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By Stu Donovan, on March 4th, 2013 Are you passionate about cities? Want to know more about public transport?
If so then you might be interested in an upcoming event being held at the University of Auckland: “Get Connected – Futures in Public Transport” (NB: The link takes you to the Facebook page for the event, where you can RSVP). On the night (19 March) you will get the opportunity to hear from the following speakers:
- Jarrett Walker - who has 20 years experience working on public transport projects across the Asia-Pacific, especially the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand. FYI Jarrett was the lead consultant on the recent re-design of Auckland’s PT network. Jarrett currently resides in Portland but – as mentioned in this earlier post - he has a soft-spot for Auckland, which he describes as:
“… New Zealand’s largest city, the focal point of an agrarian nation’s ambivalence about urban life. If you’re a young North American who wonders what Seattle was like 40 years ago when I was a tyke — before Microsoft, Amazon, and Starbucks — Auckland’s your answer. To a visitor accustomed to North American or European levels of civic vanity, it often seems that Auckland still doesn’t know how beautiful it is. That’s always an attractive feature, in cities as in people, even though (or perhaps because) it can’t possibly last.”
- Anthony Cross – who is employed by Auckland Transport in the enviable position of “Public Transport Network Planning Manager” (aka “PTNPM”). Anthony was raised in Auckland but spent much of his early professional career working in Wellington. After helping the Capital’s public transport network become one of the most efficient and effective in Australasia, he was kidnapped by our oompa loompas and brought to Auckland. We managed to convince him to stay after promising him a job title that sounded important but was difficult to say.
- Joshua Arbury – since founding the Auckland Transport Blog (I can hear the cries of gleeful appreciation resonate across Auckland) Josh has upped sticks and moved onto greener – in the money sense – transport pastures at the Auckland Council, where he now occupies the position of Principal Transport Planner. My oompa loopma spies at Council inform me Josh can speak knowledgeably and with ease on any transport and land use topic, particularly the transport sections of the Auckland Plan. And that he loves his daughters.
- Pippa Mitchell – last but certainly not least we have Pippa. In her career Pippa has worked on a range of complex and fascinating projects, such as the roll-out of real-time information at bus stops. She has also worked on some not so interesting projects (haven’t we all!), such as bus stop re-locations. I would expect Pippa to inject some level-headed reality into the evening’s discourse, because we don’t want anyone to finish the evening having listened to Jarrett, Anthony, and Josh and come away thinking that it’s all drugs, sex, and rock-n-roll in this industry.
That’s not all. In between these distinguished and knowledgeable speakers you will also get to hear from our very own Patrick Reynolds; a man who is known for his enthusiasm, beautiful photos, and occasional words of random wisdom.
You know that if you give enough monkeys enough time banging away on a keyboard then chances are they will eventually churn out a word-for-word version of Hamlet? Well the same goes for Patrick when he’s talking about transport – eventually, and after much gnashing of teeth, he will say things that are both intelligent and witty. If for nothing else, you should come along to the evening and listen to Patrick (NB: Patrick I do love you).
Here’s the event flyer if you’re interested (kudos to Kent); please remember to RSVP through the Facebook event page for catering purposes. Important notes:
- For those not in Auckland we will try to video the event so it can subsequently be uploaded on onto the blog; and
- The point of the event is to get people (especially students) thinking about PT careers. It is not to debate the PT situation in Auckland.
P.P.s You will note that some of the people in the photo below are illuminated. This represents current peak hour bus mode share, i.e. a little less than half of people travelling into the city in peak periods arrive by bus.
By Mr Anderson, on February 19th, 2013 There’s a lot I agree with in Stu’s post yesterday about being careful how we look to grow the public transport market and focusing on low-hanging fruit before trying to convince rich people to give up the BMW’s by building super-expensive light-rail lines everywhere. However, there’s an interesting area where I’m not sure I do agree with Stu – and that is in relation to what emphasis we should place on making public transport faster. Here’s what Stu says:
Before wrapping this up, I think it’s also worth mentioning that some aspects of this discussion are related to an earlier post on generational differences. That is, because most of our transport decision makers (including myself) fall into the 19-65 age-group there is a natural tendency for us to propose solutions that address our needs, rather than the needs of our users. This can result, for example, in a undue focus on high-speed services. For their part, PT users seem to not value speed – or more accurately “travel-time” – as much as other attributes, such as frequency, reliability, simplicity, and affordability.
There are some really important discussions and debates which fall out of this issue and come down to the fundamental reasons why people choose either one mode of transport or another. Should we focus on improving speed of service if it comes at the cost of reduced convenience of stops (such as spacing bus stops further apart)? How important are fast services compared to simplicity – like the debate over whether there should be express bus services or not? How important is increasing speed, if it comes at quite a high cost and therefore might require an increase in fares to reflect that investment (or an increase in rates or petrol taxes or foregone investment elsewhere)?
Stu’s arguments are very similar to those made by Jarrett Walker in the book Human Transit.In Human Transit Jarrett critiques much of the focus on speed on the ground that it’s generally people who mainly drive (and therefore understand the concept of improving speed) thinking that public transport works exactly the same way. Of course public transport is more complex in the sense that other issues like reliability and frequency matter a lot as well. Along with other, more difficult to quantify matters such as simplicity and ease of understanding of a PT network, quality of waiting facilities and so forth.
Perhaps what’s really key here is to focus on improving public transport speed as actually meaning improving the time it takes to get from your door to where you’re going, including wait times, including transfer times, including how long it takes you to walk to the stop and so on. In this sense, the actual speed your vehicle goes is going to have a fairly tiny influence on the speed of your entire trip (i.e. how long it takes to get from A to B). What’s going to matter a lot more are things like:
- How frequently does the service come? (i.e. if I turn up randomly how long am I likely to have to wait)
- How long does it take for people to board the service? (this matters a lot for buses when they’re stopping to pick up passengers all the time)
- Does the service get stuck in traffic congestion or does it have a dedicated lane?
- Does the service have to wait at traffic lights all the time or is there a clever pre-emptive phasing system?
- Does the service take a straight line from A to B or does it go all over the place down every back street imaginable?
At risk of falling into the trap that Stu outlines above, it is the excruciatingly long time that public transport takes for most non-commuting trips which puts me off using it for pretty much anything other than getting to work. Even for getting to work, catching the bus is far slower than driving would be (probably at least twice the time), but as I don’t want to shell out for parking each day I catch the bus.
By contrast, in cities where public transport seems to be used for a wide variety of trips every little piece of the system seems dedicated to making your trip time as short as possible. Frequencies are high, dedicated infrastructure is provided to separate the service from congestion (whether that be bus lanes or rail infrastructure), routes are straight, traffic lights turn green when the bus/tram approach them and – yes – the services are fast. In a successful PT system the weighting given to all these competing factors (frequency vs speed, simplicity vs speed etc.) varies by the area being looked at. In inner suburbs frequency and simplicity are perhaps more important than sheer physical speed because a greater proportion of the trip is likely to be waiting for the bus/train to turn up. For longer trips speed becomes more important because you’re on the service for much longer.
I’m guessing that perhaps Stu’s position is not as different to mine as you might think – because it comes down to defining what is actually meant by “speed”. In my mind we do need to make public transport a lot faster. However the most important ways to do that in the vast majority of cases won’t be through making the vehicles travel quicker when they’re at top speed – instead it’ll be things like better frequencies, straighter bus routes, faster boarding times and the most important of all…
…A WHOLE HEAP MORE BUS LANES!
By Peter M, on January 11th, 2013 There was a good post and fascinating comments thread on Human Transit recently about driverless cars and what impact they may have on transport planning in the future. Jarrett Walker blogged that he can’t really see driverless cars being as revolutionary as some people think, for a few reasons:
- Many of the benefits from driverless cars (such as increased capacity of the road system) only arise when there has been a complete changeover from current ‘driven’ cars and it’s difficult to see a pathway towards that eventual outcome.
- Driverless cars will still (although potentially to a lesser degree) suffer from the ‘space extensive’ nature of individualised transport options so may not be that useful for very high demand routes.
- If driverless technology becomes feasible then why wouldn’t there be a huge shift to driverless buses as well, which could dramatically lower the cost of public transport provision.
He concludes:
Sure, driverless taxis might replace many lower-ridership bus lines, but wouldn’t buses become driverless at the same time? In such a future, wouldn’t any fair pricing make these driverless buses much cheaper to use where volumes are high? Wouldn’t there be a future of shared vehicles of various sizes, many engaged in what we would recognize as public transit? As with all things PRT, I notice a frequent slipperiness in explanations of it; I’m not sure, at each moment, whether we’re talking about something that prevents you from having to ride with strangers (the core pitch of “Personal” rapid transit) as opposed to just a more efficient means of providing public transit, i.e. a service that welcomes the need to ride with strangers as the key to its efficient use of both money and space.
As I noted earlier, the comment thread is interesting because a few of his questions are answered in quite a lot of useful detail. For example, a progression path from the current system to a future transport system based around driverless cars:
1. A car maker introduces a driverless model that essentially works as a souped up cruise drive. A driver is still legally required, but the car will drive itself when you toggle it into cruise mode. This model will be expensive, but it will sell well to rich people who don’t like driving. Liability will naturally belong to the person who is in the drivers seat.
2. As these cars become more and more popular and proven to be safe, old/disabled people will lobby for regulations that the person being in the drivers seat don’t have to have a drivers license.
3. As these are getting safer and safer, regulations for someone being in the drivers seat will fade. More upper middle class people will buy them to driver their kids, pick themselves up from the airport, and so on and so forth.
4. At some point, taxi companies/uber start to buy these cars because they are cheaper then paying salaries.
5. As the number of automated cars grow, cities realize that they need smaller lanes and move more cars per lane. A few really big freeways will start seeing automation only lanes.
6. The prospect of skipping congestions means that they will sell better, allowing for more automation lanes to be built.
7. Meanwhile, competition slowly forces down taxi/uber prices, making car ownership less desirable for lower classes, reducing manual cars on the road.
8. Car makers only make automated cars because poorer people are buying less and less cars, and well off people all demand cars that at least CAN drive themselves.
9. And we are in the future utopia already.
I’m not completely up to date on the whole driverless cars thing. Some obvious issues that come to light are things like legalities when something goes wrong and how, if not impossible to work around, it’s certainly likely to slow down implementation. This is highlighted by another commenter:
…every time a driverless car hits a child who darts in to a street after a soccer ball or plows in to pedestrians in a crosswalk will set the movement back. When people-driven cars do this, we can usually find fault (“they didn’t see the kid”, “they were distracted by their phone”) but when a computer does it, there will be no easy answers and people will call for the cars to be off the road.
I guess one big advantage of driverless cars is that if they really do stop perfectly to ensure they don’t run over pedestrians, it pretty much turns every street into a defacto shared space because the vehicles will always automatically stop for you when you’re crossing the road.
By Peter M, on September 19th, 2012 Auckland Transport’s board papers highlight that the high level principles of the new bus network will be consulted upon in the Regional Public Transpor Plan: which will be open for public submission in the next month or two. The huge number of comments on Matt’s previous post about the network highlights that this will be a very interesting process.
Having recently completed the excellent book, Human Transit, which is basically the bible for PT network design, I can see a lot of the principles of that book coming through in the new network (not surprising as the author, Jarrett Walker, was involved in its formulation). Things like “frequency is freedom”, “embracing connections” and the importance of a “grid” are quite obvious when you look at the crowning glory of the new network – its huge extension of the “frequent network”, services operating no worse than once every 15 minutes, seven days a week. Through some careful analysis of the existing route system, we will be able to (approximately, these maps are from April and may have been updated since then) go from the frequent network on the left to the one on the right for no extra money.
Of course everything comes at a cost though, and it seems there will be a number of things the new network won’t do – in order to reallocate bus resources to creating this extremely extensive network of high frequency routes. It seems that long bus routes which parallel the train lines will be turned into rail feeder services: stripping out pointless duplication that only exists because our rail system used to be truly rubbish. Furthermore, from staring closely at some of the maps produced, some of the lower frequency buses won’t continue to run all the way into the city and back – but rather they will feed passengers into the frequent network or the rapid transit network before returning to do the same thing again. It seems pretty dumb, off-peak in particular, that we have a whole heap of mostly empty buses chugging along some of the arterials in Auckland just because they eventually split off to serving different areas.
Implementing this new network will inevitably have its challenges for Auckland Transport. Very little of the existing network looks like it will be completely untouched by the changes. People might find that the 5.13pm Flyer bus that they’ve caught from the city out to somewhere in South Auckland for years, which operates just once a day, no longer runs and they need to catch the train or a different bus route before transferring to their local service. Some of the changes will require infrastructure improvements that, for one reason or another, lag behind implementation of the route changes. The devil will most certainly be in the detail – and this is where an extended public consultation process (which seems to already have commenced, according to the board reports) will add a lot of value.
In some places it might be necessary to apply a little bit of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” logic – but this can probably only go so far before it results in a lot of resources being used unnecessarily. There’s a great little section in Human Transit about a bus route somewhere in North America that basically turns down a rural cul-se-sac for a few hundred metres before doing a “u-turn” and heading back to the main road. When the relevant transit planner is asked about the detour, they respond something along the lines of “oh, Mrs Smith lives down there and kept going on about having a bus”. That was many years ago and they didn’t know if Mrs Smith (or whatever her name was) still lived there. Yet the extra kilometres were travelled, all the other passengers were inconvenienced, a lot of money was spent.
In short, I just hope that the rollout of the network and any compromises that end up being made do not lose sight of the big picture. As shown in the schematic below, we have the opportunity for an absolutely revolutionary improvement to that often neglected, yet still utterly dominant, part of our public transport system – the buses:
This new network also says a couple of absolutely vital things:
- Public transport is not just for those travelling to the city centre
- Public transport is not just for those travelling at peak times
For so long Auckland’s bus system has been tremendously close to useless for all trips except those to the city centre and at peak times. At the moment you can’t even catch a bus from Onehunga to the Airport, your buses to Te Atatu Peninsula struggle to come hourly outside peak times, a bus trip from Mangere to the Otara markets would probably take a couple of hours, including waiting for low frequency services. With the new network all these places and all these trips finally get properly ‘connected’ by Auckland’s PT network. Heck, at 4pm on a Sunday there’ll be a bus from Manukau to Botany or Manukau to the Airport or Mangere to Sylvia Park or Mangere to St Lukes with a transfer – all running once every 15 minutes at worst.
I hugely look forward to seeing this network implemented. I look forward to seeing the diagram above on every bus stop and train station in Auckland so people can see what an interconnected public transport network they can now enjoy. I look forward to people having the confidence to try public transport for trips they’d only ever considered driving before (Howick to Cornwall Park on a summery Sunday afternoon? Frequent services all the way, just change buses at Ellerslie!) If that comes at the cost of removing some duplicative routes, making a few trips transfer where they currently do not (though even this looks like it’s counterbalanced by increasing through-running, like that Orange Line linking Jervois Road services with Remuera Road services), then it’s still so completely and utterly worth it.
Bring it on, I say!
By Joshua Arbury, 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 Joshua Arbury, 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 Joshua Arbury, 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 Joshua Arbury, 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 Joshua Arbury, 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.
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