Hub And Spoke Transit Planning – Is TransLink ‘s Planning Out of Date?
A subway here, an elevated guideway in the countryside there, begs the question: “Has TransLink badly erred with their transit planning.”
TransLink is completely hooked on the “hub and spoke” philosophy of transit, where buses bring passenger to light metro hubs, to be transported to another transport hub, and the either arrive or take another bus to their destination.
Contrary to the myth that transit must be fast to garner ridership, the hub and spoke philosophy of transit is time consuming when one adds the walk/wait time to get a bus; then the time on the bus, then the time waiting for a train and the more time if one must again transfer onto another bus.
A local example.
Zwei used to commute daily by bus from South Delta to downtown Vancouver and the entire trip took between 45 to 60 minutes depending on the time of day and traffic. The express buses used to have standing room only and it was not uncommon to be left at the curbside because the bus was full.
Then came the Canada line and part of the P-3 contract was a nasty little clause that made all downtown Vancouver buses, forcibly transfer their customers onto the Canada Line, at Bridgeport Station to complete their journey to Vancouver. For added insult, where prior to the Canada Line, there was direct bus service to Richmond Centre from South Delta, with the Canada Line Richmond bound customers were forced to travel by the Canada Line, again forced to Transfer to the Canada Line then doubling back to Richmond Centre. By forcing customers to transfer onto the Canada Line, added 10 to 15 minutes to ones journey time going to downtown Vancouver and increasing journey times by as much as 30 to 45 minutes going to South Delta!
This put a lie from TransLink that customers would save about 10 minutes in travel time using the new route.
Ten years after the Canada Line opened South Delta Express buses are a quarter full and service has been cut back to a 1990’s level of service as customers have voted with their feet by avoiding transit. TransLink is unrepentant and refuses to address customer’s wants.
In 2019 Zwie was held up by 90 minutes at the stark Bridgeport Station on a very windy and cold Saturday afternoon, due to cancelled buses and unannounced changes made by management. No help was offered to the large contingent of marooned passengers: management did not give a damn.
I have never used a bus since and I am not alone.
I have been told privately by neighbours and long time acquaintances in South Delta of many similiar experiences, with management ignoring customers and in the end, TransLink loses both customers and any hint of public support.
No wonder TransLink is held in high odor by the taxpayer.
It is also important to note that South Delta now has a lot of electric cars, with a recent survey at the local shopping centre, every fourth parked car was electric.
From my somewhat experienced eye, it seems to me that the locals have turned their back on transit and instead have gone electric.
This does not bode well for future transit investment.
TransLink wants $20 billion in coming years to both expand and operate the regional transit system, but with the majority of public, seeing TransLink in such a vile light, I doubt they will not get public sympathy and the politicians trying to sell TransLink to taxpayer may find themselves out of office with a populace fed up with TransLink’s insatiable lust for money, but providing a mediocre service outside the Vancouver, Burnaby and New Westminster nexus.
Thus the question remains: Is TransLink ‘s planning out of date?
If you are going to have multiple modes of transit, let’s face it, LRT and or tram trains can’t and shouldn’t go everywhere, so we will have to transfer, this is the basis of every large international transit agency. The transfers should be efficient as possible and this is where you come to the issues with hub and spoke.
Hub and Spoke transit planning comes via airlines. American transit planning came to this type of route structure in the early 1970’s, thanks to a lot of research into transportation routing at the time. The brand new Mass Transit Administration in the USA (now The Federal Transit Administration or FTA) was desperate for a win at the time so, much effort and money went into promoting this type of route structure. Hb & Spk (Hub and Spoke) was actually fairly cheap, it very efficiently uses buses or other transit vehicles on branch services. The evidence, hundreds, if not more than one thousand transit agencies around the world use some form of it in their route planning at some point.
The best transit route systems however, are hybrids of many different transit route topologies, not just one. The reason is that along with some advantages there are some monumental disadvantages with Hb & Spk routing, so it is often better to combine it with other topological elements so that, one type routing weaknesses gets covered by another route type’s strengths.
Hb & Spk transit routing is cheap but by it’s nature, it generally gets paired with low frequency of service. Since the U.S. has such a lousy system of paying for transit operations, Hb & Spk tends to rule the roost. The U.S. often has great, mostly federal government funding mechanisms to build new transit routes (transit capital budgets) but often relies on local and state governments to fund the majority of transit operations (transit operational budgets). This has ment anti-transit policies led by mainly Republicans or ultra Conservative Independents get more support at local councils and state governments because they have the tendency to rule the majority of state and local governments in the U.S.
Hub and Spoke:
1. Has a very low frequency outside of the hub areas. It is very expensive with Hb & Spk to add frequency when needed.
2. Relies on higher frequency service between the Hubs, ideally rapid transit, if you have the capital or operating budget to do that.
3. Has all the disadvantages of radial service, including a high time/distance penalty for trips originating and or ending in outer areas.
4. The Hub to Hub service is entirely based on what the agency subjectively defines as a “Hub”, thus many areas have and or can be bypassed for many reasons, race, wealth, low passenger density, low financial return or poor route capacity issues like, road bottlenecks.
5. The network coverage is very poor compared to other route topologies.
6. The resulting Hub to Hub network can have very low cross coverage thus, one key Hub to Hub route is often the only Hub to Hub route covering many other spoke routes. Like how a constriction in or completely cutting off one of the main branches in a tree can have devastating effects on all the smaller branches and twigs that originated from that main branch.
Hub and spoke in metro Vancouver is ultra high density at transit hubs, with the hope those those living in the towers will use transit. As over all percentage of population using transit falling, important questions must be asked.
Operating budget is $2,000,000,000 per year or more. Additional capital budget covered by taxpayers, not users, unknown but astronomical.
Number of users might be 200,000 if that.
Annual cost per user is $10,000 to only cover operating expenses. Added capital expense per user?
Fire the fools and tools responsible for this fiscal debacle. Run trams or buses on the roads which are already paid for by taxpayers without them:
https://tech.hyundai-rotem.com/en/green/hydrogen-fuel-cell-tram-to-run-in-an-eco-friendly-hydrogen-society/
https://blog.ballard.com/poweredbyballard-new-urbino-18-hydrogen-bus-is-ready-to-transform-zero-emission-public-transport-in-european-cities
Most of the bus routes in the City of Vancouver are actually grid route topology (I’m a big grid fan myself). You only get the real hard core Hub & Spoke routes in the outer areas like Delta, once the grid routing has disappeared entirely.
Zwei replies; That grid route in Vancouver can be traced back to the old streetcar operation.