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New ideas at Newcastle
Page 34
Page 62
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A first report of the sixth annual symposium 'Operating public transport'
by Martin Watkins HOW can bus services that people need be run at a price they can afford? This simple statement could adequately sum up the underlying philosophy of the seven papers presented to the University of Newcastle's sixth annual symposium "Operating public transport" this week.
The papers clearly demonstrated the great amount of knowledge, both theoretical and practical, available to the operators of public transport today. They also, to some extent, revealed the failure to transfer this pains-takingly accumulated theoretical knowhow to actual bus operation.
I was often left wondering
why, a f ter six annual symposiums, there was so little to tell of actions actually undertaken on the ground to improve our bus services in any meaningful way. The technology of bus operation always seems to lag behind the technology of psv design.
A welcome change from the string of theoretical papers was one by Mr A. H. Coleman, the interchange planning officer at Merseyside PTE, describing the full-scale experiments with bus/rail inter change on Merseyside.
Most of the papers presented aimed at giving the bus users a better deal. The notable exception was a paper given by Mr H. A. Werz of Geneva which seemed to place bus passengers in the same category as freight cargo. He was concerned solely with the narrow efficiency of loading and unloading the vehicle as quickly as possible and as often as possible, with little thought for passenger comfort or convenience.
Should bus services within a city be costed differently according to the different social purposes that they serve? Brian Parker of R. Travers Morgan and Partners, who gave the first paper at Newcastle, certainly thought that they should.
Mr Parker in his paper " Routeing strategy for urban passenger transport services " proposed that bus services should be split into three categories. First civic services —to provide citizens and visitors with access to all parts of the town or city. Secondly commercial services —to provide additional services for business use where these can pay their way. Lastly social services—to provide needy citizens such as the aged or disabled with selected transport services.
Mr Parker believes that general subsidies tend to undermine incentives to good management and to result in great waste of resources. He argued that every civilised city should have a civic public transport system providing a reasonable level of accessibility between all parts of the community.
The benefit of such a service to non-travellers justified, said Mr Parker, the service being paid for by the community as a whole, on the same basis as payment for water supply, sewerage and fire services. This civic service would then be used as a basic framework on which to build commercial and social services.
Mr Parker criticised the wisdom of political decisions which placed low fares at the top of the priority list for psv operation. He maintained that analysis of change in patronage following changes in service supply showed clearly that people were very willing to pay for reliability. Investment in service improvements was money far better spent than money used to subsidise fares.
Low cost
The theme of efficiency at low cost was extended by Mr Coleman in his paper devoted to experience with the bus/rail interchanges on Merseyside. Mr Coleman thought that both the bus operator and the travelling public had a great deal to gain in practice from the interchange concept, and put forward three main rea sons. First, the rail/bus journey was quicker than the bus journey. Secondly, if rail was sufficiently utilised the journey would be cheaper. Thirdly, buses released from service could be better employed in areas without railway lines.
Mr Coleman said that in his opinion t h e interchanges actually introduced on Merseyside did not go far enough to prove the viability of the concept. The bus feeder to the rail services was superimposed on the current bus network, and no duplicated bus services were withdrawn. The practical problems caused by fare tapers on bus and rail, discouraging multi-made journeys, were discussed in the paper. These were solved by the introduction of two section datestamped tickets issued by Ultimate ticket machines.
Mr Coleman was able as a result of experience to closely define three factors which resulted in an interchange service being successful. He said the journey length in Liverpool should be between four and 10 miles of the centre. This inner limit was determined by the point at which bus/rail ceased to offer a time advantage over bus all the way. Beyond 10 miles few people worked in the centre so there was little need for a service. Two less important factors were that the combined fare should be a penny or two dearer than the rail journey fare, and also wherever possible the bus passengers should have easy direct access to the rail station.
Although the bus and train schedules were operated independently the connections seem to have been very reliable on Merseyside. In the absence of sophisticated communications systems this had been helped by the reliability of the electric train service and by the common sense of the bus driver in ensuring train connections were made whatever the circumstances.
The fact that bus drivers do have common sense seems rather to have eluded the authors of the three papers which followed. These all made use of service modelling techniques or computer simulation programs to predict the consequences of service modifications. Some interesting results were achieved on paper which could show the way towards achieving substantial improvement in actual bus services.
In the first of these papers Mr L. J. S. Lesley, the public transport officer of Durham County Council, introduced the concept of the "behavioural cost" of making a bus journey. This quantity was defined by a simple formula and represented the unification of three objective measures of the impedance of making a journey. These were the actual riding time, the excess time walking and waiting time and expenses such as bus fares. The advantage of identifying behavioural cost was that it enabled bus operators to evaluate the effect different types of measure had in improving the bus service.
Waiting time
Mr Lesley's paper gave some illustrations of the results of this. Reducing the waiting time of passengers would reduce the behavioural cost more than speeding up the bus running time. Also by bringing busstops closer together to save passengers an extra minute walking, the average riding times would have to increase by more than two minutes before passengers were worse off overall.
Time spent waiting at bus stops was the passengers' primary measure of bus service reliability. Research had shown that passengers would wait longer for less frequent buses, presumably because the cost of missing a low-frequency service was "higher" than for a high-frequency service.
Mr Lesley spent some time examining current timetabling practice, and suggested some very sensible methods of compiling more realistic timetables. The current timetables of some of the services studied proved to be impossible to comply with even in ideal conditions. On one Cleveland Transit service he found the average journey time less the total delay time was still 16 minutes longer than the timetabled journey time.
Fixing the journey time allowance for a route often developed into a fight between management and unions, resulting in the reliability of operations coming a very poor last. He criticised operators for being reluctant to introduce differential running times, which in his opinion should reflect three elements of a bus journey; bus-stop time, running time, and delay time.
Mr Lesley used the results of a computer simulation programme to define the criteria for providing a reliable service. A reliable timetable was required which should be based on the prevailing traffic conditions. Timing points should be identified after an analysis had revealed where reliability deteriorated by more than twice the average.
"Journey times between these points should sum the average values of bus-stop time, bus running time, and those bus delay times which have a 50 per cent or more chance of occurring," he said. "These conditions should allow an 83 per cent level of reliability to be obtained provided that crews strictly observed the timetable."
Various methods of overcoming service irregularities caused by the removal from service of some scheduled bus journeys were described by Mr P. H. Bly and Mr R. L. Jackson of the Transport and Road Research Laboratory in their paper "Scheduling for depleted services."
The simulated results presented in this work sugested that the increases in waiting time, and consequently the cost to the community, can be cut by about 50 per cent by re-scheduling for fewer buses. The authors said the improvement in waiting time was a direct benefit to passengers and thus allowed the operator to retain patronage he might otherwise have lost.
They described both analytic and computer simulated models of bus route 9 in Bristol and London Transport route 11.
Service reliability
Two different analytical approaches to improve depleted service reliability were tried. In one the available buses were re-scheduled to provide an equal headway service and in the other a fixed fraction of buses originally scheduled were set aside as a reserve pool to be used when available. The conclusion made was that for headways greater than 12 minutes the use of a reserve pool was much superior to headway equalisation.
The results presented in this paper suggest that the increase in passenger waiting time, and thus the cost to the community, could be cut by about 50 per cent by re-scheduling for fewer buses.
An interactive computer model of London Transport's route 11 was described in a paper presented by Mr R. L. Jackson and Mr D. Stone. All types of service delay and disruption were programmed into the model in addition to the normal details of service running. Three different types of control system were then tried to determine which was the most effective. The model predicted that control by roadside inspectors could produce reductions in mean passenger waiting time of about 11 per cent. The paper stated that a further 3 per cent improvement could be made if radio telephones were used in buses, and a further 2 per cent improvement made if an automatic bus location system (showing bus locations on a model of the complete route in central control) was introduced.
These results achieved by modern technology tended to fall rather flat after mention was made in the paper that by ensuring the complete service ran, and that duties commenced on time, improvements of 33 per cent could be made using no form of control at all
Roadside machines ?
The case for roadside ticket vending machine and multidoor buses was put in a paper by Mr H. A. Werz of tne Compagnie Genevoise des Tramways Electriques. He listed a number of advantages of this system, namely : it made fraud prevention easier; it allowed a more varied fare system to be maintained ; it resulted in vehicles unencumbered by ticket machines and in which passengers could board and alight by any door.
Mr Werz said •the disadvantage of his proposal was the high initial cost of the roadside machines and also their vulnerability. He related, however, his experience that a fully automatic fare collection system had made a very effective contribution to improved service regularity in many European cities.
A description of bus services in Oxford, given by Mr P. M. D. Lutman, the traffic manager of City of Oxford Motor Services, was the final paper presented at the symposium this year. Of most interest in this paper was the section dealing with bus priorities in Oxford.
Mr Lutman here described the with-flow bus lanes that operated from 0700-1900 allowing bus priority inbound on the radial routes between the centre and the Oxford Inner Ring road. Priority for outward bound evening buses was not considered necessary as, hopefully, motorists would have been persuaded to leave their cars out of town in the morning.
In the centre of Oxford buses were allowed into pedestrian precincts and there were also some short contraflow bus lanes, said Mr Lutman. Oxford's principal aim for the future was to operate a service of impeccable reliability.