Must there always be a 'bad side'?

Go to almost any rail-based retail strip in Melbourne and you'll find a 'good side' and a 'blighted side'.

The good side has the busy shops; the bad side has the empty shops, derelict buildings, tattoo parlours, pawnbrokers, sex shops, secondhand dealers and other low-rent and marginal uses.

The reason is visibility and pedestrian access. A thriving retail shopping strip caters to many needs and tastes. You won't want to go into every shop, but if there's one across the road that grabs you, one expects to be able to walk directly to it and be inside within 20 or 30 seconds. Poor visibility, waiting or backtracking kills the shopping experience and reduces customer count and sales. This is because the number of shops one can impulsively entered in a 30 minute visit to the strip is reduced. If people can't get adequate and accessible variety they they'll go elsewhere (eg a large shopping centre where the traffic problems are left outside in the car park).

This goes some way to explain why shopping strips based around or near traffic sewers (North Road Ormond or South Road Moorabbin) are failures, while those based around smaller streets (Puckle Street Moonee Ponds or Koornang Road Carnegie) are successes. And along the same street, eg High Street Preston, those sections with closer intervals between pedestrian signals win more shoppers than those that don't.

Nevertheless traffic along a shopping street (or more precisely long gaps between pedestrian crossings and long cycles for those that exist) isn't the only enemy of easy access to shops. Railway lines or major highways, running across a shopping street can divide an area, reducing visibility and/or access. Shops require much closer links between them than do houses; customers often go from shop to shop, but people seldom go from house to house in a street. Not only does visibility have to be good, but retail shops need to be almost adjoining and on the same level to maintain interest and encourage the shopper to 'drop in'.

Anything like a major highway or railway line violates the need for good sight and quick access and condemns the less favoured half of the shopping strip to decline (*). An underpass helps, but not if it is indirect and results in extra walking (as many low-grade DDA-compliant ones can be). Overpasses have similar problems. Even the 'cage' appearance of at-grade gates or booms reduces sightlines, even though in 80% of cases these won't be closed and access is faster than the perception of same.

What about grade seperation of road and rail? Local retailers appear to like this and think it will fix all their problems. While there may be other benefits of grade seperation, fixing a divided retail strip is not necessarily one of them. Indeed it could make matters worse; making a two dimensional problem into a three dimensional problem, further 'killing off' the less favoured side.

Oakleigh, Huntingdale, Sunshine and Richmond station grade seperations are all failures from an urban amenity standpoint. All have caused or encouraged significant urban blight in the overpasses' shadow. Even Elsternwick, which I have praised before, has it's 'bad side' of the line, as Reuben points out (and it was that post which encouraged this one).

If grade seperations aren't the cure for divided shopping strips, what is? I don't think there is one given the clear sightlines and continuous access required within a shopping strip for it to function as a whole. In this case it might be better to admit defeat and rezone the 'blighted sides' of shopping strips from 'retail' to 'residential - high density' with mixed uses also permitted.

This has a number of benefits. For a start it increases the pedshed of the railway station and local shopping strip, generating custom for both. While residents of this area will need to cross the railway or road to reach the shops this is acceptable since once over the line access between all shops in the strip will be good. Urban blight will be minimised since the retail strip will no longer be divided and there will be increased pedestrian traffic from local residents. And if the strip needs to be expanded, some houses could be rezoned mixed use or commercial towards the unblocked end of the strip.

(*) Reservoir seems to be one exception - with two active shopping strips on both sides of the railway.

Melbourne Public Transport Standards Review

Booz & Co (who are also doing some bus reviews for DoT) have also been busy researching on service standards for Melbourne public transport overall.

Read their review here 

[2024 update - archived link here https://web.archive.org/web/20091026200532/https://transport.vic.gov.au/DOI/DOIElect.nsf/$UNIDS+for+Web+Display/C221874DC287B4C9CA257522001694AC/$FILE/booz_and_co_public_transport_standards.pdf ]

My main observation was that though the report include a list of things that individually contribute to service (eg amount of rail infrastructure, span and frequency) it stopped short of trying to bring it all together to form an overall measure.

As a result reading the report provided a bunch of statistics that did not convey the user experience and the extent to which this varied between cities. Here's just a few questions one might ask:

* Is the public transport in my suburb good enough to go somewhere on a Sunday or stay out until 11pm?
* Can I rock up at a station or stop and expect a service in a few minutes in peak hour or should I instead plan the trip beforehand?
*Or is the train likely to be faster than driving, and if I need to catch a bus will the connection be good?
* What proportion of suburbs get a service every fifteen minutes or better?
* Are summer and public holiday service arrangements standard across the network or does each operator or route do its own thing?

These are the sorts of questions that a robust set of service standards (and study of same) would address. I have a rough idea of service levels and characteristics in some of the Australian cities mentioned. Melbourne trams good, Perth trains good, Adelaide buses good, Perth connectivity good, Brisbane trains poor off-peak, Melbourne's trains extensive, Sydney ticketing terrible etc. However I'm not sure if this report would convey this sense to the general reader (or policy-maker) so we know where Melbourne sits.

Another thing the report could usefully have done is to define an overall service standard for its client; especially since page 4 says service standards are 'largely undefined'!

The service standard method mentioned before on these pages involving coverage, frequency and span seems as good a starting point as any:

V % of the population within W minutes walk of a service that runs at least every X minutes between Yam and Zpm, seven days a week.

The figures to insert depend on what the policy maker wants the public transport network to do - ie compete with driving for many trips, or to provide a social welfare type service. For example:

* If you wanted to make it a high standard network intended to win modal share, V = 90%, W = 10 min, X = 10 minutes, Y = 6am and Z = midnight.

* If public transport is more a social service then W might be 5 minutes, X every 60 minutes and Z = 7pm.

* A network somewhere in between might have a substantial grid of primary routes where X = 15min, Y = 6am, Z=midnight supplemented by local secondary routes where X = 30 or 60 min, Y=6am and Z=9pm.

Of these three the last option could be achieved in Melbourne fairly quickly. The use of service standards to reduce the myriad variations in bus service levels to a three tier system of primary, secondary and tertiary routes with harmonised hours, frequencies and holiday arrangements would permit the sort of network legibility, information and marketing that other cities take for granted.

A good service comparison between cities might set a moderate to good level of service (such as an Adelaide Go-Zone) as a reference. The study would compare the proportion of the population within 10 minutes walk of that level of service. All Australian cities are likely to have only a minority of the population near a service of that quality, but it would be a substantial minority and comparisons would be readily made. In particular Melbourne's tram network would stand out as exceeding this level, while most of its buses (including some SmartBuses) would not exceed it. The latter would also be true of Perth for its buses, but it's train network would meet the standard, unlike Adelaide's or Brisbanes. And this sort of comparison would more closely align with the user experience mentioned above.

Robust service standards along the lines of that above can be very useful to a co-ordinating departmet. They would then flow into network design, service levels and then marketing. Adelaide excels here with it's 'Go Zone' buses where passengers are assured of a 15 min weekday/30 min evening and weekend frequency and wide operating spans and the service is marketed as a coherent network. And Brisbane has 'BUZ zones', offering services every 15 minutes until late at night. Instead of drawing from as many overseas cities, these concepts could have been proposed as practical, local and achieveable examples of effective service standards and marketing. Unfortunately, despite being raised in the body of the report, the need for genuine service standards did not make it into a conclusion, recommedation or summary of key points.

Now onto some specific points. All are fairly minor, but I can't resist mentioning them.

Page 4. Trams are ignored in the service comparison tables, presumably because other cities don't have anything matching it (although Sydney Buses could have been surveyed). In a survey this would tend to unfairly work against Melbourne bus frequencies since in other cities trams' purpose is performed by high-frequency bus routes (eg Adelaide's Go Zones').

Page 4. The report is correct in that 'Track Record' is not the place for train span and service frequency standards. However these are specified in the train operating contracts. Information from these could have been provided rather than the columns left blank. Again this make us look less favourable.

Page 7. The claim that Perth has a standard 15 minute train service might better have been qualified as only applying during the day (Monday - Sunday) with some minor exceptions. Perth's night trains run every 30 minutes - ie similar to Melbourne Monday - Saturday (Sunday some lines). Hence the report oversells Perth's night services, when they are better regarded as comparable to us.

Page 8. While Perth's 'late night' trains do run later than Melbourne, it should be noted that this is at the cost of frequency - every 60 minutes instead of ours every 30 minutes. A true comparison would also factor in trams and NightRider buses, which have seen substantial boosts lately.

Page 9. The 10-20 minute evening train frequencies quoted for Melbourne are unrepresentative since they only apply to stations between the city and Footscray, Clifton Hill, Ringwood, Caulfield or Sandringham. Claiming a 30 minute average would have led to more robust findings. Claiming a wider range of peak frequencies such as 3-20 minutes would also have helped since the quoted 5-10 minute pm peak headway is only seen at a minority of stations.

Page 10. No Australian rail system beats Perth's consistent 15 minute daytime 7-day off-peak frequency, but nevertheless the claim is made that Melbourne performs better off-peak. If we were to make such a claim for Melbourne, it would have to be on a geographic and multimode basis, with trams included.

Happy New Year!

Best wishes for 2009 to all readers and contributors.

Public transport was never far from the news with three major themes dominating the headlines in 2008. Major themes for the year were trains, ticketing and transport plans.

A patronage boom tested the limits of a fragile train system with longer trains and revised timetables providing some relief in 2008. Other ideas to 'ease the crush' included free 'early bird' travel, a short-lived bicycle ban and plans to remove seats from carriages to increase standing room.

Ticketing items mainly dealt with the myki smartcard system, which first saw public use in Geelong. Marketing to promote 'bulk purchase' and 'weekend saver' travel continued, while more people got free Sunday travel through the broadened 'Sunday Pass'. Restrictions for seniors and periodical ticket holders were proposed but withdrawn before the effectivness date. Hence, unlike 2008's taxi driver protest, we were spared the sight of topless seniors in the streets.

Discussion about transport planning was largely in the context of Sir Rod Eddington's East-West Needs Assessment, which recommended road and rail tunnels linking east and west. The peak capacity of the rail network was a major point of contention with operators, academics, activists and gunzels debating the extent to which existing infrastructure can reliably accommodate the pathways needed for extra services. The Government responded with the Victorian Transport Plan. This multi-billion dollar long-term plan took up many Eddington recommendations but the major projects will require federal government funding.

To the above 'big three' should be added several topics of local or regional importance during 2008. In the inner suburbs rising traffic is reducing the efficiency and deliverable frequency of tram services year by year. Extended 'Clearways' have sought to provide relief, but not without opposition from local traders.

Further out, buses were the focus, with one major new SmartBus route introduced, continued 'minimum standards' upgrades to local routes and a boosted NightRider network with a doubled service frequency. Local bus service reviews continued with their consultations, meetings and submissions. The earlier reviews had their reports published and some of their less radical recommendations implemented during 2008. December 25, 2008 was the first Christmas ever where the number of local bus routes running exceded 150; a far cry from (maybe) 20 or 30 a few years ago.

Outside Melbourne regional buses received attention with revised timetables in some major centres. Less populous regions also got new or augmented community-style buses run by a local operator under DoT's 'Transport Connections' Program. These generally run a few times a week but provide access to the nearest major centre for country residents.

What's in line for 2009? (Advertisement)

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I'll refrain from making any serious predictions for public transport in 2009 as it's much easier to be wrong than right. Besides there's no money in it in the slim chance the forecasts prove true. But if you wish to have a go at guessing what the year will bring, feel free to leave them in the comments below.