Rabbit Transit In Italian Free Download
Sandrine Willert
Transfers:
To complete a one-way trip, rabbitEXPRESS riders may board York or Gettysburg scheduled route vehicle with a transfer from the rabbitEXPRESS bus for free. Transfers are only good for one hour. Please alert the driver at the beginning of your trip that you will need a transfer, but obtain the transfer at the end of your trip.
Riders using a transfer ticket from a scheduled route bus to board a rabbitEXPRESS vehicle will be responsible for paying the difference in fares.
rabbitEXPRESS monthly passholders may ride any fixed route bus for free at any time.
Lebanon Transit (LT) and rabbittransit have a cooperative agreement where transfers between commuter bus routes are accepted free of charge.
Provides multiple round trips during weekdays between Gettysburg and Harrisburg. Destinations include Downtown Harrisburg, State Capitol Complex, Harrisburg Amtrak Station, Farm Show Building, HACC (Harrisburg Campus) and the Harrisburg International Airport (via Route 7 CAT, a service of rabbittransit). Park and Ride lots are available.
Mixed-traffic transit can be slowed down by long waits at traffic lights or controlled intersections in general. By congestion along their routes. By people queuing to enter through the front door and validating/paying their fare to or in front of the driver. By stops that are too closely spaced. By exiting and merging again into the main vehicular flow after stopping. Sometimes one simple vehicle blocked in the middle of an intersection can cause many minutes of delay in a single run, with delays cascading down the whole route because of the well known bus bunching phenomenon. Something as trivial as a person searching for their pocket change to pay the fare in front of the driver can make them miss a whole traffic light cycle, losing dozens of seconds. They are all trivial facts, you may say, but second add to second, making the trip longer and running times more inconsistent, pushing agencies to overpad their schedules, as the STM currently does for most of its bus routes adding 2-3 minutes between the second-last and the last stop of each trip.
Saving precious seconds in any of these operations is fundamental. Every second matter. Time, like costs, is a matter of multiple factors adding on top of each other and reinforcing each other. Delays on top of delays on top of other delays is how we end up with buses that are scheduled to run at a painfully slow pace of 10-11 km/h.
One of the main sources of delays for transit in general and for traditional bus transit in particular is boarding/alighting. The relationship between stop density and average speed is well known, and widely researched and discussed both among professional (see, for example: here , and here) and academic circles. The impact of stop density is also quite evident in our very small sample of six cities.
The more (doors) the merrier. Urban mixed-traffic transit stops frequently, and ease of boarding and alighting is key to reduce dwelling times. The typical North American bus has two doors for 12m buses and three for 18 m articulated ones (sometimes only two). And sometimes even less. As a comparison, the typical Italian urban bus has one more door: three for the 12m ones, and four for the articulated bus. Moreover, boarding is allowed from the front and back door only, while alighting passengers use the central door(s), avoiding conflicts between the two flows. As a comparison, in Montral alighting is allowed also via the front door, potentially further delaying boarding passengers.
Bus bulbs and Step-less boarding. I will brush through these points quickly because they are well known and discussed, but both are effective measures to reduce dwelling times that should be rolled out on all the conventional bus network as part of a rolling program of routine improvements, not only on BRT-like routes. Bus bulbs, in particular, should be the default design for stops whenever buses and streetcars run in mixed-traffic along a curb-side parking lane. Again, this is something that Bologna, Vienna and Zurich have been doing extensively, while Montral, Milan and Toronto have lagged behind. Bologna, has deployed them in great numbers over the years on all the urban routes, not just the main ones, mostly leveraging the funds from traffic fines (which, since 1992, can be used by cities to support traffic safety infrastructure) to fund a rolling program that has been going on for two decades. Step-less or quasi-level boarding is trickier (and costlier) but feasible. It can be achieved by using design elements like the Kassel Kerb for platform edges. Full, ADA-compliant level boarding can be achieved on buses too, thanks to a more sophisticated technological approach, such as the one used in the new Crealis trolleybus in Bologna, that uses a camera-guided approach to platform
The stereotypical image of old pre-gunpowder defensive systems is that of a big, tall wall with towers encircling a city. In reality, most defensive systems have always been based more on the depth than on the height, using a layered succession of different defensive works. The Theodosian walls of Constantinople, possibly the most outstanding example of defensive engineering of the Late Antiquity, were a deep succession of elements: the moat coupled with a first low wall, the outer wall and the inner wall. The purpose of this layered approach is not to block the assaulting enemies outright with a single direct obstacle, but to first slow them down, weakening their impetus and then making it easier to deal with the fewer ones among them who finally make to the real wall.
Zooming into one of these traffic diversion arrangements in the Bolognina neighborhood (see picture below), we can better understand how bus lanes, road closures and one-way streets have been strategically deployed to divert and disperse incoming and outgoing vehicular traffic away from the main thoroughfare in the area, via Matteotti, where five trunk bus lines converge before heading into the city center, in addition to several local and suburban lines (see second picture).
On top of this three-layer strategy, since the late 1990s Bologna has implemented a centralized traffic light management system covering 75% of the controlled intersections in the city. The system, emphatically called UTOPIA, was modelled after the perimeter control scheme rolled out in Zurich. Thanks to more than 1,000 traffic detectors and real-time GPS data of the bus fleet shared by the transit agency, UTOPIA gets real time information of traffic volumes and can modulate the length of traffic light phases using a predictive dynamic traffic model in order to delay private traffic upstream of congested areas until they are cleared, while also giving priority to transit, especially when buses are running late. This system has received the "Bangemann Challenge Award" in 1999 and is estimated to have reduced travelling times by 12-15%.
This is not a peer-reviewed study, but rather a quick exploratory investigation, mainly based on the analysis of scheduled running times provided by transit agencies and other metrics manually measured using google maps and collected in a spreadsheet (that you can borrow and improve!) for a quick comparative analysis.
Transit users in North America learn through their everyday experience that there is a implicit but clear hierarchy of transit modes. And street-running transit, whether it runs on rubber or steel wheels, is the Cinderella of them all (with no Prince Charming in sight): slow, unreliable, often infrequent, and supported by minimal infrastructure, often nothing more than a curbside stop signal hung on a pole at an intersection. Even people that are strong supporters of bus-based transit tend to think that the current state of things is how \u201Cnon-rapid\u201D transit is and will always be. Some even argue that slow is, actually, good. Thus, if one wants better performances, expensive investments such as BRT- or LRT-like infrastructure are needed. In policy-makers minds, nothing exists in between the shiny BRT and \u201Cnormal\u201D buses.
Yet, I have taken the bus my whole life as a teenager in Bologna and I didn\u2019t recall this sense of hopeless slowness, the constant stop-and-GO for picking-up passengers or halting for a controlled intersection at every corner. Buses weren\u2019t that much slower than biking in my memory. I started biking to places mostly because I liked it, not because it was remarkably faster than a bus ride. Perceptions are not good guidance for analysis, especially when they are so far back in time, but they can suggest that, maybe, we are into something. So, out of frustration and curiosity, I\u2019ve started investigating if buses are effectively slower in Montr\u00E9al than they are in Bologna. What I found1 made me wanting to know better what makes bus priority apparently more effective in Bologna compared to Montr\u00E9al (and many other places). This post is what I learned going down that dangerous (and time-consuming) rabbit hole\u2026
My home town of Bologna has no light rail (yet) and apparently no sophisticated heavy surface transit infrastructure such as street segments with BRT features. It\u2019s just an entire transit system based on what appears to be \u201Cregular\u201D buses. Yet, trunk bus lines in Bologna are not only more frequent, but they are also, on average, faster than the urban frequent lines of Montr\u00E9al\u2019s R\u00E9seau 10 max, the (in theory) frequent network of the city I now call home. On average, the ten routes of Montr\u00E9al frequent all-day network run at a scheduled 11.9 km/h during peak morning rush (7-8:30 AM), while Bologna\u2019s ones have a scheduled commercial speed of 14.3 km/h, which is 20% faster. Inner-city routes in Montr\u00E9al, like the 24, the 80 and the 105 are even slower, running at less than 11 km/h. And the real running times are probably even worse, as the STM has effectively admitted that their schedule tends to be \u201Coptimistic\u201D for some routes, especially at rush hour as punctuality is dropping well below 80% lately. The only route in Montr\u00E9al that stands out for its higher-than-average commercial speed is the recently (almost) finished BRT along Pie-IX boulevard. Bus 439 zips along it at 17.5 km/h on average, despite a detour around a still unfinished section. But it took ten years and $650 million to get there. That\u2019s not a recipe that can be applied to every bus corridor.
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