I’ve often wondered why and how Auckland’s meandering bus routes came to pass, Jarrett from the outstanding humantransit blog states:
Every transit system gradually acquires odd bits of route that really don’t make any objective sense. They may have been added to take care of some noisy complaint, or they may just be obsolete services that have been superseded by something added more recently. These oddities and complexities tend to hang on because if you try to cut them, the people who are used to them will complain, and there’s often just not that much to be gained — at least in the eyes of our political masters — from enduring these complaints. So a lean budget season, now and then, can be a blessing, because it creates the political will to fix these things.
Sounds like as good an explanation as any for Auckland’s examples to me. Also sounds like a good reason to get rid of some of them that can be consolidated and increase frequencies.
Hat tip: Humantransit.org
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I certainly agree 100% on the need for simpler route structure. I wonder whether there is an argument for a different approach to peak (where regular users will learn the time and route of their bus, and speed is perhaps most important) and off-peak (where you have more casual users who don’t know the system so well, and convenience is more important than speed) times.
Maybe some greater level of complexity is OK at peak times?
I guess you could but if the routes are well spaced why not increase frequencies, seems to be the point to me…
Why would you want MORE complexity? There is a huge need to simplify the fare structure, the timetable structure (ideally, only two schedules – peak and off-peak – Saturday and Sunday automatically being off-peak except for maybe the midday hours of Saturday) – and also, as this post implies, in simplifying route structure.
The only area where I see sense in more complexity is using forked ends – i.e. a route goes along the same length for maybe 60-80% of its length, but at the end(s), half of them head one way and half the other.
Oh I certainly wouldn’t advocate for MORE complexity, I guess the point I was making is most clear if you look at how buses on the North Shore operate. At peak times there are a huge number of express services that travel through the suburbs before hitting the busway, then go along the busway into town. It’s quite complex but gives people a fast and convenient trip into the city. During off-peak hours those more complicated services disappear and you have the hub and spoke system of the Northern Express plus feeder buses.
While the feeder buses could and must be improved during off peak times, the split between how things work at peak and off-peak times is my main point. You wouldn’t have wanted to get rid of all those express buses during peak hour I wouldn’t think, even if it meant you could have run millions of feeder buses and millions of Northern Express buses.