Dublin has achieved a remarkable increase in bus patronage through the introduction of
quality bus corridors. Marcus Enoch reports on Dublin’s success which is founded on
properly implemented bus lanes. He concludes that the key to persauding car users to
switch to the bus is that the bus journey time must be consistently and significantly less
than that taken by car

Marcus Enoch (1171632)

English

Loughborough University Institutional Repository

   This item was submitted to Loughborough’s Institutional Repository by the author and is made available under the following Creative Commons Licence conditions.      For the full text of this licence, please go to: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/  252 Putting the bus firsttec JULY/AUGUST 2003Getting the bus to work: why quality buscorridors work in DublinDublin has achieved a remarkable increase in bus patronage through the introduction ofquality bus corridors. Marcus Enoch reports on Dublin’s success which is founded onproperly implemented bus lanes. He concludes that the key to persauding car users toswitch to the bus is that the bus journey time must be consistently and significantly lessthan that taken by car. P ersuading people to use publictransport instead of their cars haslong been seen as a key compo-nent of any sustainable transport policyapproach. The Government’s Ten YearPlan is no exception, requiring publictransport use to increase significantlyover the period until 2010.To do this, the plan relies on the railsector to deliver a 50% increase in pas-sengers, while the bus industry’s targetis a more modest 10%. However, sincethe adoption of the plan, the railwaysystem has degenerated into turmoilMeanwhile light rail schemes will onlyever be viable for a very few corridors ina very few cities. Thus, in the shortterm, the humble bus represents theonly realistic hope of the Government’stargets being met.This is a tall order. Although bus pa-tronage levels have remained stableover the past decade or so after a steadydecline since the 1950s, much of thiscould be explained by the boomingeconomy. Bluntly, buses are perceivedas being the ‘mode of last resort’ by thevast majority of people, and especiallyby those with access to a car.On the other hand, buses currentlyperform two-thirds of all passengerjourneys in the UK. And there are ex-amples of towns and cities where bususe has increased, bucking the nationaldownward trend.One reason for this, has been theemergence of the concept of QualityBus Partnerships. QBPs were developedto address the problem caused by the1985 Transport Act, which separatedbus operations from the infrastructure.In essence, the bus operator pledges toupgrade its bus service – generally bybuying new state-of-the-art vehicles,improving frequencies and training dri-vers in customer care techniques. In re-turn, the local authority offers to up-grade infrastructure along the route,possibly through the provision of newbus shelters, real-time passenger infor-mation and bus priority measures.While  significant advances havebeen made in terms of patronage in-creases in a few cases, most notably byTrent Buses in the East Midlands andBrighton and Hove Bus and CoachCompany, in general patronage gainshave been fairly moderate. However,even in the Trent and Brighton cases,progress has been threatened becauseincreasing levels of congestion are dra-matically reducing the reliability of thebus service offered. In other words, thebus priority measures typically offeredat the moment by local authorities arenot up to the task.One solution to this problem is toimplement a network of guidedbusways, specifically designed to bypassthe worst pinch points, and this is theoption favoured by public transport au-thorities and providers in West York-shirel. Another less publicised approach isin place across the Irish Sea in Dublin.THE DUBLIN QBCSDuring the 1990s, with economicgrowth of around 10% a year, Dublinwas facing worsening levels of trafficcongestion. This led in 1994 to the pub-lication of the Dublin TransportationInitiative – the first integrated study oftransport in the city – which in turn re-sulted in a virtual halt to urban roadbuilding (although the C-ring, the M50motorway around the city was givenDublin Bus claimthat commutersno longer run for abus during thepeak periodbecause they canusually see thenext one.TEC.07.03 p252-254  7/24/03  4:58 PM  Page 252253tec JULY/AUGUST 2003the go ahead), three LRT lines (nowtwo) and a number of so-called QualityBus Corridors – 10-11 radial routes, andone orbital.The goal of the Quality Bus Corridor(QBC) is ‘to provide a clearly defined,high performance bus transportationsystem segregated from other traffic’. Inpractical terms, the aim is to deliver busjourney speeds on the corridor of atleast 20km/hr, with a minimum in-crease in bus journey speeds of 25% onall corridors. Buses must be segregatedfrom other traffic along the completelength of the corridor, except where theroad width is too narrow to provide abus lane. In addition, it is aimed to pro-vide high quality waiting areas withreal-time passenger informationthroughout, while buses will have anaverage age of only five years, be acces-sible to mobility impaired people, bedistinct in appearance from other busesand be air conditioned. Finally, averagewaiting times for passengers were set atthree minutes during the peak and fourminutes in the off-peak, with an aver-age excess wait of two minutes allowed. As of late 2002, 98 km of bus lanesforming nine QBCs are in place, andthree remain to be developed – Orbital,South Clondalkin and Ballymun. Theresults are impressive. In total, bus usein the morning peak (07:00-09:15 Mon-day to Friday) inbound services has in-creased by 38%, from 138,500 to191,500 since 1997, while on the Stil-lorgan QBC, patronage rose by 232%!Further, cordon counts on the ‘canalring’ of traffic entering the city showthat the modal share of the bus in-creased from 36.8% in 1997 to 40.5% in2001. These counts also showed thatsome 60%-65% of new bus users hadswitched from the car. Altogether, the QBCs cost e57m for98km to implement, or €575,000 perkm. While installing the lanes was rela-tively cheap, the cost of providing traf-fic signal improvements, additionalcycle lanes and a whole raft of ‘villageimprovements’ – necessary for gaininglocal approval of the process – weremore costly. The QBCs were mainlyfunded through European Regional De-velopment Funding and Traffic Man-agement Grants from the DTO. In practice, Dublin Bus claims thatcommuters no longer run for a bus dur-ing the peak period because they canusually see the next one – frequenciesaverage 90 seconds. In the off-peak, fre-quencies are closer to ten minutes, al-though sometimes passengers can becaught out. Meanwhile most of thelanes operate 7am to 7pm (whichmatches the parking time limits acrossthe city), although some have windowsfor loading between 10am-12noon andothers are 24 hours. Initially the Irish National Road Au-thority was against the QBC concept.Thus when Dublin Bus officials sentdrawings of bus lanes to the NRA, theywere sent back with the lanes crossedout. The main problem was that theNRA did not want to lose junction ca-pacity. Interestingly neither did DublinBus – lost junction capacity slows downbuses. Instead, the bus company did itsown evaluation and then asked a con-sultant to work out the details. In theevent, the proposal from the consultantwas not radical enough about where toput the bus lanes, and had to redraftedto be more ambitious! In terms of the throughput of peoplein the corridor as a whole, where QBCshave been introduced, some have in-creased throughput by 20%. The bal-ance that needs to be struck is betweenproviding the infrastructure and usingit enough. In the case of the QBCs,Dublin Bus estimates that around 20buses an hour are needed to justify buslane infrastructure. QBCs have been implemented in awide range of area types. For example,the Malahide Road QBC already hadhigh usage with a bus modal share ofover 40% prior to the QBC being intro-duced. However, the QBC upped this toover 50% by providing a bus every 35-40 seconds in the peak. By contrast, the Stillorgan QBC serveswhat should be classic non-bus operat-ing territory, where residents have highincomes and high car ownership levels.Here, the heavily congested corridormeant that within six weeks patronagehad increased dramatically – from10,000 passengers to 25,000, between07:00-09:14 Monday to Friday in thepeak flow direction only. This was al-most entirely due to the bus consis-tently taking only 30 minutes com-pared to a car journey time of 50 min-utes. Indeed, customers with a 09:00 startwhen they first took the bus set off 75minutes early, but after a few weeks setoff only 35 minutes earlier. Of coursethe downside of this reliability is thatthe peak has sharpened as a conse-quence meaning more buses are re-quired – roughly 80 buses now serve thecorridor over the period. On the posi-tive side, outbound commuting too hasstrongly increased. And, large numbersof buses using the lanes helps justifytheir implementation – on some lanesthere are as many bus passengers as caroccupants. Buses are perceived to be sofrequent that drivers even drop theirfamilies off at bus stops. There are though, a number of prob-lems. In particular, worsening conges-tion on road sections once buses leavethe main bus-laned corridors has im-pacted on reliability. Discussions areongoing with local councils to try andimprove accessibility to various placesthrough bus only roads/gateways in cer-tain locations.Other than that it is in the marketingarea where the difficulties arise. This ispartly due to the complex route net-work which makes operational plan-ning complicated too – although thesystem does work from the providerpoint of view. Two related issues arethat while branding buses as QBC buseswas tried, it was found to be inefficientand difficult to maintain, and has there-fore been abandoned. The provision ofinformation too remains poor, and al-though there is a high proportion ofpre-paid tickets (35%), cash fares re-quire an exact fare which while goodfor boarding times can be annoying forthe passenger – especially where  infor-mation is difficult to understand. Thereis also a perception that there is a lack ofintegrated tickets, although this is notthe case. The lessons from the QBC policy aresimple. If car users are to be persuadedto switch to using the bus, then theremust be a tangible benefit. In short, thejourney time taken by bus must consis-tently be significantly less than thattaken by car. As a consequence, conges-tion is seen as the ally of the bus – atleast on the segregated sections of theQBCs. For this to apply, the bus lanes mustQBC’s which havenot been assuccessful arethose that do nothave close to100%segregation, haveunfavourabledemographics orare simply tooshort to generatea sufficientjourney timedifferential withthe car.TEC.07.03 p252-254  7/24/03  4:58 PM  Page 253254 Putting the bus firsttec JULY/AUGUST 2003QBC Launch QBC Total Inbound Time Journey Survey Time Bus Bus IncreaseDate length Route am peak Saving Time Bus Saving Journey Patronage In(km) Length scheduled Over Survey Journey Over Survey Speed Over Survey Patronageof run time Route Length Time Distance Over Survey Distance Over SurveyService pre-QBC Since QBC (km) QBC Distance Before Before Distance(km) (mins) (mins) (mins) (mins) (km/hr) QBC (%)Stillorgan Aug-99 12.9 17.3 75 15 11.1 41 11 21.9 9769 232Malahide Dec-98 7.5 12.5 55 5 6.5 26 8 21.75 22018 27  Finglas Jul-00 6 11.2 45 10 5.2 18 3 19.78 8928 0.5  Lucan Jul-96 12.1 17.8 60 -10 11.1 45 9 18.65 16328 36  Rathfarnham Mar-01 7.1 12 60 0 7.4 54 30 18.25 10786 37  Tallaght Apr-01 12.2 15.7 80 0 11.1 44 6 17.47 18916 19  N. Clondalkin Feb-01 12.1 14.1 55 0 8.7 43 8 14.96 14723 -2  Swords Nov-01 11.7 14.9 60 5 4.8 25 4 13.48 16829 17  Blanchardstown Sep-01 16.4 19.2 60 -20 8.4 24 – 21 20383 39  be as continuous as possible. Four kilo-metres of bus lanes on a  six kilometreroute is of limited value if congestionwill still interfere with reliability andjourney times in the remaining twokilometre stretch. Pre-signal trafficmanagement is helpful too, as is activebus management. To this end, DublinBus injects spare buses into routeswhere necessary to better match de-mand. Finally, extremely frequent busesare highly visible to car users and alongwith the continuous nature of the lanes(which makes it very difficult for trafficto re-merge into the general purposelane) helps negate the need for police orcamera enforcement although therewas an initial presence at the launch. Beyond the bus sector, recentchanges in parking policy have helped.While there was a severe over supplyduring the 1980s and 1990s, this is nowbeing redressed and high parkingcharges often form an important pushfor people to change to the bus.QBCs that have not been as success-ful are those that do not have close to100% segregation, have unfavourabledemographics or are simply too short togenerate a sufficient journey time dif-ferential with the car.For the future there are plans to tryand introduce orbital QBCs to matchchanging travel demand patterns.There is also a move to introduce morecross city routes. This was impossibleuntil recently due to high levels of citycentre congestion with no scope for buslanes. But, a series of low-profile trafficmanagement measures preventing carsand lorries from entering certain streetsor making certain turning movements,has now discouraged some throughtraffic2 and transformed a 15-minutetrip across town to a five minute one.And, more alterations are planned.Meanwhile Dublin Bus is now look-ing to be still more radical in where itputs bus lanes. And, if space permitsonly a single bus lane in a two-waystreet it will now seek to introduce alane in one direction for the wholelength of the link. Previously, DublinBus would have introduced a lane inone direction and a lane in the other di-rection both for only half the length ofthe link. A further change on the cards is thatMinisters are keen to see more competi-tion in the bus market, although this ismore likely to follow the Scandinavianroute franchising model than thatadopted in Great Britain outside Lon-don. LESSONS FOR THE UKIn transferring such experience to theUK, it is clear that the major advantageof the bus company in Dublin is that itis part of the same organisation as thetransport planners and therefore‘singing from the same hymn sheet’.This is not the case in Britain wherelocal authorities are sometimes distrust-ful of bus operators that are seeking tomaximise profits, although the devel-opment of QBPs should have gonesome way to addressing this issue.Related to this, is that the core objec-tive of the Dublin QBCs is to reducepeak period congestion, and hence thesize of the vehicle fleet, the cost of pro-viding that and the level of public sub-sidy has risen as a result. This may be asignificant barrier in the UK context, al-though bus companies are alreadybeing forced to supply more buses inpeak periods due to units being trappedin congestion.Otherwise, neither the transportproblems nor the transport institu-tional set up are sufficiently different toprevent a UK council following theDublin example.While the results of the Dublin QBCexperience are truly impressive, what isextraordinary is that these have beengained almost exclusively due to thebus lanes. However, unless one actuallysearches for the QBCs it is very difficultto tell that they are there. This is be-cause the buses and stops used arebranded in the standard corporate liv-ery, there are virtually no adverts – evenon shelters or on the buses themselves –and the lanes themselves are black as-phalt rather than pigmented green as inEdinburgh for example. Further, the in-formation for the services is not easy tounderstand, and the use of the exactfare system is off putting – although akey component in reducing bus board-ing times and hence overall journeytimes. Such a revelation is actually ratherpositive for the future of the bus indus-try as a whole, as it would appear thatno urban area in the British Isles has yettried matching a Trent Buses-style mar-keting strategy with a Dublin Bus-stylebus lane solution. Given the almost40% increase in bus use just from prop-erly implementing bus lanes, one couldonly imagine what results that ap-proach would achieve.AcknowledgementsThanks are due to Derry O’Leary ofDublin Bus, and Marion Wilson of theDublin Transportation Office for alltheir help.Footnotes1. Bain R (2002) Kerb guided bus: is thisaffordable LRT?, Traffic Engineeringand Control, February, pp.51-55.2. Roughly 40% of traffic on O’ConnellStreet, the main street in the city wasthrough traffic before the traffic man-agement measures.About the authorDr Marcus Enoch is a lecturer in transportstudies at Loughborough University, avisiting research fellow at The OpenUniversity and a freelance journalist. Hecan be contacted by email atm.p.enoch@lboro.ac.uk.Table 1: Based on DublinTransportationOffice (2002).TEC.07.03 p252-254  7/24/03  4:58 PM  Page 254

Getting the bus to work : why quality bus corridors work in Dublin

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Getting the bus to work : why quality bus corridors work in Dublin

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