Examination of Witnesses (Questions 300
- 319)
WEDNESDAY 1 MARCH 2000
MR IAN
BUCHAN, MR
PETER HENDY,
MR FRANCOIS-XAVIER
PERIN AND
MR NICK
BUCKLEY
300. Is it the same with Transdev?
(Mr Perin) Yes. If I may add, this quality partnership
with the local authorities is vital for bringing quality into
public transport. Our other area of work is integration of the
network where probably the local authorities cannot bring that
alone, and when I speak about integration I speak about integration
between cars in carparks and public transport, integration in
through-ticketing agreements, integration between modes, between
cycles and light rail, for instance. This involves probably far
more than just the local authorities, it involves other operators
as well, it involves highway authorities and a number of different
authorities, and all these people need to work together to raise
quality.
301. Is there any scheme for light transit railways
to be introduced into the areas where you are running buses at
the present time? Have you any schemes for the LRT to be introduced?
(Mr Buchan) In our case, Chairman, we are certainly
keen to get involved in discussions in any areas where local authorities
have ideas for light rail transit and for new guided busways.
Chairman
302. But no specific one at the moment?
(Mr Buchan) We are talking about this in Portsmouth,
Bristol, and we are very much involved in CERT in Edinburgh which
is a new guided busway out to the airport. There are others in
the pipeline as well but those are the three most advanced at
the moment.
(Mr Buckley) We are of course involved in Nottingham.
We have also been advising Hampshire County Council about Portsmouth's
operational needs for about three years. We are very interested
in that scheme and we are committed to developing light rail wherever
we feel there is a need and we can justify it.
Mr Donohoe
303. Do you think you are brought in early enough
in the development of any of these projects?
(Mr Buckley) We worked both in Nottingham and in Croydon
with the project development groups which came together quite
early on in those projects, and certainly in those two projects
the operators were involved early on but other projects have lacked
operator input early in their concept phase.
304. Part of that development, one assumes,
is to study the viability of putting anything like this into place.
Earlier we heard of an experience where there has been an increased
traffic loading of some 30 per cent. Outside London, what is your
experience, if any, and do you analyse the social mix of the passenger
that you expect to have?
(Mr Buckley) Certainly we have worked on analysing
Birmingham, from the point of view of bidder, and Nottingham and
Croydon of course. You tend to look at where you see the patronage
coming from—existing bus users, car users, increments from
development exercises—and you tend to look at it that way
rather than from the point of view of, if you like, the economic
structure of the passenger mix.
305. So what evidence do you have that you are
taking people out of the car and putting them on to these services?
(Mr Buckley) You survey it afterwards. You do your
estimates beforehand and then you survey it.
306. What is your experience of that? Have you
any experience, or has Firstgroup any experience, in introducing
any of these schemes that there is a transfer of people?
(Mr Buckley) Yes. We have four schemes which we have
introduced in France where we know what has—
Chairman
307. They are?
(Mr Buckley) Strasbourg, Nantes, Grenoble and Toulouse.
(Mr Perin) And we are building three more in Montpelier,
Orléans and Rennes. The kind of evidence you are probably
looking for is in the park-and-ride system in Strasbourg, where
we started a park-and-ride system, where people effectively do
park their car and jump on the light rail system. We started with
something like 500 car spaces in a specific place. We have had
to extend this to 2,000 car parks because on Saturday morning,
for instance, the place is so crowded by people leaving their
cars and going shopping to the city centre with LRT. That gives
real evidence of the success of this switch from car to tram.
(Mr Buckley) This switch is not just dependent on
putting a light rail scheme in and providing a carpark, it is
very dependent on what the local authorities do in the city centre
in introducing pedestrianised ways and affecting the number of
carparking spaces in the city centre. It is not just transport
actions.
(Mr Hendy) Can I go back to the start of the original
question which was, is the operator involved early enough? I think
your colleague was referring to a stage of development in these
schemes before they are put out for private/public sector partnerships.
We do believe there is a case when that is done to separate the
selection of the operator from the whole consortium and that is
simply because the operator, together with the public authority,
whoever is promoting the scheme, has generally a much longer time
frame of interest in it than the people who merely construct it
and equip it. I think you have already heard other evidence to
suggest that some of the public authorities promoting these schemes
in the future will look at them in that way, which is that it
may be beneficial for the long-term health of the scheme to select
the winning consortium, as it were, in two bites.
308. What is the difference between these sorts
of schemes in terms of what has already been given to us as evidence
in terms of the numbers you can actually extract from the cars
to ride on these types of services against that of the bus industry
itself? We have heard in the past evidence to suggest it is very
difficult, what would your experience be given that Firstgroup
has operated that as well?
(Mr Hendy) I think the evidence that Ian has given
you is about substantial traffic generation, drawing people out
of their cars in schemes where guided busways and other bus priorities
are sufficient to give real priority, real reliability and real
increases in speed. All of our efforts now have concentrated on
getting these improvements—bus priorities, guided busways—where
it is justified on corridors which are long enough and have enough
people on them to make some real changes to people's perception
of public transport. Where that is done, and you can do what has
been done in Leeds and elsewhere, the differences will not be
very different from the effects of light rail in those cases.
309. That is where you are using things like
the O-Bahn as guided bus routes and whatever else?
(Mr Hendy) Yes.
310. Has Firstgroup found any distinguishing
differences between these sorts of schemes and trying to get people
out of their cars and into ordinary buses? We have heard evidence
in the past which suggests you have not had any success whatsoever
in getting people into your £80,000 bus.
(Mr Hendy) I think the case is that we do have evidence
that on perfectly normal bus corridors with good quality vehicles,
with well-trained staff and with sufficient bus priorities in
congested areas to get the bus reliably past jams, there is passenger
generation. It is clear from earlier answers to your colleagues
that both guided buses and light rail add something more because
they are something special, but there is not any doubt that a
well-presented bus service can make some shift and we have evidence
of that.
(Mr Buchan) On the premium routes we have introduced—and
as I have mentioned we have 1,500 of the new specification vehicles,
with a flat floor, a low floor and all the other features I mentioned—on
every occasion where we have put them on what I would call a premium
route, we have had passenger growth.
311. I am sorry to interrupt but what I am trying
to do—and I maybe doing it in the wrong way—is find
out if you analyse social mix. Are you pulling people out of cars
or are you growing your business on the basis of existing passengers
doing more journeys?
(Mr Buchan) Every case is different, but we have had
growth on these routes from something like 7 per cent to 20 per
cent. On the surveys we have done, something between a third and
a half of that increase has been from people we have attracted
out of cars.
Mr Donohoe: Excellent. Thank you.
Dr Ladyman
312. The Committee recently visited Adelaide
and I was very impressed by the O-Bahn system, and I would be
interested in hearing from both groups of witnesses how you see
the strengths and weaknesses of an O-Bahn system versus a light
rail system. In particular, can somebody give me some help as
to in what circumstances the light rail system would be considered
to be more cost effective than something like an O-Bahn, which
I would guess would be a lot cheaper in terms of construction
and rail costs?
(Mr Perin) Each of the modes has its pros and cons;
capacity, costs in capital and bus operation, speed and environmental
effect are different in both cases. If you want to run in the
core of the city and if you need to carry more than 5,000 people
in a peak hour then you need a light rail system. You just cannot
achieve it with guided buses. If you are in the range of 3,000
people per peak hour, then you are just at the edge of having
guided buses instead of a light rail system. So capacity is the
first item; cost, indeed the capital cost of guided buses is far
below, in the range of 70 per cent of building a light rail system,
let us say £10 million per kilometre for a light rail system
and £7 million for a guided bus system[2].
(Mr Buchan) It is how long is a piece
of string because it depends how much guideway you need to get
the improvements in service. In the guideway that we are building
now on the East Leeds corridor out to York Road there will be
relatively short stretches of guideway which are designed to get
the bus around pinch-points, around bottlenecks, and that scheme
is going to cost £10 million and the operators, ourselves
and Arriva working together, are putting half of that money forward
for the infrastructure, and in addition we will put state of the
art new vehicles in. So that has cost £10 million. To build
an LRT from end to end on that section would probably cost, I
would think, at current prices about £160 million, so you
can see there is a very significant difference.
313. Can you just clarify that for me? £10
million buys you how many metres of guided busway and what is
the total length of the route?
(Mr Buchan) The routes vary because they fan out,
but I would say the longest route out from the centre of Leeds
is something like six miles. Of course, the other advantage of
the guideway is that the vehicles using the guideway and getting
the benefits of the shorter journey times can fan out at the far
end and serve six or seven estates. You would never put LRT tracks
into all those six or seven estates, you could not justify the
cost of that. The latest figures in terms of what it would cost
for a kilometre of guideway, although you would never have those
sort of sections, is in the region of half a million pounds or
something like that, very much below what it would cost for LRT.
But it all depends on how many of the services underneath you
have to move, what land is available and so on. The key about
the guideway in the way we are using it at the moment in Leeds
is that it is not end-to-end like Adelaide, you simply build stretches
where you have the land round the bottlenecks and you put traffic
signals in to get the bus to the front of the queue of queuing
traffic all the time, so at every pinch-point the bus goes straight
to the front of the queue. In the Leeds guideway system it means
from end-to-end, which is about five miles, we can do the journey
in exactly the same time at major peak times as we can at off-peak,
therefore they are getting a faster journey, it is reliable and
the bus end-to-end at peak is faster than anybody could to it
in a car.
314. Is that using very much the same technology
as the Adelaide system?
(Mr Buchan) Yes, it is exactly the same.
Chairman
315. The thing is, however, of course if you
reverse the pattern and you run your buses in the same number
into the centre of Leeds, you lose the advantage of the bus, do
you not? Because if you have clogged up the centre, if you have
brought them off the guideway at a certain point to put them into
the centre, you would have an effect upon the traffic in the centre
of Leeds, would you not?
(Mr Buchan) This is where Leeds City Council and the
PTE work hand-in-glove. In the centre of Leeds we have an inner
core around the central area which is bus only and there is another
section immediately around the next set of roads which is for
circular car traffic, so the bus has access across the outer ring
which is ordinary traffic into a central ring around the central
area which is buses and delivery only.
316. So when we are looking carefully at the
calculations for light rail versus buses and guided bus versus
straight forward, we would have to do some kind of calculation
for the amount of money which the local authority is spending
on alternative traffic arrangements?
(Mr Buchan) Yes.
317. I am not going to say that that would not
also apply to light rail, but when we are doing the costings we
would have to bear in mind the reason that that system works is
because the local authority is prepared to plan ahead and do the
extra work on the core centre of Leeds as well?
(Mr Buchan) Yes, but that is done for the benefit
of the shopkeepers and all the bus network and the car users as
well.
318. Yes.
(Mr Buchan) It is not just for guided buses.
Mr Bennett
319. How crucial is housing density to making
any of these systems work? It does appear that in most of the
European cities where tramways work well, housing densities are
much higher than here.
(Mr Hendy) If you are talking about light rail and
tramways, all of the evidence is that you need large existing
volumes of traffic to be able to get an economic justification
for either and—both now—public and private funding.
So you do need relatively high volumes of housing and you need
relatively high volumes of existing usage but that is not mutually
exclusive, you can suck in still more people out of their cars.
When the Committee were in Croydon you will have seen on the eastern
side of Croydon that that system will serve very large areas of
high density housing, which is where it will get its baseload
of traffic volume.
(Mr Perin) I would like to say that the cities in
France which are building light rail systems are cities with 200,
300,000 inhabitants, which are not so dense probably than the
British 600,000 or 700,000 inhabitants. On the main corridor I
think there is evidence that the LRT itself can be very efficient.
Grenoble has 400,000 inhabitants and the LRT system which is a
two lines system carries 45 per cent of the total network—bus,
tram and trolley bus.
2 Note by Witness: Capital costs of guided
buses are far below that of light rail systems, as described,
but cost of operation per passenger carried is lower for a light
rail system than for a guided bus system. Back
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