COUNTING THE COST OF CONGESTION

• Delay, Expense, Bunching, Stress - and Case Study

Research repeatedly demonstrates that reliability is the customer's top priority for any public transport service. This is not surprising. No amount of top quality service, investment in new buses or new technology will count for much if the buses cannot be depended upon. Ironically, just about everything about bus services has improved dramatically in the last ten years, with the exception of reliability. This is because traffic congestion is getting worse by the day. What's more, no two days are ever the same. Traffic patterns vary considerably, and unlike other road users, buses have to stick to a route and timetable. We cannot set out earlier or go a different way because the traffic happens to be a little worse today.

This makes robust bus scheduling problematical. Allow too little time for a bus journey and the service will be unreliable. Allow too much and the driver will be pulling up at regular intervals so as not to be early. This puts people off.

In recent times we have had to extend journey times considerably to allow for increased traffic. Very often this means using extra buses (for example our Derby - Sandiacre - Nottingham rainbow 4 service used to take twelve buses but now uses fourteen to deliver exactly the same frequency). This might sound innocent enough, but every extra bus so employed costs us close to £100,000 a year to run.

So, congestion also impacts heavily upon our costs. Inevitably this also means that it will effect fares too. Against this, motoring costs have fallen in real terms in the last year.

We are determined not to let this shockwave affect all of our fares, because it could undo the growth in public transport use that we have been working for over ten years to create. So we are being driven to make economies by looking critically at buses that have been not so well used.

Congestion also has an effect on bus frequency. On a typical urban route there may be a bus every 10 minutes. However, when traffic delays one of these buses, it falls further and further behind as it starts to pick up the people who have come out for the next bus. In the meantime the second bus finds that the way has been cleared and has a much easier time, often catching up with the first. This leads to the classic scenario in bus operation - you wait 20 minutes and two turn up together. In heavy traffic it is very hard to maintain intervals between buses and this is one of the things that prevents us from introducing very high frequencies.

Another by-product of traffic congestion is stress. Bus drivers have a timetable to keep to, day in day out, and the worse the traffic, the more stressful the experience. We find that some new recruits tend to leave within their first year because they find it too difficult to deal with the stress of driving in heavy traffic and dealing with the frustrations that this causes for customers at the same time.

CASE STUDY – the 18 and 32

Few cases illustrate the damaging effects of traffic congestion better than 18 and 32.

These once very successful bus routes came to grief not because they didn’t carry enough people, but because they couldn't carry the costs of delays in traffic.

These former Barton routes started in either Bulwell or Ilkeston, coming together at Stapleford and continuing through Beeston and the Rylands to Nottingham.

They hit unpredictable traffic on the outskirts of Nottingham, again around Beeston and again between Bramcote and Stapleford. Much of the route is known as a rat run for motorists trying to avoid snarl-ups on the A52 and M1.

It’s hard to imagine a more industrious crew. These drivers have a reputation for knowing their route and knowing every safe trick in the book to rescue precious seconds and avoid bottlenecks.

We have made numerous timetable adjustments over the years to keep in step – switching a few minutes here and there, cutting out one or two lesser-used diversions in the route – all pretty standard measures, even if we’d prefer not to take them.

But in 2003 it was clear that we were not making ends meet. We cut short a few journeys and turned buses round to get back on time.

This worked – for a while. But by the next year the traffic had overtaken the improvements and we were getting more complaints of unreliability. So we allocated an extra bus to ‘pad-out’ the timetable and allow extra time in traffic.

Innocent as that may sound, it immediately pushed the costs of the whole route up by well over 20%. And of course it did nothing to improve frequency – so there was no chance of any extra custom. Before long we knew that the 18 and 32 would not be able to support the new buses that we had hoped to buy.

And still the traffic was getting worse – and the cost of fuel was not making things any better either. By the end of 2005 we were reaching the point where the whole route was in jeopardy.

Drastic action was needed. January 2006 marked the end of the service between Stapleford and Ilkeston, and all of the Bulwell to Stapleford section too. In cutting back to keep the Stapleford-Beeston-Nottingham part, we lost around 20% of our customers, but the drastic surgery has helprd us to stabilize the new 18 and keep it running.

It's a decision we would far sooner not have made.