Why Waste A Crisis (Crude Oil Edition)?
I've joined forces for an innovative debate with Russell King of "The Transport Leader" to talk policy and responses to this latest oil crisis. First up: increased bus service.
Key Takeaways
Oil supply disruptions consistently expose how deeply car-dependent countries like Australia and the United States are.
A crisis creates a rare window for bold policy action that would otherwise take years to gain public and political support.
This blog, in partnership with Russell King, debates the opportunities for bold reform. Each of us will argue a position (pro or con) for each post.
We start with bus services. Opportunities include:
Dedicated bus lanes. One of the fastest tools available to make buses more reliable and competitive with the car, but only if they are properly enforced and run end-to-end along a corridor.
Increasing bus frequency. During peak hours is largely off the table in the short term due to driver and vehicle shortages, but shoulder peaks and weekends represent a more realistic opportunity.
However, these suggestions might be too ambitious. Instead, we should focus on:
Better signal timing and flexible street design. These can improve conditions for existing buses without requiring new infrastructure or significant additional resources.
Transportation demand management. Tools such as employer incentives to stagger working hours or subsidise alternatives to driving can reduce pressure on the network without major capital investment.
What Next?
Have you considered the opportunities for structural reform to our bus services that the crisis might make possible?
Introduction
This is not the first, nor will it likely be the last, time a conflict disrupts the OECD’s absolute reliance on crude oil for transport. Since at least 1960, when OPEC added “predictability” to global markets, each international conflict that involves oil suppliers or the Middle East gets governments scrambling for policies to respond as their populations feel the pain: high prices at the petrol (gas) stations, improbable and unreliable flight costs, and so, so much more (did you know that over 99% of plastics are refined from crude oil and natural gas?).
For large, geographically sprawling countries like Australia and the United States, where car dependence is baked into the built environment, the exposure is especially acute. Whilst governments are inevitably focused on managing the immediate pain, the crisis also makes structural reform to reduce our dependence on oil for transport easier. As Rahm Emanuel, former adviser to President Obama and Mayor of Chicago, put it bluntly: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Indeed.
That’s the premise of what follows.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be working through six policy responses to the oil crisis alongside Sam Sklar, a planner, writer, and the voice behind the Exasperated Infrastructures newsletter, who brings over 15 years of experience working in New York City (and across the world). Rather than simply advocating for our own views, we’ll be arguing sides, including, at times, positions we might personally question. Making the strongest possible case for a position you don’t hold is a time-honoured way of testing ideas, and we’ll employ it here.
The six areas we’ll cover are:
Improving bus services: How do you make the bus a genuinely attractive alternative to the car?
Lower or free fares: Should public transport be free, and if so, when and for whom?
Promoting cycling: What would it take to make cycling as appealing as driving?
Fuel and gas taxes: Is a crisis the moment to hold the line on taxes, to cut them or even increase them?
Carpooling: Should we encourage carpooling as an option instead of driving alone?
Speed limits: Should we “lower” speed limits on our roads where we can to promote safe driving?
We’re starting this week with buses, the workhorse of urban public transport, and arguably the policy lever with the most immediate potential.
Improving Bus Services
The case for improving bus services rests on a straightforward premise: better buses mean more people leave their cars at home, reducing fuel consumption and easing the pressure that transport costs place on household budgets.
Research consistently points to the same handful of factors that determine whether someone chooses the bus over other options: reliability, frequency, speed, convenience, personal safety, and cost. Shift any of these in the right direction, and ridership tends to follow.
A wide range of policy tools can move these levers. Dedicated bus lanes, smarter ticketing systems, revised timetables, improved policing and CCTV coverage, and reformed fare structures all have a role to play. The challenge is timing. Many of these interventions take months or years to bed in. New timetables must be planned and communicated, operational improvements require procurement and coordination, and meaningful changes to policing take time to resource and deploy.
That makes the question of immediate impact worth asking separately. Three interventions stand out for their ability to deliver results quickly: new bus lanes, stronger enforcement of existing lanes, and increased service frequency. The rest of this piece focuses on these, exploring what the evidence says and how they might be implemented effectively.
The Arguments Against (Sam)
Overview:
It’s too controversial to simply install bus lanes where there’s limited right of way, especially if ridership doesn’t support them. Slicing the street will only make traffic and congestion worse.
Bus lane enforcement will require extra resources that are already hard to come by. What’s the point of spending capital dollars if there’s no operating budget for it?
More frequent service requires more buses and drivers. These cost centers come with challenges to delivery: bus manufacturing is backlogged, and drivers are expensive.
Now is not the right time to focus on improving bus service: ridership numbers simply don’t support it, our cities do not have the resources to enforce new policies, and new buses and their drivers simply aren’t available to scale to the necessary size to make a significant impact. Worse than not improving bus services is pursuing a policy and then not delivering parts or all of it.
Instead, we should be focusing our efforts on improving traffic on our streets so the buses we do have can move faster and more reliably than the current service our city provides. We might seek to implement better signal timing, changing the configuration of our street designs where appropriate, and employing transportation demand measures (TDM) to control demand.
Signal timing changes help all road users by making movements more legible: these signals can be programmed from a central artery to ensure the timing, like length and frequency of traffic signals, responds to current and local demand. By prioritizing the needs of most users, we can ensure that our streets are serving the traffic as we measure it.
We might also wish to highlight our most congested routes and reconfigure the street design to relieve pressure. Since we’re in a city and bound by tight geometries, widening lanes or the street bed is not feasible; instead, we might seek to shift parking lanes to elsewhere or eliminate them altogether. This newly “found” right-of-way can be shifted to increase road capacity or sidewalk capacity, depending on time of day or day of week. The key component here is flexibility. With more roadway capacity, buses and other traffic can move more quickly and reliably.
Last, we might also seek to employ demand tools to reduce the incentive to drive during certain times of day, when bus traffic is likely to be highest, for example. These include employer incentives to work from home or to stagger working hours, or they could include subsidies to ride the bus, bike, or walk to work, depending on how far the employee lives from their place of employment.
There are policies the city might implement that don’t include potentially unpopular bus lanes, extra resources to enforce bus-only lanes, and making promises that will be hard to keep in the short-, medium-, or long-term. Only after we exhaust other options should we seek to directly develop new bus infrastructure to complement the existing lanes and chassis we already have.
The Arguments In Favour (Russell)
Conclusion
Should we be improving bus services during an oil crisis?
On one hand, dedicated bus lanes and higher off-peak frequencies offer a genuine opportunity to make buses faster, more reliable, and more attractive to people who currently drive. A crisis shifts public tolerance for bold moves, and interventions that stick beyond the immediate emergency can lay the groundwork for a less car-dependent city over the long term.
On the other hand, more frequent services require drivers and vehicles that most operators simply don’t have to spare. And in cities where ridership doesn’t yet justify new infrastructure, there may be smarter first steps: better signal timing, flexible street design, and demand management tools that improve conditions for the buses already running.
Should cities seize the crisis to make structural moves that would otherwise take years to get through? Or should they focus on getting the most out of what already exists?
We’d love to know what you think.