Joe Anderson’s folly: why scrapping Liverpool’s bus lanes will lead to more congestion, not less

Followers on Twitter and transport geeks will be aware that Liverpool’s directly-elected mayor, Joe Anderson, recently decided to scrap bus lanes in the city.

Anderson claims that bus lanes “simply don’t work“, adding that “we have looked at it over six to seven months and we feel it makes no improvement to the traffic flow in the city.”

I assume he’s referring to the ‘royal’ we, as I’ve seen little to suggest there’s been a serious consultation. I can find no evidence of consultation with experts nor, in fact, the bus company Arriva who have written to all 90 councillors opposing the decision. Arriva carry 80 million passengers by bus in the region and in 2005, 82 per cent of public transport journeys were made by bus, so it’s safe to say they have some experience in the area.

There’s already been a fair bit of coverage around this controversial decision, many quoting the displeasure of a Green Councillor, Coyne who said “It goes against everything that is sensible about transport thinking“.

Unfortunately, no journalist goes into this in more detail. I did some searching and, while I’m not familiar with the specific problems in Liverpool during peak hours, but I did find some pretty basic theories of road transport applicable to this situation that support Coyne’s statement.

Bus lanes exist to allow buses priority because a single bus transports more people than cars for the same amount of road space. A double-decker can hold 64-90 people, whilst a single-decker can hold 48-80. Go browse Arriva’s fleet.

Remix of the 'Car, Bus, Bike' poster by Matt Wiebe, used under Creative Commons 2.0-BY-NC

Scrapping bus lanes might allow slightly more car traffic to flow, but it is inevitable that buses be slowed and the timetable disrupted. Remember, the timetable and frequency will all have been planned with the knowledge that bus lanes are in operation.

Furthemore, studies have shown that the more road space you supply, the more traffic uses it. This is called induced demand and was recognised by J.J. Leeming, a British road traffic engineer who described it in his 1969 book. More modern studies have also confirmed this, going so far as to suggest a “fundamental law of road congestion“:

“[That] the number vehicle-kilometers traveled (VKT) increases in direct proportion to the available lane-kilometers of roadways. The additional VKT traveled come from increased driving by current residents and businesses, and migration.”

So potentially, all Mayor Joe Quimby Anderson has achieved is:

    1. scrapped bus lanes to slow down bus user’s journeys
    2. increased the amount of road space for even more traffic to congest Liverpool city centre

..all because he believes bus lanes “don’t work”.

Range Rovers all round!

Road safety on Great Ancoats Street, Manchester – letter to Councillor Mick Loughman

Below is a letter I emailed to my local councillor, Mick Loughman, on 26 June 2013 (two weeks ago). As yet I’ve had no response.

I believe politics should be open, so I wrote this letter privately and hoped to receive a response before I published the correspondence and discussed it further

Dear Cllr Loughman,

I’m writing to raise my concerns with the dangerous state of Great Ancoats Street. Specifically the section including the junction with Newton St/Blossom St, all the way to and including the junction with Store Street. Continue reading

A great way to think big and uncover your company’s potential

Originally published over at Melbourne.co.uk

In a company like ours, where we’re dealing with customers 24/7 and managing the day-to-day activities of the business, finding time to think about the future can be a challenge. There’s always something you could be doing – a ticket that needs responding to, a report to write – but taking a step back and flexing our imaginations from time-to-time is just as important.

In the tech industry, there are literally no limits to what we could achieve, yet as technologists, we can sometimes experience a failure of imagination because everything is a problem that needs to be ‘solved’. Continue reading