[sustran] Re: How much money should we spend on nicer buses?

[Peter Lutman]

Dear Eric,

I was particularly interested by Dr Adhiraj Joglekar's contribution relating to several Indian Cities posted today. Much of what he stated is sound common sense. I have knowledge only of Mumbai and perhaps the following comments relating to that City may have appication elsewhere.
1    I was in a team asked to examine the Mumbai bus network. With many hundreds of routes spread over a huge area and carrying 4.5 million customers daily, this was an impossible task in the project time available. We therefore concentrated on routes feeding the CBD peninsula.
2    Even this had a huge route network with bus services extending to the west coastal communities, the central ones. the eastern ones and Nowe Mumbai.
3    Analysis of the network route by route showed that the nonsense promulgated 50 years ago by the Consultancy arm of the old London Transport (add the two way journey time to the two terminal layovers and divide the total by the number of buses one wished to deploy on the route to determine the frequency) had resulted in various services offering headways of 19, 23, 37 and 52 minutes and the like. Note I have called these headways not frequencies.
4    Clearly the people planning this nonsense either never themselves travel on these services or possibly catch exactly the same bus every day to and from their destination so they know what time it is scheduled. Most people are unable to plan their days with such precision.
5    Bearing in mind the scorching heat / driving monsoon rain depending upon the season, the maximum interval between buses should be 10 minutes or less on every important route. (Dr Joglekar mentions 5 minute intervals but there were very few individual routes reaching this frequency - although some trips where several routes ran in common would offer this level of service)
6    The absolute minimum urban headway in a metropolis like Mumbai should be 30 minutes. No bus service should be planned unless the headway is divisible into 60 minutes - the only acceptable ones are anything up to 6 minutes, 7.5 minutes, 10 minutes, 12 minutes, 15 minutes 20 minutes and 30 minutes. 
7    The times should remain as constant as possible throughout the day (allowing for running time variations to cope with peak congestion) so that customers can remember the times past each hour when buses leave a terminal and have these fixed in their minds - e.g. 07,22,37 and 52 minutes past each hour. This is the basic key to successful marketing of any public transport timetable, and is even more vital where, as in Mumbai, the timetables are not published or advertised.
8    The rubbish routes with crazy, non memorable, non recurring headways should be ditched. Most of them probably only exist due to vote-catching political pressure from someone who doesn't understand the basics of public transport.
9    Transfer tickets should be available to enable customers who used the 37 / 52 minute headway routes and the others instead to use two frequent routes and interchange between them realising the benefit of short waiting times, staying cool and dry, getting there more quickly etc without any financial penalty. Season tickets would offer the same convenience but might not be affordable by those living on the financial margin.
10   The resources from the rubbish routes should be used to strengthen the rest of the network, so the 19 minute headways might become 15 minutes (or 20), the 27 minutes become 20 or 30 etc.
11    I could go on about the removal of double deck high capacity buses and the need for two conductors on these and the handful of articulated buses, the impossibility of clambering up (and down) three steps by the elderly or handicapped (who are effectively excluded from public transport as a result) but these are other matters not relating to the route / timetable patterns themselves.
12    The chief planner told me on my second visit that he had listened to my earlier recommendations and had implemented many of them in the last 4-monthly service review. As a result daily boardings had risen to 4.7 million customers (of course a few thousand of these may have been due to a minority of users having to transfer). These solutions will work everywhere in the world and might be worth trying in the other Indian Cities too.

Peter Lutman FCILT

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  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Eric Britton 
  To: Sustran-discuss at list.jca.apc.org 
  Sent: Sunday, June 21, 2009 6:24 AM
  Subject: [sustran] How much money should we spend on nicer buses?


  Dear Sustranes and particularly everyone who is chipping in on this great topic, this seashell to the ear and you hear the roar of the ocean. .

   

  What I am seeing thus far is so very good, so very germane in many ways for many paces, that I would like to turn it into a small series of pieces for World Streets. I have already contacted several of the authors to see how we might best handle this.

   

  All thoughts on this and further discussion here are very welcome indeed.

   

  Best/Eric

   

  PS. Have you chipped in with your thoughts on World Streets. We are getting some wonderful commentaries and commendations, and these are going to be very valuable for us indeed as we chart a course for the future.

   

  Eric Britton | World Streets | The New Mobility Agenda  | Paris  | +331 4326 1323 | Skype ericbritton  

   



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