There were certain cities I found very convenient to get around, and others I found inconvenient. It took me several weeks to work out why: the cities I found inconvenient to get around were those with multiple city stations and an ineffective “glue” to hold them together. By “glue” I mean a simple, convenient way to get from one station to another to make a connection.

New York
New York is always quoted as an example of a Metro which runs at high frequency and long hours. I was looking forward to riding it, even though my travel plans only allowed time for a trip from Penn Station to JFK Airport. I was disappointed, partly because the staff were fairly unhelpful, but mainly because it was a case of “Take the Long Island Railroad to Jamaica station, then transfer to the Airtrain from there”.

There’s a problem right away – why are there three separate companies (Subway, Long Island, Airtrain), each with their own separate ticketing system and with no coordination?

The rule slowly started to gel in my head. Ideally there should be only one city station, served by all trains into the city. It’s an extension of the rule that says there should be “Fewer, larger transport interchanges, preferably at major activity centres”.

Thankfully, there was plenty of time before the flight and I was able to enjoy the Airtrain once I got onto it. Lots to say about Airtrain but that’s a topic for another day.

London
London was a similar case – I was looking forward to seeing if the Tube is everything it’s cracked up to be. I arrived on the Gatwick Airport Express to London Victoria and tried to find my way to a Manchester train. But Manchester trains don’t go from Victoria, they go from Euston. How do I get there? Take the Tube. But the Tube wouldn’t accept our BritRailPass, so it would cost us £8 just to go from one London station to another.

The rule was modified in my head: If it’s not possible to have every train arrive at a single station, the “glue” between them must be free. Think of an airport – would they charge you to travel on the shuttle between the international and domestic terminals? Of course not!

Melbourne – options
I was talking this over after the trip and suddenly realised that Melbourne is (partially) guilty of the same offense. A visitor coming in on Skybus would (at some hours) be presented with a line up of PRIDE screens almost all saying “Take next train to Flinders Street”. Of course we are already following the second half of the rule by having multimode ticketing – whatever train they are taking from Flinders Street, the ticket they need for it will also cover their trip there from Southern Cross. Also if they came in on a V/Line service they have free Zone 1 travel. The problem is Skybus, it doesn’t cover anything but the bus. Perhaps we should look at the possibility of Skybus tickets giving free travel within the City Saver area – although it looks like an even better idea is in the wings (although I don’t know how influential those backers are).

However, we are very close to implementing the first half of the rule – that every train should go through one single station. And that station is Southern Cross.

Currently the only trains in Victoria (including interstate trains and even Skybus which acts as the airport train) that don’t run through SSS are the Sandringham, Blackburn and Alamein services which terminate at Flinders Street. If (as many have proposed) we make those services form Northern Group services, the collection will be complete. No matter where in Victoria you want to go, you can get a train there from Southern Cross – with at most one change of train (clearly announced) where it’s operating as a spur line.

If we accept that, it would also be logical to move driver changeover, recovery time and the various operational procedures that need to be done to terminate a service from Flinders Street to Southern Cross.

There is more room to add infrastructure (specifically platforms) at Southern Cross than Flinders Street. And the central location of Flinders Street (being next to the major shopping areas on Swanston and Elizabeth Streets) is declining in relevance due to the expansion of the Docklands area.

An even weirder idea – gunzel anti-drooling alert!
If we take the airport example further, we can note that the distance between Melbourne’s five city stations (or even eight if you include North Melbourne, Jolimont and Richmond) is not unlike the distance between terminals at a major airport. I have for a long time been of the opinion that public transport should take a leaf out of the airlines’ book – where privatisation and competition have increased the level of service offered by orders of magnitude.

Suppose we called them all “Melbourne station” and distinguished Flagstaff from Flinders Street by giving them terminal numbers? Or if the gunzels and historians won’t let us do that, “Melbourne Station, Flinders Street Terminal”?

That would eliminate the confusion of “This is a Flinders Street train”, “This is a City Loop train”. All trains are Melbourne trains, and at Richmond it is announced “The next station is Melbourne Parliament” or “The next station is Melbourne Flinders Street”.

On the face of it, none of this would make the service any better from the local’s point of view. But something we need to realise is that international students are forming an increasingly significant proportion of the public transport system’s passengers.

It’s easy to say “Oh, of course Flinders Street means Melbourne! People will just have to learn that” when we’ve lived here all our lives and used it for years. But for a foreigner dragging three suitcases and still jet-lagged from the flight, it makes a big difference.

Long term ideas
One day I’d really like to see tram routes go the same way. Within the City Saver area people really don’t care whether their tram is eventually going to Box Hill, North Balwyn or West Preston. And they don’t want to have three trams come within two minutes and then seven minutes until the next one. What we need is a regular high frequency shuttle along each of the city streets. Missed your tram? Look, the next one is just at the top of the hill over there.

Also, to make it easier for people to get from the station to the tram stop, we need the streets to be car-free. Look at Bourke Street Mall – people will happily come out of a shop and pick a tram without any stressful waiting-at-the-pedestrian-lights-oh-dear-am-I-going-to-miss-it-should-I-risk-crossing-against-the-lights like there always is at (say) Melbourne Central. If we had something similar at Flinders Street and Southern Cross, we would be a lot further toward truly integrating the public transport system than we are today.

The ribbon cutting effect is the desire of politicians to improve the public transport system by very showy, headline-grabbing augmentations (usually physical infrastructure) rather than much cheaper, often very mundane and less beneficial in themselves (but cumulatively powerful) service or navigability improvements. These latter improvements have little or no physical manifestation that the politician can ‘cut the ribbon’ on.

What causes or influences it?

Politicians are driven by the own re-election, and by the perceived short attention spans of voters and limited time in the media, hence the desire to build monuments to themselves that are easy to explain to the voters. Any other improvement to a public transport service become, in the words of the Yes Minister comedy program, ‘courageous’ for the politician.

TGVs of course make a real difference to passenger demand and travel times on the routes they serve and are welcomed by this author. But it is also recognised they are an integral part of French geopolitics (with countries from Morocco to Argentina buying TGV systems) and national political strategy, and headlines like the recent world rail speed record on the Est line are not intended merely for passenger consumption alone. Source wikipedia.

What impacts does it have on service efficiency?

Poor decisions result from the ribbon cutting effect, and can lead to improvement A, which costs the same as improvement B but delivers less benefit, getting the go-ahead. Or improvement C, which delivers no real improvement at all, or even harms the system, getting the go-ahead. Or improvement D, which may deliver benefits to society overall (for example, a large national monument) but delivers no direct improvement to the system. And all these projects come with the opportunity cost of what might have been done with the money. As construction and asset inflation make projects more expensive, the consequences of misallocation become greater.

What impact does it have on passenger demand?

Misallocation in improvements is usually associated with the other misallocation of staff or other resources, and can engender the wrong types of demand response. For example, building peak express infrastructure on rail lines rewards peak travel and consolidates gradient effects. Busways can physically remove the bus from the city streets (its natural home and competitive advantage) and make it further from its natural pedshed and thus result in longer end-to-end journey times, offsetting any speed benefit from the busway. This clearly negatively impacts on demand.

This is not an argument against some of these types of infrastructure improvement; only that the infrastructure improvement needs to be only the tip of an iceberg of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ improvements to the system, from bus frequencies at rail stations, correct farebox policies, seamless interchange to gain ‘network effects’, passenger information and navigability for casual or non-users, to name a few soft improvements.

Australian examples

There are unfortunately too many Australian examples to name, which is regrettable in an overall environment of constrained spending. There is a predilection for odd-numbered track patterns, which reward expensive and irregular peak services, a predilection for giant rail stations (as if people travelled to hang around at stations), and for bus ‘interchanges’ when what people really want, is to not have to wait long for the next bus.

Melbourne’s City Loop, for example, is probably the worst example of resource misallocation in urban rail infrastructure in Australia in recent decades. As posted on my blog, there were a range of ‘soft’ and minor ‘hard’ problems that faced trains at Flinders Street station in the 1960s and 70s, that could have been much more easily and cheaply addressed than in fact occurred through the construction of the City Loop.

This is not to say that some people have not benefited from having stations at Melbourne Central, Parliament and Flagstaff, only that such a service could have been provided far cheaper than the City Loop ended up costing, and the Flinders St issues had cheaper, simpler cures.

Overseas examples.
Comparing the French and German high speed networks indicates that the French spend far more on each line, to gain headlines (for example, Lille to Marseille in 3 hours for 1000km). However, this came at the expense of seamless interchange between trains, which uses the network effect to provide semi-high-speed services to hundreds of cities in Germany, rather than simply the dozens that can be accessed via  French high speed routes.

The French also tend to build connection lines (for example, the circum-Paris line) to allow single-seat journeys, reflecting a lack of confidence in passengers changing trains to maximise the value of the high speed investment.

This potentially results from French politicians’ delusions of their global importance, as well as the desire to cement Paris as the capital, as distinct from the calmer, more even German approach.

Related concepts
navigability, gradient effect, seamless interchange, median wait time, single seat journey, passenger information display, network effects, bus-rail interchange, pedsheds, farebox policies, odd-numbered track amplification, true end-to-end journey time.