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By admin, on January 23rd, 2012 I’m not going to repeat the excellent Guest Post review of the book Human Transit – other than to note from what I’ve read of the book so far I agree with pretty much everything in the review. It is a very good book. It is a book that should be widely read by those involved in public transport planning, as well as by anyone who find themselves interested by public transport, how it works and how it could work better.
One part of the book that I found particularly interesting, perhaps because it fits with some of the critiques I’ve made of Auckland’s bus network in previous posts (for example: here and here) relates to the question of how much emphasis we should put on peak travel against all day travel. The question occupies chapter 6 of Human Transit, which also provides some useful insights into this issue.
At a basic level, most public transport has times of peak demand which correspond with the beginning and end of the working day. Human Transit notes that the peaked systems (those with the biggest difference between peak and off-peak demand) are almost always systems serving low-density suburban areas – where driving all day is easy and it’s only congestion (or parking costs downtown) which encourage people onto public transport during peak hours. Auckland’s North Shore is a pretty good example of a highly ‘peaked’ public transport market, with very strong demand for public transport to the CBD during peak hours (to avoid congestion and having to pay for parking) but pretty weak demand outside the peak because the public transport system isn’t particularly useful for trips other than those heading to the CBD.
There’s nothing particularly new about all this. Where life becomes interesting is when we start to look at the cost-effectiveness of adding services at different times of the day, or alternatively where we decide to cut service if we need to save money. Human Transit tells us an interesting story in this regards:
In the early 1980s, when I was an undergraduate intern in the planning department of Portland’s TriMet, I remember a day when the manager of scheduling was tearing his hair out in frustration. The agency faced budget cuts and was having to cut service, but the general manager (the chief executive officer of the agency) had instructed them to cut only outside the peak. “Don’t cut the peak,” he had said. “The peak is our bread and butter!”
But as it turned out, there was no way to protect the peak service from cuts and still save any money. They could cut midday service, but this would turn all-day shifts into peak-only shifts, which would make those shifts more expensive to run. This effect was so pronounced that it cancelled out most of the cost savings from the service cut.
There are many reasons why peak services are more expensive to run than off-peak services. Labour is one matter, getting the buses and trains back to the depot when empty (those dreaded “not in service buses”) is another, but perhaps the most significant is the cost of the bus or train fleet that must be owned to provide that ‘peak of the peak’ service frequency. Increasing off-peak frequency generally only requires a bit more fuel and staff cost (and may not even require that if staff are heading back to the depot anyway, or have contracts requiring minimum shift times). Increasing peak frequency typically requires buying more vehicles (be they buses or trains), hiring more drivers, running more ‘out of service’ kilometres and entering into increasingly complex and inefficient rostering procedures. The book picks up on this issue:
Fleet size depends on how many vehicles you need at once, and that, of course, depends on your peak service, not your all-day pattern. Many transit agencies must purchase, license, store and maintain a vehicle that makes only one round trip per day. That’s a huge inefficiency compared to an all-day operation whose fleet may work 10 to 20 hours each day.
I think it was Paul Mees’s book “Transport for Suburbia” which compares Vancouver’s West Coast Express peak-only commuter train with the Skytrain system on this issue. On average, each West Coast Express train has its seats filled around twice a day – one trip in during the morning and one trip out during the evening. In contrast, each Skytrain has every seat filled something like 50 times a day because they operate at high frequencies all day long, providing service for far more trips than just commuting ones. That makes the Skytrain system incredibly efficient to run, even if overall it may not seem as “crowded” during very peak times as the West Coast Express train.
What the book goes on to highlight is that if we are looking to improve the cost-effectiveness of our system, we shouldn’t focus on cutting services outside the peak (even if the buses or trains are fairly empty), but rather look at services during the peak that aren’t at maximum capacity:
…if you see a transit vehicle running nearly empty during the peak period and in the peak commute direction, you may be seeing some actual waste. Suppose that a commuter express bus, doing a long run from a distant suburb into the city, carries only fifteen people, less than half a seated load. If the transit agency is looking at its cost-effectiveness fairly, this situation should look much much worse than a bus with fifteen people at noon, running on an all-day, two-way line. For this one commuter express run, the agency has spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the bus, thousands more for the land on which to store it, and thousands per year to maintain and operate it, including penalty rates for the driver who works a brutal schedule and is kept from spending time with family most days – all to serve only fifteen people!
In this previous post, I compared bus frequency across a number of central isthmus routes: 
Perhaps the most interesting observation of the above (along with Dominion Road’s excellent inter-peak frequencies) is how service levels drop away dramatically after 6pm, which encourages people to travel home during the evening peak. A thorough assessment of whether each and every one of the peak hour services is needed may end up freeing up resources to run a huge number of inter-peak and evening services – at the cost of just a few peak time buses.
The 15 minute frequency all the time of the Outer Link bus is a pretty extreme example of an ‘un-peaked’ service, but is a key element of the route’s success. We are able to afford to run a good frequency service around much of the inner isthmus, even on a Sunday night, because we don’t have the extremely high costs of additional peak services (aside from a couple, to ensure the route can keep to its timetable in peak hour traffic). While those Sunday night buses might generally be empty, over time the guaranteed frequency of the service means that people will learn to trust it and rely on it – influencing land-use patterns, decisions people make about where to live and decisions people make about how many cars to own. The Outer Link’s constant timetable and its regular frequency are all made possible by squeezing the peak a little bit harder (lower frequencies at peak time on some services in the area than there used to be), so we have achieved a really high-quality service at relatively low cost. I suspect though that some additional peak time services, for capacity reasons, will be required inevitably.
This is not to suggest that we should go cutting peak time services ‘willy nilly’, because – after all – the TriMet General Manager was correct in saying that serving the peak is the ‘bread and butter’ of public transport, to an extent. However, it’s worth keeping in mind the cost differences of running peak and off-peak services, so you don’t get quite so grumpy next time you see a predominantly empty off-peak bus, or have to squeeze onto a peak time bus. Even though such an outcome looks inefficient, looks can be deceiving.
By Guest Post, on January 22nd, 2012 This is a Guest Post by Matt. (Yes a lot of Matts comment on this blog, this is by “handlebars Matt”).
Human Transit is Jarrett Walker’s blog, which he calls the professional blog of a public transit planning consultant. Human Transit – How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives is his book distilling his blog, and the essence of his philosophy of public transport planning. The book, and his views are based on where he’s lived and worked (Portland, Sydney, Vancouver amongst them) and his examples are from West Coast North America and Australasia, and therefore will not be so remote from readers in Auckland and Wellington. He even acknowledges that some people call it public transport, and in some cities they even drive on the left. He’s worked in various cities and hints at some of the arguments and debates that he’s witnessed over the years. Whatever his frustrations may have been, he wished that everyone was arguing from the same place with the same language and the same understanding of the basics. This is a book about those basics.
It’s a short book, and an easy read (which I finished today, appropriately on a train). You’ll not struggle with convoluted language. It uses simple and clear prose. This is a bit of a blessing since this is essentially a book about the geometry of transit, a topic which could be as dry as Weeties in a milk drought, but here it isn’t. I think anyone could read this. And I think a lot of people should. It would be nice if more people understood the trade-offs that a city makes when they plan and fund their network. You’d hope this was known like the backs of hands by people who do the actual planning. One look at the average city map (like Maxx’s Southern Suburbs map) shows that there is a lot of room for taking on more of the book’s key messages.
Some of his topics will be familiar to readers of his blog – legibility of maps, and frequent network maps is important, and the ease of making connections (with a short spiel on smartcards and integrated ticketing) facilitating a grid of rapid services which give the rider the freedom of personal mobility to move around their city. Coverage in a network can be given by local, meandering services, but ridership is increased by frequent connected services linking the major nodes of the city in a grid. In a flat city with many nodes of activity this would be a rectangular grid, but in a city like Auckland with a strong CBD, and it’s unique topography, a spider’s web network of rapid services would fit (that’s my observation and not one from the book). It is making the same point as Paul Mees in his book A Very Public Solution (and more recently, Transport for Suburbia); a network of frequent interlinked services is possible in dispersed cities (like Australian, US, Canadian and NZ cities) even with low overall density if the local density around the stops is higher.
Like his blog the book is technology neutral. He doesn’t care whether trains are better than buses. He cares about whether they have their own right of way, whether their crossings are at grade or not, the frequency of service, and the span of those services. He talks about planning for all day products, and not necessarily concentrating on the peaks. The book does ignore technology, but there are aspects of technology that are relevant in regards to capacity, e.g. passengers per hour (train lines can carry more passengers than a dedicated bus lane perhaps) and in some ways technologies aren’t solving the same problems. Replacing the Wellington Cable Car with a bus for instance isn’t possible as some technologies have different capabilities. Somehow, interesting as they are, I think those kind of discussions would have got in the way of the lessons that are in the book.
Another thing missing perhaps was much talk of the stations and stops themselves, other than to say they must respect the passengers, and be safe and pleasant places. There was only passing mention of bicycle and car park and rides and kiss ‘n rides. Again maybe this is my bugbear and is a detail left for elsewhere.
Frequent readers of Human Transit, or other urban transit blogs may think they know it all already. You probably do, but still read this book. Seeing the rules of transit planning distilled down to simple heuristics, and understanding that some things (like coverage and ridership) are tradeoffs, all in the one place may be useful to you. Lessons learned for me are the language of describing the different delays that a service may encounter and the “be on the way” rule. If you’re planning a passenger generator (like a university) don’t build it on a cul-de-sac or on top of a hill. (He mentions the currently in the news Simon Fraser University in Vancouver in regards to this). Another example of his “be on the way” rule was the dreams unfulfilled of Peter Calthorpe designed Laguna West south of Sacramento. It had me breaking out Calthorpe’s The Next American Metropolis and checking it out on Google Maps. His example of Fresno, California left me scratching my head though. 6-8 lane boulevards are just not the New Zealand experience.
All up this book is a practical vision, working inside political realities, where a city can intensify development opportunities, by choosing the geometry and frequency of its services, that result in more efficient public transport opportunities that give people true freedom to have the mobility of their own cities. It is a very human philosophy and should enable us to share a language to ask for what we want.
For Auckland if the political reality is a central government that is not going to come to the party on rail improvements then what lessons could we learn from this book about how we could have a frequent grid? For all NZ cities how do we get bus priority and, where useful, buses in their own dedicated lanes? We often accuse the central government of “being dumb”, but how, faced with that reality, could we be smarter? This book should help.
By admin, on January 4th, 2012 An article in the Sydney Morning Herald highlights a key step that public transport system both in Australia and New Zealand need to take in order to both improve their usefulness and the cost-effectiveness of their operation: by encouraging (rather than discouraging) transfers, connections or interchanges (whatever terminology you want to use) between services. The article is informed by Jarrett Walker’s new book: Human Transit (in part itself based on his blog).
The article discusses the difficulty that people find when trying to use public transport to get from one inner suburban centre to another – without having to go through the enormous hassle of travelling all the way to the CBD and back out again:
It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that a hypothetical Sydney resident – let’s call her Jane – might head out for a drink in Taylor Square and want to meet up with friends the same night in Newtown. How should Jane get there?
Jane could drive or catch a cab. But she’s had a couple and hasn’t reached that point in life where she’s comfortable throwing money away on short cab trips. She can’t cycle because she’s been drinking. So she will use public transport.
Jane’s best bet is the 352 bus, which runs direct from Taylor Square and Oxford Street to King Street, Newtown, via Crown Street and Cleveland Street.
But the trouble with the 352 is it comes only every 20 minutes. And it stops just after 6pm on weekdays.
Another option is to catch a city-bound bus down Oxford Street and change to a train or a Newtown-bound bus from the CBD. (If Jane gets on a bus that goes past Central, she shouldn’t freak out; she can make this change at Railway Square.)
But now the volume of information Jane needs to make this short trip is starting to build up.
She would also need to know that most Newtown-bound buses run down Castlereagh Street on their way out of the city, so she’d need to walk to Castlereagh Street after getting off at, perhaps, Park Street or Elizabeth Street to make this connection.
Or, she could wait on George Street for the other Newtown-bound bus, the M30.
Or, she could not bother with the five-kilometre trip and just meet her friends another time.
Substitute Taylor Square and Newtown for Ponsonby and Kingsland and you’ll find yourself in a fairly similar predicament in Auckland. You could catch the Inner Link along Ponsonby Road and Karangahape Road to around the corner with Symonds Street, then fight your way across that intersection, dig your way through a million different bus stops on the Symonds Street overbridge to find either a New North Road or a Sandringham Road bus – and then for your troubles get penalised by having to pay two fares even if your trip length is actually pretty similar to a journey between Midtown and Kingsland – a one stage fare.
And, by Auckland’s standards, that’s a pretty easy transfer involving quite high frequency routes and the pretty easy to understand Inner Link.
The article goes on to note that our initial response to these kinds of situations would be to look at providing direct services, but this comes with its drawbacks:
But the solution, from Walker’s perspective, is not to do the obvious thing and put on more direct buses connecting the two points, or more 352s.
This is how governments have tended to solve transport problems in Sydney. As demand has grown, governments have met the need by adding extra bus routes through the suburbs.
Most of these routes run from their suburban origins right into the CBD.
But what this bias towards a radial bus network has left us with is the sorry irony we have at the moment: the city centre is teeming with public transport – all those buses – but they are so clogged they are of little use to anyone.
Walker’s solution is for governments to embrace what they have often been loathe to touch: encouraging connections, or compelling passengers to change from one bus or train to another.
This is where the logic becomes counter-intuitive. If you want to build good public transport links between two locations, the solution is not necessarily to put on more direct links between the two locations. Because in planning for public transport, there is usually some trade-off between the frequency with which a service comes and how close it can get you to your destination.
You can once again substitute Sydney for Auckland here. Our city centre is slowly but surely getting clogged up with buses. Trips such as inbound Northern Express services take as long to travel the last 500m of their journey as they do to travel the whole length of the Northern Busway proper. Outer Link buses clearly take an age to get through the inner city – meaning that they’re increasingly unreliable at peak times. Yet we keep running more and more buses downtown, even when they compete with the rail network we’re spending billions on and even when they aren’t particularly necessary. Yet all those buses often come but a few times a day on any particular route, making them pretty useless and impossible to understand for anyone other than the hardened commuter.
The tradeoff between frequency and transfers mentioned in the article is remarkably similar to the points that I’ve been making about having more services transfer to rail or b.line bus at key points like Panmure, Onehunga and Manukau. Substitute in a few of these Auckland suburbs for what’s said below:
All those 3-something buses on Oxford Street, for instance, represent the legacy of transport planners meeting the needs of particular locations in the eastern suburbs by putting on direct services between those locations and the city.
But could there be a better way?
What if they didn’t all continue down Oxford Street into the city? What if, instead, say, the 394 from La Perouse turned around on getting to Maroubra Junction?
If you were travelling from La Perouse to the city, the disadvantage would be that you would have to transfer at Maroubra.
But the advantage, the plus side of the trade-off, might be that services could leave La Perouse every seven minutes outside of peak hour, rather than every 15 minutes.
Or, and this is the logic of Walker’s book, those extra buses could also be used to run grid-like routes that did not connect to the city. These could include routes running along the eastern suburbs from Bondi to Maroubra. Or more routes running from the inner east to the inner west.
Jane on Oxford Street, meanwhile, would benefit from not being confronted with such a confusing variety of services entering the city.
There is clearly a tradeoff here, but it is the benefits of a simpler network with higher frequencies being traded against having to transfer between services. In the Auckland situation, using the rail network means that our benefits also include a much faster journey from places like Panmure, Manukau and Onehunga than would be possible on the bus. Sadly, much of Auckland’s street network doesn’t quite lend itself to the ‘grid’ service pattern that Jarrett Walker’s book (building on what Paul Mees has also said previously about The Network Effect) discusses.
In Auckland, for some reason we like to ignore what every overseas city has done when it comes to transport matters. Things like fixing our bus network, having railway stations used by many thousands of people her hour, looking after the rail network (until recently) for some reason often seem impossibly difficult in Auckland – even though many many other cities around the world have come up with solutions to these exact same issues. The article highlights San Francisco as a city that has put a lot of effort into creating a more sensible bus network in recent years. I’ve often highlighted Vancouver as another (it manages over three times the number of per capita PT trips as Auckland, but has a rail network not much more extensive than ours).
It seems that many of the issues faced by both our bus network and Sydney’s are very similar. In a logical world, we would look to work with Sydney on how both cities can improve their networks and learn from overseas success stories. Key to that is for both cities to ensure that people are encouraged to transfer between services: to make sure that they’re not financially penalised for something that’s already annoying, to make sure that they don’t have to wait long at all for a connecting service and to ensure that the physical process of transfering is made as easy as possible. Like Sydney, we need to embrace the transfer.
By admin, on December 1st, 2011 Nelson Street and Fanshawe Street are pretty horrific roads to try and cross as a pedestrian – largely due to the high speeds that drivers travel at along them. You’re effectively stuck at trying to find one of the (very rare) signalised pedestrian crossings, or taking your life into your own hands by sprinting across when it looks clear.
I’ve amusingly thought that one good way of raising enough money to build the City Rail Link would be to place permanent speed cameras near the top of Nelson Street and just after the Beaumont Street intersection for eastbound cars along Fanshawe Street. You’d certainly make an absolute killing!
One of the primary reasons why cars travel along these streets so quickly is because all the cues are telling drivers that they’re basically still on the motorway. Take a look at the road-markings on Fanshawe Street: Three wide lanes with the “bumpy dots” (I’m sure they have a technical name) separating them. Exactly what you’d see on the motorway.
As for signage, head along Fanshawe Street towards the city a bit more and – once again – you pretty much find the type of sign that you’d see on the motorway: Big overhead gantry, hard median between traffic heading each way, very wide lanes. Everything’s telling the driver’s subconscious that they’re still on the motorway.
Nelson Street is pretty similar with its signage, although it hasn’t (yet) had the motorway lane markings: Further down the hill there’s another overhead gantry – solely there to direct people to Sky City and its carpark. Once again, decked out just like a motorway sign.
Subtle cues are important when defining the type of street environment you’re attempting to create. The most recent post on Human Transit touches on this issue, when discussing street signage in San Francisco:
The motorist faces a stopsign. That means they should be looking at the crosswalk in front of them, and the other traffic approaching. What’s more, they should be stopped, or stopping, which means that their focal length should be short; they don’t need a sign that’s meant to be read at high speeds. Yet high speed is implied by the green sign’s large typesize, high position, and “freeway font”; the green sign has the same color, font, and typesize typically used on California freeways….
…Then there’s the question of focal height. A sign placed very high, like the green sign here, is pulling the driver’s eye away from the ground plane, which is where the squishable pedestrians and cyclists are. Extreme type size also encourages reading the sign from further away, which means focusing further away, which means a greater risk of not seeing the pedestrian in front of you.
In short, the message of the green sign (“read me from a distance, like you’re on a freeway, driving fast”) contradicts the message of the stopsign and crosswalks.
Motorists choose their speed and focal length based on a range of signals, not just explicit commands and prohibitions. These signs may be appropriate on high speed multi-lane streets, where you may need to change lanes to turn once you’ve recognized a cross-street. But what are they doing at stopsigns?
The signage and road-markings on Nelson Street and Fanshawe Street are telling drivers that they should be driving fast, that they’re basically on a defacto motorway and needn’t bother looking out for anything but whether the car in front of them is braking.
This is fine on a real motorway, but not along streets in our city centre. Changing the signs and the street markings would be really cheap, but help to minimise the reinforcement of these streets as defacto motorways, which they clearly shouldn’t be.
By admin, on November 30th, 2011 Human Transit has an excellently detailed analysis of public transport operating costs, which comes from Jarrett Walker’s upcoming book that’s bound to end up being a bible for public transport planners around the world. Each year we spend close to $150 million subsidising public transport in Auckland, so it’s utterly essential for us to ensure we’re running the most efficient system possible and making best use of that money. We need to have a good idea about how PT operating costs work and also look at where we can save money without reducing service quality/quantity. This is an issue I touched upon in this recent post.
Jarrett notes that there are a number of components to operating costs:
- Time-based costs vary based on how many transit vehicles are operating and for how long. The dominant time-based cost is the wages and benefits of the driver and any other on-board employees, which we pay for by the hour.
- Distance-based costs vary with the odometer reading of the transit vehicle. As in cars, most of transit’s maintenance and fuel costs are distance-based.
- Fleet-based costs vary with the number of transit vehicles owned. Fleet size is based on the number of vehicles needed to run the most intensive part of the service day, typically the commute period which transit planners call the peak. Fleet size drives some maintenance cost, but it main impact is the cost of the vehicles themselves, and of the facilities needed to store and maintain them.
- Finally, there may be some administrative costs unrelated to any of these, though in fact most administration costs are roughly proportional to the other measures of size.
One thing to keep in mind, when thinking about operating costs, is that getting an additional vehicle on the road/track at peak times costs a lot more than getting that vehicle in service outside the peak – because of ‘fleet-based costs’, and to a lesser extent ‘ time based costs’ (need more staff on expensive/messy split shifts).
Generally the biggest section of operating costs is spent on labour, especially for bus based systems where you have fewer passengers per employee. Labour is obviously a time-based cost, and if we can reduce time-based costs (like shifting to a ticketing system for our trains that doesn’t require a huge number of on-board staff) then we can save a huge chunk of our operating costs. I’m looking forward to seeing our per-trip rail subsidy plunging over the next few years as we shift to the new ticketing system. It is time-based labour costs which I suspect will end up providing the ‘tipping point’ for North Shore rail becoming financially viable: it will become hugely expensive to run hundreds and hundreds of buses from the North Shore to the city at peak times in the future. A driverless metro, like what Nick suggested in this post, would have massively lower operating costs than continuing to add and add buses.
Another key consideration in operating costs is what Jarrett calls “lumpiness” – where trip length is just above or just below allowing a logical number of vehicles you need to operate the service:
Lumpiness has important consequences when designing lower-frequency networks, such as local bus routes in low-density suburbs. In these cases, good planning designs routes to be of a certain length, so that they will run an efficient cycle. If our network of local routes is meant to all run every 30 minutes, for example, we try to design routes that cycle in 29 or 59 minutes, but not 31 or 61.
A small deterioration in speed can cause sudden big changes in operating cost. If we’re running 30-minute frequencies on a route that cycles in 29 minutes, that will require one vehicle. But if for some reason the line slows down just a little, so that it now cycles in 31 minutes, we have to add a whole additional vehicle and driver, doubling the cost of running the line. A mere 7% increase in the cycle time has become a 100% increase in operating cost. In that case, a planner may try to redesign the route to make it shorter.
The Western Line is a classic example of this, with a 53 minute running time between Britomart and Swanson allowing 15 minute frequencies with 9 trains and three and a half minute layovers at each end – but, the running time to Waitakere station of 58 minutes being just a bit too tight. This means an extra train is needed for Saturday services compared to what would otherwise be required, rather a waste of money and probably partly explaining why Saturday train frequencies on the Western Line are still a pathetic hourly service.
Of course one way to increase frequencies at no cost is to increase the speed of a particular service. If we think about Northern Express buses, because the busway allows them to travel so quickly we can get pretty high frequencies out of many fewer buses than would be required if each service took a lot longer to complete its route. This is the magic of bus lanes and other bus priority measures: not only do they make the trip faster and therefore more attractive for users (probably increasing farebox recovery rates and requiring a lower subsidy), but also the faster trip means that it takes fewer buses and fewer drivers to maintain a certain level of frequency.
To finish, Jarrett highlights perhaps the three most important aspects of thinking about operating costs when designing networks:
- Every increase in frequency is an increase in service hours, and thus in operating cost. If you want to increase service on a line from every 30 minutes to every 15 minutes, that will double the cost of running the line. This is why most transit agencies would like their service to be more frequent, but have trouble affording that frequency.
- Every increase in average speed is a savings in service hours, and thus in operating cost. If we can cut the cycle time of a line by 25%, that cuts its operating cost by 25%. This is why transit agencies are always trying to control delay.
- At low frequencies, operating cost is lumpy. Because you can’t run a fraction of a driver, small differences in speed or frequency can create large differences in operating cost, if the overall frequency is low.
As I noted at the start of the post, it’s critical for us to think deeply about these issues if we want to improve our PT network at relatively low cost.
By admin, on October 12th, 2011 Jarrett Walker’s Human Transit blog has a post up about the study which compares Auckland to 13 other somewhat similar cities that I posted about yesterday. The post also usefully links to a full copy of the report. Jarrett helped put together the study, which compares many elements of Auckland’s public transport system to systems in Wellington, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Edmonton, Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver, Honolulu, Portland and Seattle, coming to the general conclusion that on a lot of measures Auckland falls dead last.
The most common measure of “PT success”, and the measure which Auckland performs abysmally on, is that of per capita annual trips. That is, on average how many trips on buses, trains and ferries does each Aucklander take a year? On this measurement, Auckland has 44, with the next worst being Adelaide on 59, compared to the highest which is Ottawa on 168.
Jarrett’s post though, makes the good point that the usefulness of comparator city studies has its limited if the focus is solely on simple measurements like modeshare and PT trips per-capita:
Peer comparisons also carry the false assumption that everyone wants to be the same kind of city, and is therefore working to the same kind of goals. Low mode share for transit may mean your transit system is failing, but it may mean that it’s not trying for mode share, or at least that it has other objectives or constraints that prevent it from focusing on that goal. It may just mean that your city has different values. It may mean the city strikes a different balance between cycling, transit, and walking based on its own geography.
Helpfully this study goes much beyond the simple measurement, also looking at matters such as operating expenses, revenue per passenger, revenue per service kilometre, and service quality measurements. How Auckland scores on these measurements helps explain why we seem to do so poorly when it comes to per capita patronage. Service quantity and quality is low while fares are very high on a per kilometre basis. While this information is all very interesting, I think that for comparator city studies like this to be truly useful, they need to be extended to look at two key additional matters:
- What benefits do cities with higher per capita patronage enjoy compared to cities like Auckland with very low per-capita patronage?
- What specific measures did successful cities take in the past that led to significant improvements (to patronage, cost-effectiveness, service quality etc.)?
I elaborate on the usefulness of the first point in my comment on Human Transit:
It would however be potentially even more useful for studies like this to go to the next level and start looking at the issue of “what does this actually mean for the city?” Per capita annual trips is a really good measure of a system’s quality, but what does that mean for the city?
For example, we know from this study that Ottawa has 168 trips per capita a year, compared to Auckland’s 44. What does this mean for Ottawa? Do residents spend far less of their money on transport, enabling a higher quality of living? Is much less of the city given over to providing road-space, allowing for greater development densities? Does the city have a more thriving and vibrant downtown – leading to better economic productivity? Does it have lower greenhouse gas emissions per capita? Has it been able to get away with spending far less on expensive road-based transport infrastructure over the past few decades? And so forth.
Politically it seems like the main justification for public transport investment is, at the moment, its ability to reduce peak hour traffic congestion. As I have calculated previously, it certainly does a pretty good job at this, but in order for a better understanding of the benefits generated by having 168 trips per capita per year, rather than 44, it would be great to dig a bit deeper into how cities like Ottawa really take advantage of the higher patronage statistics. Because, after all, high public transport use is the means to a better city, not the ends in itself.
Looking at the second issue above, the study doesn’t really look at this matter too much – although some factors of the Canadian cities (which perform incredibly well overall) are detailed, which probably provide us with a bit of an idea why they support so well:
Service quantity:
The quantity of service appears to be a significant factor in explaining why Canadian cities do better than US cities. Canadian cities have roughly 20-30% more service per capita, so this on its own should be likely to increase patronage, although perhaps not to a proportional extent.
Auckland, it should be noted, is in the same low range as the US cities in service quantity per capita and considerably below all the other Australian/NZ cities. This probably reflects decades in which public transport has been given a relatively low priority.
Wellington, by contrast, ranks near the top on service quantity, which probably reflects the city’s relatively long history as a dense and physically constrained centre with permanent public transport infrastructure (trolleybuses as well as rail). Wellington ranks generally among Canadian cities in the quantity of its service, though below the Canadian peers in patronage.
Urban form:
All four of the Canadian cities exhibit a high degree of centralisation of activity in the CBD and inner city. Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa in particular all have strong CBDs and unusually high CBD densities given their locations. These high CBD densities have led to high parking prices by North American (though not Australasian) standards.
Vancouver’s CBD is famous for its exceptional concentration of high-rise residential accomodation at a range of price points. While the CBD does have a business district, as a whole the CBD has more residents than jobs, yielding a slight net out-commute. This unusual feature of Vancouver helps to provide for remarkably balanced loadings on major public transport corridors into and out of the CBD, yielding much better utilisation of service overall than would be expected in a single-centered city.
CBDs and other major centres rely on rapid transit, which means service running at high frequency and high speed, thus yielding high capacity. Rapid transit may be bus, rail, or ferry. What matters is not just the quantity of rapid transit, or the technology used to provide it, but how well it fits with the shape and demand-patterns of the city.
Beyond the CBD, the overall fit of development to public transport is important. Vancouver’s suburbs have built remarkable quantities of high-rise residential development immediately adjacent to rapid transit stations, generating permanent markets for these attractive services. In general, there is a high level of fit between the suburban development pattern and the rapid transit that serves it.
Finally, density overall tends to be slightly higher in Canadian cities than in comparable US ones, though density in the form that matters to public transport usage is impossible to summarise in a citywide statistic.
Major PT trip attractors:
Cities dominated by government employment usually achieve good public transport patronage. Governments are especially likely to encourage employees to use public transport, and tend to locate in centralised high density districts, usually parts of CBDs, where public transport is prominent. In Ottawa, the dominance of the Canadian government as an employer is obviously a factor in the strong performance, and this is also a factor in Wellington. Australian major cities are all state capitals, but most major US cities are not. Of the three US cities listed, only Honolulu is a state capital.
CBD-based universities also tend to be major generators of PT patronage. Cities with both universities and national/state governments located in the CBD, such as Melbourne and Ottawa, are likely to have an advantage on this score.
It would be particularly interesting to track this over time. To work out when patronage fell and rose in these cities and try to understand what was the cause for this change, particularly to work out what was successful in boosting PT usage.
By admin, on July 14th, 2011 A few days back the Human Transit blog superbly outlined the basics of designing bus routes – using Halifax in Nova Scotia as the example. There are some excellent “basics” outlined in that post: the need to identify choke points, the need to have good “anchors” at each end of your route, the benefits of bouncing routes off at right-angles once you reach the edge of a grid system and so forth. What seemed perhaps most obvious of all is how each route is designed to achieve a number of different things – not just to drag various people from around the suburbs and take them into the city before turning around and doing the same thing. The first route the blog post looks at is perhaps the best example of this:
While the whole peninsula is fairly high density, the main patronage attractors are within the various shaded areas – education facilities, employment zones, hospitals and so forth. The red circles represent the chokepoints on entering the island and the “T” represents transfer points. What I like about this route is how – let’s say during the morning peak – there would be strong flows of passengers both ways along the route – because it doesn’t simply terminate in the middle of town and then head out again, it passes through the city. With transfer points at both ends of the route you would have a lot of passengers on the bus right to the end of the line (which is good for efficiency) and because it keeps to a very low number of streets it’s a simple and easily understood route.
You would struggle to find too many routes like this in Auckland. Most bus routes seem to very much “peter out” at their suburban terminus, while through-routes are extremely rare as well. This means that our system has huge inefficiencies, in the form of empty buses close to the end of their runs, and then by having to run many ‘empties’ from the city centre terminus back to the start of the route.
When I wrote this post about the possibility of using the Wellesley Street corridor for most North Shore buses, there was a lot of interesting discussion in the comments about sending some of those North Shore buses further south. The 881 service from the North Shore to Newmarket via the University and Hospital is apparently very popular – and many have thought that it might make sense for the Northern Express to continue to Newmarket. Personally I view the NEX as part of the “Rapid Transit Network” and see no point in duplicating RTNs between Britomart and Newmarket (we have the train line of course), so I would do things another way.
My route, as shown below, basically brings two routes together: the main ‘non-busway’ QTN route on the North Shore and the future Manukau Road b.line service between Onehunga and the city.
 If we start with the ends of the routes, we have two obvious major transfer points: Onehunga in the south and Constellation bus station in the north. As I outlined in my blog post about Mangere bus routes, I see most of them feeding into Onehunga in the long run – allowing transfers onto train for the fastest Onehunga-downtown trips – or onto a Manukau Road b.line for intermediary trips. Manukau Road is a major arterial that clearly requires a high frequency bus corridor in just the same way as Dominion Rd, Mt Eden Road and others do.
In the north, while the busway will obviously be used for most trips heading to or from the city, there will similarly always be the need for a service linking together all the town centres and various trip generators on the North Shore. So if we’re going to need both these routes – primarily not for fast trips to the city centre from outlying areas but for trips along the route, for trips that may occur outside the peaks, for trips in the reverse peak direction and so forth – why not join these two routes up so we offer even more options? The route above would allow one to travel from Takapuna to Epsom, or from Royal Oak to Milford – but without the inefficiency that a normal ‘everywhere-to-everywhere’ style of service pattern tends to generate. Run this route at 10 minute frequencies off-peak and you create a really strong north-south bus corridor across the whole city that can be useful for a vast number of different trips.
I suppose that on the down side it would be a fairly long route and with that comes potential for unreliability. But because there would hopefully be enough patronage generated by the route (in both directions and right to the ends of it) it should be able to support high enough frequencies that make unreliability less of an issue.
This is quite a dramatically different way to operate a bus route in Auckland. Do people think it would work? It seems critical to me that it has a fast route through the city centre – so people travelling from Takapuna to Epsom don’t spend half their lives stuck at traffic lights downtown – but it seems potentially a pretty efficient way to provide for a lot of different potential trip options.
By admin, on July 11th, 2011 The NZ Herald is running a story today based on a study of Auckland’s most congested areas. According to the study, the worst congestion in Auckland is for those trying to make the trip between the city centre and Takapuna:
Morning traffic queues back from the Northern Motorway’s Esmonde Rd interchange mean Takapuna commuters face a harder slog to work for the distance travelled than other Aucklanders.
Navigation equipment supplier Tom Tom has found that it takes an average of 18 minutes longer to drive from Takapuna to Auckland in the morning travel peak than in free-flowing traffic, when the trip takes just over 10 minutes.
That puts Takapuna ahead of all other surveyed Auckland suburbs in terms of delays in proportion to trip distances, according to statistics gleaned from users of its GPS-based equipment.
But the return journey in the evening peak takes just 17 minutes, making it the fifth easiest of the 24 suburbs surveyed to get home to.
I must say this result took me a little by surprise. Takapuna seems to have pretty good transport options and while at peak times it may take longer to travel than at off-peak times, the trip is still fairly short.
What this story highlights is what I think is a weakness in measuring congestion in the way the study did – a point that the Human Transit blog elaborated upon quite well in this recent post. The criticism is probably best explained by the simple diagram below: I suppose this highlights why I have concerns about using ‘congestion’ as the main measure of how good a city’s transport system is. Under the methodology used, if a city was gridlocked 24/7 then it would actually get a really fantastically low congestion score – because there would be no difference between travel times during the peak and outside the peak.
Other measurements, like ‘trip time reliability’ or ‘average speed’ would seem more obvious measurements of ‘mobility’, while ‘percentage of city within an “x” minute trip” would seem the best way to measure accessibility. One does wonder whether many of the poor transport decisions we make are the result of obsessing over ‘congestion’ rather than the more fundamental transport issues of mobility and accessibility. Takapuna certainly seems to me as a part of the city with pretty good mobility and accessibility, even if its roads get clogged up for a couple of hours each day.
By admin, on June 12th, 2011 The Human Transit blog has a good post about “dead running”, which effectively is the time buses spend not in service. Jarrett notes the two general circumstances that create dead running:
All transit vehicles must travel between their operating bases, where they are stored and maintained, and the beginning and endpoints of service. Rail services usually have bases directly on the rail line, but may still have to dead-run through the rail system to reach their trip’s starting point. Bus bases can be anywhere. The location of bases (called depots in Britain/Australia, often divisions in the US) is a major issue. It’s often worth spending capital money to save operating money, and careful investments in bases, reducing dead running, can do that.
Transit agencies that run extensive one-way express incur massive amounts of dead running. Brisbane, for example, is a very, very centralized city, with a downtown far out of scale to anything else. That means a huge demand for one-way trips into downtown in the morning and out in the evening. All those services that are needed in only one direction usually have to get back in the other direction so that the driver’s shift can end where it began. (The other alternative is to pay the driver to hang around downtown all day, which is even more expensive.)
The first of these causes is pretty unavoidable. The clever location of bus (or train) depots can reduce the percentage of time the vehicles spend getting from the depot to the start of their run. For example, the investment in stabling facilities for trains at Henderson, central Auckland and Papakura is likely to pay off incredibly quickly – as all Auckland’s trains no longer need to be stored centrally at Otahuhu and then driven ages each morning to start their runs at Waitakere, Swanson, Papakura or Pukekohe.
The second reason for dead running is less unavoidable – or at least with a more clever running of services it could probably be reduced. Human transit says this about ways of potentially reducing the time services spend ‘dead running:
Can dead running be better addressed by a rigorous review of whether these one-way peak services can be combined, replaced by links to rail, or otherwise made more efficient? Given the higher cost of dead running for one-way peaked service, could some of it be converted into two-way, all-day service at less expense than it would first appear?
One big advantage of the kind of feeder bus based service pattern that I discussed in this recent blog post is that the amount of dead running should be avoided, because in general the buses would be operating much shorter routes. Generally this is likely to mean that they’re closer to their depot for most of their run (as depots are generally located in outer parts of the city), plus the time taken for peak time services to ‘return to base’ would also be greatly reduced.
Another way you can reduce dead running is by operating services with patronage attractors at each end, so that you have good two-way flows at peak times and therefore can keep your buses (or trains) in service for a greater proportion of the time. My hope is that the Manukau Station could potentially operate in this manner – with the shopping area and the tertiary education centre acting as big patronage attractions for southbound rail passengers during the morning peak – utilising the existing resources more effectively. It’s also why many of my suggested routes for improving bus services to Mangere didn’t end in random places – they all terminated at Onehunga, Otahuhu or Manukau City.
There are many ways we can improve the efficiency of Auckland’s public transport network. Structuring the routes so that the amount of dead running is minimised is an important part of that process.
By admin, on May 6th, 2011 A good post on Human Transit highlights the usefulness of improving bus signage – and in particular the importance of naming routes by the main road they pass along, rather than by their destiation. A good example of an effective bus sign (by that I mean the signage on the front of the bus) is the 38 Geary Boulevard service in San Francisco:
As Jarrett says in his post, this signage is great because it lets you know the bus runs along Geary Boulevard, while also saying that somewhere near the end of the route is V.A. Hospital. This compared to in many other cities (like Auckland) where it seems most of the signage relates to the place where the bus ends up:
Many other cities, including Sydney and Seattle, habitually turn it upside down, so on the 38 above they might have said “38 VA HOSPITAL via Geary.” A Sydney sign might read “380 DOVER BCH via Oxford St.” I find that less intuitive, because the path the bus follows is usually more useful than the final destination in determining if the service is useful to you. Still, it’s understandable in Sydney where street names change so frequently that it’s hard to associate bus routes with them, as “38 GEARY” does.
Auckland is a classic example of the latter situation. The 267 bus has “Lynfield” all over its signs, while the 258 says “Blockhouse Bay” loud and clear. If you didn’t know Auckland’s bus system well, you might be somewhat unlikely to think that they predominantly follow the same route – as they pass along Dominion Road. Same with New North Road buses - we have buses that say “Rosebank Road”, “Patiki Road” and “Henderson” - even though for all these services they actually only spend a tiny fraction of their time along the parts highlighted in big bold letters on the front of the bus.
One of the biggest complaints I have about Auckland’s bus system is that it’s overly complex and difficult to understand. Changing the way we name routes, so that we sell all the New North Road buses as “New North Road – to Rosebank” (for the 211) or “New North Road – to Patiki Rd” (for the 212) seems like an obvious way to at least make the system seem a lot simpler and easier to understand. It wouldn’t cost a thing to do either – just a bit of reprogramming on the buses and on the real time information signs.
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