Dead running – and how to reduce it

The Human Transit blog has a good post about “dead running”, which effectively is the time buses spend not in service. Jarrett notes the two general circumstances that create dead running:

All transit vehicles must travel between their operating bases, where they are stored and maintained, and the beginning and endpoints of service. Rail services usually have bases directly on the rail line, but may still have to dead-run through the rail system to reach their trip’s starting point. Bus bases can be anywhere. The location of bases (called depots in Britain/Australia, often divisions in the US) is a major issue. It’s often worth spending capital money to save operating money, and careful investments in bases, reducing dead running, can do that.

Transit agencies that run extensive one-way express incur massive amounts of dead running. Brisbane, for example, is a very, very centralized city, with a downtown far out of scale to anything else. That means a huge demand for one-way trips into downtown in the morning and out in the evening. All those services that are needed in only one direction usually have to get back in the other direction so that the driver’s shift can end where it began. (The other alternative is to pay the driver to hang around downtown all day, which is even more expensive.)

The first of these causes is pretty unavoidable. The clever location of bus (or train) depots can reduce the percentage of time the vehicles spend getting from the depot to the start of their run. For example, the investment in stabling facilities for trains at Henderson, central Auckland and Papakura is likely to pay off incredibly quickly – as all Auckland’s trains no longer need to be stored centrally at Otahuhu and then driven ages each morning to start their runs at Waitakere, Swanson, Papakura or Pukekohe.

The second reason for dead running is less unavoidable – or at least with a more clever running of services it could probably be reduced. Human transit says this about ways of potentially reducing the time services spend ‘dead running:

Can dead running be better addressed by a rigorous review of whether these one-way peak services can be combined, replaced by links to rail, or otherwise made more efficient? Given the higher cost of dead running for one-way peaked service, could some of it be converted into two-way, all-day service at less expense than it would first appear?

One big advantage of the kind of feeder bus based service pattern that I discussed in this recent blog post is that the amount of dead running should be avoided, because in general the buses would be operating much shorter routes. Generally this is likely to mean that they’re closer to their depot for most of their run (as depots are generally located in outer parts of the city), plus the time taken for peak time services to ‘return to base’ would also be greatly reduced.

Another way you can reduce dead running is by operating services with patronage attractors at each end, so that you have good two-way flows at peak times and therefore can keep your buses (or trains) in service for a greater proportion of the time. My hope is that the Manukau Station could potentially operate in this manner – with the shopping area and the tertiary education centre acting as big patronage attractions for southbound rail passengers during the morning peak – utilising the existing resources more effectively. It’s also why many of my suggested routes for improving bus services to Mangere didn’t end in random places – they all terminated at Onehunga, Otahuhu or Manukau City.

There are many ways we can improve the efficiency of Auckland’s public transport network. Structuring the routes so that the amount of dead running is minimised is an important part of that process.

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