transport, bus, DART, tram and the likes.
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Each individual route is represented by a separate line.
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The map shows each and every station,
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each and every station name,