Author Archive | Jarrett

Wellington: Notes on that Newsroom NZ Piece (updated)

Posted on October 1, 2018 in Journalism, Wellington

According to Newsroom NZ’s Simon Louisson, I am “the US Consultant behind the Wellington bus nightmare.” Wellington, New Zealand is having some problems with recent bus service changes. I have had no role in Wellington for the last six years, and did not even know the service changes were happening until I read about them in the media, but I, being a foreigner, must be to blame!

Jarrett Walker, the US consultant that has united Wellingtonians in their loathing for the chaotic new bus network, has also redesigned Dublin’s network and has met an even more rigorous negative response.

The entire article is false and defamatory, so if you read it, please also read this.

Through my employer at the time, the Australian firm MRCagney, I did a project for the Greater Wellington Regional Council on the design of the bus network in Wellington (the city only). This work was mostly in 2011, ending in early ’12. My role ended with the completion of the draft network plan. I had no role in how the plan was presented to the public, and when that didn’t go well in 2012, I assumed it was dead. That is always a possible and valid outcome of a public consultation process.

This year, a somewhat similar plan was implemented without my knowledge and involvement. The implementation has not gone well, for a variety of reasons, most of them not related to the network design. One of the big ones was a decision to switch operating companies at the same time in a way that changed the drivers’ working conditions, something I always advise against.

At it happens, my role in Wellington was exactly the same as my role in the Auckland redesign, which has been rolled out over the last several years to great success. In Auckland, too, I led the original design process six years ago, then had no further role except to offer encouragement.

But no facts will prevent Newsroom NZ from constructing me as a cartoon villain, through an astonishing series of blatant falsehoods about who I am and what I believe.

Jarrett Walker, head of JWA, is one of America’s foremost advocates of public transport over cars, but he sees the intense reactions of Wellingtonians and Dubliners as a welcome part of the process. His stance opposing ride-sharing has led Tesla manufacturer Elon Musk to call him “a sanctimonious idiot”.

My exchange with Elon Musk had nothing to do with ride-sharing. It was about Musk’s insulting and ignorant comments about public transport which I identified as an example of elite projection. And while it’s true that I anticipate negative feedback on my plans, that doesn’t mean my goal is to make people upset, as he seems to imply here. All I have said, in many ways, is what every politician knows: Changing anything will upset some people.

In paragraph after paragraph, Mr Louisson wanders around the internet finding things I wrote that sound vaguely incriminating to him, and uses these to construct false descriptions of my views:

Walker takes a very binary view of change. In his blog he says cities should either totally revamp a network or leave it as it is.

That appears to be a perversion of this post, which points out that network plans have a degree of interdependence that limits how much they can be revised without falling apart. People who need me to be a villain imagine me saying “my way or the highway,” which is nonsense. Plans get revised a lot through public consultation, and that’s a good thing.

And anyone who knows me will burst out laughing at this:

His company, Jarrett Walker [and] Associates, is very comfortable with the neo-liberal mantra of user-pays, and a strong commercial imperative underlies much of its design work.

Bonus points if you can figure out what text of mine was misread to fabricate this, because I can’t think of one. I have always advocated heavy state subsidy of public transport. As for commercial, that’s a confusing term that I never use myself, because it gives the impression that the only reason to serve lots of people is greed. (Tip: Sometimes you do it because you want to improve lots of people’s lives.) And even so, of course, I don’t bring an imperative to carry lots of people, because I encourage each city to think about the ridership-coverage tradeoff.

Mr Louisson formed all these insights without interviewing me, but you won’t find out why unless you get to paragraph 28:

Asked to comment on the implementation of the Wellington redesign, Walker seemed at pains to distance himself, saying in an email, “Unfortunately, I have not had any role in Wellington since 2012, and have not had time to study recent events there closely enough to have an opinion.”
While JWA’s work had involved developing a network redesign proposal, “I had no role in the public consultation at that time or in anything that has occurred since.”

My quoted words are indeed the only words I sent to Mr Louisson. I was trying to establish that it would not be interesting to interview me, because I could tell him nothing about what had happened to transit in his city in the last six years.

Does this make me “behind” a revised plan, implemented without my involvement or even my knowledge six years later? And does my unwillingness to comment on something I know nothing about license a reporter to just make up stories about who I am and what I believe?

Remember, if you don’t want your name dragged through the dirt in the media, it’s an easy thing to avoid: Say nothing. Do nothing. Propose nothing. Change nothing.

That’s why nothing gets done.

Auckland: The New Bus Network is Complete!

Posted on September 29, 2018 in Auckland

For the last three years, Auckland, New Zealand, has been rolling out a new bus network in different parts of the city. Sunday, the final portion, the North Shore, got its new network, so the entire effort is complete. Bravo!

I worked on the original design back in 2012 (with colleagues at MRCagney‘s amazing New Zealand office) and first explained it here. While public comments have led to revisions and improvements, the most important layer, the citywide frequent network, is almost exactly what we designed.

A 2011 sketch of what the all-day high-frequency network would look like when complete. (In 2011, only a tiny part of central Auckland had frequent service all day.) (MRCagney)

Even more important than the network are the principles, which Auckland Transport explains here. We figured out these principles at the beginning of the process, and they should sound familiar to anyone who knows my work. For example, this image still appears in most of my firm’s reports, showing two ways to serve an abstract city consisting of three residential areas (top) and three destination areas:

[The idea, explained fully here, is that in this simple fictional city, if you run three routes instead of nine, you can afford to run them three times as often, which means that the average wait is only 1/3 of what it was before. Even if you have to change buses in the new network, which means you make this short wait twice, you’re still waiting only 2/3 as much as you did before (1/3 at the start of your trip, and 1/3 for the connection). Hence the counterintuitive fact: a network that makes you change buses gets you there sooner. Such a network is also simpler, three routes instead of nine in this case, with buses coming so often that you don’t need at timetable.]

An important complement to the bus network redesign has been a major increase in frequency on the city’s four commuter rail lines, which enabled us to offer outlying areas frequent connections to the rail line instead of a long bus route competing with it. Now, the New Zealand government has funded a huge project to extend this network underground through the city centre, so it will function like a proper subway system.[1] This will further strengthen bus lines connecting with it and further reduce the need for lines running parallel.

Each phase of the network has triggered gains in patronage — increases in total journeys, not just passenger boardings — so all that new frequency is clearly attracting new riders.

Many people ask me about phasing. Does a new bus network have to be implemented all at once? The answer in many cities, including Houston and Dublin, is yes: The geography of the city is so interconnected and interdependent that trying to implement a network in pieces is just too much work. The interim phase in which the network is partly new and partly old becomes a huge network design challenge in itself, as well as a challenge for communications and operations.

Auckland was an exception, though, because of the city’s shape. The city is so riven by bodies of water that it functions almost like an archipelago. The narrow points of connection between areas make those areas relatively easy to separate. (This is why New York City, for example, can reasonably do separate phases for Staten Island, Manhattan, and the Bronx, although Brooklyn and Queens are inseparable.)

I’ve been back to Auckland several times since the network began rolling out, and it’s great to see this great Pacific city becoming more and more oriented toward great public transport. I’ll be back there in late November, to speak at an Auckland Conversations event, and look forward to getting places sooner on the new frequent network.

Congratulations to everyone at Auckland Transport and the City for this great milestone. The plan had many important authors and advocates, but if I had to call out one it would certainly be Anthony Cross, the tireless head of bus planning who conceived this project and pushed it through, in a struggle of many years. I hope he’s happy today.

[1] North Americans are encouraged to make wistful comparisons to the eternally-deferred San Francisco Caltrain downtown extension and New York Gateway project. Further cause for antipodean triumphalism: similar projects are well-advanced in both Melbourne and Brisbane.

Why Your Bus Network May Never Improve

Posted on September 23, 2018 in 3-newbasic, Dublin

Improving a bus network requires changing things. Maybe you change a bus route number so that the system is easier to figure out. Maybe this segment of a bus route would be more useful if it connected to other segments differently than it does today. Maybe these parallel routes are just too close together, so that they are competing for the same riders while not coming often enough. Maybe there are other problems that are barriers to people being able to get where they’re going, soon.

Figuring out plans to address these problems is my job. I’ve done it for 25 years, all over the world. And if you think it should be done in your city, you need to reckon with how hard it is.

To improve anything without massively increasimg the operating cost, you have to change things. And when you do, people will say this:

And someone will say “save the ___!” about every single bus route in the existing system.

To satisfy these comments, the only solution is to leave the existing system exactly as it is. That means keeping a network that does what it does mostly because it’s been doing that for decades and some people are used to it.

Changing bus networks is fiendishly hard to do politically, and this is why. When I prepare government clients for a network redesign, part of my job is shock-therapy: they need to know who will be yelling at them, and what they’ll be saying, and how unpleasant that will be. Because if they are not ready to sit through some of that, there is no point in beginning.

The other reason that is hard is that advocates of these plans do not speak up. In Dublin, for example, we put out a network plan that makes public transport useful to vastly more people for vastly more trips. The average Dubliner can get to 20% more useful places in 30 minutes. But most of the the people who benefit won’t learn about the plan, or complete the survey.

The problem is that people falsely assume that the plan will happen anyway. Therefore, people who like the plan don’t speak up because they take it for granted, while people who don’t like it think they need to scream bloody murder. So the story in the press is mostly of people screaming.

The other problem with the screaming is that makes a lot of noise but doesn’t tell us what to do.

The authors of this petition think we don’t hear this comment, so they need to scream loud, with a petition.

But the problem isn’t that we don’t hear it. It’s that the comment means either (a) the bus network should never change or (b) there are some things wrong with the plan, affecting some people on the 40D, and we need to look at those in the next round.

Usually it’s actually the latter. “Save the 40D” may really mean something specific. It may even mean something that the plan already addresses. People may be reacting to the news that we’re “axing the 40D” without even looking into what the plan does instead, and why that might even be better for them. Or, it may be a problem that we could fix in the next draft.

But if you just tell me “save the 40D” we don’t know exactly you want. So apart from changing nothing at all, we can’t fix the problem in the next revision, which means you’ll continue to be mad.

Which could mean, in the end, that after huge amounts of stress and anguish, nothing changes (or improves) at all.

What is a Spine?

Posted on September 19, 2018 in Basics, Dublin, General

A spine is a really powerful network design idea that takes a moment to explain. This is how a spine works, in an example from the Dublin bus network redesign proposal.

[That diagram is by Dublin-based graphic designer Kevin Carter, and uses a style common in the UK. The National Transport Authority has hired Kevin to complete these diagrams for the other six spines. If you’re on Twitter, follow him at @yascaoimhin.]

A spine is several bus lines designed to share a common segment, with the buses evenly spaced on that segment to deliver a very high frequency. In this case, each spine branch runs every 15 minutes all day, so the common segment is every 3.75 minutes on average.

If you are in the inner city, where all the spines are running on their common segment, you just say “take any bus whose number starts with A”. The result is a high-frequency network map that’s easy to draw a map of, and to learn, remember, and explain.

(That image is ours, from the summary report.)

In the case of the A spine, all four branches are every 15 minutes all day so the common segment is a little better than every 4 minutes all day.

The National Transport Authority also did an animation, here.

Many, many cities have a geography where this structure makes sense. As you move out from the centre, the area to be covered gets wider but the frequency need gets lower, so you branch. But you make it legible. The inner city needs an extremely frequent line that’s easy to learn and remember, so we just explain that the A-spine is made of all the buses whose numbers start with A. Presto. You have a simple network of inner-city lines where the bus is always coming soon, exactly what people moving around in the core need.

Once you understand it, it’s simple. But it takes a moment to learn, and different people learn it differently.

Dublin: Call Copenhagen

Posted on September 6, 2018 in Dublin

A few silly things (and many smart ones) have been said our proposed bus network redesign for Dublin, but the silliest is that it’s “North American.”

Actually, it’s European:

Copenhagen has much in common with Dublin. A maritime city and national capital about the same size and not that different in shape. It has a frequent heavy rail system like DART (marked S), and one metro line (marked M) but no trams.

Look at the bus routes. The route numbers ending in A are high-frequency services all coming every few minutes and they form a spiderweb-shaped grid. Look at 3A and 4A on the left. They run north south on the west side and then curve to the right in the north. We call those orbitals, because they orbit the city centre instead of going into it. Intersecting them are a bunch of radial lines that go into the centre. Wherever these lines cross (or where they cross rail lines) you can change easily. That’s what makes it easy to go anywhere, not just into the centre.

Several areas, you’ll notice, are on only an orbital. If you are on an orbital-only stop, you may have to change buses (or take a bus to a train) to reach the city. The ticketing system, however, gives you unlimited use of the system for a fixed time. NTA is proposing a similar 90-minute ticket, so that your fare never depends on how many times you change vehicles.

And if you don’t think people will use this kind of network if it requires them to change buses in bad weather:

	Dublin	Copenhagen
Average daily low (January)	3.9 C	0.8 C
Annual precipitation	758	523
Days with rain or snow per year	129	157
Days with snow per year	16	21

We practice what we preach. My home town, Portland, Oregon, has almost exactly the same climate. I change buses in the rain all the time. In fact, sometimes I ignore my infrequent direct bus to the office and instead take two frequent buses, because with so much less waiting, I get there sooner.

Many European bus networks show the same principle in their design. I chose Copenhagen because it’s especially comparable, and they draw an especially clear map.

Again, I don’t want to pretend this is easy. But it’s certainly European (and Asian, and North American, and South American, and Australian) if you care about that.

Do We Need a New Theory and Name for “Bike Lanes”?

Posted on August 22, 2018 in General, Language

Important: I’m thinking out loud here! The title is a question because I don’t have answers and am not proposing anything.

Now that we have scooters sharing bike lanes, I wonder if we’ll need to think more clearly about the different kinds of lane on a street and what their real defining features are. This could lead to different words.

We separate traffic types for two reasons:

Speed, so that faster vehicles aren’t often stuck behind slower ones,
Width, so that we use less space to serve the needs of narrower vehicles, thus using scarce space more efficiently overall.

Sarah Iannarone and I were chatting about this on the bus this morning, and after that she went straight to the whiteboard and drew this:

The idea here is that a street with a speed limit over 30 km/hr will need to separate these three kinds of traffic, because they differ in both speed and width. At lower speeds you can mix them more.

Where speed and width come apart, however, speed has to be the defining feature. You can’t ride a motorbike at 30 km/hr down a “bike” lane, even though it may be narrow enough. You have to ride it in the traffic lane, even though that’s a waste of space.

All this came up because I was trying to think of the correct new term for “bike lane” as we proliferate more vehicle types that run more or less at the speed and width of bicycles but are clearly not bicycles, such as electric scooters. The two logical terms seem to be narrow lane or midspeed lane. One way or another the two concepts will need to track with each other.

I wonder if this kind of language can make our sense of the role of these lanes more flexible, and thus less divisive.

There is a lot of room for individual choice here about which lane to use. Cyclists, for example, already choose between midspeed “bike” lanes and full-speed traffic lanes, depending on their preferred balance of speed and safety. Meanwhile, an 8-year-old learning to ride a bike should probably be on the sidewalk. Another reason that “cycle lane” may be a misnomer.

This isn’t easy. The things that might go in a midspeed lane have very different acceleration and stopping characteristics, all of which will cause friction. When I raised this thought on Twitter, I got lots of responses expressing concern about different kinds of vehicles sharing a lane. But even with just the few lane types that we already have, it’s hard to make them all fit. We’ll never have a separate lane for every type of vehicle that needs a slightly different speed, acceleration, or stopping distance. So again, I’m asking a question, not answering it.

Finally, Sarah assigns transit to the full-speed, widest lanes, but of course that leaves open the question of transit priority within that territory. Where there’s demand and room for a bus lane, it should be automatic in my view. It doesn’t even need to be “constructed” necessarily. Just paint the lane red.

Why We’re Used to Some Outrage at Network Redesigns

Posted on August 11, 2018 in Canberra, Dublin, General, Houston

Here are some things that happen whenever a big bus network redesign is first proposed to the public. They are happening in the Dublin network redesign process right now, but to some degree they’ve happened on every project I’ve done over my 25-year career.

People assume that the plan is more final than it is, so they feel they need to gather forces in angry meetings and attack us, when in fact we want their detailed comments so we can address them.
We consult the public about the plan and they tell us, as we’re consulting them, that we’re not consulting them. (This is an understandable consequence of the previous point; people assume they’re being told when in fact they’re being asked.)
People say that while we’ve consulted some people, we haven’t consulted everyone in the right way. (This is an understandable complaint, and often a valid one, but we will always get it no matter how much consultation is done. People rely on so many different information sources, and need things explained in so many different ways, that reaching everyone the right way is a potentially infinite task.)
Some people hear only that “there won’t be a Route 54” and begin holding rallies to “Save the 54,” without knowing or caring what service is proposed to replace the 54. (Sometimes we’re just changing the number!)
Media headlines often inflame this confusion, with headlines about bus lines being “scrapped”.
People attack the whole plan because one local detail isn’t right. (Many of the details that people are outraged about in Dublin are fixable, now that we have heard about them. That’s why we’re consulting you about it now, to help us get the details right!)
Unions representing bus drivers, understandably seen as experts in some circles, will often put out their own messages tied to their own interests.
People attack the consultant. (It’s not the first time my tiny 10-person firm has been called “corporate.”)
Some sympathetic person explains to me that people in their city or country are just crazy in some way, and I assure them that no, this is what happens everywhere, from Russia to the US to New Zealand, when a proposed network redesign comes out. Because what everyone is doing is completely understandable in their situation.

Here, for example, is a deep dive into a current network redesign in Canberra, Australia (which I helped lay the groundwork for years ago). You will see all of the themes I’ve listed.

What’s happened next, in all my projects, is that we collected the comments and fixed what was fixable, which turned out to include most of the details that had most inflamed people. In most cases that addressed enough concerns that the plan moved forward and was a success. It solved the problems it was meant to solve, and once people got used to it many of them discovered that it wasn’t as bad as they thought.

That doesn’t always happen, though. Sometimes elected leaders panic at this point and stop the plan, leaving all of the existing problems in place.

For me, there’s a reason to be happy about all the controversy: It means people care. The least controversial projects I’ve done were in very car-oriented places where few people (and no powerful people) cared what the buses did. I would much rather be dealing with controversy.

The key thing is not to panic when we hear outrage at this stage of the process. While was it was especially inflamed by misinformation in Dublin’s case, it’s a normal phase in the conversation.

And again, that doesn’t mean we’re not listening. The whole point is that we are listening, so we can make the plan better.

[Note: I will be mostly away from the internet, until the 20th August.]

Dublin: We Need Your Comments!

Posted on August 10, 2018 in General

The proposed Dublin bus network redesign has been out for public comment for about a month. It’s very important that Dubliners learn about the plan (there are many ways to do this) and then to comment on it before the end of September.

Sadly, a great deal of false or misleading information is out there. Falsehoods appeared on social media within minutes after the report was posted, long before anyone could have read it. Then, a major bus drivers’ union distributed a table that claims to describe the plan, but whose real effect is to cause needless confusion and panic. For example, it describes existing route 140 as “gone” even though every segment of that route continues to be served, mostly at higher frequencies, in the new plan.

We’ve put out more accurate information, including a detailed route-by-route table and interactive maps that help you see how an existing route would be replaced, and how the network expands where you could go on public transport.

But of all the falsehoods being spread, the biggest is that NTA has “decided” to implement the plan. Many people are outraged because NTA “decided on” the plan without consulting them.

The answer is: NTA is consulting you now. That is what the draft plan is for, to put ideas out there for people to respond to. Nothing has been decided. What you tell us now will guide what happens next.

So again:

Read my overview of the plan here.
Explore the plan here (busconnects.ie), or at one of the meetings (check back for more to come).
If you have a specific objection to the plan, use the survey to explain that objection.
There’s no need to attack the whole plan unless you hate the whole plan. We may have gotten something wrong in your neighborhood, but that doesn’t mean the whole plan is a bad idea.

Again big ideas of the whole plan are:

a much simpler, more frequent network on which more people can get to more places sooner …
which requires a few people to interchange where they now have a direct bus …
and which sometimes requires a little more walking, though almost never over 400m.

If you hate these ideas, you should definitely oppose the whole plan. (Look at Chapter 5 of our report if you want to understand why these things are connected. )

But meanwhile, we need everyone’s detailed feedback and comments, so that we can make the plan better. Start here.

Dublin: New Map of Where You Can Go, and How

Posted on August 6, 2018 in Dublin

As the public consultation on the Dublin bus network redesign ramps up, we’ve been working hard to get information out in as many ways as possible.

Today, at busconnects.ie, you’ll find an interactive map that shows you two things:

Where Can I Go? Click a location, and the tool shows you how the plan changes were you can get to, in 30, 45, or 60 minutes midday, including the average waiting time at the start of your trip. It also shows you the change in the number of jobs or school enrolments that you can get to in that time.
Show Routes. This gives you an interactive layer showing all the proposed new routes, with the most frequent routes shown most prominently. This is a good tool for exploring the new network, and seeing how you could make various trips within it.

Let’s look closer:

Where Could I Go?

Click “Get Started” and then click any point on the map. Let’s select Priorswood in Dublin’s north east. Then, in the upper left, you can choose whether you want to see what’s reachable in 30 minutes, 45 minutes, or 60 minutes. Let’s choose 60 min.

See the legend at left.

Dark blue is the area that you can still reach in that time. (You can reach it now, and in the new network you still can.)
Dark grey is the area that you can no longer reach in that time. You can see a little of this on the east edge of the city centre, and around Malahide in the north. (Yes, I know this looks too much like the light grey of the parks and bay, but if you look close you’ll notice the difference. There are good but boring technical reasons[1] why we didn’t have a free hand in choosing colours.)
Light blue is the area that you can newly reach under the new network. You can’t get to these places in 60 minutes now, but under the proposed network, you can.
The box “How Many Jobs Can I Reach?” shows you that the light blue area, minus the dark grey area, amounts to an increase in 1/3 in the number of jobs (and student enrolments) that you can get to in an hour. We show these because there’s good data on where they are, but obviously this gives you a sense of your ability to get to all kinds of useful things: shopping, social opportunities, etc etc.

Want to dig deeper into these calculations? See Chapter 8 of our full report.

Across all of Dublin, the average person can go 20% farther (i.e. to 20% more jobs and student enrolments, and thus other useful places) in 30 minutes. But this tool shows you what that result is for any location, and where.

Many people have asked us for “travel time maps”. That’s what this tool is. Compare the 30, 45, and 60 minute results, and you’ll get a good sense of how long it will take to get somewhere, and whether that changes.

And yes, this is the midday outcome, which is usually also the outcome for the early evening and weekend. Doing this calculation for the peak rush hour raises several difficulties [2]. The outcome will usually be the same in direction (positive or negative in the jobs reachable), though sometimes not as dramatic in the degree of change. For outer suburban areas, peak express services may be proposed that give better outcomes than shown.

“Show Routes”

How would you get to those places? The “Show Routes” tool shows you the proposed network with the high-frequency network highlighted in red, because it’s especially likely that a logical trip will go via those routes. Note the frequency legend that appears in the lower right.

Roll over any route (like we did for the route serving Priorswood here). It tells you that this is Route A1 and the yellow highlight shows you everywhere that A1 goes. Now, it’s not hard to see how you’d go to another part of the city, because you can see where A1 crosses other routes going in your desired direction, and you can roll over them to see what they do.

Many people have asked us for a before-and-after trip planner, giving exactly how a trip would go before and after the change. We are sorry we can’t provide that, but you can get most of that information from exploring this tool. First, the “Where Can I Go?” tool will show you, pretty closely, what a travel time will be from any point to any other, and then the “Show Routes” tool will show you the network. Follow the brightest lines (the most frequent services) that seem to go where you’re going. That’s usually the fastest path.

Footnotes:

[1] Our tool required us to choose colours such that the “no longer reachable” and “newly reachable” colours add up to the “still reachable” colour, while still providing adequate contrast. This turns out to be harder than it sounds.

[2] In short, the midday service pattern (which is also the pattern of much of the evening and weekend) remains the same for several hours, so we can coherently talk about a typical condition. The peak service pattern, by contrast, is changing every minute, so the facts about how long a trip takes are also changing continuously. The result of a peak analysis would therefore be hard to present as a general outcome that would describe most people’s experience. (A peak analysis would also require making many more assumptions that would make the outcome less reliable.) In general, peak results will be similar to midday results in direction (positive or negative) but may be less dramatic in the degree of change.

The Absurdity of Counting Bus Routes

Posted on July 21, 2018 in Basics, Connections and Transfers, Dublin

When presenting a plan, I’ll sometimes be asked to count bus routes. How many bus routes change in the plan? How many bus routes still go into the urban core?

These questions have nothing to do with the quality or quantity of transit service. They have nothing to do with anyone’s ability to get anywhere, or even with how much the service is changing. The number of bus routes measures one thing only: the complexity of the service.

Here’s how this works:

A bus route is a path followed by some number of buses during the day. A route may be followed by one bus a day or by a bus every two minutes; either way, it counts as one route.

The number of bus routes can also be changed by how they are named or numbered. Say a bus route is mostly the same but has a branch on one end, where some buses go one way and some go the other. Is that one bus route or two? The answer to that question changes the number of bus routes, even though the service itself is identical in either case.

If you want to talk about service quantity, the correct unit is service hours (or service km), where this means one bus operating in service for an hour (or km).

Why count bus routes then? Only if you are making a point about complexity. The number of routes in a network is a measure of how complicated the service is. In this post, for example, I show how a three-route system gets everyone where they’re going faster than a nine-route system, with the added benefit that three routes are easier to keep in your head than nine.

In our Dublin bus network redesign proposal, the number of routes goes from 130 to about 100. Stated in isolation that sounds like a service cut, when in fact we are just running more buses on simpler routes. We are expanding service, and making it more useful, by reducing complexity. Practically nobody is losing service; most people are seeing a measurable improvement

The more routes a system has, the more complexity you have to remember. Spreading a service budget across more routes also means those routes are less frequent and therefore less useful.

And again, the real measure of a network plan is where people can get to in a reasonable amount of time. In the Dublin proposal, for example, the average Dubliner can get to 20% more jobs (counting student enrolments) in 45 minutes. That’s a real expansion in the liberty and opportunity that people experience in their daily lives. Are you sure the number of bus routes matters more than that?

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