Human Transit

sydney: destroying the bus lane to save it

Why did I leave Sydney?  Partly because of things like this ...

TENS of thousands of bus commuters face hours of extra gridlock each week because traffic authorities have removed the requirement for an afternoon bus lane during widening of the M2 [the main radial freeway to the northwest suburbs of Sydney].

As part of the conditions attached to the $550 million M2 upgrade, Transurban [the toll road operator] was asked to set up a ''tidal flow'' bus lane to replace two bus lanes removed during construction. The flow of traffic on such a lane is reversed from morning to afternoon to match the heaviest traffic.

The Roads and Traffic Authority [RTA, the state highway agency] and the Department of Planning under the previous government dropped the requirement for a bus lane out of the city in the afternoon peak and agreed with Transurban the lane would be dangerous.

The idea that it's appropriate to remove transit lanes for a road construction project is backwards and upside-down.  Construction inevitably constrains a highway's capacity.  So if you want the economy to move, rather than just the cars, you go out of your way to attract more customers to transit during the construction period.  Instead, customers are being encouraged to drive instead of take the bus, which will make the freeway even slower, thus obstructing all road users regardless of mode and thereby maximizing the construction's negative impact on the local economy.

And this is priceless!

According to the Planning Department, the RTA said it had since done more traffic modelling and the lack of a bus lane would not affect travel times much. The RTA could not provide any extra modelling yesterday.

In other words:  "But mom!  It's not my fault!  Dad told me it was OK to destroy the bus lane!"

UPDATE:  So I was glad to see this today, the new government's much anticipated centralization of transit planning in Sydney that will strip RTA of much of its authority over public transport. 

[New transport minister Duncan Gay] said the RTA knew the public thought it had a ''culture of arrogance'', and that the organisation needed to change. ''You will not see the RTA the same after this process,'' he said.

Could be promising!

conservatives commit to federal funding of transit (in australia)

US readers watching the Federal budget process, in which one major party is proposing Federal disinvestment in city-serving infrastructure, might note that Australia is moving the other way.  The Labor government created Infrastructure Australia in 2008 to be a conduit for federal funding of transit infrastructure, a role similar to that long played by the Federal Transit Administration in the US.  Now, the more conservative opposition -- the "Coalition" of the Liberal and National parties -- has endorsed the contination of that policy, signaling that this role is likely to continue regardless of who is in Government.  On his party website, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott states:

The Coalition supports Infrastructure Australia (IA) and in government will strengthen its role, creating a more transparent, accountable and effective adviser on infrastructure projects.

We’ll keep it, we’ll fund it and we’ll listen to it because important infrastructure decisions should be made on the basis of rational planning ...

The Coalition will ensure that Infrastructure Australia has guaranteed ongoing funding. ... The Coalition’s commitment means that IA will be provided with the resources necessary for it to do its job properly.

It's interesting to think about why urban issues that are bipartisan in Australia seem to become Democratic concerns in the US.   In both countries, most of the population lives in urban areas, but there is a crucial difference in language that creates a difference in habits of thought.  Americans think of big "cities" as separate from their "suburbs," and often use these terms as shorthand or euphemism for a range of other oppositions.  (Only in America, for example, would a style of music associated with black people be called "Urban.")  Americans also have the idea of a suburban center (what Joel Garreau calls an "Edge City') that clings to the outer orbit of a big city but can think of itself as unrelated to it.  Hence someone in Tyson's Corner, Virginia, say, may be happier thinking of their metro area as "Northern Virginia" rather than "greater Washington DC."   

Those word choices lead to a US political reality in which big cities -- narrowly defined in exclusion of their suburbs -- represent a minority of the population and thus attract the interest of only one side of the political divide. 

By contrast, when Australians say "Sydney" or "Melbourne" they usually mean the entire urban area -- the continuous patch of lights that you see from an airplane.  So people who live in what Americans would call the suburbs of Sydney think of themselves as living in Sydney.  This way of speaking encourages them to accept that the problems of Sydney are their problems, whereas a resident of Tyson's Corner may feel quite removed from the problems of "Washington."  When cities are understood in that inclusive way, it follows that most Australians live in cities, so naturally both sides of the political divide must care about them.

sydney, call los angeles

In the Sydney Morning Herald today, I wonder out loud if Australian cities can move forward on public transport given the lack of a mechanism for local initiatives or referenda.  Based on our work last year on Sydney's Independent Public Inquiry, I compare Sydney's stasis with the aggressive building program in Los Angeles, and note that for better or worse, California's tradition of direct popular votes on spending plans makes it possible to lock those plans in for decades, providing the security that the private sector needs to do its part.  In Australia, where spending on big infrastructure happens through regular state budgets, nobody can make a commitment beyond the next election cycle, and nobody dares ask the public for a major new funding source.  So the Australian debate always seems to be about which one or two projects will be built in the current generation, and which will be left for our grandchildren to build.  My article is here.

sydney morning herald on congestion pricing

(If you've found your way here from my article inside the Sydney Morning Herald's "debate" on congestion pricing, welcome!   There's a category of articles on Sydney here, but I hope you'll poke around more widely. The "about the blog" and "about the author" are the place to start.)

In the Herald's congestion pricing debate today, I tried to make the general case, but Professor David Henscher seemed to nail the policy angle that's needed, one that would respond even to the car advocate's complaints. 

Congestion pricing, if and when it happens in Sydney, needs to start by replacing other fees associated with driving, especially those that affect rural areas where there's no alternative to driving and never will be.  This won't be enough to build all the public transport that Sydney needs; we ran the numbers on that last year for the Herald inquiry.  But it makes both political and practical sense as a way to start.

The NRMA [Auto Club]'s line about needing better public transport before you charge for roads is one I agree with, but of course NRMA has no idea how to pay for that, nor is it really their priority.  Realistically, any congestion charging scheme would need to start with the places where public transport is already abundant, which means for travel into and out of the City of Sydney.  That's the one thing that seemed missing from the four articles. 

I certainly objected to the punitive tone of the framing question: "Should motorists pay for the congestion they cause?"  No, motorists should have the option to pay to get out of congestion. 

UPDATE:  By the way, One reason that the Sydney car vs transit debate is so polarized is that both have major projects in mind that require expensive tunnels.  NRMA (the auto club) recently proposed that they would support turning a surface street into a "transit boulevard" if transit advocates would just support a multi-billion dollar road tunnel underneath it.  I doubt there's a deal there.

 

london's northern headache

Commenter David M on what rivers teach about transit:

It's interesting to note that in London the newest Underground lines have no branches (Victoria, Jubilee). In fact, when Jubilee was originally opened it took over one of the Bakerloo Lines branches, reducing the Bakerloo to a branchless line also.

For real complications, look at Camden Town [top center] on the Northern Line [black on this classic map] in London, England. Just south of this station is a complex deep underground junction that lets trains from any two of the branches south of Camden to simultaneously run on any two of the branches to the north. It is a marvel of engineering, but it is also an operational nightmare with trains run from any branch to any branch - one train runs late and it can cause problems on all of the branches.

London has wanted to simplify the operations by spliting the line into two and requiring an interchange at Camden Town. There are four platforms at Camden Town but the interchange passages are insufficient to handle the expected interchange traffic - so for now, it is cheaper to suck it up and deal with the operational issues.

There is an interesting effect of this interchange. Going south, both branches serve Euston Station before heading off to cross London on two different lines serving different areas of the core. You can get on one train at Camden, stop at Mornington Crescent and at Euston. You could get on the following train at Camden and arrive at Euston without passing through Mornington Crescent. The reason is that Mornington Crescent is on only one of the two branches, the other just bypasses the station. It makes for fun time when trying to get to Mornington Crescent.

The other night a Sydney rail expert was telling me that when the North West line is built, creating a four-way junction at Epping similar to the one at Camden Town, they will spend a number extra millions on the tunnelling to create the ability to route trains from any segment to any other.  A similar decision has already been made about a similar junction at Glenfield in Sydney's southwest.  I wonder how much could be saved if we let lines cross without connecting track, and required connections, where that pattern makes sense as part of a larger grid.  It's not the right answer everywhere, certainly, but it sounds like London transit experts aren't very appreciative of all the flexibility that their great-grandparents gave them with the design of the Northern Line.

sydney: it's 10 pm, do you know where your buses are?

This won't amaze readers in places like San Francisco or Boston, which have had Nextbus.com for years. But it's an important step for Australia.  Realtime locations of Sydney's buses, via a new app by Flink Labs of Melbourne.

Not sure what the colours mean.  They need to be colour-coded for inbound vs outbound, which otherwise can't be distinguished. 

Thanks to Chris Loader, who blogs about Australian public transport at Charting Transport, for the tip.

connections vs complexity

In my first "basics" post on connections, I explained why a network that requires connections (or as North Americans call them, "transfers") can actually get people where they're going faster than a network that tries to avoid them.

But there's another important reason to plan for connections rather than direct service, one that should be important to anyone who wants transit to be broadly relevant to urban life: Unless you welcome and encourage connections, your network will become very, very complex.

If a transit system is too complex for people to learn, it can't be used spontaneously, and if you can't use transit spontaneously, then transit is reduced to a very limited role in urban life, serving only trips that people make regularly and can therefore learn how to make even in a complex system.

In presentations on this point, I often compare a network based on connections -- such as that of Los Angeles -- with a network based on fear of them -- such as the inner network in Sydney. Here are more or less comparable slices of the two networks, each image about 8 km wide and 3 km high. Both lie just south of the CBD of each city, so you can see routes converging toward the CBD on the north edge of the map.

Los Angeles:

Sydney:

Network maps drawn by transit agencies are often hard to compare, because each is full of details and conventions that make sense only locally.  To make sense of the Los Angeles map, you must know that line numbers in the 300s and 700s are limited-stop or "Rapid" services that almost always appear on top of a local-stop service on the same street.  So for example on Vernon Avenue, the big east-west corridor across the center of the Los Angeles image, 105 and 705 are local-stop and rapid versions of the same line.  These two services are not duplicating each other; in fact, they are designed to complement each other.  So you should think of 105 and 705 as a single composite line.

Once you account for that, the striking thing about the Los Angeles map is that most streets have only a single line on them, even though we are immediately south of downtown and you would expect many lines to be converging.

By contrast, in a similar sized slice of Sydney, most streets have several lines on them, and in most cases these lines are not designed together. In Los Angeles, if you see two buses right next to each other for many miles along the street, they are probably on the same line and one of them is probably late (a phenomenon called bunching.)  In Sydney, if you see the same thing, the two buses may well be scheduled to do that, usually because they're on different lines that run on top of each other on the same street, and no attempt has been made to co-ordinate their schedules.  For example, Sydney's Oxford Street, for the entire 3.4 km between Taylor Square and Bondi Junction, has four local bus lines and one limited-stop line, ranging in frequency from 10 minutes to 30 minutes, with no particular co-ordination of their schedules.   On this street, bunches of buses are a common sight because in many cases, they're scheduled that way.

Sydney-style networks happen where the prevailing assumption is that people will resist connections at all costs, which means that there is a strong motivation to run direct services between every possible origin and destination.  Even where planners would like to introduce connection-based design, they are frustrated by a fare structure, out of their control, which penalizes connections.  So Sydney ends up with lots of overlapping lines, a high degree of complexity.

This problem is also the cause of others, such as the excessive volume of buses, most of them not full, choking the narrow streets of the CBD.  Obviously, if you didn't feel constrained to run direct service from everywhere to the CBD, you'd organize some buses to feed others (or to feed trains).  This would give you fewer buses in the CBD, with heavier loads on those buses, and thus a stronger moral claim to transit priorities, such as exclusive lanes.

Just for fun, here's an 8x3km slice of an even simpler network, also just south of downtown, though admittedly in a smaller city.  Portland:

I often show this map in Australia because the pattern is even more clear than in Los Angeles.  The simplicity is extreme.  Every arterial has exactly one bus line on it, with a simple 1-2 digit number.  The only exceptions are very close to downtown, where radial lines inevitably have to converge, and a few ghostly line numbers that appear on a white background, which signifies a handful of trips that run only on the peak.  (Note, by the way how this notation helps the viewer see the all-day network on which she might rely,.  This clarity is quite unavailable on the Sydney map.  The Los Angeles map also doesn't distinguish peak-only services, though across much of the city there are very few of them.)

The Portland map also makes clear that even in a city with an exceptionally strong downtown, many frequent lines don't go there, including 70, 71, 72, and 75 on the map above.  The focus, as in Los Angeles, is on anywhere-to-anywhere travel using connections.  Because these "crosstown" lines rely on connections more than the radial lines do, they all run as frequently as possible, and as late into the night as possible.  Sydney, too, has non-downtown lines, but with one exception, the 400, they are too infrequent for fast connections to be possible, and often shut down earlier than the rest of the network.  Again, the frequency is hard to afford in Sydney because resources are divided over so many lines, even those these lines are often overlapping.  Portland and Los Angeles, by contrast, are running the minimum possible number and length of lines, so that they can run each one as frequently, and as late, as possible.

Sydney planners will sometimes argue that Los Angeles and Portland are simpler because they already have street grids, while Sydney is an unplanned accretion with no large-scale order to its street network.  This is partly true; grids are certainly easier to remember, in both cities and transit systems. But you can take a structure like Sydney's and design a more gridlike system, featuring fewer and therefore more frequent lines, all designed to work together to serve any origin-destination pair, rather than picking a few major destinations as today's network tends to do.  I did a sketch of one here.

UPDATE:  An interesting series of comments, starting here, is applying this thinking to equally gridless London, including a very, very frequent grid bus network sketch by commenter Zoltan, which is here.  Remember that polar or "spiderweb" grid, consisting of radials and circles, can also achieve good connectivity while still focusing on a center.  Most workable grid networks, including my sketch for Sydney here, are a hybrid of polar grids and standard rectangular grids. 

connection fare penalties: why they happen

Is it fair to have to pay more if your trip requires a transfer or connection?  I've argued that it isn't, but I also have an appreciation of the difficulty of eliminating these penalties.  So when complaining about a fare penalty, try to understand the situation from the transit agency's point of view.  Not because they're right and you're wrong, but because you many need to help them solve the problem that it presents for them. 

Definitions first.  A connection penalty is any element of a fare policy whose effect is to charge people more for a trip that requires two or more transit vehicles than for a trip using only one, even when the trip is of exactly the same distance and when there's no evident difference in class, amenity, or inefficiency to justify a surcharge.

For example, in the Sydney Morning Herald's inquiry on Sydney's public transit, I prepared this table showing the difference between rail fares and rail+bus fares for trips of exactly the same distance:

My basic view of connection penalities has always been this:  The connection is not an added convenience for which the customer should pay extra.  It's an inconvenience required by the geometry of any efficient, legible, and frequent transit system.  Transit systems must therefore do what they can to minimize this inconvenience and encourage people to make connections.  Connection fare penalties are exactly contrary to this imperative.

As near as I can tell, most fare penalties for connecting arise from some mixture of four basic issues:

• Practical security problems around the physical tools used to record connections, such as the opportunities for fare evasion created by abundant transfer slips.  If this is the primary reason for a connection penalty, smartcard systems will eliminate the problem and should lead to removal of the connection penalty.
• Laws and funding arrangements that refer explicitly to the cash single-ride fare.   A key funding formula that governs Los Angeles County transit agencies gives these agencies more subsidy if they push their base fare downward.  The formula is actually trying to reward ridership, but because ridership is hard to measure across multiple agencies, it estimates ridership as the fare revenue divided by cash single-ride fare.  This penalizes agencies for raising their cash single-ride fares, and encourages them to invent other fees and fare penalties instead, for reasons that have nothing to do with the real intentions of the formula.  Again, smartcards, which will provide a more accurate and direct measure of ridership, should eliminate the need for such approximations and the perverse incentives that follow from them.
  
  
• A journalistic obsession with single-ride cash fare as the key measure of fare cost.  The single-ride cash fare is easy to talk about, and journalists and other non-transit-experts tend to focus on it, producing soundbites such as "Los Angeles fares are cheaper than San Francisco's."  Prevalence of these soundbites motivates agencies to try, for reasons of appearance, to keep their cash single-ride fares down.  Again, this is just like airlines: If you become obsessed with reducing your base ticket price at all costs, you'll have to invent more and more fees, and connection penalties are one fee of that type.
  
  
• Conflicts between the self-interests of geographically entangled agencies or operators.  In multi-agency or multi-operator environments, the introduction of a free connection can come at the expense of the bottom lines of multiple operators, and tends to affect different operators differently.  These problems are sometimes overcome through heroic negotiation, in which the operators agree to shift money among themselves in complex ways in order to present a simple integrated fare system to the customer.  In other cases (as in Brisbane) the solution is to create a new meta-agency that sits over all the operators, pays them for operations, receives their fare revenue, and takes responsibility for a single region-wide or city-wide bottom line.

So it's hard.  It's important, and good transit agencies are at least thinking about the problem, but it's still hard.  In multi-agency cases, for example, the problem may impossible to solve without creating a meta-agency, with all the attendant anxiety about "adding another layer of government."   

What can a citizen do?  One thing is to confront journalists and others who try to make simplistic comparisons based on cash single-ride fares.  Journalists: if you want to do quick pieces about fares, look for average fares (fare revenue divided by ridership) rather than published base fares.  Yes, this is harder because not all agencies can calculate ridership reliably, or (as in Los Angeles) they may actually be relying on fare revenue to get to a ridership estimate.  Again, though, smartcards should eliminate that problem.

Finally, since I've now referred twice to smartcards solving the problem, let me be clear:  Technology can solve information problems, but not ethical ones.  Connection penalties based on the inadequacy of information-tracking tools should fade away once smartcards provide the necessary tool.  But technology won't change the poltical problem: to eliminate fare penalties without losing revenue, you will probably have to raise the single-ride cash fare to compensate.  Effectively you'll be admitting that you've been subsidizing some riders at the expense of others, and you should expect all the blowback that we see anywhere when we tell people that we're removing a subsidy on which they've come to rely.

That's the real problem, and courageous leadership is the only solution for it.

new york's broadway: why do the cab drivers hate it?

New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan is here in Sydney, and spoke last night at the City of Sydney's CityTalks series, hosted as always by Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore.  Sadik-Khan gave her standard presentation on her work in New York, with emphasis on the conversion of traffic and parking space to pedestrian and park spaces.  She also highlighted the new Bus Rapid Transit project, called Select Bus Service, clearly distinguishing between SBS projects that are still compromised, such as First/Second Avenue and Fordham Road, and those that really will be fully exclusive-lane and thus highly reliable, such as the 34th Street line now under development.

Sadik-Khan was as eloquent as usual, but she was asked one question that seemed to deserve a better answer.  The question was "Why don't the cab drivers like the removal of traffic lanes on Broadway?"

Broadway, a diagonal street across the otherwise regular midtown Manhattan grid, is gradually being converted from a through-traffic street to a low-traffic local street with a generous pedestrian and outdoor seating area, like this:

The remarkable thing about this project is that it not only created a lot of pedestrian space but also improved overall traffic flow on other streets of the Manhattan grid, or at least on the long north-south avenues.   Vehicular flows on these avenues actually improved, as measured by GPS transmitters located in all of the city's taxis.

That outcome is credible because the diagonal intrusion of Broadway had always interrupted what were otherwise consistent flows of green-time along Manhattan's parallel avenues.  At times when the rest of the grid flowed fairly well, intersections involving Broadway tended to be particular knots because Broadway required an extra signal phase.  De-emphasizing Broadway as a traffic street has apparently had the effect of removing some of these knots.

So as Sadik-Khan reports it, the taxis themselves measured an improvement but the drivers of those same taxis still declared the change a failure.  Sydney is contemplating a street-repurposing project on George Street (coverting traffic lanes to pedstrian, bike, and light rail) that will be at least as impactful as the Broadway changes in New York, so Sydney listeners needed some useful advice on this point.  Taxi drivers, like hairdressers, get many opportunities to share their opinions with customers.  (This is especially true in Australia where solo customers usually sit in the front seat, so that chatting with the driver feels like a natural thing to do.)  Becuase taxi drivers are often intensely knowledgeable about the city and its traffic, it's easy for the average citizen to assume that they're experts about urban transport issues generally.

All Sadik-Khan offered on this was the usual "change is always difficult" line, or as she put it: "Everyone wants change so long as everything stays the same."  Yes, taxi drivers may be thinking like NIMBYs, with feelings of entitlement about all the street space in the city, but many of them are also -- as Sadik-Khan herself mentioned -- very smart and practical.  Among such smart and practical people, why is there such disapproval of the changes to Broadway?   Does the taxi industry see no benefit in having more pedestrians on the streets of Manhattan?  After all, only pedestrians hail cabs ...

sydney: ambitious draft car-sharing policy

The City of Sydney has just released its Draft Car Sharing Policy (Item 4 here).  The Murdoch-owned Daily Telegraph has a respectful story here, although the print edition of the same story carried a more lurid headline, "Clover's car wars speed up." 

"Clover" is Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore, who has made the City a national leader in sustainable transport policy despite the relatively weak role of local governments in the Australian political system.

It's important to note that the City of Sydney is small -- only 177,000 of greater Sydney's 4.5 million people, consisting of the CBD and innermost, densest neighborhoods.  Even there, public transit isn't all it needs to be, with frequencies as poor as 30 minutes (and no evening service) for trips between inner city activity centres other than the CBD. 

With that in mind, the statistics are looking good.

The growth of car sharing in the City’s area has been extremely rapid. Since 2007, the City has installed more than 190 dedicated car share spaces, catering for approximately 4,000 City residents and 500 City-based businesses. Membership is growing by some 180 residents a month.

It is estimated that the car sharing program has taken at least 550 cars off City streets and reduced on-street parking demand by at least 250 spaces compared to business as usual.

And unlike many governments, the City of Sydney is explicit that rising car ownership is a problem for a city with finite space:

The City of Sydney has the lowest rate of household car ownership in Metropolitan Sydney, at just 0.72 cars per household (in 2006). In many City neighbourhoods, however, household car ownership levels are rising quickly, with serious implications for parking availability, traffic congestion and resource consumption. Increased car sharing can slow growth in household vehicle holdings.

The goal is to raise carshare membership from the current 4000 (out of 90,000 households) to 9000 or 10% of all households.  They estimate that this can be achieved with a car share fleet that would be 1% of the total fleet registered in the city.  In other words, there's the potential to replace the ten cars now owned by ten households with a single shared car.

The City will now require inclusion of car-sharing spaces in new high-rise residential development.  The Sydney Morning Herald grabbed that point as the lede:

ALL large new apartment blocks in inner-city Sydney must have parking spaces for car share vehicles, according to a City of Sydney proposal, the latest move by a council to discourage vehicle ownership.

Large residential blocks will have to include one car share space for every 50 regular spaces under a draft Development Control Plan endorsed by the council's traffic committee last night.

An adequate supply of car-share cars in a high-rise building can reduce the building's overall parking needs, which is a key step toward making high-rise units more affordable.  Residential towers are one setting where car-share vehicles can be closer to home than your own car -- since their reserved spaces will be closer to the elevator than your own car would be.

The division of metropolitan Sydney into more than 40 city governments is mostly a barrier to good planning, but it does have a positive side for the inner city.  With its CBD-driven tax base and exclusively high-density, inner-city population, the City of Sydney has both the resources and the political consensus to drive aggressive change.  There's plenty of controversy about the details; everyone loves cycle lanes, for example, as long as they don't take "my" on-street parking space.  But the broad sustainability context of the City's work, and the need to restrain cars, is not controversial, and given the continued development of high-rise residential, I'd gamble on the city exceeding its target to have 10% of residents in car sharing, even if the costs of car ownership stay roughly the same.

Full disclosure:  I do occasional consulting work for the City of Sydney, but not in the area of car share policy.