A School of Continuous Improvement research poster trials suburban bus-stop consolidation across 24 routes and finds the saved running time never reaches the passenger, while the operator adopts the reduced stop count as a network-wide standard regardless.
A 24-route stepped-wedge trial finds door-to-door travel time and missed connections unmoved, and the operator locks in the trim as a standard anyway
A five-and-a-half per cent saving in the timetable has not reached a single passenger’s trip. A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a stepped-wedge trial of bus-stop consolidation across twenty-four suburban routes, and finds the saved running time absorbed entirely by longer walks to the stops that remain.
Led by Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation, with Dr Joost Nwosu and Dr Marit Osayande, the study tracked scheduled and actual running time by vehicle telemetry, missed connections at six interchange hubs, and walking time to the consolidated stops over an eight-month rollout. Door-to-door travel time and the missed-connection rate held flat throughout, inside the operating authority’s own service-standard tolerance.
A measure that improves in the timetable and nowhere in the passenger’s day is not a smaller result waiting on a longer trial. It is the whole result.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation
The finding joins a University ledger increasingly comfortable reporting a schedule that improved without anyone, in particular, getting there sooner. “The routes are quieter to run and exactly as slow to ride,” said Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow. “Both of those are now true at once, and the second one was the whole point of catching a bus.”
The trial’s null result has not slowed the rollout it examined. The operating authority’s revised Minimum Stop Spacing Standard, drawn from the trial’s scheduling data alone, reaches every remaining route at the next timetable change, with no site-specific exception.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.drr94p.