An articulated 'Phileas' bus travelling along a busway in Eindhoven, Netherlands.

Bus services are often seen by the travelling public, policy makers and planners alike as an inferior third rate public transport service which travellers fall back on when other services aren’t available. When planned and implemented effectively however, buses can provide a fast, frequent and efficient service which is attractive to commuters. The list of criticisms of buses is long, and there is no shortage of lobby groups and advocates who lobby for the laying of rails as the panacea to all their transport woes. While there are certainly cases where replacement of bus services with rail is warranted by passenger demand, this is not always the case. Somebody and MJJA have written recent posts about matching the appropriate modes to the required task. Rail solutions are often put up as solutions to problems where the answer in fact lies not in the vehicle used, but the manner in which the service is delivered. Given the right operating environment, buses can provide an alternative to trunk metro or light rail services with shorter implementation timeframes and lower implementation costs. 

Bus services as we know them

In many Australian cities, bus services involve poor frequencies (often half hour at best), old vehicles, contending with traffic congestion, poor signage and route information, poor passenger amenity (bus stops which consist of little more than a pole at the side of the road), poor interconnectivity and frequent stopping delaying journey times. Journeys are further delayed by the need for the driver to sell tickets to passengers. Buses are therefore said to be slow, irregular, uncomfortable and unpredictable. Furthermore, it is often claimed that passengers don’t catch buses because they “don’t know where bus stops are and they don’t know where the bus is going to go”. Conversely, it is said, trams and trains, give prospective travellers an idea of where the vehicle travels by virtue of the fact that the vehicles follow the rails.

Can buses play a mass transit role?

Let’s contrast this poor standard of services with the other extreme on the bus transport spectrum – the deluxe model in bus transport, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). Based on the pioneering BRT model from Curitiba, Brazil, BRTs have been employed in other parts of Latin America and increasingly catching on in Europe and North America. Australasian bus systems which contain significant features of BRT include Brisbane’s South East busway, Adelaide’s O-Bahn, Sydney’s Liverpool – Paramatta transitway and Auckland’s Northern Busway. Queensland Transport is considering options for a Cairns Busway and a busway has been planned for Canberra.

How is BRT different?

The BRT model provides high frequency services, with high occupancy articulated buses carring up to 300 passengers. Vehicles can be gas powered, reducing emissions. Multiple doors allow for rapid boarding/alighting in the same manner that passengers enter and exit trams or metro carriages. The bus driver is relieved of the responsibility for selling or checking tickets as these are purchased at stations and various other outlets before boarding. Rather than stopping at frequent bus stops, BRT buses stop at bus stations which resemble light rail stops.

Busways can be created without the need for tracks or overhead cabling and can often be laid in less time than it takes to construct rail networks. Furthermore, because residents along major roads are already used to high volumes of traffic, new busways tend not to be subject to NIMBYism to the same extent that new rail or light rail lines are.

Ideally, BRT involves dedicated ‘bus roads’ or busways which separate buses from cars and regular traffic. Separating bus routes has the obvious advantage of removing buses from congestion – in the case of Brisbane’s South East Busway, buses zip along at 80km/h adjacent to the South Eastern Freeway, which in peak hour resembles a car park (a good depiction of this appears briefly in the video linked below). A journey from Eagle Plains to the city takes 18 minutes, compared to 45 – 60 minutes by car in peak hour. [1]. 

Achieving separation

Adeaide's O-Banh runs on a guided system designed to achieve a smoother ride. Running at top speeds of 100 km/h, it is among the fastest BRTs in the world.

Separation can be achieved by delineating existing lanes of traffic exclusively for bus use (in some cases by using physical barriers such as low curbs or in Chinese examples ‘fences’). More elaborate schemes involve the complete physical separation of busways from roads. This can be done by locating busways in the medians along arterial roads or freeways (eg. Curitiba, Brazil), in tunnels, elevated roads and overpasses (eg. Brisbane), or building new transport corridors (eg. Adelaide). Integrating busways with existing tram/light rail lines is also an option, however this option would be more prone to bunching.

Providing a dedicated, clearly legible bus route also removes the problem of “not knowing where the bus is going to go or where to catch it”. Moreover, it allows for trunk bus routes to be indicated schematically on metropolitan transit maps alongside trains, trams and light rail. This has been done effectively on Brisbane transit maps.

Bus stations

Bus stations are located at intervals similar to those of metro stations. Bus stations can provide ticket sale facilities, high levels of commuter information, real time departure info, and passenger amenities. When designed properly, bus stations enable buses to overtake those ahead of them and avoid the bunching phenomenon sometimes experienced by trams.

Significantly, bus stations can be staffed. Contributors at other forums have derided the suggestion that a ‘bus stop’ might be staffed at all, however staffing has significant potential benefits. Staff can sell tickets, undertake fare enforcement functions, provide customer assistance and information (particularly useful upon opening of new services), and ensure safety and amenity at bus stations. I understand that Brisbane bus stations and interchanges have begun employing staff at peak times to pre-sell tickets in order to expedite boardings and reduce dwell times.

Bus stations in Bogota have glass doors which open when the bus pulls up.

Off-road operations and network integration

Finally, busways enable integration between trunk services and local feeder bus services. This can be done by allowing feeder routes to enter the busway and travel along it to a final destination (CBD or a cross city destination), providing a single seat journey as is done in Brisbane and Adelaide (39% and 80% off system boardings respectively)[2]. Alternatively, feeder routes can be designed to connect with busway trunk services, allowing passengers to transfer to the busway. This is the case in Sydney’s Liverpool – Parramatta Transitway where no on-road bus routes directly access the busway. The latter option, with turn-up-and-go services can avoid the need for real time travel information, but may require high level of coordination with on-road feeder services if the trunk service is less frequent.

With these higher standards of service, one would expect sizable passenger volumes. In peak hour Brisbane’s South East Busway moves 15,000 people per hour. It has achieved a 56% increase in corridor ridership growth resulting carrying 26 million passengers a year. Adelaide’s O-Bahn carries 7 million pax/year, 4,500/hour in the peak, achieving a ridership growth of 25%, of whom 40% previously drove cars. [3].

A shopping list of options

BRT is the top of the range in bus services – the top shelf product. Like all transport modes, it isn’t without costs. An obvious one is higher staffing costs arising from higher numbers of vehicles involved. Another is the initial infrastructure cost compared with on-road buses. Installation costs vary depending on busway alignment, station intervals, and infrastructure such as tunnels and bridges. Brisbane’s South East Busway, which involved eight tunnels over 1.6km, a further 1.6km of bridges and viaducts, and 10 bus stations over a distance of 16 km (other sources report 20km) came in at a pricey >$24m/km [4]. There is no question that this was an expensive busway however much of this cost must be attributed to high quality station design, tunnelling and bridges. Adelaide’s O-Bahn cost only around $8m/km (in 1998 prices)[5]. Both of these were new busways built along entirely new alignments (although Brisbane’s follows an existing freeway). BRT costs would be reduced significantly when constructed on existing roadways, or within existing road reserves as has been done in South American and Asian examples. The quality of station design, amenities, and provision of real time travel information adds to the costs, as does the provision of elevators where bus stations are located above or below the ground.

Implementing low cost improvements utilising BRT principles

Even without full blown BRTs running inside the medians of major freeways and arterial roads, there are elements of BRT which can be incorporated into existing bus systems to provide better levels of service. Where opportunities exist, the busway separation concept can be partially applied at no cost, (eg. the use of freeway shoulders by buses in peak hour, as is done on Melbourne’s Eastern Freeway). Other initiatives may involve some cost. It is possible to cherry pick any one or more of these to provide improved services:

Buses share the tracks with trams in Mannheim, Germany.

- bus priority on the road network (eg. bus only lanes and priority signalling at intersections),
- improved traveller information,
- real time departure displays,
- improved cross modal integration,
- improved frequency,
- expedited boarding, and
- route legibility & identification.

In the interests of length I won’t describe each in great detail however I will briefly discuss the last two.

Expediting boarding and reducing dwell times is a no-brainer . This involves enabling passengers to enter/exit through all doors and relieving the driver of the ticket sale and enforcement function. Many European bus systems (particularly those in Eastern Europe) have significantly wider doors than Australian buses and operate much like Melbourne trams do – that is, passengers get on at any door and validate their ticket on board. Ticketing is not the driver’s concern. Some networks provide conductors, but most simply rely on random ticket checks by ticket inspectors.

Secondly – route identification. Without the need to construct busways, it should be possible to convey to (sub)urban dwellers the existence and connectedness of a bus network in the same way that tram tracks do through their presence.  What I have in mind is high visibility bus stops with matching on-road signage that indicates to potential travellers the presence and direction of a bus route. I’m not aware of any existing system, where cars and buses share lanes of traffic, which uses road markings indicate bus routes in a similar fashion to those used for dedicated bus lanes. I’m sure that some bright minds could come up with effective designs (like a continuous wavy line, or regular yellow polka dots) which could be used to indicate the presence of a bus route.

Another tool in the transport planner’s toolkit.

Buses are by no means a panacea. There will still remain a role for heavy and light rial. Buses need not however remain the poor cousins of trains, trams and metros with expectations of lower service standards. They can be an effective means of rapid mass transit and have proven to be effective in this role both in Australia and in other parts of the world. They should be considered as a viable option where the mode suits the purpose.

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References
[1] Currie, Graham. 2006. Journal of Public Transportation, 2006 BRT Special Edition. “Bus Rapid Transit in Australiasia: Performance, Lessons Learned and Futures”. p12. (references – Cr Quirk, and Currie, p12. ) .
Cr Quirk, quoted on “”Making Things Happen with Rapid Bus Transit Part II”. Accessed at http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEtf32Bu3Y&NR=1 on 21 Nov 2008.
[2] Currie, Graham. 2006. Journal of Public Transportation, 2006 BRT Special Edition. “Bus Rapid Transit in Australiasia: Performance, Lessons Learned and Futures”. p7.
[3] ibid.
[4] ibid. p5.
[5] ibid.

Useful Resources
1. “Go BRT” A ‘Fact Sheet’ with several good photos (PDF).
2. “Making Things Happen with Rapid Bus Transit“. YouTube video in two parts. (A look at BRT through rose coloured glasses, but several interesting images).
3. National Urban Transit institute “At-Grade Busway Planning Guide” – full of technical design info for all you technical folk.

Brisbane has benefited more than any other Australian city from a robust approach to area transport planning and corridor transport planning. So much so, I would argue, that rail sometimes comes off second best, because integrated transport planning can tend to put well-planned and funded road capital upgrades, local road improvements and relatively soft proposals for bus upgrades, against rail plans that are never as cogently thought through, with less certain funding, and hence placed in the ‘never-never’ category.

But despite the long start-up dates on some of these plans, they have at least been comprehensive and rational in the way they have addressed the large projected and actual growth in the population of South East Queenland.

For those who have never lived in Queensland and therefore never imbibed that unique Queensland-ness they produce up there, a short explanation.

It is well known that Queensland is decidedly more rural in character than most Australian states, and that ex-Brisbane population was larger than in-Brisbane population (although some of this is a trick of the classification; I would suspect the ‘urban’ population is much larger than the rural). The characterisation is largely correct, though, from my experience.

It famously manifested itself through the perception that Brisbane was a large country town; that though the Parliament sat in Brisbane, many of its members got traction by slamming the city and its spending proposals, and that money was generously syphoned away to non-Brisbane needs, such as very generous subsidies for air services, among many other things.

This characterisation may have been correct many years ago, however, I did not get this feel when I lived there. Certainly the proof is not in the pudding, the standard of a lot of Queensland infrastructure was ordinary to say the least, as a Victorian moving in.

However, what I would venture is that the ‘rurality’ of the immediate area surrounding Brisbane was very striking to me. Some places not 50 kilometres from the CBD felt as though they could have been 1000 kilometres away, such was the change not just in landscapes but in cultures. (Conversely, somewhere like Mackay’s northern suburbs could feel NOT 1000 kilometres away, though it actually is).

This feeling of rural SEQ being actually rural, not ‘fringe’ or ‘dormitory’ or a million other words for it, is obviously passing as more and more land falls into what is called in the USA “ex-urbia” – a suburban area with no obvious focus. But those areas which have not yet fallen under the suburban block still have that quintessential rural feel.

And the rural feel does not immediately die, just because the suburban blocks have arrived. You could not say this about many places in Sydney or Melbourne – for example, no-one would accuse Woodend of feeling 1000 kilometres from Melbourne, or Picton from Sydney.

So why this digression into a the culture of the place? I want to provide some context for just how dramatic the shift to population has been in SEQ, compared with the very similar population increase in Sydney and Melbourne. My own take is that the population increase in Melbourne has been the ‘thief in the night’ – taking away the innocence of a large slab of south-central Victoria without any obvious benefit to the bystanders who woke up and found it had taken place. If anything, people have run a meme for many years that Victoria was suffering from emigration (based on a few short years at the start of the Kennett government) when the opposite was true.

Again I would say, you would not say the change has affected a place like Pakenham as much as it has affected Maroochydore, yet the practicalities (infrastructure, housing, services) is probably not a whole lot different. Both will end up commuter suburbs but one has clearly profited the better for it.

In this context Queensland governments, rather than sleep oblivious to the ‘thief in the night’ sticking a population in that they didn’t know they had, in Queensland they have been all too aware. Because it does not just result in extra bods on trains and cars on the roads, but changes the culture of the place, in a way that Victoria and NSW probably don’t know.

I would also venture that in Queensland the budget prioritising has been largely a matter of when, not if, and getting best value for the transport dollar, rather than arguing whether transport is needed at all, which, if Victoria (and to a lesser extent NSW) inaction can be construed that way, is the debate that has been had down here.

This is the context for developing integrated area and corridor planning in Queensland.

Apart from the political will and funding stream being stronger and more certain, I will posit certain other factors at play. First, coherence in the organisation of Queensland Rail. While there has been much deckchair-shifting, corporatising and ring-fencing and so on within QR, the practical reality is that all business units, freight and passenger, country and city, have agreed on the likelihood of growth and the need for specific action in shared hotspots and bottlenecks, and the need for the taxpayer, and most likely the Queensland rather than the Australian taxpayer, to pay for it.

Second, Queensland Rail and rail transport generally has not developed that toxic dislike from the disaffected commuters and former commuters that affected the southern states. Of course there is a large proportion of the population who don’t or won’t use rail transport in their day. This is the same in all Australian states, and Queensland has large slabs of urban area for whom this is natural, for want of rail transport to those areas. But this toxic dislike is not borne of that; it comes from that vile mix that the southern states knew so well. Political double-speak, management incompetence, and unions running wild, especially in the 1970s and 80s. A whole generation of commuters have graduated from the ‘never catch the train again’ school, and only the high oil prices might bring them unwillingly back again.

I didn’t see that as much in Brisbane though, and I was not surprised to see them so proud of the Rocky Tilt Train, or the Gold Coast Railway, or various other measures, while simultaneously watching Melbourne and Sydney people looking their gift horses in the mouth, such as the Regional Fast Rail.

This confidence I suspect has infected the political sphere, so that a political class with some money to spend, some confidence in the bureaucracy to identify the right policies, and some confidence from the population in these policies, has kept the planning rational and well directed.

This contrasts with Melbourne and Sydney, where one plan after another is written and shelved, or where the truly bold plans are hidden behind a wall of FOI defences till the media have to just about steal these plans.

Moving on from the context of the corridor planning, what is special about the corridor plans themselves?

First, I will outline the mechanics.

Most plans emerge in the first instance from a desktop analysis of the issues, and this is appropriate. Queensland hasn’t yet been down the Perth route to bottom-up planning, from giant town hall workshops, charettes and so on, perfected when Alannah Mactiernan was Minister but I believe not started by her.

While I personally believe the Perth approach is superior, it requires political preconditions – a mature stakeholder base, a gifted interlocutor and chair (in this case, the Minister) and very little conditionality about the eventual funding. With the runs on the board for improving suburban rail, the workshopping done around extending the Northern Suburbs railway into Yanchep and Two Rocks was very credible. With the two large landowners on board, the local council supportive and a Treasury who can at least imagine the possibility that rail transport will one day be needed in that area, the planning environment for bottom-up methods is satisfactory.

Queensland is not that lucky. Ministers, in my observation, have not been prepared to stick their necks out much for rail, and have tended to need the crutch of a strong bureaucracy in Queensland Transport and Queensland Rail to support initiative planning. It may also be the legacy of having dominating premiers, with a penchant for reading the tealeaves and micromanaging.

Once the desktop analysis is complete however, the bureaucracy is reasonably forthcoming in sharing the findings, the workings and the conclusions, neatly packaged into glossy maps and soundbites.

Victorians, starved of information, often don’t even get these. As I complained in an early blog post, the Beerburrum project at least had some very glossy documents and animations. Ninthnotch, in that post, pointed out you can’t polish a turd, and some of Victoria’s projects did not have that merit. Nevertheless, for key Victorian projects such as the Bacchus Marsh and Dunnstown realignments, finding out even basic information on the how, what and why of these projects has proven very difficult.

As that blog post (Using your brains in Steve Irwin country) also pointed out, the bureaucracy, confining itself somewhat to the outcomes of the corridor plan rather than the specifics (as is so often the case in Victoria and NSW) found itself fortuitously the beneficiary of a contractor plan that was better and cheaper.

For those who don’t know the story, the QR invitation to tender had suggested that the existing corridor would be used and that significant line closures would take place, at considerable inconvenience and expense. The successful tenderer found in fact that a double track line built on a new alignment would be faster, cheaper, and would leave the existing track in place, for refuging, extra capacity or a storage siding, they could take their pick. And QR could pocket the saving.

Part of this is attributable to the open, transparent JV arrangements in place, called SEQIP (which I will come to later, as it is downstream of this stage). However, part of this is also attributable, I would argue, to keeping planners to the planning, setting the outcomes for projects rather than rushing into the technicals, a skill, recent times have revealed, they are deficient in. We will never know, now, whether the advice to rip up the second track to Bendigo came from within the bureaucracy, or from a contractor (by which I mean a contractor who was prepared to do the work, not a consultant or advisor).

Could a contractor have offered to achieve the outcome, to a price, and left the 2nd track in place? Might he have gone to Britain for examples of railways using signals to separate trains at risk of scraping each other in tight places like tunnels or heritage bridges?  Or found in Sweden a local railway safely doing 160km/h on 47kg rail? We’ll never know. It is important to keep planners to planning and specify outcomes.

Back to the glossies and the soundbites. Of course I’m not worried about the ‘fluff’ myself, but getting the package properly ‘out’ to the punters, the potential users of these services is important at the ‘exposure’ stage of the consultation. Again, I find Queensland and Western Australia far stronger at this than Victoria, at any rate. The humble public servants who do the shopping centre stands and school visits seem much more at ease than the very tense media shots I see of John Brumby and Lynne Kosky trying to look natural while extolling the benefits of a bit of extra siding in Laverton, benefits they seem to scarcely understand themselves.

The package needs to include: detail (affected landowners, environmental impacts, assumptions about population and demand growth and so on); benefits (in very clear language so that people can see not just that 90 seconds is saved on some curve, but that the journey from Brisbane to Nambour saves 20 minutes when several of these curves are done); and costs, with buffers, inflation assumptions and so on clearly displayed. This latter is where WA ran into trouble. There was nothing surprising to anyone with a skerrick of knowledge about railway construction that Mandurah+Clarkson+Thornlie project copped about 10% cost creep over its budgeted  cost when the first budget was realised (I believe from $1.5 to $1.6 billion all up). Seems perfectly reasonable to me (but not to the Liberals, the West Australian Newspaper or their backers in the inner southern suburbs of Perth). The budget creep in Queensland projects does not seem so newsworthy.

The disadvantage that I conjecture integrated area planning gives rail, however, does not affect corridor planning to the same extent. Perhaps there is an inherent bias in corridor planning to solutions that are corridor based. Even where there is some doubt about the nature of the problem, for example, the interesting conclusions of a study into the area around Hamilton/Airport/Doomben which recommended a rail solution where many of us least expected to see one, rail at least stands a chance of getting a look in.

TO BE CONTINUED…