[sustran] Re: route and frequency rationalisation

Dr Adhiraj Joglekar adhiraj.joglekar at googlemail.com
Tue Jun 23 22:05:01 JST 2009


This really is a continuation of the previus theme - How much money should
we spend on nicer buses?
Peter is correct in highlighting that when it comes to thinking in terms of
headways, perhaps bus routes in Mumbai could do with some re-thinking. He is
also right in pointing out that when I refer to buses in Mumbai running at
good frequencies of 5 minutes - its more due to overlapping routes.

As an end user, frequency makes more sense while for the route planner
headways may make more sense. But if I travel from Hounslow to Chiswick, I
have two options - 235 and 237 at 10-12 minute headways that use the same
road - practically speaking, I stand a chance of getting a bus in 5-6
minutes.

Mumbai generally manages to do the above, but I am sure Peter is right that
there are more than a handful token routes with poor headways and those
buses could make up the crucial difference between using the bus fleet
sub-optimally Vs optimally.

Much of my interest in queue management and thinking about demand and
capacity / waiting times comes from my work in NHS. I thus can't be an
expert but, it may help to have more views generated on this topicc to help
improve some these issues in India.

Fundamentally Mumbai has got it right to an extent. I would not say so of
the other Indian cities. Typically if one route averages 20km and buses move
at average (including stoppage time at bus stops) of 20KPH, one needs a
fleet of 10-12 buses. London has 8K buses and about 700 routes. Mumbai has
3300 odd buses and 300 odd routes. The only other city in India known to
have a decent bus based public transport is Chennai - they too manage this
sort of a ratio.

Now lets look at Pune - more details in the links at the end but a summary
is as under

   1. At the time of me doing this analysis last year, Pune had 1000 buses
   with over 200 routes.
   2. Based on data on 180 routes, I found out that - The averagefrequency
   is one bus every 57 minutes!!!
   3. Average km per route is 17 km but over 50 routes are 10 km or under
   and up to 77 12km or under.
   4.

   There are routes where buses run every 2, even 3 hours. Two routes are
   run thrice a day and one 4 times a day.
   5.

   The immediate problem one may see from above is that on paper, Pune has a
   bus stop within 500 meters from where one lives/works, they have on paper a
   vast network coverage - but who will wait for the bus to turn up
   (reliability is notoriously poor, cancellations rife) an hour or so later?
   6.

   Further, by having politically driven excess of routes, simple maths
   shows that Pune manages to set aside 4 - 5 buses per route. As some major
   trunk routes have more demand, fleet sizes for certain routes are higher.
   While this makes sense to an extent, recently shared information shows that
   700 of these buses run on 10% of Pune roads, some 470 are linked with the
   current 17km pilot BRT stretch.
   7.

   Effectively, this starves the rest of Pune of buses. How many people live
   within walking distance of these trunk roads? My guess is no more than 1/3
   of Pune's 4 million.
   8.

   I did a little exercise to demonstrate how 30 routes if reformed to 9 or
   10 could provide same coverage at better frequencies (available here with a
   link to  an antecedent document inside it
   http://better.pune.googlepages.com/Rationalising_PMT_bus_routes_case_ex.pdf)


Coming back to Mumbai, the bottleneck lies in matters already discussed
recently  -

   1. Financially a weak model with huge overheads by way of employing
   conductors when 21st century alternatives exsist.
   2. 1990s saw a massive investment in to flyovers - over 60 of them. BEST
   ridership has since remained more or less the same
   3. The soon to be started Bandra-Worli sea link at cost of 1.5k crores
   which will serve an expected 75000 vehicles per day (Mumbai has 1 million
   vehicles - it should not be too difficult to compute what % of Mumbai is
   served through this investment).
   4. Thus we have 2 decades of prioritising everything else but the buses.
   5. The poor speed of the buses - its high time Mumbai takes steps to
   implement bus priority measures. For too long there is the love affair with
   the Gold standard scheme of median grade separated busways, last few years
   there is a committee of experts racking their brains to find out how this
   will operate on two express highways with dozens of flyovers in the middle
   of the roads - end result - no progress of any kind on bus priority.
   6. That kerb side bus priority can work is evident from recent and
   ongoing pilot bus lane at Haji-Ali in Mumbai where throughput of buses has
   improved 30%.
   7. Some issues around headways which Peter rightly points out could have
   been sorted easily if there were more buses. There are 8K buses in London,
   Mumbai has 3.3K despite a population twice the size of London, just doubling
   the fleet size and clever route management stands to provide massive
   benefits which may compund several fold with bus priority schemes.

Of course, all this is utopian for authorities in India. For them a lip
service provision of 200 AC buses will suffice until the next elections.

Cheers
Adhiraj





On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 4:00 AM,
<sustran-discuss-request at list.jca.apc.org>wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
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>   1. Re: How much money should we spend on nicer buses?
>      (bruun at seas.upenn.edu)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:35:54 -0400
> From: bruun at seas.upenn.edu
> Subject: [sustran] Re: How much money should we spend on nicer buses?
> To: Peter Lutman <lutman at globalnet.co.uk>
> Cc: Sustran-discuss at list.jca.apc.org
> Message-ID: <20090622123554.13682axoaiio5mv4 at webmail.seas.upenn.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; DelSp="Yes";
>        format="flowed"
>
>
> Peter
>
> The fact that you even had to explain this to someone shows that there
> is a lack of professional
> planning capacity overseeing the network.
>
> Eric Buun
>
> Quoting Peter Lutman <lutman at globalnet.co.uk>:
>
> > 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
> >
> > ********************************************************************
> > This email and any attachments are confidential to the intended
> > recipient and may also be privileged. If you are not the intended
> > recipient please delete it from your system and notify the sender.
> > You should not copy it or use it for any purpose nor disclose or
> > distribute its contents to any other person.
> > ********************************************************************
> >
> >
> >   ----- 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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