Posts Tagged: Wait Times

09
Sep

2013

Understanding Travel Decisions—A Human Perspective

Like many people of my generation, I put myself through two university degrees working in restaurants and bars. The last spot I ever worked at was a high-end Irish Pub in Toronto’s financial district.

Thankfully, the pub was located exactly 25 minutes’ walk from my apartment. I knew, because I’d meticulously timed it, measured it and shaved off every potential minute by finding every potential short-cut I could find—demonstrating the kind of meticulous attention to detail that makes us transit geeks so popular with the ladies.

The question then before I walked out my front door was whether to walk or to take transit.

Seems like a simple question, right? It wasn’t. Let me explain:

The most direct transit route from my apartment to the pub involved (in order of sequence of events):

  • a 2 minute journey from my front door to the streetcar stop;
  • an undetermined wait time for the streetcar;
  • a 6 minute streetcar trip;
  • a 2 minute transfer time from the streetcar to the subway;
  • an undetermined wait time for the subway;
  • a 4 minute subway ride;
  • a 2 minute journey from the subway to the pub.

You see the problem right away.

While the trip itself (let’s say the fixed journey time) was 16 minutes long, the wait times for the two vehicles in between were completely undetermined. Generally speaking, those wait times ranged any where from 1 minute to 10 minutes, and predicting them were nigh impossible.

That meant that my actual travel time by transit would be any where from 18 minutes to 36 minutes. Sure there were some situations where transit was a faster option, but that only occurred in 28% of all the possible wait time combinations.

Here’s the most interesting part: If I had to wait 8 minutes or more for either the streetcar or (not both) the subway, travelling by foot always yielded a shorter travel time. I know this because I built a spreadsheet to understand it for myself.

Assuming that an 8 minute wait time for any transit vehicle in Toronto is 50/50 proposition (at best) and given the $3.00 fare, is it any surprise then that I almost always walked?



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Thought Experiments
6
Comments
02
Apr

2012

How Long Will You Wait For Public Transportation?

A long time ago we asked the question When is a Minute, Not A Minute? In that post we went into how one’s perception of travel time is relative to how they’re actually travelling. As we note in that post, the Transportation Research Board states that a minute of time waiting for a transit vehicle is equivalent to 2.1 minutes of in-vehicle time. This figure increases to 2.5 minutes at transfer points.

This suggests some very interesting things about how wait times have an impact on transit ridership and how we might be able to play with them to increase ridership.

That stats always rolling around in the back of my head, and I’ve recently been playing with a similar idea for the last couple of weeks and I wanted to get our readers’ reactions and comments to it before I put together a “final” version. Remember, this is very rough and preliminary:

The basic idea here is that the time we’re willing to wait for any given transit vehicle is dependent upon the time we’re likely to spend travelling a given distance on that vehicle. The longer (further?) we’re going to travel by that mode, the longer we’re willing to wait.

While by no means mathematically precise, I think it’s anecdotally and intuitively correct: We’re willing to spend 3 hours waiting at an airport for our plane to travel literally thousands of kilometres, but we’re only willing to wait a few minutes for a bus to take us a few klicks to a subway station.

There are, I suspect, some large implications for this, but I’d rather save those until I get some reactions, corrections and ideas from everyone else.



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Thoughts
16
Comments
07
Jun

2011

The Potential Perils of LT1M Wait Times

“Five more minutes then I’m hailing a taxi.” Image by flickr user Pim Horvers.

One way to build a successful business is to provide a product, feature or service the market didn’t even know it couldn’t live without. Once the market is exposed to that which it can’t live without, everything that came before it seems lacking and the market is irrevocably disrupted for the better.

The urban gondola feature that has the most potential to cause this kind of disruption (yet receives so little attention) is less-than-one-minute (LT1M) wait times.

It’s odd. Nowadays, wait times are accepted as a given within public transit to such an extent we barely even pay attention to them anymore.

Yes, I’m going to have to wait for my bus or streetcar.

Yes, my streetcar is probably not going to arrive at its scheduled time.

Yes, I’ll be waiting for ten minutes only to have four buses arrive all at one time.

(Note: That last one is such a common occurrence, there’s even a name for it – bunching.)

We barely discuss these things anymore because they are simply a part of the performance-cost package of public transportation. These things are such a given, we don’t even recognize that another way is possible.

Urban gondolas do away with that problem to such a massive degree, one has to ask themselves the following: Once people are exposed to LT1M wait times, how long will they be willing to accept the old model of unreliable schedules and extended wait times offered by standard technologies?

One could even find themselves wondering how to reliably implement LT1M wait times in our standard transit technologies (hint: you currently can’t).

To the cable industry and urban gondola enthusiast this must sound like an excellent opportunity, and it is. But it’s also a situation that’s fraught with peril:

If people begin to demand LT1M across their transit network, we may find transit agencies and planners attempting to implement cable technology in wholly inappropriate ways and locales. That doesn’t help anyone.

Recognizing the possibility that the Cable Propelled Transit’s LT1M wait times could make existing transportation services look inferior (from a wait time perspective), transit agencies may balk at urban gondolas entirely.

The convenience of LT1M could cause riders of other parts of a transit network to shift their usage to an adjacent or nearby urban gondola line. This shift in ridership could potentially overwhelm the urban gondola line, push it over capacity and thereby eliminate all of the convenience LT1M initially provided. It should be noted that this very situation occurred with Medellin’s Linea K.

LT1M wait times represent a massive advantage cable has over every other standard transportation mode and is one that’s unlikely to be matched any time soon.

But unless transit providers, planners and manufacturers recognize the potential problems LT1M could cause – and effectively manage and mitigate those problems – cable transit could find itself a victim of its own success.



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Thoughts
5
Comments
22
Jul

2010

A Wait Time Thought Experiment

According to the Transportation Research Board’s Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual, wait times for transit are around 2 times more onerous to riders than actual in-vehicle time. They see that ratio rise to 2.5 times when wait times are coupled to transfers.

With that in mind, how long is the following journey:

  • A 5 minute walk from your front door to your bus stop.
  • A 7 minute wait for your bus.
  • A 10 minute bus ride to the LRT.
  • A 1 minute walk from bus stop to LRT stop.
  • A 4 minute wait for the next LRT.
  • A 15 minute LRT ride.
  • A 3 minute walk from LRT station to your destination.

Standard transit planning practice would say that the total journey time is 45 minutes. But is that accurate? Yes and no.

Yes, in the sense that it’s the actual journey time. No, in the sense that it doesn’t actually reflect the riders’ experience of the journey.

If the TRB is to be believed, the journey feels like it’s 58 minutes long, a 29% premium over actual journey time.

We know time flies when you’re having fun but the exact opposite is true as well.

So when you plan your transit models, shouldn’t you take the experience and subjectivity of your riders into consideration? After all, aren’t those the people you’re serving? Shouldn’t their experience be paramount?



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Thought Experiments / Urban Planning & Design
2
Comments
16
Dec

2009

Transit Signal Priority (TSP) Schemes…

. . . are often touted as the answer to our transit woes. The idea is simple enough: When a transit vehicle approaches an intersection, the light changes to give it priority. Trouble is, there’s very little research to suggest it works and transit advocates such as Steve Munro continue to laud this technology without discussing its very dubious track record.

When you dig into the research you see that some cities who’ve implemented it have shown a roughly 6-10% reduction in travel times, which is not, I’ll admit insignificant. Trouble is, most transit riders are more concerned with wait times rather than total travel time (a point made explicit by the Transportation Research Board) and TSP has little impact on wait times.

The Transportation Research Board’s Transit Signal Priority Handbook is a good place to start learning about Transit Signal Priority. The document is very positive on the technology, but that should be viewed with severe skepticism. Of the 32 systems case studies, statistics are only offered for 7. Those seven claim a reduction in travel times, but their methods of evaluation are not reported.

This is an important issue because (as pointed out in another TRB study) most evaluations and studies have been based on computer simulations, rather than on hard, empirical data. The few independent studies that use real-world data show that TSP’s impact is inconsistent and negligible. In fact, in Portland, they experienced an increase in travel times on several routes where TSP was implemented.

I’m not going to say TSP doesn’t work, because I don’t know. I won’t mistake lack of evidence of worth for evidence of worthlessness. But I will ask why it is that cities around North America are spending tens of millions of dollars on a technology that has questionable effectiveness.

Cities throw money at worthless projects all the time, we know that. But wouldn’t it be better, instead, for a few of them to get together, each chip in a little bit of money and hire a legitimately independent and deeply skeptical research team to investigate the technology’s actual worth?

The team would be required not to use computer simulations. They’d have to actually go out and ride, measure and observe the systems in question and report without fear of political interference or reprisal. They’d have to use their own eyes and they’d have to be honest. And if after that we find that TSP is the messiah of transit, then I’ll be all for it. Until then, however, I think we all should be a little more suspicious about TSP’s actual value.



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Analysis / Other Transit Techs / Research Issues / Thoughts / Urban Planning & Design
0
Comments
01
Dec

2009

Up To 16 Extra Minutes Each Day

Extra 16 Minutes

And That's When The Streetcars Run On Time.



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Analysis / Thoughts
0
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