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TRAFFIC CONGESTION IS A DISEASE WHICH IF LEFT UNCHECKED WILL DESTROY THE BUS SECTOR.
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Of course all congestion is caused by bicycles.
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Debate!
"TRAFFIC CONGESTION IS A DISEASE WHICH IF LEFT UNCHECKED WILL DESTROY THE BUS"
(8 posts)-
Posted 9 years ago #
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Must admit. This reads more like propaganda than anything else. How can you claim that part of the reason why Edinburgh bus times have declined over the last ten years is due to the off peak trial, when this is just a recent aletration? Very selective in its logic.
Posted 9 years ago # -
I'm not a bus fan, apart from electric buses or the gas powered ones that I think we don't have anymore. The diesel fumes are awful, like midges, clouds of it, visible in the air. Much worse for me than 100 cars (which would be spaced out over a bigger bit of airspace), I think. Can't get excited about getting people out of cars and into buses. They're both baddies, of course. Maybe LRT need to spend more on servicing.
Posted 9 years ago # -
Whoever wrote this must have a very poor grasp of what you do to cut costs and get buses travelling between 2 points is shortest times.
In London the massive elephant in the room is the political decision to bin the bendy bus. To deliver the same service for shifting people one route had to buy 87 new double deck buses to replace 37 bendy buses. To deliver the movement there needed to be a double deck bus every minute on the busy bendy bus routes, which could run every 3 minutes and deliver the same results.
The service is destroyed - as with walking by the length of time you stand still. For walking its traffic signals and crossing roads, plus the diversions that add roughly 1 minute for every extra 50 metres. With most walking journeys being between 10 and 20 minutes, hanging about for 3-4 minutes waiting for the green man has a big impact on your journey times. So intuitively, pedestrians aim to keep walking, and cut corners....
With buses its the dwell time at stops. I recommend watching this video of how buses in Bogota work. Local buses are free and the interchanges with faster running express bus services have huge secure cycle parks - you pay (off-bus) at the bus 'stop' and when the bus arrives up to 100 people are 'hoovered' on board in seconds through 3-4 sets of double doors.
Note - for every 20 bikes parked at the bus interchange we save the cost of a providing an extra feeder bus....
We had this when buses had a crew of 2 - the conductor collected the fares, and the bus stopped only to let people on and off, and Ralph Roberts (who was speaking at the WCCC conference today) has restored conductors on his busiest services so that they can run consistently to time even when the rush hour crowds board. A general rule in London used to be that a conductor operated bus could be timetabled to run a route in roughly half the time it takes a Driver only vehicle, and since this then means only half the number of buses and drivers are needed the financial equation is obvious to all but the dumbest bean counters - the extra cost of conductors is far less then that of extra buses and drivers.
Likewise the free rides on the bendy buses, should not have been viewed as lost revenue - but balanced against the cost of trying to capture every last fare, and in the process racking up the costs of running the service faster than the revenue secured.
Not yet done any sensible comparisons BUT it does seem odd that London needs so many more buses pro rata to move people than other cities, and for many central bus routes the peak hour journeys need twice as many buses and can take more than twice the time to travel the routes. and that isn't through congestion created by other traffic...
Posted 9 years ago # -
"Whoever wrote this must have a very poor grasp of what you do to cut costs and get buses travelling between 2 points is shortest times."
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PROFESSOR DAVID BEGG
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- unless you know something...
Posted 9 years ago # -
Posted 9 years ago #
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From link
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If there has been a reduction of 25% on ‘key routes’ it isn’t the ones buses are using. The Embankment, which has seen a reduction in the number of motor traffic lanes (a very different thing from capacity) from 4 to 3 (a potential source for a ‘25%’ claim) is very much not a key route for buses.
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Posted 9 years ago # -
I read all of Begg's report and it is very disappointing; I'd always thought rather better of him.
The report itself is poorly written, repetitive, and full of typos. Gives the impression of being dashed off on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Then if you look into the organisation that sponsored the report, "Greener Journeys", it's no more really than a lobbying organisation for the bus companies. Begg himself is non-executive director of First Group. There's nothing wrong with encouraging bus and coach travel (stated aim of Greener Journeys) but this report is exclusively promoting buses with no word of the benefits of other forms of travel, and practically no mention, unless the subtlety escapes me, that the principal cause of congestion is too many cars. In fairness, he does say that "exponentially increasing" (probably mathematically inaccurate) deliver vans, Uber, and in London the scrapping of the congestion charge extension zone, increase congestion, but his solutions go nowhere near saying, "get people out of cars". There's no alternative mode presented as an alternative other than buses.
And then there's the claim that 25% of road capacity on key routes in central London has been removed for cycle superhighways. This is repeated 5 or 6 times throughout the report (once omitting the key route bit). It's as though he has a bee in his bonnet about cycling (not a positive word in the report) and the fact that Boris Johnson, a tory, imposed them on London. The only good thing Boris did imo. Well, the claim is just garbage, cycle superhighways are nearly all away from key routes, and virtually none goes into central London.
He advocates universal contactless payment, and dedicated bus lanes, both of which I agree with, but if only we could get most journeys of under 2km completed on foot or bike, and most journeys of under say 8km on bike, congestion would vanish.
Posted 9 years ago #
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