Human Transit

how do you compare to your peers? should you care?

Admit it:  You've always cared, at least in secret, about how you compare to your peers: your friends, your fellow students, your graduating class, your co-workers, your generation.  Well, deep down, transit authorities and city governments care too, which is why comparing a city to other similar cities always gets attention.

Sometimes peer comparisons cause complacency, especially if you choose the wrong peers.  Wellington has the highest transit mode share in New Zealand, but in a country with only one other big, dense city, that obviously shouldn't imply that it's reached nirvana.  Working in greater Vancouver I always have to emphasize that they are doing so well by North American standards that they have to start comparing themselves to European port cities in their size class (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Marseilles).  My general advice: If your peer comparison says you're wonderful, throw a party and revel in this for 48 hours, then look for a more motivating group of peers. 

At the other extreme, nothing is more motivating than being told that you're dead last among your peers.  Earlier this year I worked (through my Australian employer MRCagney under the leadership of Ian Wallis Associates) on a peer comparison study for Auckland, New Zealand, which compared Auckland's transit performance with all the five biggest Australian cities plus a selection of North American ones.  Download the full report here.  Remember, if you're in any of the peer cities that it uses (Wellington, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Edmonton, Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver, Honolulu, Portland, Seattle) this is your peer study too!  Just keep the tables and refocus the text (citing the source of course!).

More generally, the report is a good illustration of how peer comparison can work at its best, and also of the cautions that must be shouted from the sidelines once the conclusions take fire in the media, as they certainly have in Auckland.  From yesterday's New Zealand Herald:

Consultants have ranked Auckland last out of 14 cities - in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States - included in a benchmark study for the average number of public transport trips taken annually by its residents.

Aucklanders also pay the highest fares of any of the cities, amounting to 24c for every kilometre travelled on the average 44 public transport trips they take each year, compared with 17c in Wellington.

The rest of the article is further grim statistics, plus quotations from political leaders demanding that something be done. 

I'm  sympathetic to Auckland Transport in this case.  Remember, a city's transit performance is mostly about the physical layout of the city and the constraints on other modes; the quality of the transit system by itself can't overcome problems in those areas.  The nature of the economy also matters.  Wellington is much smaller but it has much more severe chokepoints in its urban structure.  In fact, all travel between the northern and southern parts of the city must go through a single chokepoint less than 1 km wide, which is also the (very dense) downtown.  Wellington's economy is dominated by government, which is generally a sector disposed to use transit heavily. All of these features are hugely important in driving Wellington's mode share above Auckland's, and yet they don't include anything about the respective quality of the transit systems. 

Peer comparisons also carry the false assumption that everyone wants to be the same kind of city, and is therefore working to the same kind of goals.  (This attitude, taken to extreme, produces the absurdity of top ten "best cities for transit" lists.)  Low mode share for transit may mean your transit system is failing, but it may mean that it's not trying for mode share, or at least that it has other objectives or constraints that prevent it from focusing on that goal.  It may just mean that your city has different values.  It may mean the city stikes a different balance between cycling, transit, and walking based on its own geography.

Still, service quality matters, and there's a lot that Auckland can do.  I hope the city's opinion leaders are listening to Auckland Transport as well as berating it, so that they understand the real choices that must be made to move Auckland forward.  If there's a real conversation, great things can be accomplished. 

bus rapid transit: two kinds of flexibility

 

On yesterday's post on the watering-down of Bus Rapid Transit proposals in Bristol, UK, a number of comments seem a little vague about how buses are more "flexible" than rail.  For example, Carl writes:

The two primary justifications for BRT [are]:

1. Like rail but cheaper. ...
2. More flexible. More flexible means it doesn't need exclusive right of way everywhere (usually the chokepoints), that other traffic can use the lanes, etc.

This a very common way of framing the question, and a very misleading one.

First of all, the notion of "flexibility" used in #2 has nothing to do with the bus/rail distinction, at least if we're talking about surface light rail or streetcars.  You can put streetcars or light rail in mixed traffic and get all the same speed and reliability problems that a bus would deliver in the same situation.  So again, in urban transit:  Speed and reliability are not about vehicle technology; they are about what can get in your way.

But Bus Rapid Transit offers a very different flexibility that in certain situations out-competes rail.  A busway can be designed so that buses from many surface lines can flow into it.  This potentially spreads the usefulness of the busway over a large area without requiring an additional trunk-to-feeder connection.  Connections are unavoidable in good networks, but if there are easy opportunities to eliminate one, it's still worth going for.

This ability to flow through to local lines yields what we call an open busway.  North American open busways include the Ottawa busway network, the Pittsburgh busway, and the Los Angeles El Monte Transitway, but they are much more common overseas, including the developed world's most extensive example in Brisbane, Australia.  This kind of flexibility is impossible to do with rail.

Closed busways, which has none of these benefits but can have more "specailized" vehicles, include the Los Angeles Orange Line.

The flexibility of open busways makes sense only where it matches the pattern of the market. Brisbane is a highly radial city, with a single downtown and densities dropping away as you move away from it.  Outlying nodes of high activity, which could be a strong endpoint for a closed busway or rail line, are scarce.  So the open busway makes perfect sense.  It allows busway service to spread out over a larger area, yielding high frequencies on the inner busway where the demand is higher, and correspondingly lower frequency further out.  It's the kind of flexibility that fits the city.

basics: dead running

The British/Australian term "dead running" means "running out of service, unavailable for passengers."  I like the term because it could be the title of a zombie movie.  I look forward to seeing if it attracts hits.

The North American term is "deadheading," which may remind you of rock fans of a certain era.  In both cases, the word "dead" is apt.  It's a waste, a loss.  It's unavoidable up to the point, but transit agencies are always trying to turn dead time into live, useful time.

The Brisbane Times has a piece by Marissa Calligeros announcing that '28 per cent of bus services are "dead running", where passengers are unable to board.'  That's a confusing way of putting it.  The reporter must mean that Brisbane buses are dead running 28% of the time. 

That sounds like a lot, but "dead running" is the result of two different issues that need to be kept separate.

• All transit vehicles must travel between their operating bases, where they are stored and maintained, and the beginning and endpoints of service.  Rail services usually have bases directly on the rail line, but may still have to dead-run through the rail system to reach their trip's starting point.  Bus bases can be anywhere.  The location of bases (called depots in Britain/Australia, often divisions in the US) is a major issue.  It's often worth spending capital money to save operating money, and careful investments in bases, reducing dead running, can do that.

• Transit agencies that run extensive one-way express incur massive amounts of dead running.  Brisbane, for example, is a very, very centralized city, with a downtown far out of scale to anything else.  That means a huge demand for one-way trips into downtown in the morning and out in the evening.  All those services that are needed in only one direction usually have to get back in the other direction so that the driver's shift can end where it began.  (The other alternative is to pay the driver to hang around downtown all day, which is even more expensive.)

There's no way to understand Brisbane's "dead running" issue, or that of any other city, without separating these two causes.  The Brisbane Times article talks only about the first, but the Brisbane bus system has a massive one-way peak due to its single dominant downtown and relatively lack of direct rail paths for much of the city.  Can dead running be better addressed by a rigorous review of whether these one-way peak services can be combined, replaced by links to rail, or otherwise made more efficient?  GIven the higher cost of dead running for one-way peaked service, could some of it be converted into two-way, all-day service at less expense than it would first appear?

That's an important question for any city.  Details of driver costs vary, but in general, dead running is one of the main reasons that one-way express service (bus or rail) can be more expensive than it looks.

brisbane: the last on the flood

Yes, it appears that many of Brisbane's ferry terminals are gone ...

... but the boats themselves were saved.  Buses are replacing ferries, we're told, though buses can't do much without bridges.

Floods this major don't often happen in developed-world cities.  If you're interested in the recriminations phase, Kerwin Datu has a good overview in the Global Urbanist.

_{Photo: Robert Shakespeare, Brisbane Times}

 

brisbane: remarkable aerial photos of flood

Nearmap.com has posted a complete layer of aerial images of Brisbane, take on the 13th when the flood was near its peak.  Here's Milton, featuring the flooded Suncorp Stadium near the top of the image. 

Panning just to the southeast, here's a bit of South Brisbane. 

There's quite a bit of transit news in this image.  The bridge in the upper right is the Victoria Bridge, which normally carries buses in exclusive lanes between the CBD (off to the upper right) and the entrance to the South East Busway, which is just west of the railroad tracks.  Just at the west end of the bridge you can make out a pair of of platforms, which are Cultural Centre station.  The street is flooded just west of that station, so it's clear that at the height of the flood the bridge, the station, and this part of the busway were all out of service. 

The building immedately north of the bridge is the Queensland Art Gallery, the main art museum, which fortunately had time to move its collection to upper floors.  South of the bridge you can see the floodwaters invading the Southbank entertainment precinct. 

This next image is further east.  It has the CBD on the west edge, then Kangaroo Point with the Story Bridge, then New Farm in the image's eastern half:

Near the center of the image you can see what looks like a piece of white string in the water, just off the northern shore.  That's the remains of the Riverwalk's floating segment.  Pieces north and south are now missing. 

Nearmap.com's excellent images can be explored just as you'd explore Google Maps, and their images of Australia are consistently sharper than Google's.  If you're in Brisbane, and don't want to be reviled as a "rubbernecker" visiting the flooded areas and getting in the way, explore the flood on Nearmap instead.  If you're not in Brisbane, well, be glad of the fact.

redundancy in transit networks: a good thing?

Transit planning consultant Bob Bourne is thinking about the Brisbane flood's impact, and wondering whether building more redundancy into transit networks is a good idea:

My heart goes out to everyone affected by the floods.  It can be devastating on so many levels, individual lives lost; extensive property damage to individual residences, and infrastructure damage.  I managed the system in Ames, IA during our floods in 1990, 1993, 1998, and 2005 and I have been assisting the Cedar Rapids, IA transit system in recovering from their 2008 floods.  I worked in Chicago during the blizzard winters of 1977-78 and 1978-79 where the city and suburbs experienced several weeks of paralysis due to the continuous heavy snows as well as way too many blizzards in Iowa over the years.

 

In the U.S. buses typically operate without a lot of redunancy in the route network.  Your commentary on numbering overlapping bus routes and make them understandable to the riding public is interesting and implies that there are lots of routes serving several corridors.  In the U.S. that may be true, but usually the headways are pretty well trimmed to provide the absolute minimal level of service.  When you add demand due to adjacent services becoming inoperative, the existing routes are overwhelmed.  Overloading causes extended travel times and buses cannot make their normal cycle times which exacerbates the problem.  Throw in a street network in chaos and the bus system will be criticized as not meeting the needs of the citizens in the time of crisis.  No easy way to explain the problem.

 

The other problem that we had in Ames, Chicago, and Cedar Rapids was that some of the drivers lived in areas that were flooded or had immediate family in those areas.  They needed to tend to their family/housing priorities and this decreased the number of people available when the workload  of more passengers and longer travel times increases.

 

At some time in the future, after everything settles, perhaps you could solicit comments on building redundancy into your transit system.  Sometimes, it is good to have lightly used routes that can be cancelled in a crisis allowing redeployment of drivers and vehicles.  Sometimes it is good to have headways with a loading standard of less than 125% of seats at the peak point on the route instead of cramming buses with 150% or 175% of seated load.   Your 10 or 12 minute frequent headway concept can provide additional resources if you need to cut it back to 15 to 20 minutes during a crisis.

 

After the September 11, 2001 disaster in New York, the subway system was able to recover quickly because the lower end of Manhattan was one of the few places in the subway system where there was some redundancy.   Multiple routes close to each other and at the end of some routes made it easy for commuters to resume their normal lives long before the reconstruction of the subway damage.

 

Redundancy is not favored by policy makers and can add to costs.  However, a system with excess capacity will perform well in times of crisis and will provide addtional service during normal times.

 

Our prayers are with everyone who is suffering through this disaster and we hope that good luck will shine on Australia again.

The kind of redundancy that Bob praises is something transit planners spend much of their time trying to get rid of, because on typical days when we don't need it as redundancy, we call it duplication and waste.

Transit agencies work on such tight budgets that it doesn't make sense to run, say, a bus line next to a rail line, doing the same thing, just for the redundancy.  If the rail line is serving the market, the bus should be off somewhere else, providing unique mobility rather than duplicating the rail.

This is especially true in small cities like Bob's hometown of Ames, Iowa, or Great Falls, Montana.  These networks' resources are stretched tightly to create the maximum amount of mobility for the budget.

Having said that, there are a few situations where an efficient network is also a redundant one.

Classic high-frequency grids provide redundancy for transit in the same way they do for cars.  If one segment in a grid goes down, there's a parallel line 800m away that you can walk to in a pinch.  It will probably allow you to complete the same L-shaped trip that you intended to make on the disabled line.  

Ferries are more complicated.  The long cross-city run of the CityCats mostly connects stations that are also connected by bus.  The bus trip generally runs a shorter distance at a higher frequency, though it may require a connection.  So there's no question that the intrinisic attraction of the ferry is part of what keeps it busy.  There may also be secondary issues, like the legibility problems of much of the bus system in downtown Brisbane, where most connections occur.  But there are also situations where CityCat and the smaller CityFerry does a link that's simply impossible by road, or much, much longer, and in these cases the ferry wins on pure mobility grounds. 

Of course, bus operators generally have backup fleets in case they need to suddenly replace a non-redundant train or ferry line that goes down.  In Australia, there are often standing agreements between government and private operators to shift buses into this role, and given a day's warning -- which Brisbane had -- it's not hard to replace a failed network segment with buses even while running the rest of the bus network.

So is redundacy a good thing in disasters?  Of course it is.  Is it a reason to design networks that are redundant all the time, at the expense of more mobility that could be provided at the same cost?  No, probably not, because you're weighing a rare disaster against daily inefficiency.  Are there styles of network design that are both efficient and redundant?  Yes, the high-frequency grid comes to mind. 

In really big and dense cities, you can also get both redundancy and efficiency, because there will tend to be overlaps of service just to provide capacity into dense centers like Lower Manhattan, and in these cases, as Bob notes, redundancy is often possible.  The key there, however, is that the duplication of services isn't justified by the need for redundancy, but rather for the sheer capacity need, and providing necessary capacity, of course, is part of efficiency.

 

brisbane: free fares for a week, ferries out of action

As Brisbane's great flood of 2011 recedes, the Brisbane Times has this roundup of the flood's impact on public transit:

Premier Anna Bligh said travel on buses and trains would remain free for seven days, starting today.

CityCat and CityFerry services are out of action after the surging Brisbane River inflicted major damage to pontoons and terminals, but authorities have been trying to continue rail and bus services wherever possible.

If the river ferries are out for a while, it will be interesting to see how well buses take over their functions.  As you can see on the ferry map below, or on Google Maps, Brisbane is defined by a squiggly river with a spectacular shortage of bridges.  There are many bridges around the CBD but only three other bridges in the west and one in the east.  The big CityCat ferries that ran the length of the river mostly served markets also served by buses running along the shore, but the smaller cross-river ferries made some connections that will be vastly longer by road (Bulimba to Teneriffe, for example, in the city's east). 

Perhaps this will give some impetus to the idea of "green bridges" -- bridges across the river exclusively for transit, bikes,  pedestrians, and emergency vehicles.  Brisbane already has one, in addition to two bike-ped bridges.  Portland, a city much like Brisbane in many ways, is building it first.

From far-away Vancouver, Gordon Price shares his photos of some of what's been lost. 

brisbane: the flood at its peak

The great flood of 2011 has damaged many of Brisbane's riverside neighborhoods and destroyed the wharves of the CityCat river-ferry system.  You can find plenty of images of the damage on the the websites of the Brisbane Times (Fairfax Media) and the Australian (Murdoch). 

Here is footage (starting at 0:20) of the destruction of the floating section of the Riverwalk, which connected downtown to the dense New Farm district and carried thousands of pedestrians and cyclists per day.  The huge piece of bridge was later intercepted by a heroic tugboat driver, who prevented it from crashing into the pylons of the Gateway Bridge.  Many also have images of the Drift Cafe, a floating restaurant just a few meters from our office, breaking away and crashing into a bridge.  And this jumped out from the Australian's coverage:

All buses to the city centre were cut off, trains continued to run but only sporadically, ...  Military demolition experts were dispatched to the Moggill ferry - still hanging on by one of the two ropes it uses to help ferry vehicles across the river - to determine whether the safest option was simply to sink it.

Commenter InBrisbane writes:

Yes, thanks everyone all over the world for their support.

Our beautiful CityCat [river ferry] network is ruined. It will have to be rebuilt. Some of the city's favourite places like South Bank are covered with water, and you need a boat to go down Coronation Drive.

The transit authorities have done a stellar job moving trains out of the yard and parking them nose-to-tail in giant "snakes" to get them out of ... stabling which could be flooded. Skeleton bus and trains running. ...

the river was full of logs, pontoons and luxury boats hurtling down like missiles. Not sure where any of the citycats are.

My understanding was that the CityCat ferries are safe, but that most of their wharves have been destroyed.  UPDATE: Commenter Daryl Rosin advises that the ferries were moved out onto Moreton Bay, and berthed at Manly, where the river flooding won't affect them. 

Image of Gardens Point CityCat wharf, Peter Wallis, Brisbane Courier-Mail.

brisbane: the 100-year flood

The Brisbane River is expected to crest tomorrow at a level not seen for over a century.  The state of Queensland has been enduring severe flooding for weeks, but only this week has the disaster arrived in the capital.

This ABC image from this afternoon is looking east toward downtown Brisbane, with the partly flooded Milton district in the foreground and Moreton Bay in the far distance.

Our firm's headquarters office is in the building under the orange arrow.  We are on Park Road, which follows a little ridgeline surrounded by lower-lying land.  So we are pretty fortunate, so far at least.  Obviously, the power is out, and our offices are shut down as staff focus on protecting their homes and loved ones.

I am watching from afar in Canberra, following the ABC coverage.  I'm thinking about my colleagues and clients, of course, but also about all the urban treasures of Brisbane that lie right along the river, including the major art museums, the State Library, the historic districts, the old botanic gardens, and many of the city's most vibrant and interesting inner-city neighborhoods.

As for transit, the wharves used by the popular river ferry network have been "smashed to pieces," according to the mayor.  A heavily-used segment of floating walkway, which carried the riverside bike-ped path past the cliffs of New Farm, is gone.   Still no word on the city's underground transit infrastructure.

Brisbane is often compared to Portland because in both cities, the urban renaissance began through a new engagement with the river.  As a result, much of the revitalization and urban invention of the last decades has gone into riverside districts that are now in danger.

Loss of life in Brisbane is likely to be low, because unlike nearby Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley, which saw devastating flash-floods yesterday, Brisbane has gotten some warning. 

Still, for anyone who's admired Brisbane's romance with its river, this is heartbreaking.

san diego: the rail-bus balance

The Transport Politic has a good overview of the recently announced rapid transit plans for San Diego.  The plan, in short, is to add only one more line to the region's light rail system, a long northward extension to the huge University of California San Diego (UCSD) campus.   For other corridors in the region, the focus is Bus Rapid Transit.

(Legend:  Black = existing commuter rail.  Thin pink lines = Bus Rapid Transit.  Dashed blue line = proposed LRT extension.  Solid blue, green, orange = Existing light rail.) 

I suspect the plan reflects the influence of the locally based Alan Hoffman, an energetic and informed advocate of the Brisbane model of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), a model I've discussed at length here.  (Hoffman was a key author on a readable 2008 survey of BRT around the developed world, downloadable here, that endorses the Brisbane model for North American cities, including San Diego.)  Brisbane features largely grade-separated busways capable of very high freqeuncy and reliability but also capable of running buses through to many destinations at the outer end of each corridor.  The Brisbane model works well where you have (a) a reasonably dense corridor, extending outward from downtown, where (b) a separated busway is physically feasible but where (c) there is no single overwhelmingly important transit destination at the corridor's outer end.

By that principle, the San Diego plan looks right to me.  Light rail is to focus on extending to the biggest transit destination in the county outside of downtown, UCSD, and ending there.  A link from downtown to UCSD will have balanced, two-way demand flows all the way to the end of the line, a very good geography for rail transit with its fixed high capacity and attendant fixed infrastructure cost.

But corridors that don't have a strong outer endpoint will benefit from a pattern in which high frequency runs along the corridor but can branch in several directions as you get further out from the city and demand grows more diffuse.  This is certainly the case with the I-15 and South Bay corridors as sketched. 

The Mid-City corridor along Park and El Cajon Blvds., which focuses mostly on inner-city fabric, is more debatable.  It does have a strong outer endpoint, San Diego State University, and it also serves San Diego's great central park, Balboa Park, and the famous San Diego Zoo.  It probably could be light rail, or even some form of streetcar, so bus-based solutions should probably plan for convertibility to rail in the future, as capacity needs dictate.  Note, too, that what's proposed for Mid-City is "low-end BRT," similar to the Los Angeles Metro Rapid, where signal priority is the primary means of giving buses an advantage. It's hard to create exclusive lanes on inner-city streets, especially in the early stages of network development, but Rapid Bus service can be a sensible step in that direction.  By doing what can be done to increase patronage without exclusive lanes, it helps build the argument for exclusive lanes in the future, much as it is has done on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. 

There may be, as the Transport Politic suggests, some bias against spending too much money in the dense inner city, and/or against short corridors, in the region's planning politics; some such bias is inevitable in large urban regions where the inner city is a small part of the political picture.  It will be intersting to watch Mid City plans evolve in more detail.  This corridor is already dense, but also likely to see further urban redevelopment, much like the Pearl District in Portland.  If such development can be harmonized with locally oriented Bus Rapid Transit -- doing what a streetcar does but on tires, and a bit faster and more reliably -- it will be an important data point for similar inner cities across North America.