As I mentioned a few posts ago, I am reading a very interesting book at the moment by Paul Mees, called “A Very Public Solution“. The first few chapters of the book outlined the various problems with auto-dependency, why public transport use has declined so much over the past few decades, and why many of the steps taken to supposedly improve matters have actually ended up making them worse. It all made for slightly depressing reading actually, but fortunately I have made my way through to chapter 5 – which looks at what really has worked in various cities around the world.
Mees looks at Zurich as a good example of a city that has maintained its level of public transport use over the past 50 years – quite unusual for a developed world city. While Zurich is an incredibly rich city, what is interesting to find out is that Zurich’s system has been successful not because billions upon billions of dollars have been invested in a super-flash system, but rather because it has just been planned extremely cleverly. Mees quotes a recent review of public transport in Europe, which had this to say about Zurich’s system:
Notable is the fact that public transport use in the city has been maintained for 40 years, with strong increases in the 1980s. Advertising, promotion and ticketing have clearly played a part in the increase, but would have had little effect if not backed by an excellent service. This quality has been achieved not by the building of a few fast lines (e.g. an underground) but by providing a service network which is dense in both space and time… There is a close network of tram and bus routes throughout the city and high frequency services are operated throughout the day.
Of course central Zurich has a much higher density than we would find anywhere in Auckland, but it’s interesting to note that many of the outer suburbs of Zurich – which have more similar densities to what we might find in Auckland – also have very high levels of public transport use. The primary reason behind the high levels of use seem to be the integrated nature of the system, and how well coordinated it is. Mees explains how the public transport system of Zurich is managed:
The Zurcher Verkehsverbund (ZVV) is responsible for planning and funding public transport throughout the Canton of Zurich, and its board is appointed by the Canton and local governments. The ZVV, which has a total staff of only thirty, is responsible for setting fares, network planning and timetable co-ordination; services are operated by a series of agencies which effective act as contractors, principally the municipalities of Zurich and Winterther, the Swiss Federal Railways and Post Office (which runs many rural bus services), but also including some three dozen small private firms. Fares are remitted to the ZVV, which reimburses operators according to the service they provide, thereby avoiding disputes among operators over the diversion of fare revenues.
Such coordination by the ZVV makes it possible to have things like “pulse timetabling”, where a bunch of feeder buses are timed to arrive and pick up or drop off passengers from a train station where a number of trains arrive at a similar time (heading to different directions) making it easy to choose among a wide variety of destinations for your trip. Mees argues (and I certainly agree here) that this level of coordination would simply not be possible in a market-based system. No market based system could ever induce a range of competing operators to cooperate to the degree necessary to create an interconnected network of this kind, or determine the appropriate share of fare revenue for each operator.
While Zurich certainly is a very different city to Auckland, much of what makes Zurich’s system work so well could very easily make Auckland’s system work better. Mees agrees that Zurich has much higher densities than most other “new world” cities, and that to determine whether the Zurich experience really is relevant to other cities, it is essential to look for the general principles that underly the planning approach to transport. Perhaps of most importance, is what he calls the distinction between urban transit and commuter transit. The two terms are defined below:
Regular, or urban, transit is designed to provide for a range of travel needs. It typically consists of an extensive network of routes, both radial and circumferential, serving the whole of an urban area. Service is provided all day long, because all trips are catered for, not just work trips. Commuters are catered for not through special services, but on the regular network, which offers additional peak capacity in response to demand through longer trains, more frequent services and so on. Patronage of such systems is characterised by diversity, with relatively high levels of off-peak, counter-peak and ‘along the line’ travel. The tram and bus system operated by the City of Zurich is, of course, a classic example of regular or urban transit, so also is the Paris Metro.
Commuter transit, as the name suggests, is provided primarily for the journey to work. It typically operates in peak hour, with limited or nonexistent service at other times, and to a single destination, the central business district. Typical examples are the peak-only freeway bus services found in many cities and the ‘commuter rail’ services provided in a number of North American cities, including Toronto, Boston and recently, Vancouver and Los Angeles. Commuter rail services are usually offered on rail lines otherwise used for freight or inter-city services.
The two are quite different, even though a train line could be either an urban or a commuter service, just as a bus could be as well. In Auckland, probably the most obvious “urban transit” we have is the Link Bus route – which operates at high frequencies (there is no timetable) throughout the day. Other bus services, like Mt Eden Road and Dominion Road services (with off-peak frequencies of a bus every 10 minutes) are also pushing into the realms of being true urban transit. While only the “express bus” services are truly ‘commuter transit’ in the strictest term, I think the poor frequencies off-peak (particularly on the train network) and the low number of cross-town bus routes indicate that most of our system is really “commuter transit” rather than “urban transit”.
Mees explores the difference between the two systems, by looking at the example of Vancouver. At the time he wrote this book, Vancouver only had one Skytrain line (now it has three), and one heavy rail commuter rail line (nothing much has changed there).
The 28 km Skytrain is an excellent example of regular (urban) transit: services are provided every five minutes or more frequently until around 1 am every day of the year. Every service stops at each of the twenty stations along the line. The 65 km eight-station West Coast Express commuter rail line opened in 1995. Five services are provided each weekday morning to downtown Vancouver; five more in the opposite direction in the evening. There are no off-peak, evening, weekend or public holiday services, and 93 per cent of passengers travel to the downtown terminal station. The five double-decker trains have a total seating capacity of 7500, higher than Skytrain’s 7000. Skytrain carried 42 million passengers in 1996-97, compared with West Coast Express’s 1.4 million. Each West Coast Express seat is filled twice on a typical weekday; each Skytrain seat more than twenty times. The majority of Skytrain passengers are carried outside peak period, and to destinations other than downtown Vancouver. And Skytrain patronage is growing more rapidly at off-peak times than in the peaks, underlining the ability of well-run regular transit to serve diverse ‘post-modern’ travel, because it matches its pattern.
Unlike Zurich, Vancouver is a city that has a lot of similarities to Auckland. Being a typical North American city, its population density is relatively low and its employment is relatively dispersed. These days Skytrain has three lines (including the recently opened Canada Line) and carries 353,500 passengers per day. This compares to the daily ridership on the West Coast Express of 10,500. Clearly, the future for public transport is in providing the kind of service offered by Skytrain – frequent, useful for a variety of trips, useful at a variety of times and so forth – rather than that offered by the West Coast Express.
While I think there is certainly scope for ‘commuter transit’, if we ever want to make public transport useful for more than just a small minority of the population (ie. those working in the CBD) then I do think we need to make it more like the kind of ‘urban transit’ found in Zurich and Vancouver. I get the feeling that ARTA are headed in the right direction on this matter – by identifying “Rapid Transit Networks” and “Quality Transit Networks” that will offer ‘superior quality’ public transport options at high frequencies on well planned routes throughout the day. It is this kind of service that will make public transport useful for more than just the select few working in the CBD.
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I think Vancouver’s population density would be higher than Auckland’s now with the mixed use development… Another lesson there methinks…
Yes there has been massive intensification around Skytrain station over the past 10-20 years, because it offers such an excellent service. Urban transit has the ability to influence land use patterns far more than commuter transit.
I’m of the belief that commuter transit encourages more urban sprawl type development as many use park and ride to get to passenger rail service (but I also understand there are many benefits to commuter rail). This urban transport would on the otherhand encourage more intensification of growth. This is because the express services get people longer distances in shorter periods of time. This distance creates challengers to making urban transits stressful.
Zurich is a successful model as it has high frequency services on particular routes, but transferring between different modes of transport is very common and easy. This may come to the surprise of some CBT forum members who are passionately anti transfer. But transfers don’t have to be a negative thing if they incorporate shopping areas so people can get their groceries, medication or flowers for their loved ones.
If public trnasport is going to be useful for more people than those working in the CBD then we simply have to make transfers more attractive. That means integrated ticketing, high frequencies and easy transfers (cross-platform for example).
“I think Vancouver’s population density would be higher than Auckland’s now with the mixed use development… Another lesson there methinks…”
No, that is not the case. I just did a research paper for a class take by Mr Mees himself that was aimed at debunking this myth. The population density of Vancouver is only a little higher than Aucklands overall (it is on par with Sydney), and in certain areas i.e. the suburbs it is lower. They key difference perhaps is that Vancouver maintains high public transport services levels in and across the suburbs as well and just the main radial routes to downtown.
As Mees pointed out in his lectures the mixed use development around station in Vancouver is the ‘poster boy’ as it makes for attractive pictures and is consistent with hip TOD concepts, but the data tells a different story. I forget the exact figure but it was under 10% of skytrain patrons arriving at the station by foot (including the effects of TOD development) and a similar number by car. The vast majority, some 80%, arrived at the station by bus. If you keep that in mind then the density argument flies out the window, becuase a bus line can easily service densities much lower than Aucklands.
(I will point out that I do think TOD is an excellent way to manage growth as it puts people within walking distance of transport, jobs and services, but it shouldn’t be done just to make transit ‘work better’. In terms of the impact on population density at the urban area level, it would get lost in the rounding). Population density is but a minor component among many interrelated factors.
I agree with Brent C, transfers and interconnection are the way forward. If Auckland wants and effective sytem that can attract a significant amount of trips and not run at an almighty loss then it needs to shift its focus from a system for peak hour commuters to the central area to a system for all trips. As I have suggested on the CBT forum this can be easily achieved without a lot of infrastructure spending, it is perhaps easier to do this with buses on street than trams, busways or trains. With a big reorganisation of the routing of the bus system and some basic integrated ticketing Auckland could get a long way toward having a total system without buying a single extra bus or employing any more drivers. It would be a case of ensuring every run in well patronised and profitable, which could be achieved through interconnection and network effects.
An underlying issue here is there is a trade-off between frequency and transfers. The major problem with transfers in Auckland at the moment, and in many places, is the poor frequency of the connecting services. If you want to have direct services going everywhere you end up with a very complex array of services, with all of them operating at low frequencies, such as the currently common hourly or half hourly.
It is much better to run only a handful of services down each major route, but have them operating at very high frequency, every 10 minutes at the worst.
I don’t quite get it Luke, there isn’t really a trade off between frequency and transfers, there is a trade off between having low frequency but no transfers, or high frequency with transfers.
But I think I follow what you are saying anyway, whether you aim to have a ‘one seat ride’ to as many places as possible on the one route (which means it winds its way all across town and ends up taking an hour or more to get anywhere, which means you can only afford to run it every half hour at best). Or whether instead of long windy routes you break it into a a series of shorter lines or loop interconnecting at key points, which allows you to run them much more frequently at the expense of having to transfer to complete most trips.
I think that is what Luke meant – that to improve frequencies you will need more transfers, so we get a tradeoff between trying to find the best frequencies while still minimising transfers.
Great info Nick, thanks…
I think that without integrated ticketing there is no incentive for bus companies to provide a high frequency/more transfers type system because a bus company wants a bigger fare by keeping you on their company’s bus seat for longer. I vaguely remember watching a documentary on Newcastle’s (UK) public transport system a few years back (good documentary if you can find a copy of it). The private bus companies were offering direct services to the centre rather than transferring passengers onto another company’s rail system.
That’s a huge problem in Auckland Richard, and is the main reason why the Public Transport Management Act, and (resulting from it) integrated ticketing is so utterly essential. We need a comprehensively planned system, we need co-ordination between bus routes and trains route, and between different companies. The commercial/subsidised split current system really really doesn’t deliver in that respect.