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Coming to the UK in September!

Posted on June 18, 2025 in Events, UK 7

My travel plans will have me in the UK for much of the month of September this year. This is a great opportunity for British friends to think about events they might want me to do.

First, I can do speaking events related to my book, for free as long as there’s a reasonable marketing value.  These events can focus on any mixture of.

  • The guide we wrote on considering bus service in town planning, for the National Transport Authority of Ireland.  (The town planning habits of the UK, and the resulting public transport issues, are similar.)
  • Our Irish network redesigns, and lessons for the many redesigns that will be forthcoming in the UK.

Second, I can also offer sessions of our fun two-day intensive course in public transport network design, for any sponsoring organisation.   You can read more about that here.  These take some planning so please contact me right away if your organisation is interested.  (Our fee to run the two day course is £12,000 plus a suitable venue.)

My larger objective for the trip, apart from some time off in beautiful landscapes and cities, is to see if we can be helpful in the reform of bus services across England, which will give shire and urban area governments the power to define their own bus services for the first time in decades.  We have already provided some planning advice in both Cambridge and Birmingham, as well as in Wales.  We’re also keen to do more comprehensive network maps to help British communities assess their current services, like the one we did for for the Cambridgeshire-Peterborough Combined Authority.

So please share your ideas for what I should do!

UPDATE:  A few events are now in place:

  • Leeds, Sept. 9, Transport Planning Society event, evening, details TBD.
  • Sheffield, Sept 10, date and time TBD.
  • Portsmouth, Sept 22-24 for Quality Bus Conference

… but there is still time to schedule other things.

 

Bus Service in England: The Need for Clearer Maps

Posted on June 11, 2025 in General, Maps, UK
Map of Cambridge bus services, showing the extreme complexity.

When different operating companies all plan their own bus service, the combined network is really complicated!

It’s a time of rapid change for urban bus services in England.[1]  Since Margaret Thatcher’s privatization reforms of 1985, these services have been subsidized but not really controlled by government.  I wrote here about Thatcher’s vision for privatized public transport, including why it has been teetering for some time and is now being swept away.

Now, all over England, governments at the county or shire level have been looking at whether and how to take control of their public transport, so that they can offer coherent networks and fares, integrate public transport planning with town planning, and ensure accountability to the public.  Right now, most of these conversations are happening at a procedural level, but now it’s time to look at maps, and try to figure out what an improved and integrated network would actually look like geographically.

Right now, though, maps are a problem.  As we have wandered the transport websites of the UK, we’ve found maps by operating companies, showing only their services, but a shortage of good maps done by governments showing how all the services interact.  So we drew one, as an example, and a lot can be learned about England’s challenge by staring at it for a bit.

On my tour of the UK last summer, I spent a day in Cambridge, site of one of the UK’s most elite universities.  I was fortunate to be hosted by Andrew Highfield, an assistant director at the Cambridgeshire-Peterborough Combined Authority (CPCA), which manages transport for Cambridgeshire and its cities.  If he hadn’t been showing me around, the service would have been incomprehensible.  Many operating companies, trained to see each other as competitors, intersect here and cover different parts of the shire.  They have their own signs and shelters, each advertising their own services, and each draw maps of just their own services, if they draw maps at all.

After my visit, the CPCA commissioned us to draft a map for them.  Our mapping style focuses on what matters to the customer and not what matters to anyone else.  Instead of highlighting operator brands, we highlight frequency, the single most important variable about a service that is not always shown on maps. We use hot colors for high frequencies so that these jump out visually against the background complexity of lower frequency services.

Here is a PDF of our map.  As you can see, it’s very complicated, but the complexity of the service, as it’s evolved through the privatization era, is part of the point.

Since I’m now going to make some observations about the network, I should first announce my ignorance.  I can’t claim to know Cambridge that well.  I’ve spent a day there, and haven’t explored the shire around it at all, though of course I’ve poked around in aerial maps and Street View.  So nothing I say here should be taken as a recommendation.  Only at the end of long study of the network, and many conversations with local people, would we be in the position to do that.

However, this map should be useful for people in Cambridgeshire to understand what they have, and to think about how well it fits with the demands of the communities that they know well.  So the most important point of this article is: Every local authority should have a map like this!

What can we see?  First, let’s zoom into a slice of Cambridge itself.

Overlapping services on Histon Rd. in the NW of Cambridge

One of the first things I look for in a network is heavy overlap of low-frequency services, because this means there’s enough service to deliver a higher frequency if the service were organised differently.   So looking at our map of Cambridge, my eye immediately went to Histon Road in the northwest part of the city, served by A, 8, 8A, and T2

There’s enough service here to deliver a frequency of every 10 minutes or better, but instead there are four blue or purple lines, indicating less frequent services overlapping.  This means long gaps at some times and a pile of buses running together at other times, even when everything is running on time.  These routes look like they were drawn separately, by different people at different times with different goals, which is not what you do when you’re trying to build an integrated and efficient network.

Histon Road, by the way, looks like this, mostly the two-story built form typical of urban fabric in much of the British Isles, more than enough to generate demand for service that’s always coming soon.

What these people have now, in return for low frequency and uneven spacing of buses, is direct buses to lots of places.  Is that better or worse?  In most cases, higher frequency, even requiring connections, delivers better access to opportunity.  But an actual network plan would be the chance for the community to consider these tradeoffs and figure out what they want.

Cambridge’s Park-and-Ride structure is also interesting.  Because space is limited in the city centre and car parking is expensive there, park-and-rides around the edges are designed to intercept motorists from the surrounding area, giving them a cheap way to get to Cambridge without contributing to its traffic and parking demand.  What’s more unusual is that these facilities have their own dedicated direct routes, with numbers starting with “PR” that run frequently all day.  Other local routes may duplicate them for a long distance:

Routes 3 and PR2 can easily be described as being different services with different markets, but we usually get the best public transport for everyone by maximizing the diversity of people on any one vehicle.  So it’s more common to serve Park-and-Rides with peak-hour services to provide high capacity where demand is high, but to provide a more basic service at other times, one that serves other markets along the way.  (For example, should those intercity buses, 12 and T5, stop at the P&R to contribute to a total frequency product with less duplication?  Maybe.)  Again, I am not making a recommendation here!  That would only come after much more study of demand and some public conversations about goals.  But this may be an example of over-specialized service, one whose market is too narrowly targeted to justify being served with these nonstop links.

Now let’s zoom out to the whole map.

It’s rare to see 10-minute frequency on a long intercity link, but there’s one here, formed by A and B from St Ives into Cambridge, running in the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway.

But as it approaches Cambridge in the lower right corner of this map, it splits into two purple (every 20 minutes) branches, which later rejoin in the city centre.  So there’s frequent service along the rural link, and to central Cambridge, but not to anywhere in northern Cambridge.  This makes some sense from a commute perspective, since there are commute destinations on both branches, but when you’re trying to organise service within a city, the key is to build up simple patterns of high frequency rather than piles of different routes.  So it’s awkward to have the frequency go down, because of the branching, right as the line from St Ives reaches the area of highest demand.  Maybe this is the right pattern, but it deserves a closer look.

Finally, with our map you can marvel at the incredible complexity of rural services in England:

Most of these are one or two trips per day, many scheduled around schools but open to the public.  Some are just a few days a week.  It is hard to call this a network, because these services are mostly not intended to work together.  Instead, each looks micro-designed around a particular constituency.  Could this system be much simpler and thus more frequent — running, say, a few times a day instead of just once or twice?  Possibly, but again, it would require a full plan engaging the community.  My goal here is just to reveal the patterns that suggest possibilities, and to show why our mapping style is key to showing you what you have.

Update:  I will be in the UK for most of September 2025, continuing to promote my book!  Let me know if you have an event idea or if your organisation would like to sponsor a short training course.

 

 

[1]  Transport in the UK is a “devolved power,” which means that policy can be different in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, not to mention the various other semi-autonomous islands.  This means that Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland govern transport through their own parliaments, but the UK government plays the same role for England, since there is no separate English government.   (About 83% of the UK population is in England.)

Northern Ireland: A Vision for Better Buses

Posted on August 30, 2024 in UK

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!

 

UK Election Night Thoughts

Posted on July 4, 2024 in General, UK

Congratulations to everyone in the United Kingdom on a decisive election result, one that will unleash big changes in the public transport sector.  The Labour party, which is on track for a large majority, promises to restore government’s right to manage public transport in the public interest, sweeping away Margaret Thatcher’s vision of public transport as a purely private and competitive business. Even before the election, the dam had already started to break, as the previous Conservative government had allowed Manchester and other big cities to reform Thatcher’s system.

Since 1985 the sort of public transport planning that governments normally do in wealthy countries has been illegal in the United Kingdom outside London and Northern Ireland.  Privatization meant that private companies were free to run services whenever they liked, changing them on just a couple of months notice, and could also set their own fares.  They kept the profits from high-ridership services but demanded government subsidies for low-ridership but critically needed coverage services.  These companies were also too essential to fail:  When Covid-19 gutted their fare revenue, government had to bail them out to keep essential services running.

A report by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice describes the results of Thatcher’s grand experiment:

Privatization has not delivered a service that provides good value for money.  Private operators’ primary goal is to earn a profit for shareholders, rather than provide the best possible service. Companies extract profits in the form of dividends, which otherwise could be reinvested in the system.  They largely choose to run only profitable routes, resulting in cuts or forcing local transport authorities to step in at additional public cost. And far from taking buses off the government books, privatization has left the public on the hook for billions of pounds a year in subsidies.

Thatcher never imposed her experiment on London, because you simply can’t run a big city this way.  At high densities, public transport service is intensely interdependent with other civic functions, especially land use planning and traffic management.  Government needs confidence about what the buses and trains are going to do, so that it can provide certainty to developers, planners, and everyone else making decisions about the life and structure of the city.  Voters also deserve to know that the service funded by their taxes is designed, operated, and priced in a way that reflects their goals and values.

In the new model, which the British call franchising, there will still be a role for the private operating companies.  They’ll be able to compete for contracts to run portions of public transport networks, but those networks will be designed, managed, and marketed by governments.  Fares will no longer be the basis of their profit.  Instead, they’ll be paid a fair price to drive and maintain the services, enough to give them a small profit margin, and with various incentives and penalties for good and bad performance.  Their success will depend on providing good service.

I’ve worked extensively in three countries that have made a similar transition fairly recently: Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland.  In all three, I have led the planning of bus network designs for governments that were just starting to take firm control of public transport planning, usually while maintaining a role for the private sector.   These transitions have been difficult, especially for the operating companies who must make cultural changes to match their new incentives, but they have made dramatic improvements in service possible.  With this background, our firm hopes to find a role in the forthcoming tsunami of bus planning in the UK.  In fact, we’d love to have a little office there.  For now, I hope UK public transport advocates are enjoying their election night.  Soon, the buses may even run late enough for you to get home from the party.

more uk frequent network maps: nottingham

Posted on February 15, 2013 in Connections, Transfers, Frequent Networks, Legibility, Maps, UK

Nottingham, UK now highlights frequent services on its network map.  More detail at the link.

Nottingham slice

Often when you first map the frequent network, you notice for the first time how self-disconnected it is.  Nottingham's frequent network is entirely radial with just one frequent orbital (crosstown) service spanning about 45 degrees of arc along the west side, easily seen on the full map.  The orbital is an extension of a radial, but it's clearly in an orbital role for a while.

One of the great outcomes of frequency is easy connections, so once you map the frequent network you usually start seeing opportunities to build more non-downtown connection opportunities, whether they be full orbital lines or just ways for two radials to connect (or even through-route at the outer ends) so as to create more direct travel opportunities within a subarea of the city.  For example, looking at this map, I immediately wonder whether 44 and 45 should be combined into a two-way loop so that you could ride through, say, between Carlton rail station in the far southeast corner of this image and Mapperley in the centre.  (You wouldn't present it as a loop in the schedule.  You'd still call it 44 and 45 but note on the map and in the timetable that 44 continues as 45 and vice versa.  This is how you build more direct travel opportunities in small city while still keeping the network legible.)

dissent of the week: uk bus policy and “profitability”

Posted on May 13, 2012 in Privatization, UK

In a recent guest post, Peter Brown praised the Tyne and Wear (greater Newcastle) region in the UK for seeking to regain government powers of integrated planning.  The new paradigm is what the Brits call a "contract scheme" in which the government controls planning and operators provide service under contract with government.  This is pretty much how privatized operations work in North America.  The rider's is a customer of the government agency, the government agency is the customer of the bus operating company.  Each link has accountability; operating companies are accountable to their government purchasers, while government is democratically accountable to voters.

UK reader John Smith responds:

Bus operators in North East England have formed the North East Bus Operators' Association to vigorously oppose the imposition of a contract scheme in Tyne and Wear. They are working together with Nexus on a Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA), which will provide much of the benefits of a contract scheme without the 'unintended consequence' of transferring the financial responsibility to the public sector, particularly at a time when local authority finances are under increasing pressure. You can read about it here.

Commeter Peter Laws also responded enthusiastically to the fact that 90% of bus miles outside of London run without subsidy.  

Not so fast.  While it's obviously desirable to reduce subsidy/bus, is the purpose of this savings to be able to afford more buses?  Or is it just to avoid spending money on bus service?

The problem with aiming zero-subsidy service is it usually implies zero public control.  Government is shrivelled to the role of a "regulator," with the implication that, as in safety regulation, government can enforce laws but not direct the provision of service to serve larger public ends.

Government, especially local government, has entirely valid interests that are served by operating public transit services.  These include not just social service needs, but also a desire to support its urban development intent, or, as in Oxford, a need to organize service so that it uses scarce street space more effectively.  The old privatization paradigm made it almost impossible to address these needs.  For example, Oxford's effort to get the two bus operators to co-operate on using street space more efficiently would have been impossible, because any such co-operation was considered collusion. (Legislation under the last Labour government finally made it possible.)

Co-ordination of land use and transit, too, was impossible under the old regime, except insofar as an operating company considered it to be in their financial interest.  There was no way for government to mandate such co-operation.

Or consider the great problem of frequency.  One way you minimize subsidy or maximize profit is to run as little service as possible to serve as many riders as possible, just as the US airlines are doing, for example.  Thus, a private operator tends to be happy with a much lower level of service than a public transport authority or local government or local population want, and would pay for.  

This is especially important when a Frequent Network is at stake.  There may be large network effects, with long term importance to city form and sustainability outcomes, that arise from running a service more frequently than its break-even point, but it is fiendishly hard to do this even by subsidizing the operator to do it, because you are then declaring certain trips of a line to be "profitable" and others "subsidized." In fact, because people respond so much to frequency and span, ridership among trips on a route is thoroughly interdependent, so you cannot declare ridership on a trip to be solely the result of that trip's existence.  As a result, any separation between "profitable" vs "subsidized" trips on a route becomes an unmeasurable fiction.

So it's hard.  I think the American privatization model (transit agency controls planning, hires operators just for operations and maintenance) enables much clearer democratic conversations about the nexus between public transport and public goods.  But I understand why bus operating companies in the UK-influenced world often don't like that outcome, and why people whose main goal is to not spend money on transit don't like it either.

guest post: peter brown on the decline of u.k. privatization of transit

Posted on May 11, 2012 in Connections, Transfers, Fares, Privatization, UK

Peter Brown is a lifelong UK transit enthusiast (and an HT reader from the earliest days).   He is a member of the Light Rail Transit Association (LRTA), and a former volunteer tram driver at Seaton Tramway, Devon, England.

Twenty six years after the Thatcher government deregulated local bus services in the UK (outside London and Northern Ireland), the calls for some form of re-regulation persist.  

The latest issue is the stated ambition of the Tyne and Wear Passenger Transport Executive (PTE), which today calls itself 'Nexus,' to restore government control of planning and management for the bus system in the Newcastle-upon-Tyne/Gateshead/Sunderland conurbation.  This is significant because for a few years in the 1980s this authority operated the UK's only example of an integrated transport system on a par with European best practise — a system that was destroyed by the Thatcher government.

Img_10384In the early 1980s, the Tyne and Wear PTE directly operated a large bus system which was formed by the takeover of the former municipal fleets of Newcastle, Gateshead, and Sunderland, and also built and operated the LRT system (The Metro).  During the short life of this integrated system it was possible to travel between any two points on a single ticket by bus, local train, Metro, and ferry services. The bus system was redesigned to feed into the metro at purpose built interchanges for journeys into central Newcastle, thus reducing bus movements across the heavily congested Tyne bridges.  
 
Unfortunately the Thatcher Government deregulation of bus services destroyed this integrated network.  Deregulation swept away a regulated system that had existed in the UK since the 1930s. It meant that bus companies (referred to as ‘Operators’ in the UK) had to self financing through the fare box. Blanket subsidies and any form of network co-ordination (or what Americans would call "integrated network planning") were terminated.  In short, it became illegal to think of transit as a public resource, integrated with the city, and managed for greatest possible efficiency and usefulness.

Instead, the ideal became competition.  Bus operators could operate "commercial" (non-subsidised) networks anywhere, and the role of local government became to purchase subsidized services wherever more service was desired.  Integrated transit features that many cities take for granted — including citywide fare systems, lines that aim to connect with one another, and rational management of limited resources, became effectively impossible.  
 
Yet if the goal was competition, the system failed.  As in most of the UK today, there is very little direct on-the-road competition between the three bus companies in Tyne and Wear.  Instead, each company has settled into a "territory" in which the lack of competition is the key to profitability.  Passenger journeys starting in one operator's territory that finish in another's require the passenger to change buses and pay twice. Nexus is no longer happy about this and wants to take over the commercial networks and purchase operations from the bus companies – this is known as a 'Quality Contract' and there is new (as yet unused) legislation to do this. 

In short a Quality Contract would involve the suspension of deregulation within a specified area and the imposition of a tendered system whereby the transport authority would specify the network, fares, frequencies etc. As urban bus operation outside London is a profitable activity (nationally approximately 90% of bus mileage requires no direct revenue support) the proponents of Quality Contracts believe that massive subsidies would not be required.  
 
In order to bring about a Quality Contract several conditions must be satisfied, with an independent board to adjudicate. The promoters would have to prove that the new system would:

  • have a positive impact on the use of bus services
  • will be of benefit to users of bus services by improving quality
  • will contribute to the implementation of the local transport policies
  • achieve all the above in an economic, efficient and effective manner.

 All the above leave lots of room for argument against them, and since the commercial operators would in effect have their businesses sequestrated without compensation it is likely they will use the legal process in full, including the European Court of Human Rights.
 
The alternative approach for a local transport authority to increase its influence in the provision of bus services is the 'Statutory Quality Partnership' as demonstrated in Oxford last year using powers from the 2008 Transport Act. 
 
The 2008 Act expands the terms of the previous voluntary Quality Partnership model to allow a LTA [Local Transport Authority — the tier of local government responsible for transport] to specify requirements as to frequencies, timings or maximum fares as part of the standard of service to be provided under a scheme, in addition to quality standards. But it also provides important safeguards to ensure that unrealistic conditions are not imposed on operators, and that their legitimate right to a fair commercial rate of return on their investment is not undermined. The process by which an operator can object to particular standards included in a scheme relating to frequencies, timings or maximum fares, is an important feature of this. But at the same time it places a responsibility on them to justify the grounds for their objection, thus minimising the scope for vexatious or frivolous objections.

In the context of Oxford, where such a scheme was implemented last year, there is no history of municipal bus operation. This could account for the partnership approach being more acceptable to that LTA.

Photo: Simon Billis 

the economist and the “redundancy” fallacy

Posted on January 24, 2012 in Berlin, Journalism, London, New York City, Paris, UK

Today's unsigned piece in the Economist "Democracy in America" blog picks up on Tom Vanderbilt's Slate item reviewing my book.  I'm certainly grateful for the publicity, though for the record, I do believe in pleasure!

But the Economist's writer ends his piece with a commonplace of old-inner-city thinking that can do real harm when taken outside those bounds:

Ultimately, what makes public transit work is massive redundancy: lots of different systems layered on top of each other, all running at high frequencies, providing you clear information on when the next one arrives. The world's best cities, New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong, Berlin, all do this pretty well. For cities that aspire to greatness, the road map doesn't seem so hard to follow.

"Lots of different systems layered on top of each other" begs the question of whether these systems are working together — for example by encouraging connections from one to the other — or simply duplicating each other.  That is the distinction that matters.  

Yes, if you're in "New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong and Berlin" you may perceive a layering of "redundant" services, but one of two very different things is happening:

  1. The services are truly redundant in the sense of duplicating (or even competing) but the demand is so intense that they're all full, so the duplication isn't much of a waste.  This is the case with many big-city commute markets, but often not with all-day patterns.
  2. The services are actually fitting together into an integrated network, through some mix of planned connectivity and complementarity.  An example of complementarity is the simultaneous presence of services in one corridor that differ in the speed/access tradeoff.  A major Manhattan avenue, for example, may have an "express" train stopping only every mile or less, a "local" train stopping less than every half-mile, and a bus on the surface stopping even more frequently.  That isn't redundancy unless the market isn't strong enough to support all three.

Praising these super-dense cities for "massive redundancy" sends exactly the wrong message to less-dense and smaller cities.  Tell them to plan for redundancy, when their markets are insufficiently developed, and they'll spread their resources out in tangles of overlapping services none of which are frequent or attractive enough to be worth waiting for.  This is the lesson of inner Sydney, discussed in Chapter 12 of my book.

You need massive agglomeration for true redundancy to work.  Without that, you dissipate service quality too much.  This was a key failing of the privatization of the British bus industry, which gave private companies control over transit planning and prohibited them from working together to create rational connective networks, by declaring that to be collusion.  The result was a generation of frustrated riders who had to let Jim's bus go by because they had a ticket for Joe's bus, even though the two bus lines together might add up to enough frequency to actually be useful.  The last Labour government finally removed this prohibition on "collusion," allowing simple, obvious, and mutually beneficial plans to go forward, like this one in Oxford.

"Massive redundancy" may be fine if you're a megacity, though even there, its effectiveness may be a feature of the peak that doesn't translate to the rest of the day.  Anywhere else, services need to work together as a network.  Even in London, New York, Paris, Hong Kong and Berlin, that's really what's happening. 

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