Infrequent, direct service, or more frequent but with a change?

[Teapot42]

The latest service cuts in my area have led me to ponder whether passengers in general are wedded to the idea that only a direct bus in to their local town or city will do, or if there would be appetite for more frequent 'estate' buses feeding in to higher capacity routes on main roads.

Changes over the decade I've lived here all seem to have been consolidating and merging services to the point where some routes are not only infrequent but take a long time to get anywhere as they tour around yet another housing estate. Even then, there is duplication on certain main roads which have little demand in themselves, but are the only way out to the 'suburbs'.

Personally, I'd take a more frequent option providing overall journey time wasn't much longer, but I'm not sure how well that would go down overall - thoughts?

 

[Snex]

Always an interesting one this.

Personally, I'd happily use a bus service to a rapid transport or train network over using a long route around the world service as the they have a unique corridor so will very likely be on time without delay and the estate bus will very likely keep on time as there won't be much traffic in the sticks. I wouldn't be happy with bus to bus interchanges though to get to the main town, unless both services were 10 minutes or more frequent, as you just can't time things because of external delays. Once I've had a long day in town, the last thing I'd want to get a bus which is 15 minutes late for whatever reason, to then get off an wait another 15 minutes as I've just missed the estate bus at a random bus stop in the middle of nowhere.

 

[PeterC]

I have no problem changing buses in Greater London. Where I live now even the local bus from the village is unattractive because of the extended deviations from the direct route.

 

[WelshBluebird]

The two things that put me off having to change buses:

• Extra cost - some of my local buses have changed in the last few weeks, meaning to make the same trip I now have to take two buses, so a journey that used to cost me £2 now costs me £4. For a return journey, the cost has gone from £3.80 to £6. Not exactly great.
• The lack of reliability / increased journey times. If everything is changed to a frequent service, and is reliable, then that is great. But at least the changes made near me result in one service being increased in frequency but the connecting serving remaining at a lower frequency, or with more unreliability added (e.g. due to making the bus route more likely to hit congestion).

 

[Teapot42]

• Extra cost - some of my local buses have changed in the last few weeks, meaning to make the same trip I now have to take two buses, so a journey that used to cost me £2 now costs me £4. For a return journey, the cost has gone from £3.80 to £6. Not exactly great.

That's an interesting point - does the £2 (soon to be £2.50) fare cap allow for fares which involve a change of bus? While not common, I have seen cases where you can buy a through ticket which means a change.

Personally, I feel there should have been a 'journey' fare cap as well, say 50p extra with a 1 hour time limit to start the final leg. Not uncommon on the continent, but likely not easy to implement quickly here.

In the area I'm thinking, a day ticket is £4.60 so cost wouldn't increase based on the higher single price soon to come in.

• The lack of reliability / increased journey times. If everything is changed to a frequent service, and is reliable, then that is great. But at least the changes made near me result in one service being increased in frequency but the connecting serving remaining at a lower frequency, or with more unreliability added (e.g. due to making the bus route more likely to hit congestion).

While I'm thinking more about the wider area, in our particular case, the local bus is going down to hourly. However, even at the current half-hourly frequency there can be significant delays, especially on a Saturday. With the latest twist to the route I can only see this getting worse - and a long delay on an hourly service is just going to mean people avoid the bus completely.

 

[TheGrandWazoo]

There is never a hard and fast rule, so it's best not to be ideologically hung up about things. It is usually about the time and convenience of interchanging. Two examples from Tyne and Wear....

• Buses from the Gateshead suburbs such as Saltwell Park etc were truncated in the early 1980s; people were forced to interchange onto the Metro. That meant you had passengers who would have a 14 min bus journey into Newcastle city centre, now having a 9 minute journey, 5 mins to interchange and then 3 mins to Newcastle. A more convoluted journey and not a shock when deregulation saw bus operators reinstate direct journeys
• Buses from Washington would take 30 mins to get to Newcastle but these were then truncated at Heworth Metro. Even with the change, you could still get into Newcastle in 29/30 mins

In short, the use of buses as feeders isn't a bad thing. In fact, it has a great many benefits. It just needs to have a minimal time penalty (at the very worst) for the faff factor, and ease of ticketing.

 

[Hophead]

As a general rule: infrequent-> frequent; not a great problem. Frequent-> infrequent; tricky. If your local service is hourly and you have to change for one every 10 minutes, a slight delay doesn't cause too much inconvenience. The other way, though, how do you deal with that? Is the suggested 5 minutes connection going to be kept? Should I catch the bus before? But then, you're extending the journey time and what if there's roadworks, or an accident? Passengers are only going to put up with that once.

I seem to remember this was tried near Maidstone. I don’t know what came of that.

All of the above is fares-agnostic, which introduces a whole different range of complications.

 

[thaitransit]

The two things that put me off having to change buses:

• Extra cost - some of my local buses have changed in the last few weeks, meaning to make the same trip I now have to take two buses, so a journey that used to cost me £2 now costs me £4. For a return journey, the cost has gone from £3.80 to £6. Not exactly great.
• The lack of reliability / increased journey times. If everything is changed to a frequent service, and is reliable, then that is great. But at least the changes made near me result in one service being increased in frequency but the connecting serving remaining at a lower frequency, or with more unreliability added (e.g. due to making the bus route more likely to hit congestion).

Victoria Australia essentially solved the fare cost issue overnight by making the entire state a flat fare of $10 per day or $5 per day Concession. This is for unlimited travel within 24 hours. So there is no penalty for transferring between buses or trains. Also there is no price difference between urban, rural or regional long distance service its all the same. This flat fare zone covers an area similar to entire UK.

 

[LeylandLynx]

A study found that ridership elasticity was higher for frequency than route density, but the latter wasn't far behind the former.

Coverage vs Frequency : Is Spatial Coverage or Temporal Frequency More Impactful on Transit Ridership?

2017-08-01

By: Torrey Lyons, Reid Ewing, Guang Tian
Final Report
November 2017

Repository & Open Access Science Portal

 

[duncombec]

I seem to remember this was tried near Maidstone. I don’t know what came of that.

The services involved were largely withdrawn in the subsidy changes in February 2023.

The 58 and 59 are now one-day-a-week shoppers services, whilst the 13 was kept on Mondays to Fridays, but no longer with a connection. In each case, these revised services are going back into Maidstone, where people wanted to travel anyway.

It could be argued that Arriva's unreliability had something to do with it, particularly knowing whether the every 12 minute bus on the return was actually going to run and not leave you with a 45 minute wait, but there was also an element of just not wanting to change generally. It seemed very much a good idea, bad plan", in that the increased frequency wasn't really outweighing the disbenefit of having to change, rather than go straight in to town.

 

[route101]

I would be up for a change if both services were frequent and a good place to change like a bus station.

 

[Roger1973]

It depends.

Ultimately, no bus network is ever going to be able to offer a door to door service for every possible journey, and the range of journeys people want to make is more complex than just travelling to the nearest town centre or railway station to do an 'office hours' job (although too many of the people who are involved in transport planning / policy, or have the loudest voices on the subject, do only do that and seem to assume that means everyone else does.)

It is a failing of buses in the UK that (generally) transfer fares have not been available, imposing a financial (as well as time and convenience) penalty on any journey that requires a change of bus. The London County Council Tramways managed it in the 1920s, but because it wasn't done on London buses, it stopped (in London) in 1950.

As a lot of passengers in London now show, changing buses can be done, and generally no longer imposes a financial penalty, and doing it by smart card or contactless removes the potential for people to pester passengers getting off buses to give them a ticket they no longer need.

But it does add to the time taken for a journey (unless you by chance get to the connecting point just before your next bus comes, rather than just miss one) - guaranteed connections is all very well, but is likely to involve more waiting time put in to the schedule 'in case'. Or if the arrangement is that bus B will always wait for bus A, then one delay is going to snowball across the network (and outside London, I'm not sure how that fits in with the traffic commissioners' punctuality targets, or how it would work in practice if the 'main road' service is commercial and the 'feeder' service is tendered.)

The inconvenience factor of changing buses is far higher if you're someone who's disabled or elderly / infirm, or are carrying luggage / shopping, or have small children with you. (again, those people tend not to be involved in the transport planning / policy process.)

Then there's the question of where passengers wait for the next bus. Perceived risk to personal safety is something that puts people off using buses, particularly in the evenings - adding the need to get off and wait in a remote location won't help. This is more likely to affect women, who again tend not to be the policy makers.