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Area Transport Boards

Vot Necessary

Fr HE call for area transport authorities to be responsible for all forms of public transport in large conurbations was rejected by Mr. Bernard Griffiths, executive director of The Tilling Association Ltd., in a paper presented to the annual conference of the Public Transport Association at Scarborough, on Wednesday. Mr. Griffiths's paper was entitled "Facing the real problems of passenger transport in conurbations", and was written with special reference to Merseyside.

It was against the background of increasing traffic congestion, the growth of private transport and the consequent loss of passengers that the problem of maintaining an efficient public transport system was viewed, said Mr. Griffiths. Integrated planning of urban development and transport, involving co-ordination between town planners and undertakings providing public transport had quite obviously become very necessary.

Public transport could no longer be considered in isolation, town planning and transport planning must be linked together and. with this end in view, and taking advantage of the advanced methods and techniques of carrying out these surveys, many were being made in various parts of the country. For the first time comprehensive data were being prepared. of the economic and social characteristics of travel for thepurpose of forecasting future transport needs. It had been considered essential to extend the survey areas beyond the boundaries of individual towns and cities so as to embrace the whole of the conurbation. or continuously built-up area.

One great new authority ...

The former Minister of Transport said in the House of Commons on November 16. 1965: -In some of the conurbations it is likely that they will conclude that the only proper way to provide a public passenger transport service will be by the creation of one great new authority, which will Tian the buses and the trains and perhaps other forms of public passenger transport. I think that this is very likely and in any case there will have to be better co-ordination than there is at present-.

It was evidently in the mind of the Minister at that time that the creation of a new authority to take over buses and trains in the conurbations was desirable in order to obtain better co-ordination of public transport—in other words, to plan a comprehensive transport system for each conurbation. It is vitally important that such proposals should be the subject of careful study and the full implications thoroughly explored before any such irrevocable step is taken.

Studies were currently being made in London, West Midlands, South East Lancashire and North Cheshire, Merseyside, Teesside. West Riding, Tyneside, Cardiff and Glasgow. They were not a new exercise but were intended as a comprehensive examination in detail, scientifically conducted on a scale not hitherto attempted rather than a piecemeal unrelated look at selected areas.

The land use/transport survey in the Merseyside conurbation was being carried out by Traffic Research Corporation Ltd., of Canada. It had been decided to proceed with Merseyside strictly within the limited boundaries of the study area and it would not be possible to examine the influence of counter-attractions to Merseyside on outlying areas of new development except in broad terms.

From the early days of bus operation when the municipal authorities of Liverpool. Birkenhead and Wallasey were still operating tramway systems in their respective areas, the private bus undertakings, including Crosville Motor Services Ltd. and Ribble Motor Services Ltd., had maintained a very close relationship with these authorities with co-ordination agreements dating back to 1924 in the case of Wallasey, 1926 with Birkenhead and 1931 with Liverpool. The systems of co-ordination had been revised periodically to meet changing circumstances and there was every reason to believe that the present problems facing public transport within the conurbation could be solved in a similar fashion.

Services from various Lancashire towns into Liverpool were run jointly by Ribble, Lancashire United and the St. Helens, Leigh, Wigan and Salford municipal undertakings. These services were subject to various minimum fares and picking-up and settingdown restrictions.

Transport committee report

A great deal of work had been carried out by a transport committee set up by the Steering Committee in 1962. In its interim report of September, 1963, this transport committee recommended that the loeal authorities concerned, together with transport undertakings affected, should consider the need for a unified authority responsible for all forms of cross-river traffic. The committee failed to agree, however, on a recommendation that this proposed authority should be enlarged and extended as a Merseyside Transport Authority with responsibility for all forms of public transport within the conurbation. In the opinion of the majority of transport operators on the committee, the problems of co-ordination could best be settled by the formation of a Co-ordination Committee.

In December. 1962, the Liverpool Junior Chamber of Commerce issued a report entitled "A Merseyside Transport Authority" in which they too expressed the view that the establishment of such an authority would be of the greatest direct benefit to road passengers by breaking down the existing artificial barriers to efficient service set up by restricted areas of operation.

Some of the advantages claimed for a transport authority in the two reports referred to, together with those adduced recently when the matter was considered by the transport committee, might be summarized as follows: With regard to a proposed outer loop railway around Liverpool, this extension integrated into the Merseyside transport system would require the closest coordination between railway and bus services. Only a unified authority would be able to give expressions to these schemes and ensure their efficient operation.

A properly integrated system

A unified authority would be free to use or adapt in the public interest any of the physical assets of the transport system. It would substitute a simple form of public ownership to secure a properly integrated system of public transport in place of the present separate and sometimes conflicting interests. The sphere of operation of the authority would be determined by the public interest and its limits would depend on the pattern of travel, not the boundaries of Mical government areas.

Company and municipal undertakings were expected to pay their way; although the aim must be to make public transport pay its way. some form of subsidization might be necessary in the future and under these circumstances such aid could more appropriately be made available to a single public authority.

Control would be vested in one small but expert body, instead of the various boards of the existing separate undertakings.

Overlapping of services should be eliminated, scheduling could be carried out centrally with a more economical use of vehicles.

Advantages of large-scale organization could be applied to a reduction in the number of garages, elimination of duplicated maintenance facilities, reduction in costs through bulk purchasing, reduction in clerical costs through use of computers and better fleet utilization, particularly at off-peak periods.

A single authority would permit a better use of existing manpower, and make possible improved staff training schemes. iprehensive publicity would be possible on an area basis.

fr. Griffiths then discussed some of the arguments against a sport board. However compact, conurbations could not be lly. self-contained, and must be seen as the nuclei in the Lomic planning regions which had been established. The irbation and its hinterland were naturally interdependent illy and economically.

perators serving rural areas relied upon more profitable urban Lees from which to effect cross-subsidy. Liverpool for example, a recognized shopping centre for people living in North Wales, Liverpudlians in their thousands went to North Wales in the mer months. Why then should there not be cross-subsidizabetween the bus services in the Liverpool conurbation and e in North Wales, some of which were not economic?

ge-scale economies?

be claim that large scale economies could be effected by taking antage of large-scale operation to reduce the number of iges required and the number of vehicles for duplication and atenance, and by the introduction of flow-line overhaul ;edure, simply could not be borne out by the facts. The )osed authority would operate only about 2,000 vehicles and ras considered that this number would not justify radical ages in maintenance procedure, at least for the larger underngs.. The total number of vehicles required for duplication and atenance would not be affected.

o far as the number of garages required was concerned, given irea the size of Merseyside, bus depots must be dispersed for -ating efficiency and economy.

xperience had shown that there were few advantages and y disadvantages in the workings of large monolithic underags. Despite its efforts to avoid over-centralization, even the don Transport Board had not found itself free from criticism it seemed unlikely that a unified transport authority on seyside would successfully avoid the many difficulties experid by London Transport.

dominant characteristic ln the other hand, there were examples of very successful ordination schemes where an advisory body was set up to .re co-ordination between various undertakings. Transport was ervice provided by people for people. The predominant .acteristic was service and the smaller the unit the closer the act.

ulk purchasing by a unified authority would not lower prices ny substantial extent, because both Ribble and Crosville were ciated with a large group of companies which, when taken ther, made a very much larger fleet than that of the proposed ority, and the benefits of bulk buying were already exploited le full. Co-operation between the various undertakings on Merseyside had been on a very high level. Further changes were now necessary, but it was considered that a unified authority could do nothing to improve the existing pattern of public transport that a co-ordinating committee could not do much more quickly and easily.

The advantage of preparing bus schedules by computer was the speed with which the schedules could be produced; no significant saving could be made in the cost of providing crews to operate timetables similar to those commonly operated today by employing new and better techniques of scheduling. These were the con. elusions reached by Mr, Andrew Young, professor of numerical analysis, Liverpool University and Mr. J. C. Wilkinson, lecturer in operational research, Lancaster University, in a paper read to the conference on Thursday.

Entitled "The scheduling of buses and crews by computer", the paper described the results of efforts made to devise economical bus and crew schedules. The work was commissioned by The Tilling Association, helped by the advice and assistance of the staff of Crosville Motor Services Ltd.

There were many factors which everyone knew at least something about, intuitively, and whose importance could be demonstrated, said the authors, but which one did not yet know how to measure. Given bus timetables in an area where new housing or industrial development was going on, it was obvious that a company had new potential customers. Measures such as "pence per passenger mile" were adopted as devices for justifying increasing or decreasing the frequency of buses on the services; transport managers anxiously watched such statistics and carefully weighed them up before extending new routes. But were they adequate? To what extent were the activities of bus companies self justifying—or self defeating?

As a preliminary to their studies on scheduling, the authors briefly considered some of these factors. Most, if not all, bus timetables had grown into their present patterns over a period of years. There was little that a scheduler could do but accept them. But it was perhaps worth while here to point out the self-justifying nature of the decision to establish routes. There was an intimate interaction between existing routes and public demand.

For example, wherever a bus stopped for more than a brief period there was often to be found a newspaper or sweet shop. put there originally to get the trade of the passengers, but eventually meeting a demand from local people. Other shops followed and the public got used to going to that point. Whether it was, nowadays, to go to the bus stop or to the shops was difficult to know, but the company was now inhibited if it wanted to move that stop.

A truly complete operational research study of bus company activities would• have to take such factors into account. The authors' effort had been more modest. They had attempted to find answers to the problem: "Given existing timetables how could buses and crews be allocated to journeys to reduce the costs as much as possible?" Ideally, the exercise should be tackled in one stage, but because buses could operate longer hours than crews the authors had found it simpler to treat two problems separately: (i) fitting buses to timetables; (ii) fitting crews to buses. In the rest of the paper the authors described their approach and the computer programmes they devised.

Dealing with the bus scheduling first: The primary benefit anticipated for the cadaputer programme over the other traditional manual methods of scheduling was the speed with which new

schedules could be produced for an integrated network of routes simultaneously. and the consequent ease of scheduling for a complete recast of timetables. The Board of The Tilling Assciciation decided that it would prefer the programme to be used to schedule journeys for the actual timetable operations of the buses from one depot, and this had been done, using the data pertaining to a single Crosville depot.

The application of the computer programme to the timetable information from the particular depot confirmed the view that the primary benefit of using the programme rather than schedule clerks to produce bus journey schedules was the speed with which the schedules could be produced—assuming the timetable information was prepared in suitable form. It followed that the programme promised the greatest return when a fairly thorough revision of timetables was contemplated.

The programme also afforded companies an easy way of assessing the minimum extra vehicle requirements which would ensue from the introduction of new services, or equivalently the maximum number of buses which could be saved following the withdrawal of services. Whereas these calculations tended to be made at the moment by considering the affected services in isolation, the programme was always concerned with the system as a whole.

If the need ever arose to reschedule quickly—perhaps for unexpected extra services—the programme would not be of great use, as an experienced scheduler should be able to adjust established schedules faster than the new data could be prepared for the computer programme.

Turning to crew scheduling, the authors dealt with this subject at length, describing fully the exercise carried out at the same Crosville depot as that at which the bus scheduling was done. The task of scheduling crews was much more complicated than that of scheduling vehicles—a man had a will of his own which rebelled at being used in a manner to which he had not agreed. and he certainly had not agreed to work for unlimited periods with minimal rests.

There were many tacit agreements between a company and its crews at very local levels which were never written clown, but must be kept in mind by the clerk who prepared the duty schedules if these were to be accepted by the crews. These generally concerned the composition of duties; for example, no weekly duty would contain only split turns, a return journey of two hours would not be included more than twice in succession in any one daily duty and so on. These unwritten agreements. which were observed by the company only to prevent discord and possible unofficial industrial action among employees, varied widely from one depot to the next. It was unlikely that the fully automatic production of duty schedules was a feasible exercise for a computer.

The principal conclusion which could be drawn was no doubt disappointing for bus companies. It was that no significant savings could be made in the cost of providing crews to work timetables similar to those commonly operated today by new and better techniques of scheduling. This did not merely state that no costreducing techniques had yet been found—it was a much more positive statement, for it said that no such technique existed and it would be wasteful of both time and money to look for such a technique.

Delegates were reminded that the objective of the study had not been to attempt to schedule bus crews by computer, but to investigate whether there were any potential savings to be made, if another method of scheduling could be found. The investigation had been made and the finding was that any savings would be negligible.

There was one consoling feature, however, confirmed by the mixture of duties Used on a particular day by the computerproduced schedules. This was that the actual schedules used were as good as could be produced. It reflected great credit on the skill and efficiency of the schedule clerks, whose experience had clearly taught them as much as it could.

OUT OF RETIREMENT N interesting event took place in Wolverhampton on Sunday when a "preserved" trolleybus from one undertaking operated over the wires of another. The vehicle in question was Huddersfield trolley No. 541 which toured the remnants of the once extensive Wolverhampton system carrying a party of about 50.

I understand it is believed to be the first time that a trolleybus has come out of retirement to operate over another system. The event was organized by the National Trolleybus Association.

Trolleybuses are shortly to disappear from the streets of Wolverhampton, leaving Walsall as the only surviving operator of the "trackless tram" in the Midlands.

Warning to Mrs. Castle

DELEGATES speaking at the Wednesday business session, presided over by Mr. W. M. Little, chairman of the council of the PTA, sounded a note of warning to the Minister of Transport not to interfere with the existing structure of the bus operating industry when implementing area schemes. A forthright denunciation of the growing desire to subsidize bus services was made by Sir Reginald Wilson, deputy chairman and managing director of the Transport Holding Company.

Speaking during the discussion of Mr. Griffiths' paper, Sir Reginald said that the country appeared to be increasingly sold on the idea that in general bus services must be subsidized. The user was in favour, of course, though a subsidized service tended to turn into an indifferent one. The worker was in favour, yet subsidized undertakings rarely paid the best wages in the long run. Local politicians were often in favour because subsidies meant votes. Some economists were in favour, hoping that if unremunerative services were separately paid for the others could be left to compete—a serious and academic over-simplification.

Even some of the operators were now in favour, being defeated and dispirited by the framework within which they had to attempt to conduct their business. The fact remained that there was no need for subsidy except in a few extreme cases like the deep rural bus. The fact also remained that this general trend towards unnecessary bus subsidy could cost the country scores of millions of pounds a year in due course.

This unthinking conspiracy against the public purse needed our attention, and was a very dangerous trend, he said.

There was also a disquieting trend in the country's thinking on organization and constitution. What was wanted was strong management, proper freedom to get on with the job, and units of a size and structure that did not make life virtually impossible. Wherever there were units of great spread and great inflexibility with "administrative" Board committee direction, and political influence as well, the services could become beyond efficient management and subsidy began to look as though it was the only solution.

Let us not be misled, he concluded. With proper constitutional management of the services, we need not put another sixpence on income tax. Proper organization was the answer.

Mr. R. F. Bennett, Manchester, said that we must not lose the valuable experience of America, where overall authorities look after policy but not actual operation. A two-tier system with one overall authority to co-ordinate the operation of individual undertakings was probably the solution. Mr. Bennett stressed the need to deal with the matters being considered now—and not wait until the result of the survey.

Mr. D. C. Haselgrove, Ministry of Transport, also urged operators and local authorities to sit down together and face up to their problems. They should be deciding now how these problems were to be tackled, and not waiting for the results of the studies.

Other contributors to the discussion included Mr. G. Brook, Ribble, who said that many people tended to forget that co-ordination schemes were already in force. For example, Ribble interworked with 18 municipal, 16 other BET and THC operators and 11 independents.

Mr. B. T. Pratt, United Automobile Services, said that integration and co-ordination had become the panacea to cure all transport ills within conurbations.

Finally, Mr. W. M. Dravers, BET, asked if it was just a coincidence that the smaller BET companies were usually those with the lowest running costs.