Frequent transit service offers many benefits for both transit riders and the city, and these are increasingly recognized by both transit authorities and by transit advocates.
It has become a trend to designate a subset of transit routes as a "frequent transit network" or by some similar name. These range from half hourly services in some American Sunbelt sprawlburbs to ten minute networks provided in cities like Toronto and Sydney.
With the benefits of high frequency in mind, it is important to ensure that the transit system actually runs frequent service, as opposed to changing the signs on a route with infrequent service.
In Canada, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Vancouver sign frequent transit networks in addition to us. Our service standards are the weakest among the bunch, but we have more "frequent" transit routes for our population, illustrating the basic truth of transit service that intensive, high-frequency service is a tradeoff against service coverage.
Expanding the frequent network has obvious benefits, namely, that the coverage of frequent service is wider; however, an agency that does not really run frequent service will erode public trust in the advertised service.
What is Frequency?
Because the definition of frequency is so variable, it's useful to control for it before comparing service across cities or across Ottawa. As noted above, the headway required to be signed as "frequent" varies by city-to-city; while ten minutes or less is ideal for high frequency operation, with a few exceptions, most notably Toronto, US-Canadian transit has generally standardized on 15 minute headways as frequent service.
The span of frequent service also varies from city to city. Toronto will not sign a route into its Ten Minute Network if it runs every eleven minutes after midnight on Sunday; on the other hand, Ottawa only requires 15 minute service in the daylight hours on weekdays.
Frequency can also be quantified.
One method of quantifying frequent service is to count the number of frequent hours in a network. Since agencies will set standards, for example, "between 0600-2100 on weekdays and 0800-2100 on weekends," that can be quantified as 101 hours of frequent service a week.
The other method is to literally count the number of buses scheduled on any given route. This has the upside of catching supplemental, non-standard, or non-15 minute (Toronto) frequent service, but it also catches buses scheduled for capacity rather than frequency, and is also difficult to do across many systems.
For the purposes of illustrating the choices OC Transpo has made in putting together the frequent network, I will use the former method.
Comparing Service Standards
Each transit agency uses its own definition for frequent service.
OC Transpo says:
The New Ways to Bus network features 27 Frequent routes ... these routes generally run:
- Every 15 minutes or less (on their busiest sections) weekdays between 6 am and 6 pm
- 7 days a week along main roads
Some frequent routes don't always run every 15 minutes. Some parts of frequent routes may not be served every trip. [emphasis mine]
Here is a chart presenting the frequent service definition provided by transit agencies across Canada:
Counting by hours a week, Ottawa is a clear loser, with every other city having more hours of frequent service, and by a large margin:
The tradeoff of the lower standard operated by OC Transpo is that there are more frequent routes. OC Transpo operates more routes signed as frequent than any other city except Toronto and Vancouver, which are much larger than Ottawa:
Of all the cities in the country with frequent transit networks, only Ottawa, Montréal, and Winnipeg do not include weekends, and all nine of Montreal's frequent routes run frequent service on weekends anyways. OC Transpo runs ten frequent bus routes on Saturday and seven frequent routes on Sunday.
Real Frequency
Having found out that OC Transpo stands on the extreme end of the service quality-service coverage spectrum, there is one big component that is missing from this discussion.
In every other city, a bus route that is signed as frequent will run (barring reliability issues, which are pervasive in Toronto at least) to the standard of the frequent network. Not so in Ottawa, where bus routes "generally" run every 15 minutes "on the busiest sections," but "some parts of frequent routes may not be served every trip."
The implication is clear: OC Transpo stretches the definition of frequent service in order to avoid making the hard choice of "appearing" to cut frequent service. This is the kind of tradeoff which is also conspicuous by its absence in discussions surrounding reliability.
Customers who missed squirrel language like "generally" and "on the busiest part of the route" may arrive at their stop, only to wonder why the bus hasn't shown up for 29 minutes.
The conversation around the tradeoff for frequent service has not occurred, not in OC Transpo materials and certainly not in advocacy spaces. With OC Transpo facing budget deficits, doing so is of the utmost importance.
Striking a Balance
There is a balance to be found in frequent service, either running frequent buses into the late evening and weekends or expanding coverage of frequent service. However, OC Transpo has tipped the scale, choosing to expand the size of the frequent network while the service operated has declined, to the point of signing infrequent routes as frequent.
An honest discussion is urgently needed here, as it is everywhere else. The disregard of service quality hurts rider trust in the system, waters down the usefulness of a frequent network, and has contributed to a decline in the utility and ridership of public transit. A frequent network balance has yet to be found.
Until next time.
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