BusTalk

[RailBus63]

When visiting Broome County Transit in Binghamton, NY last month, I noticed that each bus seemed to operate on a different route every time it returned to the main transfer center. BC Transit operates on a ‘pulse schedule’ with all routes meeting at the center, and most routes operating on the same headway (30 minutes weekdays, 60 minutes on Saturday). This scheme became readily apparent to me after I returned home and found out that I had photographed BC Transit bus #809 on four different routes throughout the day!

This has led me to wonder – do many systems schedule their runs in this manner? Most of the systems I’m familiar with tend to keep a bus on the same route all day long, although it may be interlined with another route on the ‘other side of town’. If I were a driver, I think I’d like the BC Transit type of work schedule, as it would provide some variety to my day if I did a different route every trip. The downside I could see would be if a route services a busy shopping area or other location with heavy vehicular traffic – delays on this one route could potentially ripple through the entire system as the day goes on.

[HwyHaulier]

RailBus63 -

Hmmm... Side benefit in that it evens out daily average mileage on each coach in the dispatch pool?

The "busy shopping area" effect? May have fairly predictable daily patterns?

..................Vern.................

[timecruncher]

This is a common tactic in scheduling, although it is done for different reasons.

Aside from the convenience of pulse scheduling for transfer connections at a centralized location, interlining can be used to reduce the number of transfers necesssary. If your planning department does an O&D survey (origin & destination) and discovers that most transfers from route A are to route D, then interlining may reduce the number of transfers needed and thus make the service more convenient for customers.

Another reason is to facilitate those pretty clocked headways at every 30 minutes. Route A has a round-trip time of 40 minutes while Route D has a round-trip time of 70 minutes. Combined, you have a 110-minute round-trip, plus 10 minutes of layover, and voila! -- you have a 2-hour round trip. Add two buses and you have an hourly headway. Four buses and you have a 30-minute headway. The times are consistent and easy to remember. This setup doesn't always work well for transfers at a central point, of course.

And then there are places where routes are interlined at the outer end of the route, say at a regional shopping hub. The result is similar in that you can combine the trip times for both routes and come up with consistent headways over the length of both routes.

The best interlining scheme I've seen is down in Tuscon, AZ at Sun Tran. Their routes are interlined downtown, at one of their two suburban hubs, sometimes involve three or four routes, and show brilliance on the part of whoever designs their scheduling. All routes have "clocked" headways at 10, 15, 20, 30 or 60-minute intervals, but running times vary by time of day and day of week (as they should).

It would take too much time to explain here, but I know of one route that runs from downtown to Tuscon Mall hub, becomes a suburban shuttle from there, returns to the hub, becomes a crosstown route that goes through the UA area, then returns to the hub and operates a fourth route back to the downtown hub. In between, there are trips on the crosstown route that operate only on that route in between spoked trips that run three other routes.

I shudder to think about what the driver paddles would look like...

All the same, it is scheduling genius, and my hat is off to whoever put it together. My hat won't be off for long in the Arizona sun, though, cuz I'd get par boiled!

And finally, interlining of routes helps to reduce monotony for bus operators. Rather than going back and forth on the same route all the time, you get a little variety. From this standpoint, it is a valuable tool as well.

timecruncher

[RailBus63]

Interesting stuff, Cliff. I used to study schedules when I was younger and try to figure out how they scheduled the work for the drivers (OK ... I still do sometimes!).

Here in Syracuse, Centro formalized these types of interlines a decade ago and advertised it as "Direct' service - for example, outbound buses on the Salt Springs route would end at Shoppingtown Mall in suburban Dewitt and become an inbound East Genesee trip, and vice versa. For what it's worth, I noticed on a recent busfanning foray that some trips no longer interline in this fashion when I spotted the same Salt Springs bus returning inbound that I had just photographed heading outbound 20 minutes earlier.

Jim

[HwyHaulier]

Cliff -

Indeed! I found your report breathtaking, in detail of slick dispatching and fleet management tricks!
Might need the caveat: "Do Not Attempt This At Home!" <G>

I noted you covered the part in how to deal with time of day variations...

I haven't been on premises to watch how the guys do it, but I suspect BROWN CAR has all of it well
rehearsed! After all, over a century doing it with packages and freight!

..................Vern...................

[timecruncher]

The problem is, in many cities, the schedulers are lazy and set the running times as the same from one time of day to the other. Phoenix is a good example of this. Look at the lengthy routes they run, and the clean clocked headways, then note that the bus at 4:30am has the same amount of time between duepoints on the schedule as the bus at 4:30pm.

Guess what? THAT DOESN'T WORK!

But it does make for pretty schedules. Let me work on posting some of my headway sheets and you can look at how times change from early morning to peak to midday to afternoon peak to evening. I'll have to cook up a few pdf files and put them on my server to post, but it will surely put someone to sleep.

Big Brown has a different setup altogether. Their scheduling for deliveries is similar to what we use for paratransit service except that loading and departure is from one place - their shipping hub. In paratransit, you have 1,000 people in different places going to 500 different destinations. There's a lot more going on to plan that much bus service.

I once asked our scheduling software vendor if they had considered getting into crew scheduling for airlines. I was told that they looked into it, and it was too complicated to even try!

'Nuff said!

timecruncher

[HwyHaulier]

Cliff -

Copy That! You mean to tell be that even the bus business has its share of the braindead and inept, who truly aren't up to this dispatch game?

You do make a solid point why "freight side" is an easier deal on city "PU&D" work. The example you pose, in fact, is part of the foundation of my
arguendo of what is wrong with present date transit. They can't break away from the concept of an imaginary "CBD" area!

Why is that? Because facing realities that the business is satisfying travel requirements, where every customer (rider) is a separate and distinct
"market"! That surely conflicts with thinking of all of it as "mass" anything at all. It is actually a collected market place of ad hoc, on call, myriad
trips between huge numbers of origins, to and from huge numbers of destinations. Go figure it, if you can! No one else seems up to it! <G>
For the most part, folks do it with their own vehicles...

So, "CBD" is a "security blanket and thumb sucking" exercise? It is so much easier to schedule that way. So it doesn't exist, for the most part,
anymore? What's the problem? <G>

Sidebar: Jim. I owe you one here. Explanation of the TAO and ZEN of National City Lines, and how they would have run streetcars into the 1970s.
"I'll be back!" <G>

...............Vern.............

[dsevil]

[ripta42]

I think Cliff's predecessor came to RIPTA. Six routes run concurrently along Charles Street for a few miles after leaving downtown, with several major generators along the stretch. Note the intervals between buses between 7:00 and 9:00 a.m. range from 2 to 22 minutes!

Then there's the southbound 42-Hope Street, which has 20 minute headways most of the day but has an inexplicable 52 minute interval during the p.m. peak.

[dsevil]

This is all making me curious as to what the combined timetable for Routes 17, 23, and 40 along Baxter Avenue and Bardstown Road would look like...

[dsevil]

Well, I managed to create one. It's only in the form of a tab-separated text file, but I *will* find it extremely useful myself, and that's aside from any curiosity. I *might* have to do up a PDF...

[timecruncher]

That goofy Route 2 schedule was one of the first I fixed (because it was easy, with only two Saturday - Sunday buses), but because the headway was so mixed up on weekdays as well.

With TARC, Route 17 (which includes the Route 40) and Route 23. There is no attempt at coordination because the two routes serve different destinations. 17 is a radial route to and from the CBD (easy now Hiway Hauler), and 23 goes through the outer edge of the CBD, but acts far more like a crosstown route.

http://www.ridetarc.org/Manager/Routes/SchedulePDF/Rt_17_40pocket.pdf

http://www.ridetarc.org/Manager/Routes/SchedulePDF/Rt_23pocket.pdf

On 23, there are trips that run from 10th & Broadway to/from Shawnee Park. These are garage pullins. Normally, I would hide these trips to keep the schedule "clean," but unfortunately, a lot of our drivers would put up an "OUT OF SERVICE" sign if I did and pass everyone up. So rather than have to deal with customer complaints, we run these garage trips in service. This route, and Route 18 to a lesser extent, are the only routes on which garage trips are still shown.

Additionally, there are too many destinations off of the Bardstown Road corridor for one route to serve efficiently. This was the problem back in Louisville Transit days - Route 23 had five full-time outer branches and three short-turn loops east of downtown.

I've been paring down the variations slowly but surely for 14 years now, and I have 17/40 down to what is basically two branches - 17 to Fern Creek and 40 to Jeffersontown, with a 17 short-turn during peak hours at Bashford Avenue. 23 was supposed to revert to two branches, but after public hearings, I was told to put back the Dutchmans Lane branch. It produces bupkus ridership, but there are numerous disabled riders along portions of it who ride once a month to the doctor/grocery/bingo and claim that they ride the bus to get there and back.

Centro's schedule appears to have return trips to downtown from other routes mixed in with the trunk. I didn't look too closely, but it would be more efficient to simply deadhead the trips back downtown and possibly save a vehicle or two while keeping the trunk headway consistent.

But that's just me...

Our planner refers to me as a "Fundamentalist Scheduler." I like that. It fits me perfectly!

timecruncher

[dsevil]

Actually the Route 43 schedule also lists a few trips to/from 13th & Market, not all the way to Broadway. I *think* they're garage trips.

I rode the 11 (now 43) almost every day for just over a decade, so I *might* very well have taken one of those trips once or twice (probably to transfer to an 18 or 15).

[timecruncher]

You're absolutely right about 43. Forgot those! That is, of course, because of the one-way streets down in Portland. Passengers regularly board on Portland, ride to the loop at 32nd, then ride back over Bank Street on east/southbound trips. Plus, there are potential transfers with Route 27 at Portland Loop, and on garage pull ins, the potential for connections on Market Street with Routes 15 and 18.

Route 11 used to have a wee bit more bus service in the day...

Here's a pdf of the Portland-Shelby pocket schedule from September 9, 1957 (when the timecruncher was 6 years old, I might add):

http://zeke.mine.nu/~timecruncher/LTC_11_9-9-57.pdf

Note the Monday only schedule. Monday in Louisville was shopping day/night. Stores were open until 9:00pm downtown and there were significantly more shoppers in those long-gone "blue law" days when most stores were closed on Sundays and before shopping centers. Remember too, the service shown was actually self-supporting from the farebox. At the time, cash fare was 20 cents, or 4 tokens for 75 cents. Available from your courteous bus operator, of course!

timecruncher
Old and crotchety now, of course.