Buses vs Trains in capturing riders

Jarrett at Humantransit.org has an interesting post about how public transport has developed in Los Angeles, and continues to develop, over the past decade or so. His post is based on a Los Angeles Times article which claims that it would have been smarter to invest money in making buses cheaper and getting more of them on the road, than it would have been to construct the rail improvements in LA over the past decade or two.

What the argument appears to come down to is whether a rail system will attract riders who simply wouldn’t use the bus – a perception issue that people only catch the bus because they have to (generally because they don’t own a car), while people will choose to take the train over driving. This argument is perhaps most usefully put forward in one of the comments to Jarrett’s post:

I’ll take this opportunity to repeat a statistic I heard: 75% of bus riders don’t have a driver’s license, while only 40% of rail riders can’t drive. Basically, there are two groups of transit riders here: those who take the bus because they have no choice, and those who have weighed the options and prefer transit to driving. The problem with a massive bus network is that buses are slow (generally 2.5 times slower than driving), and even dedicated bus lanes on surface have a hard time competing with freeways, while a subway has fast enough average speed that it’s actually faster than driving on local streets, and reasonably competitive with freeways. Bus ridership in Central LA is not limited by the fact that buses aren’t frequent enough, or not cheap enough, but by the fact that they’re just not fast enough. Rail gives you both speed and capacity, which frees up more money for buses, and the combination of rail and bus is often much more effective than bus alone.

Who knows whether these statistics are the same in Auckland, but there’s a chance that there would be some similarities. However, I think a good question needs to be asked about whether this is actually a debate between buses and trains or is it a debate between public transport on one side with “priority measures” such as being completely off-road (trains and the busway) or having priority in the form of bus lanes; and public transport on the other side that runs in traffic without any priority and therefore by definition cannot be faster than driving the same distance (and in fact will always be slower because it has to pick up passengers, usually takes a long-winded and indirect route and often has low frequencies meaning you have to wait for ages).

Jarrett reckons it is the latter – that what’s important here is not necessarily whether it’s a bus or a train, but how fast it goes, how frequent it is and how comfortable the ride is:

Implicit in that argument, subtly but inescapably, is the suggestion that there is a large category of “rail riders” who are only using the rail system to the extent that they can complete their trip on rail. That’s a difficult assertion to test. But the crush-loads on the Orange Line — a Bus Rapid Transit line presented as part of the mostly-rail rapid transit network — suggest that a clear and interconnected rapid transit system will attract plenty of riders regardless of whether it’s on rails or tires. Local bus system ridership is still very heavy all across central Los Angeles. Would it be higher with more service, quite possibly. But if you really want a transformative boost in transit ridership, the single most effective thing you could do can be done entirely with paint and signs: converting traffic lanes to bus lanes.

During the 1980s, rail-boosters often said things like: “Los Angeles is a great world-class city, every bit the peer of Paris or New York. Those cities have rail transit networks, so we need one too.” Well, if you’re going to admire and imitate Paris and New York, then you should know that Paris now has bus lanes on practically every boulevard, all created, at the expense of general traffic lanes, in the last two decades, and that New York is doing them too, not just across outer boroughs but on two of the busiest avenues in Manhattan.

Similarly to what appears to have happened with the Orange Line in LA, the Northern Busway here in Auckland has shown that the distinction between a bus or a train is far less relevant in attracting riders than issues like speed, frequency, convenience and comfort. Of course in many situations to achieve that outcome will require a train – particularly because of capacity issues (and because I can’t see people complaining about not being allowed to drive more than 50 metres down a railway track), but if we really want public transport patronage to increase through attracting riders who would otherwise be driving (and the economic benefits of doing this are huge) then following the lead of cities like New York and Paris by focusing on priority measures, can probably give us the biggest results for a fairly low cost.

So I don’t actually agree with the claims that simply “putting more buses on the road” is the answer to improving public transport ridership. I had this argument once with a board member of one of our public transport operators once – debating whether the money being put into integrated ticketing would have been better off invested in simply more buses (which was his argument). My counter-argument was that having more empty buses on the road was utterly pointless, and what we needed to do instead was improve the quality of the public transport available: through integrated ticketing, through more bus lanes and through a better route structure.

Let’s hope the new Transport CCO can do a better job at selling the benefits of bus lanes than the half-hearted efforts of Auckland City Council – including making sure people know exactly when they can and cannot be driving in those lanes.

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