How to provide “low demand” public transport?

I can imagine what one of the biggest challenges for public transport planners must be – dealing with how to provide public transport for low demand routes. There are a number of reasons why public transport provision is necessary – environmental, economic and social. Typically, I focus on the ability of public transport to provide congestion relief benefits and to boost economic growth and development. The Auckland CBD Rail Link business case is an excellent example (no matter how many times Steven Joyce tries to dismiss it) of how transport investment can make a huge economic difference. The environmental benefits of public transport are also well documented – particularly in terms of the ability to reduce vehicle emissions.

But public transport also is necessary to provide a way of getting around for those who don’t, or can’t, drive themselves. I tend not to focus on this matter because I think it has been vastly over-emphasised in the past: with many of Auckland’s transport plans and strategies effectively sidelining public transport as only for (and I paraphrase here slightly) “those poor suckers who can’t drive”. Over much of the last 20-30 years our transport system – particularly our bus network – was developed with the social agenda of public transport provision being at the top of the mind of those working on it. The goal was to provide a bus route within a few hundred metres of everyone’s house: no matter how rubbish the frequencies were, and to provide an ‘everywhere to everywhere’ type of service.

The practical impossibilities of an ‘everywhere to everywhere’ service (particularly when the system has so actively discouraged transfers), plus the focus on whether a bus route existed, rather than what quality it was, has led to a system that I think is the worst of both worlds: often so poor in quality (speed, comfort, ease of use etc.) that the only people who would ever want to use it were those with no choice, yet at the same time exceedingly inefficient and costly to run. Apparently a bus route (the 107?) was cancelled a few months into this year, when someone finally realised that the route had carried not a single passenger so far that year.

Now this is not to say that the social service provided by public transport is unimportant. There is a social equity concern that everyone should be able to get around Auckland without having to own a car. For the elderly in particular, a bus route can be a lifeline to friends, activities and shopping. But many of these routes – let’s say for example the 011 service which criss-crosses its way across the Auckland isthmus at horrifically low frequencies throughout the middle of the day (but only on weekdays) – are of such low quality and carry such few passengers that you really wonder what benefit they are providing for the relatively large amount of money having to be spent on keeping them going. Surely there must be a better way to provide the accessibility and mobility of public transport in a more efficient way than having heaps of large empty buses driving around the city all the time?

Some of the answer is likely to come in the form of a public transport system that is based more around transfers – as that can provide ‘everywhere to everywhere’ service at good frequencies more efficiently: thanks to the ‘network effect’. I’m sure there will be some moaning about having to ‘change buses’, but my hope is that integrated ticketing, improved frequencies and a focus on making the transfer physically easy, will alleviate some of those concerns.
But it’s still likely that there will be unfortunate people who do lose accessibility as the result of simplifying the bus network. The layout of Auckland’s street network means that it’s not possible to run the kind of ‘grid-pattern’ service that is envisaged by the network effect – an unfortunate historical mistake that is still being repeated in newly developing areas like Albany. So perhaps we need to get a little bit smarter about how we deliver “low demand public transport”, perhaps we need to think outside the box a bit.

A research report undertaken for NZTA looks at how we might effectively provide public transport in non-metropolitan parts of New Zealand – and I think that this research provides some useful insights and ideas when it comes to how low demand PT might work in Auckland.

Here’s the report’s executive summary: The idea of ‘demand responsive public transport’ (DRT) is described in more detail below: The diagram below shows the varying levels of ‘demand responsiveness’ that you can have: I think the usefulness of DRT is the ability to potentially achieve a “win-win” situation: you provide a more useful service for those who need it (door to door is possible) while at the same time you can hopefully provide that service at a lower cost than is currently being spent on running elaborately complex bus routes.

One of the best applications of DRT might be where a route needs to be withdrawn due to lack of patronage, but you have a particular group of people (for argument’s sake a retirement village) who were quite dependent on that service to get to the local supermarket. You may be able to provide that core service – a link between their home and the supermarket by way of a DRT: where they call up and arrange a time to be picked up and dropped off. This could potentially be both cheaper to operate (as you are likely to run fewer services than before and you might only need to operate a minivan rather than a whole bus) and provide something more suitable for the demand. As a bonus, it may well take away the vociferous opposition to the withdrawal of that bus service.

While the NZTA paper does focus on providing public transport in small towns through innovative measures, I do think it’s worthwhile thinking about how we could do the same thing in large cities such as Auckland in some situations. There are simply so many wasteful bus routes around Auckland, which seems silly when public transport funding is so unbelievably tight. The resources saved from finding a more efficient and effective way to service low-demand trips could ensure that we have the money available to improve other routes and create a better public transport system overall.

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