Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Buses as light infrastructure
Scenarios about intelligent transportation are part of the futurists' stock in trade. Most of them talk about putting electronics in roadways, AI in cars, and the like; few involve something as simple as using more buses and redesigning the way bus services work. But George Monbiot's recent article in the Guardian should be read as a reminder that "intelligence" isn't something that can be applied just to technologies, but to the ways well-known technologies are used:
[F]ew measures would go so far towards meeting his goal of "improving the capacity and performance of the existing transport network" than persuading people to switch from cars to coaches. The M25 has 790 miles of lanes. If these are used by cars carrying the average load of 1.6 occupants, at 60mph the road's total capacity is just - wait for it - 19,000 people. Coaches travelling at the same speed, each carrying 30 passengers, raise the M25's capacity to 260,000. Every coach swallows up a mile of car traffic. They also reduce carbon emissions per passenger mile by an average of 88%. So one of the key tasks for anyone who wants to unblock the roads while reducing the real social costs of carbon must be to make coach travel attractive.
But how? When I take the bus from Oxford to Cambridge, I arrive feeling almost suicidal.... The reason for this misery is simple: the system is unbelievably stupid. It is a hangover from the time when coaches were pulled by horses, and were probably faster. A far better scheme has been proposed by a visionary economist called Alan Storkey.
Storkey's key innovation is to move coach stations out of city centres, to the junctions of motorways. One of the reasons long coach journeys are so slow in the UK is that - in order to create a system that allows passengers to transfer from one coach to another - they must enter the towns along the way, travelling into the centre and out again. In the rush hour you might as well walk.
Instead of dragging motorway transport into the cities, Storkey's system drags city transport out to the motorways. Urban buses on their way out of town, he proposes, keep travelling to the nearest motorway junction, where they meet the coaches. By connecting urban public transport to the national network, Storkey's proposal could revitalise both systems, as it provides more frequent and more viable bus services for the suburbs.
The coaches would never leave the trunk roads and motorways. Some services would constantly circle the orbital roads; others would travel up and down the motorways that connect to them. You would change from one coach to another at the junctions. Just 200 coaches on the M25, Storkey calculates, would ensure an average waiting time of between two and three minutes.
Whenever I go to England, I'm always struck at the existence of the category of the "luxury coach;" here in the States, buses are for people who can't afford any alternative to buses.