Wellington Bus Review

This has been cross-post­ed to Sus­tain­able Welling­ton Trans­port.

Greater Welling­ton Region­al Coun­cil is cur­rent­ly con­sult­ing on the Welling­ton City Bus Review. This is man­dat­ed by the Region­al Pub­lic Trans­port Plan, which requires a review of trans­port ser­vices at least once every five years. The cur­rent shape of the net­work has exist­ed for decades and the city has changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly in that time. For this review, GWRC has cho­sen to work with MRCagney to pro­duce a rec­om­men­da­tion, which brought Jar­rett Walk­er, author of Human Tran­sit, into our region.

Although the pub­lic trans­port net­work works, it’s sus­cep­ti­ble to reli­a­bil­i­ty prob­lems. Welling­ton City Coun­cil has tuned some of the road net­work, gen­er­at­ing more than enough con­tro­ver­sy, and con­tin­ues to look at adjust­ments. The pro­posed routes are a more rad­i­cal depar­ture from the sta­tus quo. The basic assump­tions are being ques­tioned. As expect­ed, there have been com­plaints.

Dis­claimer: this post is my per­son­al opin­ion. Oth­er opin­ions are valid, but I ask that any points of dis­cus­sion be backed up with ratio­nale instead of just emo­tion. My goal for this post is to encour­age peo­ple to voice valid con­cerns to Greater Welling­ton. The bus review is not an all-or-none sit­u­a­tion, you don’t vote for or against it, and this cer­tain­ly isn’t my word ver­sus yours. It’s up to each of us to be con­struc­tive.

The most impor­tant part of the pro­posed changes is the def­i­n­i­tion of the core net­work and a promise to keep it for the long term. The core routes oper­ate at 15min inter­vals or bet­ter, all day, all week. The goal of this is to take away the sched­ule. In a high-fre­quen­cy net­work, pas­sen­gers can show up and get on, rather than plan­ning for when the next bus may arrive. As Walk­er sug­gests, fre­quen­cy is free­dom. Core routes in the south and east cross over each oth­er, allow­ing for those high-fre­quen­cy ser­vices to con­nect town cen­tres in a way that direct bus­es can’t jus­ti­fy.

The con­cept of con­nect­ing ser­vices is woven deeply into the pro­pos­al. It is prob­a­bly the biggest change to the bus net­work. Trans­fers are rare with­in the Welling­ton region­al net­work and greet­ed with any­thing between sus­pi­cion and mal­ice. They are a penal­ty on trav­el times and direct­ness, and pay­ing for a sec­ond tick­et would dri­ve pas­sen­gers away from a ser­vice. How­ev­er, trans­fers allow for much more effi­cient ser­vice — both cov­er­age and fre­quen­cy — for the same trans­port dol­lar. They also allow for a sim­pler sys­tem over­all; the details of a many-to-many net­work is hard to keep in your head. The counter-argu­ment is sim­ple: “If I only ever use one bus, why should I care about net­work com­plex­i­ty?”. The answer is also sim­ple: you’re meant to be able to use the whole net­work.

GWRC has indi­cat­ed that trans­fers between bus­es on the same net­work will be free. Snap­per already han­dles trans­fers from one bus route to anoth­er for Val­ley Fly­er, so get­ting Go Welling­ton trans­fers in place is sim­ple. Trans­fer­ring between oper­a­tors is hard­er, but not impos­si­ble. Peo­ple who trav­el longer dis­tances may be able to use dai­ly or month­ly pass­es across ser­vices until we have an inte­grat­ed tick­et­ing scheme in place, which GWRC has sig­nalled for 2016 (see page 11).

There are a few fac­tors that go into mak­ing trans­fers accept­able. After price, time­li­ness and envi­ron­ment are prob­a­bly equal­ly impor­tant. While it’s easy to show that a con­nect­ed ser­vice, includ­ing wait times, may in fact be faster than a direct ser­vice, time spent wait­ing is more strong­ly felt than time spent trav­el­ling, espe­cial­ly if the weath­er is rag­ing. GWRC promis­es to pro­vide ade­quate shel­ter at trans­fer points, which must be large enough to hold a rea­son­able num­ber of con­nect­ing pas­sen­gers. These con­nec­tion points offer an inter­est­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty for near­by busi­ness­es to pick up cus­tomers. Being on the core net­work has def­i­nite advan­tages, espe­cial­ly on the edges.

Out­side of the core net­work, res­i­den­tial ser­vices can­not run at core fre­quen­cy and should not try. Undoubt­ed­ly, res­i­den­tial pas­sen­gers are going to feel put out if their ser­vice fre­quen­cy is list­ed as low­er than present. This was sum­marised quite ele­gant­ly by a friend. Peo­ple could­n’t care a less if their ser­vice improves, but they’ll scream if they are any worse off. Fre­quen­cy for the sec­ondary and peak ser­vices were derived from tick­et­ing infor­ma­tion pro­vid­ed by the oper­a­tors. (See sec­tion 3 in the MRCagney report, part 1 and part 2.) There are areas that are tru­ly worse off, but it may be dif­fi­cult to jus­ti­fy the extra costs to fill in the expec­ta­tion gap, know­ing the patron­age isn’t there. Walk­er sim­pli­fies the point in an inter­view:

You explain that low-den­si­ty sub­urbs must choose between cost-effec­tive tran­sit or high-qual­i­ty tran­sit. Why can’t they have both?

Because the design of the typ­i­cal low-den­si­ty sub­urb makes it geo­met­ri­cal­ly impos­si­ble. Yelling at your tran­sit agency or elect­ed offi­cials won’t change the facts of geom­e­try. Once you see that, you can move beyond blame and start think­ing about what kind of tran­sit is rea­son­able in each sit­u­a­tion.

In the face of high­er demand, increas­ing the fre­quen­cy of a sec­ondary ser­vice is pos­si­ble. It’s mere­ly a ques­tion of the high­er patron­age jus­ti­fy­ing the cost of the extra bus and dri­ver.

There is a loom­ing ques­tion of where the bus­es trav­el through the CBD. Tra­di­tion­al­ly, every­thing runs through the Gold­en Mile unless it can­not. At peak hour, there are in excess of 120 bus­es per hour in each direc­tion of the Gold­en Mile. Aver­ag­ing one bus every 30 sec­onds, it’s com­mon to see bus­es queue­ing as bus-to-bus con­ges­tion caus­es a minor delay to cas­cade back­ward. While there is room for ratio­nal­is­ing bus stop dis­tances and posi­tions relat­ing to inter­sec­tions, or to speed up board­ings with tech­ni­cal mea­sures, the Gold­en Mile can­not scale to high­er capac­i­ty. The pro­pos­al aims for about 60 bus­es per hour along the Gold­en Mile — most core routes and most sec­ondary routes. GWRC has not fol­lowed the pro­pos­al from MRCagney to cre­ate peak trans­fer points with the core net­work, opt­ing for com­plete sep­a­ra­tion of the peak bus­es from the Gold­en Mile. This is a point of con­tention that I have with the pro­posed changes. Mov­ing peak bus­es out to the quays leaves pas­sen­gers iso­lat­ed and exposed.

Final­ly, it is tempt­ing to bring the argu­ment of tech­nol­o­gy into this review. The num­ber of com­plaints about the future of the trol­ley net­work prompt­ed Walk­er to write a blog post (see point 4), which was then fol­lowed up with a full post on the issue. I think it’s wrong to let the exist­ing trol­ley lines design the net­work by virtue of exist­ing. Lines were moved dur­ing the Man­ners Mall rede­vel­op­ment and lines can be moved again. I think the issue is to get the geom­e­try right. After that, we can argue that trol­leys are worth run­ning. Sim­i­lar­ly, the routes don’t depend on light rail, nor do they exclude the pos­si­bil­i­ty. That’s the ben­e­fit of defin­ing the ser­vice qual­i­ty first. How to imple­ment the ser­vice should always be a sub­se­quent ques­tion.

The bus review con­sul­ta­tion is open until March 16, 2012. Fol­low GWR­C’s instruc­tions about giv­ing feed­back, or write some­thing free-form and send it in. All I ask is for you to be con­struc­tive. We’re build­ing some­thing here.