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Long-range research vital to public Ironsporl

16th September 1966
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Page 116, 16th September 1966 — Long-range research vital to public Ironsporl
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

rrecent White Paper, "Transport Policy", would have a found effect upon the industry, said Aid. W. Alker, chairman if Bury Corporation Transport Committee, in his presidential iddress to the annual conference of the Municipal Passenger Transport Association at Dublin on Tuesday. The structure and organization of public transport would be radically changed in the Lear future and as an association they must ensure they played heir full part in the knowledge that they were pioneers with a vealth of experience in serving the public.

At last it had been realized that if public transport was to play ts proper role in the country's economy it must be correctly 'elated to, and considered along with, highway provision, land-use Ind traffic policy.

For some years the MPTA had pressed the Government to amend vgulations on one-man operation and it was encouraging to ind their views strongly supported by the Prices and Incomes loard. The regulations had, in fact, been amended and a meeting Lad been called by the Minister of Transport for September 27 to .onsider the setting up of an informal working group under Ministry :hairmanship to study the technical and operational developments lecessary to accelerate progress in the one-man bus field. The vlinistry was obviously aware that the further introduction of onenan operation was not just a matter of making a decision and ;ecuring the co-operation of employees but that there were other roblems to be overcome, particularly concerning one-man iperation in urban areas.

The curb on capital expenditure might slow down progress in he provision of new roads and other measures for easing traffic :ongestion. However, they might believe that it was an ill wind hat blew nobody any good and possibly the present squeeze might esult in fewer private cars occupying valuable road space in the owns, thereby enabling the transport authorities to provide the ervices the public desired. Could they look for some other benefits iy way of stabilized costs and hence stabilized fares? Should the ?rices and Incomes standstill, along with the Selective Employment ran, have the effect of redeploying labour from non-essential to :ssential industries this could work in the operators' favour. The luestion mark over all this was how effectively the Government ould make these policies work.

PLANNIN G URBAN TRANSPORT ,ACILmEs OF THE FUTURE Long-range planning for the passenger transport industry, with he aid of the most advanced research methods, occupied the attenion of members for much of the conference. Wednesday's speaker vas Mr. D. A. Quarmby, Lecturer in Transport and Operational tesearch, University of Leeds.

In the planning of future urban transport facilities, said Mr. uarniby, there seemed to be two important needs, that for strategy a planning and that for research to provide evidence and to back tp planning decisions. At the present time there appeared to be a endency to grasp at particular technological solutions such as nonorails or minibuses without enough regard to the problem seing tackled and the objectives to be reached.

Operators needed to start by examining the context for planning, he environment within which public transport operated and to iroject this to some future date. Next they must establish some riterion which would make sense within the planning context. inally they must use the results of research first to suggest possible transport systems and, secondly, to evaluate these systems by pre-testing their effectiveness, by calculating loadings, revenue and cost relationships against the declared objectives.

Mr. Quarmby chose a particular context, the work journey, for examination in detail. From this he could suggest an appropriate criterion for measuring the effectiveness of a transport system. Then, he said he would explain how the research he had been doing in Leeds, as part of a project for Leeds City Transport, could throw light on one of the key problems in transport planiaig—explaining and subsequently predicting how people chose their mode of travel. This he saw as an exercise, not a blueprint for action, since the work journey was not the only context for public transport operation.

Majority captive riders

The great majority of public transport users in the peak period were captive riders in the sense of having no alternative means available. What they did not know was how many of these captive riders would travel by car if they had one, but they did know that an increasing proportion of them would soon have the choice. As long as public transport vehicles shared the same roads as private vehicles the shift of commuters from buses to cars would increase congestion and delay both types of vehicle, yet this shift would happen so long as the commuters continued to find a relative advantage in driving their own cars. It seemed likely that this relative benefit would persist even as congestion grew worse so that further shift from public to private transport would continue.

In the Buchanan exercise on Leeds the projection for the year 2010 suggested that provision for no more than 40 per cent of potential car commuters to drive into the city's central area was economically feasible. In fact the City Council's policy was to plan for 20 per cent, it being proposed to achieve this by a combination of parking policies and public transport improvements.

To plan a public transport system for the future they must be able to explain more about how people chose to travel by public or private transport and must be able to predict their choices under different conditions. This was the crucial part of the evaluation stage of the strategy mentioned at the beginning. Modal split, said Mr. Quarmby, was a notoriously difficult problem and had taxed researchers, mainly in the US for some years. It was not an engineering question, as many issues in transport were, but a 'problem in understanding and predicting the behaviour of people under given conditions.

Cars must be limited

In any city or conurbation with a population above 250,000 no feasible amount of expenditure on roads would enable everyone who could use a car for the work journey to do so; consequently public transport would always have to do more than carry captive riders. Mr. Quarmby said he had taken a long view and in doing so had ignored what to many operators and undertakings must seem much more immediate and pressing problems.

He believed there had always been too little attention to longrange planning in public transport. There were two main reasons for this, first that long-range planning needed a decision-making framework and for this industry such a framework had never existed. Operational research concepts such as strategy, objectives and criteria, and evaluation of alternatives, could now provide it, together with the more comprehensive post-Buchanan approach to the relationship between town-planning, accessibility and traffic.

Long-range planning required information. Details about future physical environment were normally available but information about people, their incomes, patterns of life, and particularly the pattern of their travel were much more difficult to forecast, yet this latter information was crucial to any transport planning. He had tackled only the "how" or the modal choice problem.

Of the travel decisions that people currently made this was probably the most important for the transport planner. Their work on modal choice, the full results of which would be published in a report to the transport committee of Leeds City Council very shortly, showed that people's choice of mode could be largely explained, could be predicted, and that the effect of policy decisions such as free buses, or increased parking charges, could be pre-tested and evaluated before expensive mistakes were made.

NEED FOR OPERATIONAL RESEARCH DISCUSSED During the past year many members of the industry had been asking what operation research was and whether it had a useful contribution to make to the future of their vast industry, said Mr. R. A. Ward, head of the Local Government Operational Research Unit. He proposed to discuss a number of topics, the first being an example of an operational research study which concerned the simple problem faced by all organizations. How far did it pay to check bills before payment?

All organizations must set up a routine for checking and paying bills which they incur, he continued, and throughout the country thousands were engaged in the examination of documents and accounts. In many cases it was possible that more was being spent in finding the mistakes than the errors themselves were worth. The form followed would frequently involve making sure that the bill was the undertaking's liability, ensuring that the goods were received and were in good condition, ensuring that the correct price had been charged and checking that the arithmetic was correct. The problem presented to the OR team was whether these checks were justified and if not to what extent they could reasonably be reduced.

G LC supplies study

Their first study of this type was in the supplies department of the Greater London Council. After some discussion regarding the first check, designed to pick out invoices that were either duplicates or not the liability of the department, it was felt that this inspection should continue at 100 per cent level.

Examination was then made of the extent of which goods had been lost in the past. If no check was made to avoid losses of this type then relatively large losses would inevitably result. As soon as a small check was introduced on the more valuable consignments then the likelihood of serious loss was quickly reduced.

When about half the invoices were checked the possible losses became trivial. Such losses would be only part of the cost and the selection of a level of selective checking could be made only when the balance had been struck between the decreasing losses as more checking was done and the increasing clerical costs of performing the check. Here study showed that in selective checking for receipt of goods the most profitable course of action was to examine ti most expensive 12 per cent of all invoices, those above £50.

They went on to examine the incidence of overcharging that ci occur on invoices. Again, the frequency of such mistakes w small and the balance between possible losses and the cost finding them would work at a 12 per cent check on all invoicc once more those above £50. The results of this study had be' implemented by the GLC and were being introduced by oth authorities.

To safeguard against losing control selective checking mu always be coupled with a small random check. To sum up, ti whole process consisted of two parts, a selective check on ti 12 per cent most valuable invoices and a random check on 5 p cent of the remainder.

The Local Government Operational Research Unit, part of tl Royal Institute of Public Administration, received the collecti, support of 75 counties and county boroughs when it came in existence in 1965. As a further example of its work Mr. Wal quoted a study carried out for the South Eastern Electrici Board where the problem was whether it would be best to set up large central store and supply system in the middle of their 3,0( sq. mile territory.

This study showed the value of the technique known as simul tion. In order to predict how a centralized transport service wou work an experiment was designed which reproduced on paper tl functioning of a number of possible transport systems. T1 simulation was thus a model of the real situation on whi( experiments could be carried out without the dangers of loss at expense associated with experiments in real life.

Value of OR illustrated

Overall results showed that centralized buying with one lar store, coupled with a decentralized form of delivery, would sa the Board approximately £160,000 p.a. The distribution syste used liner trucks from the central storage point to the existii 26 depots which then delivered the appliances. The recommend tions of this study had been accepted and implementation was hand.

The value of operational research might very well be explon in connection with bus maintenance. Because of the large pea with which all services had to contend it was clearly benefici to reduce maintenance and overhaul v, ork to jobs that could completed between the morning and evening busy perioc However, to strip a bus down for overhaul or repair of sor remotely accessible part without taking advantage of the oppc tunity for other replacement attention would clearly push up cos'

Mr. Ward said the author of the previous paper had examint some major issues which went beyond bus operation into t realms of town planning. Many municipal operators work' closely with their colleagues in finance, planning, and trail engineering. It was not enough, however, to say that the motor: must be restricted, or that buses must have special lanes, or th the service must be subsidized. Operators should be able to say advance and with confidence what would happen if their indust were given the type of encouragement it was demanding.


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