Human Transit

that second on-board employee

A reader asks:

 

My question relates to the relationship between frequency and capacity.  In Boston on the MBTA ... for many of the trains, there are 2 employees running the train.  On the Green line, trains are 2 cars long, with a driver in the first, and in the second an operator responsible for opening and closing doors and making sure no one gets on without paying.  For the other lines, the 2nd operator only has to open and close doors because you need to pay to get into the stations.

 

To me, it seems like a waste to have to pay a second individual to open and close the doors.  Outside of the highest frequency travel times, and even possibly during those, wouldn't it be better for travelers to have service twice as often even at half the capacity?  Outside of the truly busy travel times, trains rarely run anywhere near capacity.  Especially on weekends and in the evening, trains are never full but the less frequent service does not encourage those spontaneous transit trips that are so vital to urban life.

 

This is not my core expertise, but my understanding is that generally this is right:  the second employee is usually a holdover from days when fare collection and monitoring of doors had to be done manually.  The job often survives because it's coded into labor contracts and sometimes also into regulations.

I am unaware of anything that non-driving on-board employees do that would be utterly impractical to automate today, the best evidence for which is that trams, streetcars, light rail, and heavy rail can be found operating with a single employee all over the world.   (Fully grade separated heavy rail, of course, can also be run with zero on-board employees, liberating the agency to operate intense frequency even late in the evening.)  Fare collection is increasingly handled by Proof of Payment systems which feature roving fare inspectors.  While these fare inspectors have a cost, their number is not directly related to the number of vehicles in service, so they are not such a direct barrier to increases in service. 

Frequency is driven by staffing requirements rather than vehicles, so the number of employees on board is the dominant variable determining how frequently any line can be run.  Only during the peak commute period is the availability of vehicles a significant element of the frequency decision.

As you would expect, however, any local debate about turning second employees into drivers of additional service will be fraught.  It is very easy for opponents (usually including the unions) to make generalized allegations about safety and security because most people feel safer and more secure if there's an employee nearby.  So it's politically hard to do.

This is one of those issues that is intensely local, and where examples of experience from other cities just have trouble penetrating a local debate.  It happens even in Europe.  See for example the peculiar fare-collector job that exists on Amsterdam trams.  A little cubicle placed at the middle of each tram contains an employee who serves as a cashier, selling tickets.  Boarding and circulation on Amsterdam trams is awkward, and effective capacity much reduced, because you're required to board only at certain doors and exit at certain others.

This second employee on Amsterdam trams is, as near as I can tell, unique in Europe; everywhere else trams run with one employee (the driver) and roving fare inspection.  Get a European transit professional going on how bizarre this Amsterdam practice is.  It's great fun over a beer.  But they can also explain, politically, why it will probably never change. 

If readers know of recent stories where second employees have been successfully removed and retrained as drivers, thus allowing more service, please post a link in the comments.

almere, netherlands as bus-oriented development

The remarkable busway network of Almere, Netherlands is impressive from the ground, as we saw in Richard Lenthall's post, but it's even more remarkable on Google Earth:

Here is the commercial core of Almere.  (You can easily find this yourself on Google Earth or Google Maps.  Just search for "Almere, FL, NL.")

The entire image is a mile (1.6 km) wide.  Across the top of the image you can see the main intercity rail line, running east-west, with frequent electric trains to Amsterdam, Schiphol Airport (AMS), and other major towns of the country.  The station is right in the middle.

Directly south of the station is the densest part of the core, on a short axis extending south from the station to the main lake, just visible on the south edge of the image.  As you can see, a busway runs right down the middle, going underground at the station and again at the major commercial/employment center on the lake. 

Directly east of the commercial/employment center is a distinctive district with a half-circle pattern of streets.  The northern edge of the half-circle is an east-west busway.  It goes right under the commercial center and emerges on the other (west) side.  Some bus routes run east-west across this segment, but most come from the two sides and turn northward to run under the station.

Let's pan southeastward a bit, at the same scale:

The half-circle district is now in the northwest corner, where this image overlaps the previous one.  The busway branches right at the center of the half-circle.  One branch heads south, while the other continues east and then turns south near the east edge of the image.  The little Google bus stop symbols indicate the busway path, but note that not all of the bus stops appear at this scale.

As you can see, the busway is reasonably central to all of the development, because both were designed together.  At the points furthest from the busway, you have open space and a high-capacity road.  The busway brings you to central points of the community, while the road network delivers you only to the edges of it.  You can see the same pattern in the commercial core above: high-capacity roads form a ring around the core, delivering you to parking on these outer edges.  But if you come by bus, you arrive at a core location where there's very little traffic, where the walking distances to everything are optimal, and where all the infrastructure welcomes you as a pedestrian.

North Americans try hard to do "transit-oriented development," (TOD) but the Dutch are doing it on a massive scale.  Even more heretically, they do it with buses!  All of Almere is transit-oriented, and the transit is all in the form of busways.  These aren't the long-haul rapid-transit busways of Brisbane, though the Dutch do those too.  Almere's busways are designed to be the local coverage for the entire town; there's no need for additional meandering local buses getting stuck in traffic on local streets, or slowing down for the traffic-calming measures aimed at cars, such as you see all the time in North American and Australian suburbs. 

Just because service is locally oriented doesn't mean it shouldn't be as fast and reliable as possible.  Remember: average speed determines a route's cycle time, which (combined with frequency) determines operating cost.  A service that's faster and more reliable requires fewer buses to cycle, so it can be run more frequently at the same cost.

The Almere busway moves at moderate speeds and stops relatively often, but still the stop spacing has been placed as wide as possible (rarely less than 500m) and the urban form works with that spacing.  The busway intersects minor streets, but it's grade separated where it crosses a major highway (such as the top-center of the second image).  Buses are able to cycle the whole system with near-perfect reliabiilty.  The only source of delay is a problem with passengers boarding and alighting. 

The urban structure here is repeated all over the residential parts of Almere.  Explore it yourself.  Yes, you could have done this whole structure with streetcars on grass track, but for a variety of reasons, probably partly due to the ease of phasing service in, they chose to do busways instead.  You can argue over the environmental and sustainability issues of that choice.

But don't let anyone tell you that you can't build a dense and transit-oriented suburb using buses!  As always, what matters is not the technology but the mobility it's designed to provide.  That's a matter of walking distance, separation from car impacts, stop spacing, and exclusive right-of-way.  Optimize all of these, as Almere has done, and you've got an almost perfect transit system, properly located to form the primary circulation system for the community.

guest post: richard lenthall on the busways of almere, netherlands

Richard Lenthall is the founder of Sight of the Navigator, a European travel and transit advisory website based in Amsterdam. It aims to improve tomorrow’s journey experience by bringing together transit providers and their passengers.

Transit and urban planners will no doubt be familiar with the “Bus Lane”, the concept of designating a lane or segment of road exclusively for the use of buses and other permitted vehicles.  When properly executed bus lanes can save time over the same section of a journey made with a car, and provide operators the means to keep to timetables during the rush hours, both of which can promote the use of public transit.

Due to constraints in most established and developed urban areas, the bus lane is something of a compromise.  The weakness of a bus lane, and where the efficiency gain is most often compromised, is at intersections with other major road arteries where the priority for the bus cannot be continued.  At these points the bus often has to compete to rejoin the normal flow of traffic and then queue normally on an equal footing.  Compounding this weakness are features of more poorly planned bus lanes such as temporary operating hours and scenarios where the bus has to either turn against the flow of oncoming traffic, or manoeuvre across the road in preparation for a junction.   (An example of the latter can be seen at Piccadilly, London roughly once every 2 minutes during the day.)  All of these weaknesses counteract the idea of giving the bus priority.  Journey time starts to suffer, where properly separated transit would be able to continue unhindered.

In an ideal world the bus lane would cover the whole of the route, maintain constant separation from other traffic and a priority at intersections, as this would guarantee the value to the user.  Such an ideology is beyond the scope and budget of many developed urban councils as it would imply a complete redesign of an existing road system. 

But what if you were able to work from a completely blank canvas? How would it work in reality?  To illustrate this theory I’d like to show you the town of Almere in The Netherlands.

The Blank Canvas

Almere is one of The Netherlands’ famous reclaimed land projects lying on artificial islands, 25km northeast of Amsterdam.  This new land provided urban designers with the opportunity to build both a normal road system and a separated bus-way network that are deeply interwoven throughout the town.  Stepping off the train at Almere Centrum you immediately see signs of how this has been done.

Directly underneath the railway station are bus stops which combine to serve as Almere’s transit hub.  Here buses serve all parts of the town with the trains above going directly to Amsterdam, Utrecht and Schiphol Airport.  While this is a good idea and the result of well thought out planning there is nothing special right here, so let’s turn around.

On the busway, car traffic is absent and no bikes are allowed.  Crucially, for the success of the scheme and the efficiency aims, the bus way doesn’t end when it reaches a junction,  Instead the buses are afforded the benefit of pro-active signalling at traffic intersections even if those junctions are very central to the town.

 

A little further out we can see how the planning of regularly spaced stops at roughly 700m on the bus-way have been incorporated into the social fabric.  The next picture is taken at the Almere Haven stop where housing, shopping, a bar and the bus stop (which also gets services direct to Amsterdam’s business districts) have all been incorporated into the area’s design.

How does it work in practice?

Elsewhere on Human Transit, Jarrett has argued that if you provide a Bus service with grade separation and proactive signalling, which are the usual provisions for Light Rail or Tram networks, buses can operate to the same high degree of efficiency as rail based systems, and in Almere that is exactly what’s been done. 

In this video you can watch the bus-way in action.  Taken at a junction, the video shows how the system works when the bus-way crosses an arterial road.  See how the first bus triggers the advanced warning system and the traffic lights controlling the conflicting road traffic turn red before the bus has to slow down.  Once the bus passes the system checks to see if another bus is in the control zone, and then reverts to green.  Shortly after, two red buses arrive and the cycle repeats, this time keeping the road traffic on hold until the second bus has passed through.  None of the buses that passed through had to stop.  Delay to traffic was kept to a minimum and efficiency was optimal for everyone regardless of your choice of transport.

Here you can see how the integrity of the bus way has been preserved despite it running through a busier urban intersection and close to a shopping precinct.

Finally in this video you can see how the bus way performs from the driver’s point of view.  Using magnetic induction loops buried into the bus-way the passing of the bus triggers the advanced warning system.  This checks and changes the traffic signal ahead so that the bus can pass through without having to slow down or stop. (The advanced signal is the white vertical stripe, when it’s lit the bus driver knows the standard traffic light will automatically change in his favour).

In all three videos the buses have exclusive use of the right of way ensuring safety and optimising performance for the service.  The videos demonstrate how capable any bus-way can be if you create a network where buses and other road users don’t compete for access and install a proactive signalling system that ensures priority for the bus.

A Matter of Philosophy

To exploit the opportunity presented by the blank canvas of new land, it must have been important to the urban planners to establish a philosophy for the bus-way and bus services.  This philosophy would have been that they were going to treat the bus not as merely another road vehicle but instead as a means of transport that was going to be afforded clear rights of way, prioritisation and separation as far as absolutely possible.  The consequence of fully pursuing that philosophy is a bus-way network that at first glance operates in a way that’s akin to a tram, metro or even railway network.  The planners of Almere chose not compromise.

The next post on Almere's busways is here!

amsterdam: the flying wheel

From the pinnacle of Amsterdam Central station, as seen from my hotel room last month.  I'm guessing it's from the Deco era, early 20th century.  There's an exuberant optimism about European rail architecture of that era that needs to find new expressions.

Note:  I'm back in Sydney, but detritus of the just-completed round the world will probably continue showing up here for a while. 

amsterdam: victory is orange

Hello from a hotel room with a great view of Amsterdam's Central railway station, and of the intricate tangle of tram loops, canals, roadways, taxi queues, bike lanes, and subway construction sites that make up Stationsplein ("station square").  The Netherlands triumphed over Uruguay in the World Cup semifinal about fifteen minutes ago. 

There aren't many cars in Amsterdam, because the city simply doesn't make room for them.  But every car in my field of vision, maybe 20 or so on all sides of the square, is honking.  (It is the sort of moment when you wonder why carmakers couldn't tune all horns to an agreed set of standard pitches, so that when everyone honks at once we'd at least get a pleasing chord.)  I can also hear a lot of happy shouting, a few things that sound like brass instruments, and the occasional vuvuzela. 

What I don't see is anything unusual in the traffic itself.  People don't seem to be getting in cars just to drive around and honk.  If they're in their cars, they're honking, but they seem to be driving safely and respecting the great masses of pedestrians flowing from the city into the station.  

At such moments it's helpful that the national team's patriotic color is the bright orange usually seen on crossing-guard flags and freeway construction cones, so the fans are easy to see at night. 

The team wears the same orange on the field, of course, and since it commonly means "slow down, look out" in other international contexts, I wonder if it has some subliminal retarding effect on the attacks of Holland's adversaries.  Perhaps even a great striker like Uruguay's Diego Forlán, setting up a make-or-break kick on goal, loses a crucial 0.4% of his attention to an unconscious fear that he may be about to run over schoolchildren crossing the road. 

Finally, a fun detail from the Guardian's live coverage:

"Paul, I must protest against your description of our [Dutch] national anthem as a 'grim dirge'," bellows Frank Futselaar. "Not only is it the oldest national anthem in the world, it's contents are also appealing in that they barely mention the Dutch at all. It was a revolutionary song during the Dutch revolt against the Spanish empire and mentions both how our founding father was a German and how much we respect the king of Spain. This could be a bit of an issue if we make it to the final."

They've made it.  Couldn't happen to nicer people, or to people easier to see in the dark. 

amsterdam: drunken revelers dancing with trams

Yes, I'm in Amsterdam, and the Netherlands scored a big win in the World Cup quarter-finals yesterday.  I was at Rembrandtplein, but I'm sure it looked like this all over the city. 

 

In that second photo, the gentleman on the far right appears to be taking the posture of a matador, and given where he's standing, the only dangerous beast that he could be tempting would be an oncoming tram.

Yes, there's a transit angle on the festivities.  As soon as they broke out, I headed over to Leidsestraat, a narrow pedestrian+tram street lined with tourist-oriented shopping.  And I have to say things were pretty much as usual, plus some noise and funny hats.

If you think you can imagine how slow this would be for the tram, it's a little slower than that.  Leidsestraat has heavy tram volumes -- every 3 minutes at peak times -- and yet it's built with a series of single-track segments.  There's double-track at the designated passenger stops, but between these there are short bits of single track.  Trams have to wait at the passenger stop until the single-track segment ahead of them is clear, before they can proceed.  So some of what looks like trams stuck behind peds is really trams waiting for the clearance to enter the single track segment. 

But in either case, this segment is seriously slow, I'm guessing an average of no more than 6 km/h (4 mph).  (UPDATE: Commenter Pete(UK) keeps me honest: it's scheduled at about 9 km/h, still pretty slow.)  This matters, because these are tram lines that extend well out into the south and west of the city, and since these trams enter/leave the urban core via this Leidsestraat segment, this is probably their peak load point -- the point on the line where they are at their fullest.  A lot of people making fairly long trips have to ride through this segment, where the tram runs so slowly that it looks like it's trying to entertain the tourists (and World Cup revellers) rather than get anywhere.

But it's not all that unreliable.  Trams ring their bells a lot, pedestrians get out of the way, and nobody gets hurt.  The big trams also move with a certain confidence.  They're not inching their way forward, as though asking for permission at every moment.  They glide slowly but firmly from one stop to another.  I'm sure accidents do happen, and they're probably pretty grim when they do, but the tram drivers manage not to seem intimidated by the high risk of hitting someone.  Even at their slow speed, the pedestrians are packed so closely around the tram that there would be no chance for reaction time if someone fell in front of one.

The only time it really falls apart is when a vehicle is present, in this case a police car.  

There are also problems when a car is crossing the mall on an intersecting street, needs to yield to peds on the far side, and thus gets stuck crossing the tram tracks.  The many cyclists, most using common sense but not observing traffic laws, add a further frisson.

Leidsestraat is the sort of place urbanists have in mind when they go on about how easily trams mix with pedestrians once you get the cars and buses out of the way.  And I have to say that it works on that score.  But it's really slow.

the march of the centipedes: amsterdam's bus rapid transit line

Throughout the Thredbo conference on transit competition in Delft, Netherlands last week, the various Dutch speakers and hosts managed to keep up a continuous theme of national self-reproach. The message was something like: "We know everyone thinks we're the closest thing to an urban transport paradise on earth, so the best service we can offer is to show you all the ways that even we can screw up."  The conference began with a plenary presentation by Hugo Priemus of the Delft University of Technology on collusion and price-fixing in the Dutch construction industry, and wrapped up with a study tour that included the Zuidtangent Bus Rapid Transit system, giving particular emphasis to its most embarrassing feature.