Bus changes and ferry connections

442 Bus about to depart Balmain East Wharf: connecting ferry from CQ still on the way

It's an old, old problem that just won't go away - Sydney struggles to get bus/ferry connections right. 

It seems so simple from the point of view of the passenger. The passenger wants a reliable bus service to take him or her to the ferry wharf with just a short wait before the connecting ferry departs. And on return, after disembarking the ferry, a bus should be waiting at the wharf to complete the journey home. 

Sydney's geography means the ferry to bus connection is usually more critical than bus to ferry. The bus journey to a ferry wharf is often down a steep incline. More often than not, passengers are willing to stroll down a hill to the wharf, but are reluctant to walk back up. That's why the transfer from ferry to bus is more important. 

It is also more complicated for a passenger to mentally juggle two schedules - "Which is the best bus to catch for me to make a convenient connection with the ferry? Should I assume the bus will be on time or do I allow for an extra five or 10 minutes in case the bus is late? What the hell, I'll just walk to the wharf".

The decision is simpler when disembarking the ferry. The bus is either waiting at the wharf or it's not.

Providing passengers with what they want is not so easy. 
Part of the problem is an issue of detail - exactly how long should be scheduled for a transfer wait? 

Take the example of the new timetable for buses terminating at Balmain East Wharf, which takes effect from Sunday 2 December. The network has been simplified by operating a single line - the 442 bus - between the Queen Victoria Building and Balmain East. Daytime on week-days and Saturdays it will run at 10 minute intervals. This is in place of two lines (the 442 and 445 (Balmain East to Campsie)) which each operated at 20 minute intervals.

As a guiding principle, simpler, higher frequency networks are better. Unfortunately, though, the new timetable does not allow enough time for transfers from the ferry to the bus. The ferry from Circular Quay is scheduled to arrive at :00 and :30 minutes past the hour, with the "connecting bus" scheduled to leave at :03 and 0:33 minutes past the hour. The walk from ferry to bus stop is 105 metres, including steps, and takes between 90 seconds and two minutes for less mobile passengers. This leaves almost no buffer for a ferry delay. As the F4 ferry from Circular Quay is usually at least three minutes late (for reasons explained in an earlier post), connections will rarely be made.

This is not such a problem when the 442 bus departs at 10 minute intervals, because it won't be long before the next bus arrives. But bus frequency drops to 30 minute intervals after 8 pm, which means passengers hoping for a transfer from this time are likely to have a very long wait.

There are also some bigger strategic design issues in ferry - bus connections.

Hierarchies are important in network planning. "Hierarchy" is an ugly word, as it implies one part of the system is more important than another, but that is not what is meant. What it really means is that lines serve different functions - for example:

• inter-suburban lines follow key transport corridors and connect major centres and 
• local lines provide for shorter journeys including connections to the inter-suburban lines. 

Two modes of public transport serving Balmain East: 442 bus (blue line) and F4 ferry (red line)

Buses connecting to a ferry wharf should be feeder lines to the ferry. But the 442 bus is also an inter-suburban line, because it carries passengers all the way from the Balmain East wharf into Sydney's CBD. 

It tries to be both a feeder line and an inter-suburban line at the same time. 

In the commuter peaks, the 442 trip from Balmain East to QVB is scheduled to be 28 minutes. The ferry ride from Balmain East to Barangaroo - not that far from QVB - is a 5 minute journey. So for Balmain East residents, the ferry is a more convenient option. Wouldn't it better for the section of the 442 route from Gladstone Park to Balmain East wharf to be simply a dependable feeder bus line to the ferry? Better for a bus to do this well (punctually) than try to compete with the ferry for passengers travelling to the CBD.

There are many other similar cases across Sydney, including the 438 bus from Abbotsford wharf to Martin Place and the 505 bus from Woolwich wharf to Town Hall. The 438 takes up to 68 minutes in the peaks, but the ferry journey is only 26 minutes to Barangaroo or 28 minutes to Circular Quay. The ability of a bus line this long to be a reliable feeder to the ferry wharf is very doubtful.

All of this highlights the importance of viewing Sydney's public transport as an integrated system, not independent operations, and for more attention to be given to improving connections between the component parts. The bus timetable changes to be implemented this week-end suggest Sydney is still not quite there yet.

So much data, so little information

There is some information about public transport networks which most us would expect to be freely available. Patronage[1], which is the number of passenger journeys on a network over a period of time, usually monthly and annually, is an example of this type of information.

It’s not just the absolute number that’s important, but also the trend over time. What is the growth in patronage over 10 years? Or is it declining? How does growth on one mode compare with others? Does the growth vary between lines? Is the growth in peak periods or off peak?

You might assume that patronage in New South Wales is nothing more than a count of Opal card tap ons or ticket sales, but this was never the case and it’s not now. As well as Opal tap ons, patronage includes an estimate of non-ticketed journeys, untapped school student travel and integrated ticketing special event travel.

Sydney Ferries’ patronage figures used to be made available by a part of Transport for NSW known as the Bureau of Transport Statistics or BTS. BTS published a lot of information on its website about Sydney Ferries, including monthly patronage by service area (Manly, Inner Harbour and Parramatta River) going back six or seven years. It also released data from a seven day census taken twice a year of passenger boardings and disembarkations by wharf, service and time of day. It even provided the name of the vessel and its capacity, so if you knew what you were doing, you could estimate capacity utilisation by service.

Summaries of the ferry census were produced by the BTS, showing trends in passenger loadings by time of day, individual routes and wharves.

I liked dealing with the BTS. I was never in doubt that they were on the side of transparency, high standards and the pursuit of knowledge. 

The BTS was restructured in 2016 into Transport Performance and Analytics (TPA). The old was swept away with promises that even better information would be released, thanks to the higher quality Opal data now available. And a new website, Open Data, was created to make it easier for advanced users to download Opal and a range of information from other “big data” sources.

So where does that leave us with ferry patronage? There is a data visualisation on the TPA website called “Historical Patronage Counts”, which shows NSW patronage by mode and financial year, back to 2010-11. The 2016-17 count for ferries is 16.009 million, up from 15.410 million in the previous year. The explanatory notes inform that ferry patronage includes Opal journeys, magnetic stripe ticket validations (July 2016 only) and an estimate of non ticketed journeys. No problems there, except that the number for 2016-17 includes Newcastle ferry patronage. This amounts to about 470,000, give or take 50,000, so Sydney Ferries patronage last year was actually somewhere between 15.5 and 15.6 million, or only a little more than 2015-16.

What the heck?

After a series of polite email exchanges with someone at TPA, who describes him or herself only as “TPA Inbox Manager”, I’ve reached the conclusion that the taxpayers of New South Wales will never find out exactly what Sydney Ferries patronage was in 2016-17. It will only be published at the “top line level” - a total for Sydney Ferries and Newcastle Ferries and will remain forever incompatible with the counts for all previous years. Not only don’t we know what the patronage was precisely, but the historical patronage chart compares apples with pears. Or apples with apples plus grapes.

It could be argued that this is all just pedantry on my part. Who cares if Sydney Ferries’ patronage is 15.5 million or 15.6 million, or if Newcastle ferry numbers are lumped in from July 2016. Near enough is good enough. And anyway, TPA does provide monthly counts of Opal trips by line and fare category, which the BTS did not publish.

Even if I am a pedant, there are more serious concerns about information transparency. I naively welcomed the promise of granular level opal trip information. Rather than rely on a seven day census count, twice a year, we could now expect more accurate Opal tap data over 365 days of the year, with origin-destination pairs.

Well, it has yet to happen. The little snippets made available on the Open Data site is subject to strict privacy controls. The counts of tap ons and offs for individual wharves in 15 minute “bins” are only reported if the value is 18 or more. In practice, the vast majority of wharves have very few 15 minute bins which qualify, so the data is of little analytical value. And the latest counts available are from January 2017, almost a year ago.

I asked a planner at Transport for NSW last year if he was worried about the 20% decline in ferry commuter patronage in the AM peaks (that information used to be available from the BTS published ferry census data). “No,” he replied,“the latest Opal data shows a big turnaround. But it’s information that only TfNSW has access to”.

The news that commuter ferry patronage is growing again was of course very reassuring, although it would be good if the information was published. Then everyone can access detailed patronage data to see for themselves how demand for Sydney Ferries’ services is trending.

I miss the BTS.

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[1] Americans call it ridership, which is probably a better word, but I’m Australian so I’ll stick with patronage

The verdict on Sydney's Cross Harbour ferry service

Sydney Ferries' Cross Harbour route

There is the germ of a good idea in the new Sydney Ferry  timetable which came into effect last Sunday. Effective public transport networks provide multi-destination travel, not just a trip to and from a terminal in the central business district. That’s because most of our journeys don’t have the city centre as a destination. We’re more likely to need to go somewhere on the other side of the city or to another suburb that’s not directly between where we are and the city terminal.

But Sydney’s transport networks, including ferries, have an unrelenting CBD focus. It’s one of the reasons the city remains addicted to the private motor car.

Transport for NSW should be congratulated therefore for trying something different in the new ferry timetable. The Watsons Bay and Darling Harbour lines have been joined together into a Cross Harbour service. Circular Quay is not the “end of the line”, but the mid-point of a route that starts on one side of the city and terminates at the other. A passenger from Rose Bay, for example, can now travel to Milsons Point, Balmain East or Barangaroo, and back, without changing to a different vessel. This is known as “through lining” and although it is a well established method elsewhere for facilitating cross town trips, it has never been tried before in the 164 year history of Sydney Ferries.

On top of this, the way that extra services are scheduled for Double Bay means there are now all day timed connections at Circular Quay between this line and the Cockatoo Island route. It’s not quite as easy for passengers to navigate as a through line, but anyone from Double Bay with an aunt at Greenwich Point really has no excuse for not visiting her now. The transfer wait at the Quay is between 8 and 10 minutes, all day, seven days a week. 

Double Bay and Cockatoo Island routes. Timed transfers at Circular Quay

If a criticism could be leveled at the strategic intent, it is that Transport for NSW did not go all the way and make timed connections for all lines at Circular Quay. This is known as integrated pulse timetabling and it’s the backbone of the Swiss public transport system. It’s also the basis for a plan to make a ten-fold increase in intercity train patronage in California by 2040.

But the germ of a good idea is only fruitful if it is nurtured with attention to detail. This is where the Cross Harbour service failed on Sunday, with vessels falling behind schedule due to the tight timetable and customary Sunday crowds causing loading times to blow out. Vessel swaps by Harbour City Ferries protected passengers from longer delays, but the fact remains that the new timetable developed by Transport for NSW is unachievable, except when demand is light.

Problems with the timetable were anticipated in a previous post. 

The Cross Harbour service worked much better on Monday and today, despite some clunky crew changes. The impact of these were minimal due to light passenger loadings in Darling Harbour. 

Crews will get used to the new timetable over time and gain more confidence in handling the new vessels. Perhaps wrinkles in the crewing arrangements will be sorted too. But it remains unlikely that the Cross Harbour will work smoothly when there is high demand on a week-end or school holidays.

It is unrealistic to expect no teething problems in a major timetable change. Even allowing for this, there seems to be a lack tenacity in getting the details right in Sydney’s ferry planning. And it's not just the timetable. How much thought goes into strategies to reduce the time it takes for vessels to berth or for passengers to be loaded? When expensive infrastructure projects are undertaken, like wharf upgrades and fleet replacement, does someone have a vision for how the design of vessels and terminals can better integrate over the long term? What is the plan for reducing congestion in Sydney Cove, which according to the Office of Transport Safety Investigations is a significant safety risk?

Through lining may never be a reliable option for Sydney Ferries, so long as our vessels and wharves are not designed for fast passenger exchange, a basic requirement of modern public transport systems. Perhaps the silly name given to our newest ferry points to a deeper malaise. Planning for waterborne transport in Sydney is not given the serious attention it deserves and requires.

The Secret of Successful Public Transport

Driving a car in Sydney has one big advantage over public transport. We can jump into our car and go wherever we want, at a time that suits us. For most Sydney residents, public transport can’t match this. Services don’t run often enough, or for only part of the day, or our destination lies on a different line which we can’t conveniently transfer to.   

But what if the planning of public transport was truly integrated? Imagine if the near CBD network, where population densities are high, was a high frequency grid, with services running from early in the morning until late at night, seven days a week. And in areas of lower population density, what if there were timed connections at all interchanges, so that even if departures are only twice an hour, transfers to other lines or modes are very convenient. Anywhere to anywhere, at any time, suddenly becomes possible.

This is not a fantasy, because it is exactly what happens in Zurich and many other cities in Europe. Surprisingly, it happens at low cost to the taxpayer. The Zurich public transport system recovers 63% of its operating costs and in Munich there is full cost recovery. According to the NSW Auditor-General, cost recovery here is less than 30%.

The quality of the Zurich public transport network means that more people use it and fewer trips are made by car. The average resident in the Canton of Zurich makes 400 trips by public transport each year. In Sydney, we make 120. Sydneysiders travel 4.9 km per day by public transport and 28.5 km by private motor vehicle. Zurich residents on average travel 11.7 km by public transport and 20.7 km by private motor vehicle. 

Visitors to Zurich or Munich may be surprised at the grim utilitarianism of transport infrastructure in these cities. Interchanges are functional and generally without architectural flourish; there are no smartcards or ticket gate barriers; and a lot of the rolling stock is old. This is because transport planners consider the “customer offer” – a  network design and timetable which allow more than 80% of residents to go from anywhere, to anywhere – to be the most important ingredient of a successful transit system. It is also because the science of timetabling is better understood in Europe and perhaps better in Switzerland than anywhere else.

Tram stop in Zurich: seat, shelter, timetable and ticket machine. What more do you need?

There is one more thing. Around 80% of public transport trips in Zurich are made by passengers using a periodical ticket: a yearly, monthly or weekly ticket which provides unlimited travel on all modes within nominated zones. Pricing does not differentiate between modes or punish transfers.

The periodical tickets are attractive as they provide big discounts compared to single journey tickets. This makes public transport pricing more akin to car ownership. While there are marginal costs in driving a car, we tend to think a short drive is "free". Unlimited travel with a periodical transit ticket creates a similar perception about public transport, in contrast to “pay as you use” systems, like the Opal Card.

So the secret to successful public transport is less about money and technology and more about philosophy and technique. The good news is that these techniques are explained in a wonderfully clear and comprehensive manual on designing good public transport, the “Hi Trans Guide”. We would all benefit if its sage advice was more widely followed.