Thursday 24 June 2010

Free-B RIP

Tomorrow, the Free-B city centre circular bus service will stop running. It started 12th October last year, six an hour all day. After its first few months it acquired its own distinctive livery, although no clear indications on its destination boards as to key stopping places that might attract passengers. I don't ever recall seeing more than two or three passengers on it at any time, and more often than not, it sped past bus stops empty, as only rarely did anyone step out and flag it down. It was painful to behold. A decent idea for linking the nodes of the bus network, but poorly implemented. It wasn't properly pitched as a resource for tourist to use. It took twenty minutes to cross a city centre that can be walked in ten by all but those with physical mobility difficulties. For them a taxi would be more convenient anyway. Since the majority of people who might use such a free service already have free bus passes, there was no attraction to using the Free-B. It was funded by a WAG grant in support of the Sustainable Travel policy agenda. What a disaster. An unsustainable outcome to a sustainability policy!

I've heard travel professionals at meetings criticise the marketing of the service, but also stoutly defend its retention as a necessary 'loss-leader', pointing out that similar facilities in other cities took a couple of years to be adopted by the mass of the travelling populace. But the geography, politics, management and social interaction patterns of every city are as variable as DNA when it comes down to detail. No matter how well anyone knows their own city, it doesn't mean to say accurate prediction of how it will respond to a new initiative can be made. So you take a risk, or you do nothing. 

From my viewpoint at the 'edge of the centre', it was obvious by Christmas this experiment was not working and meeting criticism from the professionals about the lack of clarity with which its marketing was targeted. A nice idea but, could it have been aborted earlier, at least to save on CO2 emissions? The saved expenditure could have been put into further research on the ground, and minor experiments to figure out better what would work. Easier said than done, due to the convoluted processes involving national and local government that put the scheme into place to start with.

Now the press tells us an alternative smaller electric vehicle is to be commissioned to cruise pedestrian zones and offer the same service to mobility challenged people. Will this mean a quicker journey time between bus network nodes? Quick enough to persuade people it's worth using? Apart from acquiring the necessary rolling stock, the existing traffic regulation orders governing access to pedestrian areas will need modifying. Drivers will need to be re-trained to operate safely - and hopefully learn how to give priority to pedestrians rather than just honk aggressively as often happens on the roads. And will they be able to curb their speed?  There is a move afoot to improve pedestrian safety by reducing the urban street speed limit to 20mph - common already in Europe. It will need to be much lower in any zone dedicated to pedestrians.

It's an unenviable task for public service organisations to have to deal with such complex issues and basically, after all the good science and engineering has been done, to have to potter about experimentally to get a perfect fit between good intentions and practical reality. In one of his 2010 Reith Lectures, Prof Martin Rees,  Astronomer Royal, said that we exist somewhere on the scale between the unimaginably large and the unimaginably tiny, both of which extremes, thanks to science we are able to know quite a lot about. There is also another dimension, about which we know significantly less - complexity. We have yet to get the measure of how complex the universe is and we ourselves within it, either in microcosm or macrocosm. As he also said, there's so much more we don't know about the universe than we do know.

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