Around the world, every week, with empty ACTION buses

gasman said :

At the moment, people who rarely drive cars for commuting are heavily subsidising those who do. Our taxes pay for the public land around the Lake converted to car parking. Our taxes pay for the $250+ million cost of the Gunghalin Drive. Our taxes paid for the $41 million car park at The Canberra Hospital (at $30,000 per car space), money that could have been spent on hiring nurses and opening hospital beds.

This is wrong. In 2009 Australia collected about 16Bn in fuel excise and spent 5Bn on roads. Even with other spending on parking cars make a significant net contribution to government revenue. This document has the figures.

http://www.mynrma.com.au/images/About-PDF/T3-2080_roadmapR2.pdf

In addition cars are used vastly more than other forms of transport in Australia. From the same report 74% use cars regularly, 12% public transport and 2% cycle.

Car users in fact subsidies the rest of the community in most developed countries with the US is the big exception, their fuel taxes are too low. Car users pay for car injuries through insurance. Trucks make a massive contribution to economic growth. No modern country would function without them.

If all you have experienced is Canberra’s (or Sydney’s) public transport system, you may be forgiven for thinking that public transport can never be good. However, there are cities that have made it work well, by investing a relatively small amount of money.

We don’t lack a critical mass of population, just a critical mass of political thought.

Can you provide an example of a city with Canberra’s population density that has a good public transport system?

You want to look up farebox recovery ratio and see how except for some massive, very dense Asian cities most places lose money on public transport:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

The big change that is coming in transportation is vehicles that can drive themselves. This will alter the way cars are used and owned. Currently owning a car is an expensive proposition. WIth depreciation, fuel costs, repair costs, insurance costs and parking it’s hard to own a car for less than about 2-3K a year. Even people who drive to and from work only use their car say, about 1 hour out of every 24 and often pay to keep it somewhere.

If you could get a car whereever you were in Canberra in say, 5 minutes and it would drive you where ever you wanted to go for, say, a quarter of the price of a taxis now it could make sense to get rid of your car. This may well be the reality in 5-10 years.

A bus driver costs about 100K a year when pension payments, office space, training and everything else is included. 100K should be about what a self-driving system costs that can run for years and years.

Here is Sebastian Thrun, one of the world’s foremost experts on when self-driving cars will be available to buy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5JruTeNg7s

Look up Google’s self-driving car and the DARPA challenge for more on this.

It’s also worth noting that Rio Tinto in Australia currently have the world’s largest fleet of self-driving trucks:

http://www.fool.com.au/2011/11/investing/driverless-trucks-to-drive-rio-tintos-profits/

c_c said :

Talk of screwing people on pay parking to push them onto public transport sounds like something from the Warsaw Pact and is moronic.

Thank you for your cogent and incisively reasoned argument. The Warsaw Pact was a defence treaty – not sure why you think it it relates to public transport. Calling something moronic without counter-arguments is childish.

Nobody is trying to force anyone into public transport. I’m suggesting that public money could be more effectively spent by diverting some of the money away from cars and directing it to more community friendly approaches, such as a more effective public transport system.

At the moment, people who rarely drive cars for commuting are heavily subsidising those who do. Our taxes pay for the public land around the Lake converted to car parking. Our taxes pay for the $250+ million cost of the Gunghalin Drive. Our taxes paid for the $41 million car park at The Canberra Hospital (at $30,000 per car space), money that could have been spent on hiring nurses and opening hospital beds.

Just the GDE and Canberra Hospital car park has cost each Canberra household $3000 ($300 million divided by 100K households). We all pay so you can have the convenience and indulgence of driving your 1500kg car, alone, to a very valuable piece of real estate where you car sits all day.

Many other cities around the world have discovered that you can’t just keep shoving more and more cars into a city. They are changing their policies – decreased car use and better public transport. Some of the best public transport system I have come across are in cities that were previously car-centric. Its cheap, its clean, its efficient, and everybody uses it, students, families, workers, rich and poor. It brings communities together.

If all you have experienced is Canberra’s (or Sydney’s) public transport system, you may be forgiven for thinking that public transport can never be good. However, there are cities that have made it work well, by investing a relatively small amount of money.

We don’t lack a critical mass of population, just a critical mass of political thought.

There could possibly be some gains to be made from current dead running – eg, a bus goes past the Zoo every day – empty -presumably to the Belco depot. Why is there no bus to the Zoo (except, daftly, in ACT school hols)?
My daughter noticed this while doing work experience there.

It is more of a problem to me that normal route buses on the weekends are always empty because the timetable is so sh!t.

tg_703 said :

A simple method which would significantly reduce ‘dead running’ costs would be the reintroduction of driver changeovers outside depots (yes, it happened in the past, why it ceased is beyond me). This is common place in interstate bus companies, both private and public, and ought to be considered here. Belconnen Depot is an ideal location for driver changeovers, as every bus which services Belconnen will pass through/terminate at this location. Tuggeranong, less so, but with tweaking to the routes, this too could be the case.
Having driver changeovers makes best use of vehicles in the fleet, as buses wouldn’t have to terminate in the suburbs, then return to the depot empty so another driver can pick up the same bus to then run empty to another, or sometimes the same location to commence their shift (this is where much of the dead running originates). Instead, a driver finishing their shift could pull up at Cohen St Bus Station (outside bus depot), take their cash and hop out, while the driver commencing their shift gets in, adjusts seat/mirror, etc, then continues the service, with a delay of barely a minute. Fuel tanks on the buses should allow for this too, as they are typically 200L+. Certain things would prevent on road changeovers from occuring, such as bus defects, but generally, this method works well and is proven across the country.

All well and good, except that dead running is NOT caused by drivers returning to the depot to do a change over, as you quite rightly point out the depots are close to the central terminus anyway which is where changeovers occur.

For the most part the reason is because traffic flows are not symmetrical. In the morning there are more buses from the burbs towards the town centre. To operate these you need to run an empty bus to the start of the route. Likewise in the PM the flow reverses so you need to send more buses to burbs and run them back empty too.

Sure you could operate this in service, but as someone else mentioned above it would probably cost more in wages and even more km’s for very few if any passengers and of course as they would take time to get to the start or the end of the route you would need more buses at even more cost.

But as the very first reply says the amount of dead running per bus per day is ~25km, which in the grand scheme of things is bugger all, though when you add it up it does make a ‘dramatic’ headline that pollies just love because none of us would even think about doing the sums.

What the Liberals are yet to find out is that there have been no changes to the ACTION Network since 2010. So how could things of changed in 2012 before the new network has come into effect. Now in a few months time when the new network has come into effect, maybe then will the Labour Government release this information.

Anyway, via Twitter, Alistair Coe has been asked how exactly would be reduce this dead running. I will make sure he is kept on his toes (like he likes to do with Katy Gallagher). My responses from Katy Gallagher can be received anywhere from 5 minutes later to 24 hours later. So I give Alistair until 00:00 Tuesday 17 April to answer.

A simple method which would significantly reduce ‘dead running’ costs would be the reintroduction of driver changeovers outside depots (yes, it happened in the past, why it ceased is beyond me). This is common place in interstate bus companies, both private and public, and ought to be considered here. Belconnen Depot is an ideal location for driver changeovers, as every bus which services Belconnen will pass through/terminate at this location. Tuggeranong, less so, but with tweaking to the routes, this too could be the case.
Having driver changeovers makes best use of vehicles in the fleet, as buses wouldn’t have to terminate in the suburbs, then return to the depot empty so another driver can pick up the same bus to then run empty to another, or sometimes the same location to commence their shift (this is where much of the dead running originates). Instead, a driver finishing their shift could pull up at Cohen St Bus Station (outside bus depot), take their cash and hop out, while the driver commencing their shift gets in, adjusts seat/mirror, etc, then continues the service, with a delay of barely a minute. Fuel tanks on the buses should allow for this too, as they are typically 200L+. Certain things would prevent on road changeovers from occuring, such as bus defects, but generally, this method works well and is proven across the country.

c_c said :

dungfungus said :

I thought this might develop into a serious discussion but I can now see why we have the dysfunctional public transport system we deserve.

Anyway, on a serious note, in the absence of a critical mass of population, mass public transport will always suffer from the following:

Mass Public Transport = life planned around it
Personal Transport = on demand when you want it

Yeah pretty much
The bigger problem with Canberra is not merely its population, but the actual shape of the city. Successful public transport systems like Melbourne’s have high frequency transport corridors that radiate out from the CBD – the Train lines (and trams to an extent) radiate out, while buses fill in the gaps. This simply doesn’t work in Canberra, and even with higher density and frequency, you’re still going to be stuck with the
suburban loop -> interchange -> “start heading where you actually want to go”
problem because of the way the city is laid out. There’s not really any solution when as far as building a transport system is concerned, Canberra effectively has 3 or 4 CBDs. You simply can’t cater to that effectively without costing the earth.

Canberra really was built for the car – neither light rail nor more frequent buses will fix the problem. Maybe in 50 or 100 years the gaps will be filled in and Canberra will have a more normal shape, but that’s about it.

ka1042 said :

dungfungus said :

arescarti42 said :

69,000 km per week isn’t that outrageous a number. That is 9857 km per day, which over ACTION’s fleet of 430 buses (say ~390 are actually in use each day), which is 25km per bus per day, or about 13km for the average bus each way from the depot to the beginning of its run, and back at the end of the day.

Short of tweaking the routes so that they start and finish closer to the depot, I would have thought the only other way to reduce dead running would be to simply have more depots.

Think: “privatising Action will solve the problem”

Dungfungus, with your past comments to this site and your dumb assed name, I have no doubt you are a Liberal party staffer. I have read Alistair Coe’s past comments in the Assembly denegating Canberra and the ACTION bus service but, typically, not telling us what the Canberra Liberals would do differently. Tell me, do the Canberra Liberal’s have a secret agenda to privatise ACTION buses and if so, what else do they plan on privatising? ACT Labor and the Greens have their policy announcements clearly displayed on their websites and their websites are being updated daily. The Canberra Liberal’s website hasn’t been updated since the last election in 2008.

Calling my blog name as “dumb assed” is a bit harsh isn’t it? What sort of a name is yours? Sounds like a laboratory specimen label from a batch of low grade bacteria.
No, I am not a Liberal Party staffer and I don’t deal in secret agenda’s. I am simply a fee and ratepaying Canberra citizen who is sick of seeing a large proportion of his revenue contribution being wasted on an exceptionally inefficient public transport system. It is reasonable to expect public transport to run at a loss but what we have in the ACT is a joke. Labor and the Greens public transport policy appears to be more of the same thing with heaps of spin and I have no idea what the Liberals are proposing. What sort of problem do you have with privatisation anyhow; apart fom being a trade union hack?

dungfungus said :

I thought this might develop into a serious discussion but I can now see why we have the dysfunctional public transport system we deserve.

It’s Saturday, chill out.

Anyway, on a serious note, in the absence of a critical mass of population, mass public transport will always suffer from the following:

Mass Public Transport = life planned around it
Personal Transport = on demand when you want it

Talk of screwing people on pay parking to push them onto public transport sounds like something from the Warsaw Pact and is moronic. As are suggestions of higher frequency, until Canberra get’s a sufficient population.

dungfungus said :

arescarti42 said :

69,000 km per week isn’t that outrageous a number. That is 9857 km per day, which over ACTION’s fleet of 430 buses (say ~390 are actually in use each day), which is 25km per bus per day, or about 13km for the average bus each way from the depot to the beginning of its run, and back at the end of the day.

Short of tweaking the routes so that they start and finish closer to the depot, I would have thought the only other way to reduce dead running would be to simply have more depots.

Think: “privatising Action will solve the problem”

Dungfungus, with your past comments to this site and your dumb assed name, I have no doubt you are a Liberal party staffer. I have read Alistair Coe’s past comments in the Assembly denegating Canberra and the ACTION bus service but, typically, not telling us what the Canberra Liberals would do differently. Tell me, do the Canberra Liberal’s have a secret agenda to privatise ACTION buses and if so, what else do they plan on privatising? ACT Labor and the Greens have their policy announcements clearly displayed on their websites and their websites are being updated daily. The Canberra Liberal’s website hasn’t been updated since the last election in 2008.