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Waterford, Ireland: A Plan to Double Public Transport Service

Posted on July 10, 2024 in General, Network Redesign

Waterford’s central bus interchange point. Source: Google Street View

One of the highlights of my career, and of our firm‘s recent history, has been a series of contracts for the National Transport Authority in the Republic of Ireland to redesign the bus networks of all the main cities, part of a larger national strategy called BusConnects. We started in Dublin in 2017, and have been progressing through the other four Irish cities: first Cork, then Galway and Limerick, and now finally Waterford, which has a metro area population of about 83,000.  Dublin is now half-implemented, while the rest will be implemented over the next several years.

Our Draft New Network for Waterford was released Monday for public comment. It proposes to improve frequencies; replace one-way loops with two-way lines; add weekend service; and cover new areas. It would double the quantity of bus service in Waterford.  I’m not sure we have ever before been asked to plan such a large expansion of service for relatively short-term implementation.

The level of policy clarity behind this expansion is remarkable.  Ireland has “done the maths” about what must be done to achieve national goals for emissions and for social welfare, and has concluded that a big investment in urban buses is key to those goals.  Ireland has a cost-effective rail improvement program, but it is still mostly a nation of roads. Its development pattern is dense compared to US cities but low-density compared to Continental Europe.  (For example, most urban Irish housing is either rows of townhouses or semi-detached houses, what North Americans would call duplexes.)   So the Irish government has concluded that only road-based public transport, developed at scale, can reach enough of the population to be relevant.  They’ve also followed the logic through to land use planning, hiring us to write a guidebook, now published, on how to plan for useful, efficient bus services when laying out new suburbs and towns.

The planned service increases are massive.  Dublin already had the most extensive network of the Irish cities, but even in Dublin NTA is increasing service by over 30%.  The increases will be around 45% in Cork, Galway and Limerick, and now 100%, a doubling of service, in Waterford.

Why so much more?  Waterford is starting with a fairly minimal network by Irish standards. Here’s the existing network.  It’s five routes, with frequencies of 20-30 minutes. (Note that in a departure from our usual mapping style, we’re using linewidth rather than colour to indicate frequency, mostly because if we drew all these entangled loops in the same two colours you’d never be able to follow it.)

Considering that it is made up of only five routes, the Waterford network is quite complex. Much of the complexity is caused by one-way loops: two routes are entirely one-way loops, and the other three routes have sections of one-way loop or one-way split. The benefit of all these one-way services is that a large area can be covered without using much service, but it makes people’s trips time-consuming, and it makes the network harder to understand.

And here is the proposed network. Every route will offer two-way service. The wide lines stand for service every 15 minutes, 7-days-a-week. The narrow lines stand for service every 30 minutes, 7-days-a-week.

 

This design achieves several things:

  • It’s radically simpler, because all routes are two way (with the exception of some short segments on one-way streets in the centre).
  • It fits frequency better to demand.  It offers 15-minute “turn up and go” frequency linking the biggest destinations, including the University (SETU), the city Centre, and the main hospital on the east side.  Most of the really dense parts of Waterford are on these segments.
  • It creates secondary focal points at the University (SETU) and hospital, offering direct service to these points from most of the areas surrounding them.
  • It covers several recent new developments.
  • Fewer routes end in the city centre. Instead, proposed Routes 1, 2, and 4 run through the centre and onward to the other side of the city.  This reduces the need to interchange for many cross-city trips, and also makes better use of the limited space for terminating buses in the city centre.

As always, this is a draft!  We know it will be improved by public feedback, which is already coming in.  We look forward to the public conversation that starts now, and runs through 16 August.

Click here to explore the plan and express your view. You can find our entire report, with all of the details, here.

 

 

UK Election Night Thoughts

Posted on July 4, 2024 in General

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.

Should We Paint the Bus with Route Information?

Posted on June 23, 2024 in Legibility

On most bus systems I’ve seen, information about the route is on a changeable sign, not painted or printed on the bus itself.  Many bus operations have constrained facilities and need to be able to quickly deploy whatever bus is handy to meet a need, so bus operations folks resist marketing ideas that involve making the buses too specialized.  The more different kinds of buses there are, the more likely it is that the one they have handy will not be the one they need.

But several British bus operators disagree.  In both Birmingham and Cardiff, I noticed many buses decorated specifically for use on one route, or one closely related family of routes.

Here are some examples from Cardiff (Welsh on one side of the bus, English on the other):

Birmingham’s buses, by National Express, lack that list of destinations along the top but have other information, often with an emphasis on comfort.

While the Birmingham buses convey useful information, I really like the Cardiff design, especially the list of destinations along the top of the vehicle.  For someone who knows the city, these give a quick and useful sense of what the bus does; for the visitor, they at least advertise destinations that might be of interest.

Many historic public transport vehicles used to be marked with a list of destinations painted on the vehicle.  You can still see this on some San Francisco cable cars:

And of course, the same tool is used now and then for commercial services that only do one route.  But I was struck in Birmingham and Cardiff by how widely these were deployed: Not on every route, but seemingly on the most frequent ones.

European cities are hard to navigate.  A route can’t be named after a single main street that it uses, as is often possible in North America.  Instead, every route’s identity can only be conveyed by a list of places.  As I’ve explored various British cities where I didn’t know the network well, I found myself valuing this prominent information about each route.  I also appreciated how these buses, especially the Cardiff ones, invite me to think about possible trips I could make in the future.  They help me see my options.

The operational barriers to doing this are real.  I have seen many North American operating bases that are far too constrained to enable buses to be dispatched this way, with a separate stack of buses reserved for each route.  But it could be part of making buses more attractive to people, in cities where that’s an issue.

UK and Ireland Tour Completed

Posted on May 19, 2024 in Events

I’ve just finished up a complex tour of the UK and Ireland, which took me to London, Cambridge, Cardiff, Birmingham, Belfast and Dublin.  It’s a fascinating time for public transport in these countries, and especially in the UK.  Thanks to everyone who turned out for my events!  A longer piece on the trip is coming soon.

Video of My UCLA Event: Great Questions!

Posted on May 12, 2024 in General, Los Angeles, Video

Last month I did an event at the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA (the University of California at Los Angeles), hosted by Jacob Wasserman.  It was fun, with many excellent questions that made me think.  The video is on Youtube here.

The first 30 minutes are my presentation, and the fun part, the questions, starts at 33:40. Some highlights:

  • 35:50  Jacob asks “What did Covid change?”  (“Covid liberated the transit industry.”)
  • 39:00 Jacob asks “When should we start caring about ridership again?”
  • 43:00 Jacob asks “How can you design microtransit well?  Where can it work?” (Triggers my hardware store analogy.)
  • 48:20 Jacob asks about the importance of pricing of parking and driving, which leads into a riff lanes on bus lanes and “Bus Rapid Transit.”
  • 51:30  Jacob asks “What tips would you give for writing well in planning?”  (“Write to your grandmother.”)
  • 58:10  Juan Matute, Deputy Director of the Institute, asks about opportunites to make transit easier to understand, especially for a new rider.
  • 1:02:44  Audience question: “Have transit agencies had success influencing land use?” “You can’t expect the transit agencies to do this.” Here I make a reference to the Irish Planning Guide, which you can read about here.
  • 1:06:10 Jacob asks “What is the role of consultants? Justify yourself!”
  • 1:14:15  Josh Stevens of the California Planning and Development Report asks “How will autonomous vehicles affect transit?”
  • 1:17:20 Audience question “What kinds of incrementalism are most important to get us to the point where we can make a big push (toward sustainabile mobility)”  Thus prodded, I managed to end the event on a note of optimism.

Major US Public Transit Union Questions “Microtransit”

Posted on May 10, 2024 in General, Microtransit

A dramatic report today from ATU, one of the major US transit unions, is called “The False Promise of Microtransit.”  It has four big critiques of “microtransit,” also called on-demand transit or flexible transit.

  1. Microtransit cannot efficiently scale to meet increased customer demand.

  2. It has been shown to serve a younger, more affluent, and less diverse ridership than fixed route service.

  3. Its environmental benefit is doubtful.

  4. It encourages cost cutting through privatization and the degradation of transit jobs.

The first and third points are the same point.  As I explained here, “microtransit” is so intrinsically inefficient that it can’t produce the environmental benefits that people associate with transit.  Instead, its only coherent use is as a coverage tool, useful when an agency wants to take credit for providing lifeline access to an area whose layout and street pattern are inimical to fixed routes.   The report has a striking quotation from Joshua Schank, who when he was at LA Metro was one of the biggest boosters of “microtransit”:

Admittedly, microtransit has so far proven to be more expensive on a per person basis than traditional transit. Even some of the lowest-performing bus routes in cities have lower subsidies per person than microtransit.” – Joshua Schank and Emma Huang, InfraStrategies

The ATU’s last point, that “microtransit” encourages cost cutting through privatization and the degradation of transit jobs”, is what you’d expect a union to say.  US public transit agencies are tempted to contract with private operating companies to reduce labor costs, and some agencies, especially in the sunbelt, are entirely contract operated though still mostly with union labor.  The ATU would obviously prefer to deal directly with government transit agencies, who are easier to influence than private companies.  But setting apart a union’s self-interest, there is plenty of reason to be concerned with the “gig economy” effects, both on the larger society and on the transit customer experience.  I believe that in the long run, we will get what we pay for in labor costs.   I routinely get to experience both professional transit drivers and Uber/Lyft drivers, and the contrast is very obvious.  Transit drivers are trained, and their compensation encourages them to make the work a career, not just a side hustle, so many are very experienced.  All this is good for safety and customer service.

 

UK and Ireland: Events Coming Up, Including Webinar 9 May

Posted on May 8, 2024 in Events

The tide of bus reform washing over the UK (and already much further advanced in the Irish Republic) has created an urgent need for UK decisionmakers to think about bus network design.  Many private companies that have provided much of the public transport in the UK are no longer viable in the wake of ridership drops since the pandemic, and meanwhile, major cities are demanding more control over their public transport so that they can integrate public transport with their other goals, including housing and redevelopment.

On Thursday 9 May at 3 pm London time I’ll be doing a webinar on Redesigning Bus Networks pitched to a UK audience, though of course anyone can attend.  It’s sponsored by the Bus Centre of Excellence a UK Government-funded educational institution.  We’ll be talking about how bus service redesign is an essential step in regaining government control of public transport, based on my long experience with similar reforms in Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.

Then, coming up in June, I’ll be touring the UK and Ireland in person.  Current plans include:

  • London, an event TBD on the evening of 5 June.
  • Cardiff, an event TBD on 6 or 7 June
  • Birmingham, an event sometime in the week of 10-14 June
  • Belfast, a definite event on 19 June at Queens University, details here.
  • Dublin, an event TBD on the evening of 20 June.

Hope to see you at the webinar on 9 May, and at one of these in-person events!

Buses Should Matter to City Planners: Here’s the Tool They Need

Posted on April 29, 2024 in Be on the Way, Books, Dublin, General, Urban Structure

Throughout my career as a public transit planner, I’ve dealt with city planners and developers who are quite sure that bus service of any kind is irrelevant to city building. Most city planning professionals get little training in public transit, and for years, much of that training came laced with assumptions that rail is the only public transit that really matters.

So it’s not surprising that in many developed countries, not just the US, the design of cities presents countless barriers to efficient and liberating transit service provided by buses. Some of these barriers reflect an anti-transit or at least anti-bus ideology, but in my experience, most of these barriers were created thoughtlessly, by people who were focused on something else.

I know this because I can often see how a tiny change to how something had been built, one that wouldn’t alter its nature or its economic viability, would have made good bus service possible. Most of my transit planning work, however, must deal with the built environment as it is, so I often have no choice but to present a plan that presents inferior service because that’s what the physical situation mandates.

The new edition of my book is much more forceful about these issues than the first edition was. But meanwhile, we’ve been at work on a document designed to educate and hopefully inspire the city building professions on how to take buses seriously. It’s called “Planning Cities and Towns for Successful Bus Services,” prepared by our firm (mostly written by me and my colleague Michelle Poyourow) for the National Transport Authority of Ireland (NTA). The NTA intends to use this document to educate town planners and developers on the need to consider the usefulness of bus service when doing any kind of planning task.  The document is a free PDF and you can download it here.

While the document is in an English suitable to Ireland and the UK, and focuses on problems that tend to arise in Ireland, it is perfectly readable to any English speaker and is relevant all over the world. Here is the core statement:

All decisions about how to lay out an area or design a road are decisions about public transport. In fact, they are collectively as powerful as any routing or service decisions made by a public transport operator.  [Note to North American readers: In your context, “operator” means “public transit operating company or agency”.]

This has long been well-understood in the context of railway services. A railway station is widely-understood to be a major infrastructure investment whose return depends on the surrounding built environment. For this reason, railway planning is accompanied by an intense focus on development in the areas around stations. During the planning phase, these station-area plans make a big contribution to the expected benefits of the line and help to justify its construction.

Given the scale of investment being made in Ireland’s bus services, a similar focus on the built environment is needed around bus services just as it has been provided around railway stations.

The opening chapter explains the principles of network design, and shows how networks interact with development to create access to opportunity.   The second chapter then lays out Three Essential Actions to make cities work well with buses:

  • Organise development around the Frequent Network
  • Make it easy to walk to service.
  • Make efficient and useful bus operations possible.

Each of these is explained in detail, showing exactly what city planners, transport planners, and developers need to be doing to achieve these three essentials.

The final chapter is a series of case studies looking at how the principles apply to different development types: residential, retail, medical, and so on.

North American readers will notice that we’ve included many North American examples.  While North Americans are used to feeling inferior to Europeans when it comes to transit and urbanism, there are many good ideas in North America that Europeans can benefit from.  That’s part of why our little firm is working now to develop a European practice.

This report came about after a long collaboration between our firm and the NTA on planning the redesign of urban bus networks across Ireland.  (We began with Dublin in 2016, and the improvements there are beginning to roll out.  Similar redesigns are completed and in line for implementation in Cork, Galway, and Limerick, and we are working on the last, in Waterford, now.)

A great aspect of all these projects has been the active collaboration of the most senior leaders of the NTA.  In particular, NTA’s Director of Transport Planning and Investment, Hugh Creegan, personally attended everyone one of the intensive staff workshops in which we hammered out every detail of the network designs with planners from the local government and bus operating company.  (In Dublin, for example, these workshops ran all day every day for two weeks.)  It is rare for such a senior official to delve so deeply into detail, but it meant that when we suggested this project to him, he immediately saw the need.

I hope readers all over the world will find this manual useful.  And if you would like a similar manual for your part of the world, we would love to collaborate with you on one.

Webinar Tomorrow March 21!

Posted on March 20, 2024 in General

On March 21 is my next webinar about the new book, sponsored by the Smart Growth Network and the Maryland Dept of Planning.  This one is a little longer than some recent ones: 90 minutes, of which about half is me speaking and half is Q&A.  Hope to see you there!  Register here!

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