While radial flows are no problem for the bus industry, orbital flows lead to a vicious circle of low demand and lack of investment. Time to be bold?
Coming back recently from an overseas trip, I arrived at Heathrow to assess travel options to get back to my home town of Watford.
Watford is 20 miles from Heathrow, and when the M25 is working well, takes just over half an hour by car from car park to my house. During rush hours the car journey time can be much more variable, but it is still doable in an hour. Add the transfer from terminal to car park and the overall journey time is 50-90 minutes.
I do have public transport options, but as it’s an orbital trip the time penalty is severe. If my arrival corresponds with the hourly departure time of the excellent Arriva Green Line 724 service, then with a change at Watford Junction onto local Arriva service 8, I can usually manage it in just under two hours. If I go by train via central London I’m looking at a journey time of at least two hours.
Two hours for a 20-mile journey is pretty poor – principally caused by the lack of a direct link and various interchange penalties, nothing to do with the quality of service.
Chicken and egg
Generally in public transport we do an excellent job on radial flows. High demand on main routes creates high frequencies, good quality and direct routings without interchange and that means, in a number of cases, we can be competitive with the private car and actually persuade people to leave their cars at home.
But orbital is different. Lower demand caused by more dispersed travel patterns means we can only offer less attractive, slower options in the main, and a ‘chicken and egg’ situation ensues where continuing low demand doesn’t encourage operators to invest in such flows, leading to reducing levels of demand, and so the cycle continues.
There are some excellent orbital bus examples like the Stagecoach Oxford-Cambridge service, and National Express does a sterling job offering a complex network of cross-country flows. But just imagine if the Government had been bold and taken the recommendations of some of the Multi Modal Studies in the late 1990s which advocated express motorway services stopping at key park-and-ride sites adjacent to motorway junctions.
The Multi Modal Studies were supposed to put an end to the ‘predict and provide’ culture of endless road building by suggesting viable alternatives, but they were largely left on the shelf, and those who use the western side of the M25 regularly will be aware that the extra capacity created by the additional lane has inevitably filled up, so the frustrating delays caused by the roadworks when widening have zero benefit in the long term.
A radical idea
If the expansion of Heathrow gets the go-ahead – which I know is a big if – how about a really radical ‘super planning gain’ where the whole of the M25 is widened in both directions but with a lane that can only be used by buses and coaches?
I am convinced that would make public transport orbital journey times more competitive and lead to a more sustainable solution to the additional trips the expansion of the airport will generate.
That would give a public policy benefit (air quality, economic, equality all come to mind), but would also be a boon to our industry looking to establish new growth narratives: because the private vehicle flows for orbital journeys are so high, a very small level of switching from car to bus or coach would have a massive upside to the industry’s economics for those flows – in turn fuelling further investment in frequencies and vehicle quality, creating the elusive virtuous circle.
But this requires bold decision-making by planners and politicians alike.
If all this ever does come to pass, my only other personal plea is don’t forget the most important pairing in the origin destination matrix – Watford to Heathrow!
