The planning and future of public transport
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the next 25 years
SMALLER BUSES providing a more frequent and comfortable service were suggested by Mr. C. R. Warman, city engineer and surveyor and town planning officer, Sheffield, as one of the means of improving public transport, when he addressed the annual conference of the Public Transport Association on Wednesday. The theme of the Conference this year was very much one of planning in relationship to transport, ad Mr. Warman's paper was entitled "Nanning for public transport".
A lot of the arguments and proposals put forward have been heard before and on Thursday Professor J. Kolbuszewski, of the department of transportation and environmental planning, University of Birmingham, took a similar line to the one he followed in his contribution to the Institute of Traffic Administration conference in London last month (CM May 16).
Mr. Warman confined his remarks to planning in the next 25 years. He claimed that his paper had three aims. First, was to concern itself more with what was thought to be practicable rather than that which was remotely possible. Secondly, it was to deal with the generality of towns, particularly towns of considerable size, but not with the unique case of the Metropolitan Region, although it might have some applications there.
Thirdly, he said, his paper postulated that any changes affecting public transport in the near future would have to be comparatively simple and easy to understand in order to overcome public inertia. It left theories and speculations which were largely untested to be "refined in the furnace of the next quarter of a century".
Extended peak hours
Planning for public transport included many kinds of planning—administrative, financial, physical and even psychological, said Mr. Warman. His paper, although it touched upon other aspects, was mainly concerned with physical planning.
It was frequently said that the traffic problem only existed at peak hours and that it could be solved simply by staggering working hours. This was a dangerous fallacy, he thought. That the staggering of hours would help was undeniable, but the morning and evening peak "hours" were continually encroaching on the time between them and there were many subsidiary peaks outside the normal times of travelling to work and returning home.
A recent traffic count on one of Sheffield's
main radial roads showed that there were subsidiary peaks in the morning, at lunchtime, in the afternoon and in the evening. The principal commuter peak in the evening tailed off at about 6.30 p.m. only to be replaced by a new peak, not very much smaller, caused, no doubt, by people travelling to places of entertainment, or otherwise engaged upon leisure pursuits. If the traffic flow was increased by 50 per cent from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., the road would be running at saturation point throughout the day and congestion would be continuous.
It should be appreciated that the continual growth of congestion on the roads would not induce people to use public transport so long as all transport was forced to use the same congested routes. Under these circumstances the private car, however slow it might be, was always marginally quicker than the public transport vehicle.
Any method of transport should have as its objectives speed, convenience and comfort. At present the private car satisfied these objectives comparatively well. To compete effectively, therefore, public transport must do better still in at least sufficient aspects to persuade a substantial part of the travelling public to prefer it for a considerable proportion of all journeys. In particular.
1. The cost must be cheaper than by private car.
2. The journey time (including the time spent walking at each end) should be shorter than the equivalent by car.
3. The journey itself must be more comfortable. - 4. The service must be reliable and noticeably frequent.
Unpalatable solutions
In order to meet the above objectives transport authorities must be prepared to consider policies which might seem unpalatable at present in order to make progress towards a viable system in 10 or 15 years' time. For example there had been a tendency for transport authorities to endeavour to solve their peak-hour problems by using very large buses.
Obviously such vehicles Were very economical for this purpose, but it might be that smaller single-deckers of improved design, providing more frequent services, might be more capable of integration into an acceptable overall traffic plan, particularly as general acceptance was found for the provision of special highway facilities for public transport.
Mr. Warman then discussed some of the historical development of the mass transport system and reasons which led to changes in it. Many towns contained relics of an urban or suburban railway system once heavily used but now fallen into disuse and abandoned. There seemed little doubt that its downfall was brought about by its inflexibility and track costs.
The tramcar offered a significantly better service than the conventional railway because track and operating costs, although high, were less. Routes could therefore be more elaborate and stops frequent. The system was suitable for the conditions under which it was developed—high-density development closely adjoining the tram routes. The vast growth of low-density suburban development stretched the tramway system beyond its breaking point. It was too inflexible and too costly for extensive ramifications in such residential areas. For such areas the bus was eminently suitable.
Even the present-day conventional bus was now seen to be comparatively inflexible and cumbersome compared with the private car, and its use was declining in favour of the latter. If public transport was to be revived, and made competitive with the car, history suggested that it must be by becoming more flexible rather than less flexible. It seemed very unlikely that any development of a rigid, track-using system would be successful except in a very few special cases.
In the immediately foreseeable future any revival of the public transport system must be based on the use of buses, even if their size, design and management needed a radical new look. Town planners and highway engineers should, however, seek to keep the options open along carefully selected routes so that following generations were afforded some freedom of choice should a better form of transport be devised or perfected in the future.
Bus versus car Most people appeared to want to own a car. They carried out their own "costbenefit" analysis in relation to a car and to public transport. The following factors were relative:— Concerning the car: 1. Its value as a status symbol.
2. The cost of acquiring it and running it.
3. Its availability at all times.
4. Its comfort, including its all-weather, door-to-door protection.
5. Its social value.
6. Its convenience for:—
(a) The journey to work.
(b) Non-work trips, such as shopping, visiting friends and entertainment.
(c) Annual holidays. Concerning the bus: 7. The cost of using it.
8. The limitations on its availability.
9. The limitations imposed by route.
10. Increased journey time.
11. Reduced comfort and convenience.
12. The absence of driving strain and freedom to read or relax.
The bus system could be revived, or at least prevented from deteriorating any further only by a combination of measures aimed at influencing the foregoing factors, said Mr. Warman. Traffic engineering was then discussed at some length by Mr. Warman. The problem of traffic control was much easier in radial towns than in towns where centres of employment were dispersed. He questioned the usefulness of ring roads, but suggested a solution might lie in terminating radial roads from a ring road in a series of loops near the city centre. This would facilitate the construction of pedestrian precincts, while special facilities such as over-bridges, tunnels and buses-only routes could be provided, and used perhaps by other essential services such as police, ambulances and so on in addition to buses, but closed to private cars and goods vehicles.
Having returned to the theme of smaller buses, Mr. Warman suggested some of the advantages of replacing double-deckers with, say, 20-seat single-deckers. It would be much easier and much less costly to provide special routes because bridge and tunnel clearances would be less, ramps shorter and structures lighter. More frequent services could be employed and so improve the demand for the service itself. Nothing was more calculated to lose potential passengers than the knowledge that the local service was infrequent and unreliable. (He did not say, however, where the extra drivers needed were likely to come from.) Central minibuses Small buses would also have fewer people getting on and off and would thus reduce journey times. They should also be more comfortable than the present doubledecker and be more convenient for carrying luggage and bulky shopping parcels. Late evening services could be more frequent— "standing about at midnight is not a popular pastime"—and operators should not lose sight of the fact that every homewardbound journey lost was a passenger lost in the early evening on the inward journey.
Minibuses might be particularly useful to run a shuttle service within the central area of a large city. They could link parkand-ride car parks with shopping and business areas, link one shopping area with another and link pedestrian precincts. The impending Leeds experiment with minibuses running along pedestrian precincts would be of considerable interest to other local authorities in addition to public transport operators.
The 1966 national census revealed that a surprisingly large number of people walk to work. Perhaps more should be done in the future to provide pedestrian routes, away from the noise and fumes of the busy traffic roads. Such routes need not be detrimental to public transport. On the contrary, a traveller could enjoy a pleasant walk to the bus stop at the suburban end of his journey, and have a pleasant walk to work through a pedestrian precinct at the other end.
Nothing was more frustrating than continual obstruction to road traffic by the almost continual use of pedestrian crossings in central areas. Multi-level precincts could be built so that by means of underpasses and bridges shopping frontages could be provided at first-floor and subway levels in addition to ground level, with no obstruction to the traffic flow. Mr. Warman described such an example in Sheffield.
He did not believe in the provision of travellators along streets or pedestrian precincts, but believed that escalators could be used to link major generating points for pedestrians such as a link between a bus station and a shopping area on a higher level.
Social coffee!
Shopping had a considerable influence on public transport. It had been suggested by some people that in the 1980s half the shops would have disappeared because housewives would be receiving video tapes by post and playing them through their colour television sets. This would enable people to select goods within the confines of their own home, and therefore buy in comfort.
Man was a social animal, however, said Mr. Warman. One of the biggest causes of unhappiness and loss of health was loneliness. Shopping was a form of relaxation and pleasure for many people. The big departmental stores had long since realized the value of having a restaurant and facilities for morning coffee and afternoon tea, so that their customers could have social contacts and thereby indirectly promote trade in the shop. This practice had increased since the war and the coffee habit had spread; it would spread even further in the future when less time would be occupied by work.
All this added up to the fact that people would need public transport in order to enable them to make their social contacts and enjoy their leisure time. More weight had been given in the paper to the bus than to other forms of urban public transport. This, concluded Mr. Warman, was because during the next 25 years or so no other form of transport could be made so readily to counter the private car.
Socinlogical study Professor J. Kolbuszewski's paper "The future of transportation" was largely a sociological, scientific and philosophical study of ecology (study of peoples and institutions, in relation to environment) on a global scale, in which transport was merely one of the many problems involved when discussing the "quality of individual life in the rapidly changing community". A community which he claimed was not only changing but also showing many signs of rapid deterioration.
The Professor claimed that the need for a different technique and approach to planning than the usual was not generally realized. Improvements in the techniques of planning based on injections of scientific techniques only resulted in arriving at bad solutions more efficiently. It was a completely new approach to planning based on new philosophy that might, with the aid of scientific methods, help them to get away from the constantly increasing confusion in various social institutions which stretched from public health to transport in this and all the other countries of the world.
An individual did not understand the multi-national problems and their complexity and magnitude. He noticed all around him crisis after crisis arising all around the world and an average man began more and more to realize that some sort of international understanding on the subject of planning of the human environment would not only help, but make the future of the next generation a little more promising.
Professor Kolbuszewski then drew attention to the phenomenal growth of the world's population. The problems of the human environment were no longer considered on the level of a village, town or even a country. They had to be considered on a global scale.
Control of land use In the meantime urbanization was proceeding at such a speed that it was really already possible to define human environment as urban environment. If this was not halted the standard of everybody's, life would drop.
It was only recently that those involved in transport planning in this country realized, for example, that traffic could be manipulated by controlling and rearranging the land uses that represented the destination and purposes of transport and the emphasis was being shifted, at last, from the study of the flows themselves to the land uses that gave rise to them.
Not only the problem of planning of the environment, but even transport, a relatively small part of it, when examined from the point of view of the benefits to be derived by an individual, and society as a whole, was so complicated that it was beyond comprehension and visualization by any one individual who attempted it. This, the Professor was convinced, was the most important "fact of life" which those who tampered, or should he say, dealt with transport and town planning, must at last realize.
– If the population explosion expected in the next 30 years materialized, even on a low estimate an area of 600,000 acres would be needed to accommodate the additional population in this country. It would represent only 1.6 per cent of the total area of England and Wales. But this was larger than the Greater London conurbation and equivalent to 11 per cent of the land now taken up by all the urban areas of England and Wales. Whatever the "vehicular technology", half the problem was to supply the facilities for moving, and the other half was to create an environment in which the transport system had a chance to work.
Decongestion To decongest the cities, said Prof. Kolbuszewski, to make them work again, to manipulate and reorganize vehicular and other traffic, to stop bad development and encourage building of necessary facilities, the Government must have proper control over the use of land. This was easier said than done. It was a formidable problem which no city in the world had yet solved to its complete satisfaction.
For the purpose of the discussion, the professor made the following statement: "A piece of land is not used if it does not generate or attract traffic."
Land use could be best measured in terms to generate traffic (any traffic). To measure its use one would then apply the basic unit for traffic generation, which was persons or tons per unit area per unit time.
In the case of car ownership, when existing predictions for this country were actually measured in various socio-economic groups, it appeared that more precise definitions would have to be found and used in planning.
The Professor then referred to a table of principal dependent factors, starting with factors affecting car ownership in households. These included: levels of public transport service; public transport convenience; distance from home or work from bus stop or terminal; length of wait for public transport; occupancy of the p.s.v.; number of transfers; average journey speed; fare structure; shelter at stop or terminal.
Factors affecting car usage included the travel time and cost ratios between car and public transport, while sociological and psychological factors included smoking on p.s.v. and the level of seating available.
As for traffic surveys he asked if the country should not be used as one unit, instead of so many individual surveys being undertaken.
On the subject of education and research, the Professor said that they all knew that very small numbers of people involved in, for example, transport planning in this country were properly qualified, that is qualified with university degrees or post-graduate diplomas in transport planning. The majority were qualified formally in "allied fields", such as certain fields of engineering.
Was the field of transport and human environment so much different from medicine or surgery? Was, for example, the life of the driver and his passengers less valuable when on the road than when on the operating table?
Post-graduate teaching and research should no longer be confined to the private enterprise of professors; it should be Government-supported on a scale corresponding to the scale of emergency existing in the planning of environment and transport in this country, he thought. Asked by Mr. E. W. A. Butcher (Bristol), who should be in charge of transport planning in future, Mr. Warman, during the discussion on his paper, said that engineers should be employed, and not economists or accountants. The latter should be banned he thought. Without them this country would be better off.
Smaller buses
Mr. Warman expected to be shot down for his suggestion for the use of smaller buses and several speakers did tackle him on this question. Mr. Thomas Lord (Leeds) said that small buses were totally unacceptable and would lead to big losses —public transport must pay its way. The only place for a smaller bus was in a central area of a city. Mr. T. L. Beagley (MoT) said that manpower continued to be a difficult problem and this interfered with any plan for more frequent services with mini-buses.
Mr. R. Bailey (Lancashire United) said that if '70-seat buses were replaced by 50seat buses, let alone minibuses, operating costs would be increased by 40 per cent. This was assuming that labour would be available. An extra 30 buses would be required on the Manchester service alone if 50-seaters were adopted and Mr. Warman wanted 20-seaters. Mr. W. Leese (Ribble) said there were very good reasons for large double-deckers being employed. They reduced operating costs and were better than an increased number of single-deckers during peak hours. In any case there was an acute staff shortage and his company could not provide all scheduled peak journeys now. However, he would like to see an experiment employing both types of vehicle on similar services.
Mr. G. Carruthers (United Welsh) said the most important requirement of public transport operators was to convince local councillors, and not the planners, of the need for providing good public transport. Mr. J. C. Franklin (Blackpool) was worried about the illegal use of cars carrying passengers to work. He said that there must be greater segregation of buses and then reminded the conference that his undertaking was the only one in Britain still operating trams. These trains ran on a segregated track between the road and the promenade and could do the three miles journey from the south end of the Promenade to the centre of Blackpool in 15 minutes including stops whereas it took private cars at least 25 minutes to travel the same distance and this time could be much increased at the height of the season.
One point made by Mr. Lord was that the delegates at the conference would have been very surprised six years ago if a planning officer had spoken up for public transport in the way that Mr. Warman had today. Much blood and sweat had been used in Leeds to bring together all the people concerned in the future planning of the city including its public transport system.
He felt that greater co-ordination of company and municipal bus services running inside city boundaries was required. He said: "Let us decently bury the Act of 1930."