In preparation for a feature on bus rapid transit (BRT) in the latest issue of routeone, I took a ride on the Cambridge Guided Busway.
I had already travelled on it a few times before this particular opportunity to take more careful notes on the nearest example to home of what one might claim is “BRT”.
We covered the 21 miles on Whippet’s Tiger 1 service from Huntingdon railway station to Cambridge city centre in 55 minutes – including time for a driver change. That said, it was actually not until 11 miles into the journey that we reached the busway itself, which is on the site of a disused railway line. Then it was nearly nine miles of guided travel before turning off that route into Cambridge.
Along the guided section in the rural fens, we reached speeds of up to 50mph as very few stops were made. Whether or not you consider the Cambridge Guided Busway to be true BRT, it certainly ticks the “rapid” box along that portion of the route.
Most of the stops were for traffic lights at the handful of times that the busway crossed roads. Strangely, there seemed to be no bus priority at the traffic lights, so we went from 50mph to a complete stop.
The Cambridge Guided Busway is a great service in itself but it does not provide the best example of why BRT can be so powerful. While it meets one of the criteria of BRT in having a dedicated lane, it lacks that crucial element when it is really needed – in the most heavily congested parts of Cambridge. It is quick in the countryside, but BRT’s magic is best exploited when avoiding traffic.
The bus sector needs more examples of true BRT in city centres and along car-heavy main arterial routes. However, local politicians are rarely brave enough to provide the radical bus priority that this requires.
Trams tend to be politically more palatable than bus priority measures, and we are hearing what Confederation of Passenger Transport CEO Graham Vidler describes, in his column in the latest routeone, as a “frenzy of talk about trams” among combined authority mayors. Yet, buses can deliver the same results for a fraction of the cost, more flexibly and with shorter lead times when it comes to planning and construction.
Politicians talk about wanting to encourage sustainable transport but are not radical enough in their actions to significantly alter the landscape. We are not serious enough as a society about reducing congestion and building environmentally friendly transport. The decision-makers at local and national level are sometimes more worried about being seen as leading a “war on the motorist”.
While the industry is beholden to a great degree on the willingness of politicians, there is much that operators can do to push the BRT ideology.
As buses guru Robert Montgomery told me for my BRT feature, operators can “be proactive in identifying potential BRT corridors and indicating a willingness to get involved in maybe diversifying the kind of operations they do”.
By the latter, he is implying that operators should be open to the idea of double-doored and articulated buses, which are in scant supply on UK roads.
Other methods to speed up boarding, such as tap-on, tap-off, are coming but perhaps not quickly enough. Whippet Director Ed Cameron notes that 75% of the operator’s adult passengers opt for tap-on, tap-off where it is available, and the process saves eight seconds per boarding. However, elsewhere in the country, adoption is less widespread. First York, for example, while encouraged by take-up, reports that it is one in three customers. That is not bad, but I would suggest that more passengers would be ready to use tap-on, tap-off where it is more universally offered across different operators in their area.
Robert himself sums it up well when he calls for radical measures such as BRT: “To live without congestion, we need to do more than the current style of ‘everything’s a double-deck, the bus stops everywhere and it’s only got one door.’
“If you look around the world, there are a lot of systems that work with buses having a lot more bus priority, a lot more capacity, longer single-deck vehicles, multiple doors. It’s just a kind of ‘not-invented-here thing’, we’ve always done it this way, so all of us carry on.”
