Public Transport

Rethinking Bus Priority: New York's Evidence on What Actually Works

We all know that travel time is essential to deciding how to travel. One of the challenges with buses is that they cannot compete with cars when they use the same road infrastructure. Many jurisdictions undertake bus prioritisation to speed up the bus, but which methods are the most effective? This research examined what is and isn’t working in New York City.

Key Takeaways

• Curbside bus lanes alone yield extremely minor benefits due to the curbside bus lane being frequently legally blocked.
• NYC’s busways alone also yield minimal benefits (busways are sections of roads where only buses, delivery vehicles, and local access vehicles are permitted).
• Buses are often caught in increased congestion just before entering a busway, as all the mixed traffic is forced to turn off before the busway.
• Offset and median bus lanes perform better.
• The Select Bus Service (SBS) program included, as a baseline, off-board fare collection and stop consolidation.
• All-door boarding and stop consolidation have been more impactful than bus lanes.
• Off-board fare collection, all-door boarding, and stop removal, combined with offset, curbside, or service lane-aligned bus lanes, had the biggest benefits.
• Transit Signal Priority yielded no clear benefits.

What next?

Have you got the right approach to bus prioritisation? If you are progressing with Transit Signal Priority, do you have the data to show that it works?

Planning

Political-Proof Transport Planning: Why Starting with Existing Users Changes Everything

Many of us have seen good public transport and active transport projects reversed when political winds change. This is an interesting blog from Omer Rafael Bor looking at sequencing investments to build and maintain cross-party political support.

Key Takeaways

• Many projects could deliver greater benefits if they were sequenced better.
• Political winds change direction frequently. Any local project relying solely on political support from one side remains vulnerable.
• Projects with strong economic cases or that are financially viable (where future revenues cover operations) are better placed to resist changes in political winds.
• The key principle is to start with your existing users: areas where people walk despite hostile infrastructure, bus routes with substantial ridership, and well-used train stations on the town's periphery.
• If a street is busy with pedestrians, increase pedestrian space to encourage more foot traffic. More people will arrive using buses or other sustainable modes, and investing further will be a no-brainer.
• For bus routes with high demand, introduce bus priority and increase frequency to generate even higher ridership.
• A future tram network is more likely to be financially viable if overlaid on an existing network of high-frequency, high-demand buses.
• Near busy rail stations, plan new housing developments and use value capture mechanisms to improve service.
• Focusing on existing users is not only the reasonable thing to do from a financial and economic point of view, but it is also more likely to generate public support.
• Do not create more car-dependent users. Low-density urban extensions or settlements are sure to generate objections to sustainable transport projects.
• Every jurisdiction should have a roadmap clearly showing the sequence of sustainable transport projects with a rationale of why one is needed before the other.

What next?

Look at the public and active transport projects you have in the pipeline. Are they sensibly sequenced to maintain and build political support?

Finance

Beyond Public Funding: Mastering the Art of Private Finance for Infrastructure

Many jurisdictions are tight on money and looking at ways to fund infrastructure investments. This report from the UK’s National Audit Office (NAO) examines the lessons it has learnt from using private finance to fund infrastructure.

Key Takeaways

The report includes 12 key lessons:

1. Public bodies responsible for mobilising private capital need clear mandates and objectives.
2. The forward infrastructure pipeline for public investment needs to be credible and consistent.
3. Public bodies need access to appropriate skills and resources to support investment.
4. Contracting authorities should apply robust and consistent criteria when assessing the business case for using private finance.
5. Departments should assess risks, determine who is best placed to absorb them and design agreements that clearly establish the corresponding risk allocation, funding flows and flexibility to address uncertainty.
6. The government should balance a desire to minimise the cost of finance against providing an attractive investment opportunity for investors.
7. Project approvals and financing decisions should be based on commercial and operational objectives, and not to meet accounting classifications.
8. The government should undertake comparable evaluations of publicly and privately financed infrastructure projects.
9. Contracting authorities should adopt an efficient procurement process that is competitive and avoids undue delay.
10. Public bodies should actively monitor and review performance even when projects are privately financed and run.
11. Contingency plans should include protections and alternative options when public services are at risk.
12. Public bodies must manage contracts across their whole lifecycle, including planning for the decommissioning of assets, extension of contracts, re‑procurement or taking over the operation of the asset.

What next?

Have you got a robust governance structure for privately financed infrastructure that includes consideration of these twelve lessons?

Strategy

All Carrot, No Stick: Can Malta's Generous Incentives Transform Urban Mobility?

Malta may not seem the most obvious place to learn lessons on transport planning, but there is some interesting innovation in their recently released “Reshaping our Mobility” plan.

Key Takeaways

The plan has seven pillars:

Vehicle incentives. This includes several carrots for Travel Demand Management (TDM), including:

• A ‘Surrender your licence scheme’ where anyone who renounces all driving licences and car own­ership for five years will be eli­gible for a cash grant of €5,000 per year
• ‘Be the change 17+’, where seventeen-year-olds who opt to ride a small scooter instead of obtaining a motor vehicle li­cence at 18 and commit to this choice until age 21 will receive a grant of €1,500 per year for four years.
• Green travel plans for the public sector
• Carpooling for University students.

24-hour economy. Provide services and deliveries outside of peak hours.

Parking. Increase park and ride facilities, provide additional parking at public sites in the off-peak, and increase parking for EVs, scooters, and motorcycles.

Public Transport. New and upgraded bus routes.

Road Works. Improve coordination.

Alternative Mobility. A commitment to developing strategies.

Remote working. Consider promoting remote working.

Comment

The plan has studiously avoided difficult but effective decisions, such as charging for parking or converting road space into bus lanes. Innovative carrots in the form of vehicle incentives are helpful but will be much less cost-effective than sticks to discourage driving.

What next?

Should innovative incentives be part of your transport policy mix?

Blog

The Long View: Overcoming Short-Termism in Transport Planning and Investment

My blog this week looked at how we can make better long-term decisions in transport.

Key Takeaways

Short-term decision-making in transport creates false economies with significant long-term costs. Examples include:

• Building metro rail lines with too few stations.
• Immature strategic asset management.
• Stop/start investment patterns.
• Reflexively increasing road capacity.
• Overreliance on Benefit Cost Ratios (BCRs)

Solutions to overcome this short-termism include:

• Embracing funding models that recognise transport infrastructure’s long-term value.
• Developing more mature asset management practices to extend infrastructure lifespans and reduce lifecycle costs.
• Deploying continuous investment patterns that create institutional knowledge, supply chain stability, and better outcomes at lower costs.
• Moving from "predict and provide" to vision-based planning.
• Understand BCRs as valuable tools with significant limitations, not as definitive measures of a project's worth.

What next?

What changes can you make to your organisation today to address short-termism?

Leadership

Creating a Legacy: Leadership Practices That Prioritise Long-Term Transport Outcomes

My blog this week looked at how we make too many short-term decisions in transport at the expense of the longer term. Here are some leadership tips for making long-term decisions:

Build Decision-Making Frameworks That Prioritise Long-Term Value

• Implement a "future impact assessment" for all major projects
• Establish a formal review of how past decisions would have differed with longer time horizons
• Create evaluation criteria that explicitly value resilience, adaptability, and lifecycle performance.

Enhance Asset Management Capabilities

• Invest in robust asset management systems and predictive analytics
• Establish clear ownership and accountability for asset performance
• Implement transparent reporting on asset condition and performance with forward-looking indicators.

Create Cultural Change Within Your Organisation

• Recognise and reward decisions that demonstrate long-term thinking
• Protect staff from pressure to deliver short-term wins at the expense of long-term value
• Ensure performance metrics balance short and long-term indicators
• Publicly commit to specific long-term goals and regularly report on progress

Innovation

Beyond the Visual Line: Drones Taking Railway Monitoring to New Heights

While drones have been used for various transport activities, they are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Here is an example from the UK where beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) drones are being used to detect trespassing and find track defects quickly.

Tool

Making Procurement Work for Innovation: The UK's Game-Changing Support Tool

Supporting innovation is complex, and many procurement frameworks make it more challenging. This Innovation Procurement Support Tool from the UK is designed to make it easier.