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Melbourne Transport |
Common Urban Myths About TransportMyth: People just want faster and more punctual services;
they don't care about frequency
Fact: Speed and reliability may grab the lion's share of
day-to-day headlines, but while they are important, evidence from surveys
and from actual operations shows that service frequency is the critical
factor in people choosing to shift from car travel to public transport.
Most prominent among those public transport issues in the public eye in Victoria have been the so-called 'Fast Trains to Regional Centres' and the reliability crisis with metropolitan trains. Such prominence has been given to the speed of the new country trains, and to tallying up Connex's cancellations and delays, that it is easy to think slow speeds and poor reliability are in fact the biggest problems facing public transport in Victoria, and are the principal deterrent to higher public transport use. Of course, speed and reliability are important. People will not use public transport if journey times are much slower than by car, and vehicle speed is a factor in this. And reliability is something that should 'just happen' in a functioning public transport system. The Swiss take high reliability and punctuality for granted, but even Melbourne's trains achieved close to 100% reliability throughout most of the 1920s. Nonetheless, even the fastest train in the world run to Swiss precision is of no use if you have to wait two hours for it to arrive. Most Victorians do not use public transport; the reason for this is not that trains run at 80kph rather than 120kph, or that trains sometimes get cancelled (though this certainly helps contribute to the negative perception of the system that most people don't use). The reason is simply that public transport in Melbourne and country Victoria does not offer the same level of convenience as car travel: the main reasons for this are long waiting times (due to low frequencies), long transfer times (due to low frequencies and bad planning), lack of service at the times people want to travel (due to low frequencies and bad planning) and the complete absence of services in many suburban areas and regional cities (due to bad planning). How do we know this? In part, from surveys conducted as part of the Regional Fast Rail project itself. In 2000, as part of its feasibility study, the government surveyed people who do not currently use V/Line trains, asking them to nominate the reason why. The results were as follows:
(Source: Department of Infrastructure, Fast Rail to Regional Centres Feasibility Study, Executive Summary.) While speed was given as the reason for not using trains only 7 per cent of the time, the inadequacy of urban public transport was cited 62 per cent of the time, and high fares 24 per cent of the time. In the government's report these figures were given without comment, but they actually lead to quite strong conclusions. When people travel from regional Victoria to Melbourne, their destination is frequently in the suburbs rather than the CBD, and is often not even within walking distance of a railway station. Since even people who live in Melbourne find public transport almost impossible to use under these conditions (particularly outside peak hour), it is not surprising that country Victorians think the same way. It also doesn't help that V/Line fares are high even by European standards, and Europeans get a far superior service for their money. (It's also true that 'Not enough trains to Melbourne' was given as a reason only 3 per cent of the time. But this doesn't mean that country Victorians aren't concerned about frequency. When contemplating a journey, people think first about how they are to actually reach their destination, and (mostly) form a decision to drive the car on that basis. Only if they conclude the journey is actually possible by public transport do they then consider whether there's a train leaving at the time they want to travel. And so in most cases it is the need for the car at the destination, and not the lack of trains, that registers foremost in people's minds.) But there is also ample evidence from people's revealed choices that points to factors like high service frequency as critical in attracting people to public transport. There is the example of Toronto, whose urban form and transport system differs from ours almost exclusively in the frequency and coverage of its public transport services, and yet carries around four times as many people by public transport as ours. Even in Melbourne, there is evidence that even small improvements in frequency, in the absence of any other factor, result in increased patronage. As a result of the improvement of many Sunday train and tram services to Saturday frequencies in 2000, many more people now use trains and trams on Sundays. Modest frequency improvements to suburban buses as part of the 'Smartbus' programme have similarly resulted in patronage increases (which cannot really be attributed to the hi-tech real-time Smartbus displays, as these do not even function properly much of the time!).
In conclusion, to doubt that service frequency is important to passengers is to ignore overwhelming evidence about what works in attracting people to public transport. Operators must also do what they can to speed up services, while reliablity and punctuality can (and must) be assured by competent management. But concentrating on these basic operational factors to the exclusion of everything else can only limit the potential of public transport. © 2007 Public Transport Users Association Inc. (PTUA), Victoria, Australia. ABN 83 801 487 611. Last modified: 11 June 2005
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