what if dunedin city had a subway? can it?

2023 12 08

one of our first experiences exploring dunedin city involved going around and exploring the university campus.

saw the clock tower, a bunch of tall buildings, and what looked like a montrealais styled metro station!

of course, we knew dunedin didn't have a subway. it's a hilly city, after all, it's not like trains can exist on those. trains dont like slopes!. and definitely not a small, southern hemisphere city, in a poor country like new zealand could support a metro anyways

we've been thinking about this building ever since though. every time we pass it, we think about how awesome it would be if dunedin did have a metro. if we could just pop in the buildig and get on to george street, princes, south dunedin.

and, when we take the bus and it gets delayed ten minutes from CBD traffic, we also fantasize about how wonderful it would be to have a subway.

in dunedin, railways in general actually are fantasies, and so if one was built, it probably wouldn't be all that practical. people love the idea of railways, without actually understanding why they're special. aside from trains being cuties.

and, remembering this, we remembered that a lot of the benefits of a metro network, can be achieved with buses. dunedin lacks enthusiasm by thinking things can only be done with trains!

oh, by the way, metro and subway means the same thing, i use them interchangeably. the term "subway" implies that it's underground, but in real life, trains called subways often travel above ground as well as underground.

the purpose of a subway is to have a fast and convenient link across a city. an underground metro lets it take the most direct routes, and lets it always go max speed, because it doesn't need to worry about hitting someone or something. a subway is also designed to carry lots of people comfortably, with loads of space.

a major part of the convenience and usability of a subway comes from how often a train shows up. i remember that when i stayed in ottawa, the metro coming every five minutes let me get on and off whenever i wanted, and gave tons of flexibility. i could decide on a whim i wanted to add something to my schedule, like picking up snacks, and then get off and do it, without worrying about being late for the next thing in my schedule, since the next train arrives imediately.

and i believe we can redesign the bus system in dunedin to take advantage of these characteristics to effectively act like a subway, that just uses busses. you can even do the Birsbane Australia route of getting tri-articulated electric bussies that look like trains, although that's getting ahead of ourselves.

as evidence that this works, back in ottawa, buses also act like subways. the bus line where we lived also had 5 minute headways, and had it's own dedicated roadways, as if like a railway track for the bus. they also had bendy portions to let them hold more people. and a lot of residents seem to prefer these bussies over the metro!

and this kind of conveince is completely absent in dunedin. bus frequencies every 40 minutes are common. bus 8 st clair normandy is consistently every 15 minutes on weekdays and it shows, it's always by far the busiest bus we take. nobody uses any of the other ones because they'll be late!!

except for bus 8, dunedin's timetables force people to plan their day around when the bus comes, rather than the other way around. . if you wanna make plans to see a friend, but the bus schedule doesn't line up, tough luck. this is especially the case if you need multiple buses. wanna head from port chalmers to anywhere else in the city? enjoy paying double fare because your transfer has a 40 minute wait for the second bus.

and most people dont want to rely on a bus that will make them late for work, school, whatever, if they end up missing it or it gets delayed. at least, we and the people know wouldn't like that what so ever! in fact, dunedin's current bus schedules feels abusive to our mind, controlling our lives and holding us back while also forcing us to respect it because we dont have any power over it.

in addition to this, the timetables aren't even accurate, due to delays, early arrivals, and busses just not existing even though the schedule says they do.

in practice, this makes transfers impossible to do with any amount of punctuality and comfort, and makes the bus completely useless to anyone who has obligations of any sort. on top of this though, it also forces the bus network to be designed to have as many stops as possible, and have it take its time, because the punishment for missing the bus is so huge.

where we're from, from toronto region, people regularly tell others not to fuss about missing the subway, since another train will be there in 2 minutes. this lets the subway leave the station on time without getting delayed, and means there needs to be less stops in the first place, which means it can travel at top speed for longer, which means it needs less vehicles to run at that freqeuncy.

bus stops in dunedin are regularly placed only metres apart, and i can only imagine the reason for this is because, well, if you can't make it to a further away stop, you are far more likely to just miss the bus. but with high frequncy, this factor is non existent. in very hilly areas i understand frequent stop spacing signifcantly more, but even then having multiple more than three stops on one block in a suburb is wild.

having stops placed at strategic distances apart is very important in a public transport network because the time spend boarding and deboarding is one of the single largest contributing factors to delays. if a bus takes one minute at each stop to board a passenger, and there are three stops within 500m, then you need to account for the fact the bus could randomly be delayed by 3 minutes in just the first 500m of a route, if there is a couple people at each, or even a cursory level of traffic. and, in public transport, delays effectively make your travel time longer, less consistent, and lower your average speed, and therefore make the bus less useful and less reliable, in addition to making it take more resources to run, which means less resources for expanding services.

in a high frequency system, you could reduce the number of stops to a strategic distance to optimise for coverage and speed and usefulness. missing the last bus is fine if you can show up for the next one. lowering the amount of time it takes to complete a route also means you need less buses to operate at a certain frequency, which i feel is something dunedin needs, given the whole being short on drivers thing.

now, lets be real, dunedin's actual bus vehicles also suck. aside from them being owned by two different companies with three different livery schemes and both of the ritchies ones being Ugly, basically every single bus in the network is falling apart or broken in some important way, and have extremely inefficient layouts for passenger flow. the bus layouts themselves cause so many issues for boarding and deboarding speed. the doors are slow to open and close, sometimes the doors just can't open, sometimes they can't close while moving, the card readers are finnicky and not as responsive as they should be, the doors and aisle are small and cramped, double seating means it takes longer for someone to reach the aisle from the outside of the seat, stairs make the aisles slower to navigate, the front door is so far away from any seats or hand holds, some buses have coach seating on top of the engine, which has fixed arm rests that make getting in and out of the seats impossible and catches items while in the aisle. it fucking sucks. everytime we're at a stop we like to turn a stopwatch on to see how long it takes to board the bus.

most of these problems require radically reshaping the vehicles' internal layout, like by making most seating parallel with the vehicle rather than perpendiclar, but a very simple solution would just be to let people board on the back doors. the bee reader has different software at each door that make it so that you can only board at the front one, and the front door is a huge bottleneck in boarding and deboarding. if both doors could be used, you can double passenger boarding speed (or even faster; the back door is placed closer to seating and is often a double door meaning more can enter than the front and its faster to reach seats from the back door).

in a ideal bus, it wouldn't have steps in the aisle, the aisle would be wider, the seats would be easier to get in and out of, and there would be enough space for two people to walk in opposite directions next to each other. in an ideal bus, the doors would be wider and closer to seats and handholds. there are two technical limitations to these changes, where do the wheel wells and engine go, but given that buses like this already exist, i dont think its a big issue.

the other main factor to inconsistent schedules and low speed is because of the roadway itself. in the cbd, there are massive delays by getting stuck in a traffic queue at a light. looking at you hospital junction. you could be only blocks away from the bus hub, but have it take ten or twenty minutes to get there because of how bad the signals, queues, and traffic are.

and the thing is, basically every single bus is routed through here. this is one of the most obvious examples for where bus lanes/roads makes sense, i've never seen such an incredibly perfect scenario for them before. the reason i've probably never seen it before, though, is because where it makes this much sense, other cities already have made them bus only. making the stretch in the cbd where basically every single bus goes have either bus lanes or be entirely bus only makes so much goddamn sense i do not think its possible to argue against it.

there should be no opposition to this. making it bus only signficantly increases the capacity of the road and throughput, since multiple people ride a bus and very few ride in a car.

there is like, parking garages, and an entrance to police, hospital, and countdown, but like, accessing those via public transport is much more effcient than with private vehciles, because so many more people fit in one bus, meaning they don't all need their own car. making it bus only effectively makes the road larger because buses use that space substantially more efficently than cars can. letting private vehicles onto these roads make the roads have signficantly lower capacity and gets them clogged up easier. getting the road clogged up means emergency vehicles can't get to and from the hospital and police station as quickly or reliably, and it means that countdown suffers as a business because of the traffic. these roads should be bus only.

we have literally never seen a bus hub where it is totally legally acceptable to drive your car through. that is literally unheard of. after the four minutes spent boarding ten people at the hub, you wait another 2 or 3 just waiitng to get out of the platform and at the traffic signals.

this is actually where the idea for a subway came from. we thought "wouldn't it be nice if we weren't having so much of our time wasted by traffic and signals. if this was a subway we'd already be on the other side of the cbd by now". And then we realised that bus lanes would do the exact same thing as a subway, by making it so it can't get stuck in traffic. bus lanes are basically just train tracks for buses! even in a conservative implementation you could put bus lanes only in the bus hub and at important signal queues, so that buses get first dibs in these spots

and to reiterate, having higher speeds also means you can run higher frequency with the same number of vehicles.

something we think is valuable to point out is how bus 8 Normandy/St. Clair is always packed. it has 15 minute frequency all day, and 15 minutes is relatively close to the magic 12 minute frequency that makes it so people stop checking timetables before boarding. close to the point where people start viewing it as a fixed transortation link you can just show up to whenever and get going relatively soon. it's so incredibly obvious to us that the reason nobody uses the other buses is because their frequencies are literally unusable. especially given the fact that not all vehicles are tracked so its impossible to know if a vehicle will actually come in the next 40 minutes or not.

imagine trying to get to work on time, but you missed the bus. have fun for the next twenty minutes, and then hoping you dont get delayed in traffic. imagine having a meeting and having to tell someone you can't make it because the bus is 30 minutes late. imagine not being able to do anything at the end of the day because the bus is so slow that you can't get to any shops before they close. imagine that bicycling is faster than the bus, and then you remember that in a hilly city like dunedin, a lot of people would rather bike up those hills than wait for the bus.

and any amount of sponteneity is impossible! you have to plan your entire day in advance, following the whims of the bus frequencies. you cant just hop off a bus to go get a snack or pick something up for someone, and then get on the next bus to get back on wiht your day. you are stranded there for 20-40 minutes until the next bus. this also effectively means you get less time in your day!! since more wait time means effectively longer travel times

what we're thinking

wanna make dress up page

i wann a have a pie and also wish we wrote this more gently!

in general wanna do a load on website and projects