Week 5 Studio: Designing the Transit Spine

Route the district's transit spine — where the line runs, how often, and how many residents end up genuinely within reach of it.

22 March 2027

What the spine has to do#

The bus runs from Denton Hill to Barrow Fields, named for its ends so a rider can hold the route in mind. Its six stops are Denton Hill, Marle Row, Pelling Cross, Halstead, Wickstead and Barrow Fields. The terminus sits at the foot of Denton Hill, not on it.

The reference alignment puts 62% of sampled residents within 400 m walking distance along the street network. That leaves 38% outside it. The line must improve access for the district it actually reaches and make the cost of that access visible.

Before you draw#

Open <student ID>-w04 at 08:00 and bring Week 4’s core/edge land-value pair, 48 and 19. Bring two alignments on tracing: the canonical straight bus and one loop comparator, each with a manually timed round trip and stop count. Know the formula: vehicles required = round-trip time ÷ headway, rounded up.

The first ten minutes are reading-in. Record the Week 4 close before drawing a line; otherwise later growth can be mistaken for an effect of the service.

The two alignments#

Cost the straight Pelling Street run and the Denton Hill loop in four columns: round-trip minutes, fleet at a common headway, residents within 400 m walking distance, and projected riders per vehicle-hour. The straight line takes 24 minutes and six stops. The loop takes 38 minutes and eleven. Both are defensible, but every student builds the straight line so the Week 6 comparison starts from one service.

The hill-foot terminus leaves upper Denton Hill outside the catchment. Extending the line improves coverage and increases its round trip, which can add a whole vehicle to hold the headway.

Use Marle Row to test stop spacing. It boards about forty riders in the reference peak hour while roughly nine hundred ride past it. Removing it saves about 25 seconds for the through riders and lengthens some walks by as much as 200 m. Keep or drop it, but record the arithmetic. A stop-by-stop decision that removes every stop has asked the wrong question of the line.

Setting the headway#

The manually timed round trip is 24 minutes. A 6-minute calculated headway requires four vehicles: 24 ÷ 6 = 4. The issued worksheet allocates ₡4,800/month to the service and ₡1,100/month in fares, leaving a net subsidy of ₡3,700. That ₡4,800 is four vehicles at the lecture deck’s ₡1,150 line rate plus ₡200 of depot overhead the line rate does not carry; quote the worksheet total, not the per-vehicle multiple. These are worksheet allocations, not fields in the line detail. The line panel supplies vehicles, passengers and usage.

Inside 600 m straight-line distance of Pelling Cross and Halstead, step mixed housing and medium density down towards the edge. This zoning band is not the 400 m network-distance test. It is the main lever on ridership and therefore on the revenue side of a cost that otherwise stays fixed.

The readings#

The settled reference row reaches 9,400 residents, +₡400/month, a 5.4-minute timed trip, transit share 11%, happiness 73% and land value 34. At Pelling Cross, count the queue at 08:00 and 08:10 from the same camera. A growing queue can indicate demand or insufficient fleet; it is not automatically success.

Fiscal performance moved the wrong way: the balance fell from +₡2,100 to +₡400. Growth partly offsets the subsidy but does not make the service self-funding. A plan claiming all three metrics improved has not been read carefully.

What you leave with#

Preserve <student ID>-w05 and its off-machine copy for 29 March. Leave with the three required screenshots, the photographed rejected alignment, and the line’s daily passengers, four-vehicle fleet and 6-minute headway written into your process log. Those are Week 6’s before-figures.