We really enjoyed our work, in collaboration with Aecom, on the new bus planning document for Northern Ireland public transport operator Translink.* It aims to inform future policies, strategies and plans with respect to land use and transport planning. It’s called Bus Better Connected. The short and graphically rich report can be downloaded here.
Our role was mostly in Chapter 3, which lays out some of the choices that leaders will have to face in taking the next steps on public transport. For years, Translink has been pushed in opposite directions. They have been expected to attract patronage (which is tied to both financial and climate/sustainability goals) but they are also expected to serve everyone’s needs, including in rural areas where demand will always be low and service will be most expensive to provide. This is the patronage-coverage tradeoff, and much of our work in the report goes into explaining it and its consequences. (I did the first academic paper on this topic back in 2008; it’s here.)
There are some unusual twists in Northern Ireland’s case. For example, parents are entitled to send their children to distant schools, and Translink is expected to get them there no matter how expensive the resulting services are. Sooner or later, Northern Ireland’s government will have to think about their priorities for public transport, and give Translink a more realistic definition of success.
Of course, one way out of this problem is to fund more service, as the rest of the island is doing. In the course of the network designs we’ve done across the Republic of Ireland for its National Transport Authority, we’ve been instructed to increase the total quantity of service dramatically, ranging from over 30% growth in Dublin to over 70% in Waterford. Our conversations in Northern Ireland suggest that nobody there knows where the money would come from to do this. But if climate and sustainability goals truly have the force of law, as they do — and if nobody wants to reduce rural services — then the current level of public transport will have to increase. There’s no other way the math works.
What’s next? Our contracted work in Northern Ireland is complete, but we hope to be involved in helping frame future conversations that can lead to a public transport network that meets Northern Ireland’s goals.
*I have now done work for three agencies called Translink, in Vancouver, Belfast, and Brisbane!
The “walkability” maps at page 39 are misleading. They seem to imply that you need a rectangular gird for good walkability. In reality, there are many European cities that have very good walkability despite not having a rectangular gird.
The comparison between two alternatives at page 49 is misleading.
First, the left alternative is 5 buses per hour while the right alternative is 4 buses per hour. A fair comparison would have the frequent route to the left every 20 minutes instead of every 15 minutes. Then the left alternative would only be 1 minute faster, not 3.5 minutes.
Second, in the right alternative, where you have two routes close to your home, you assume that people would always choose the closest stop. In reality, most people would check the timetable and walk to the bus stop where the bus comes first. If the buses are evenly spaced, this alternative would be faster than the left alternative.