Quote:
Originally Posted by electricron
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A well run BRT bus might be carrying 60 passengers. That's less than one half of a car on a Frontrunner train, which normally runs with at least three cars. If everyone on the train at its last stop, Provo, decides to ride the bus to their final destination, it'll take at least six buses. I dare to suggest that if as many Frontrunner trains arrived at the station as buses, there would be passengers waiting at the Provo station for a very long time. Likewise, there would be very empty Frontrunner trains leaving Provo.
You forgot to account for the capacity of the various transit vehicles. I'll agree timing is important for transferring passengers. But it is wrong to expect a train waiting at the station for every bus arriving or departing from the station. It'll be wrong to have a bus every hour just because the train runs every hour, as it is to expect a train every five minutes because a bus arrives at the station every five minutes.
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There are very well known realities in transit design. These are destinations served, frequency of service, length of travel time, multi-modal transfers, shortness of time at transfer points, ease of transfer, mechanical reliability, safety, and cleanliness.
The specific question about scheduling involves minimum wait time. The basic way to do this, IMO, is to have as high as possible frequencies on each transit mode, and, to stagger the arrival and departure times to adjust to difference in frequencies between modes.
For example: mode X arrives and departs every 30 minutes, and mode Y arrives and departs every 10 minutes.
Then the keys are to adjust mode X such that 2 out of 3 arrivals are 5 to 10 minutes prior to the arrival of mode Y (going away from the center of greatest population on the "main line"). Similarly, 2 out of 3 arrivals of mode X going towards the population center need to arrive 5 to 10 minutes after the arrival of mode Y.
This would create a 2 transfer point loop, with the compromise occurring between adjusting such times at each end of the BRT loop. The key here being the commuter line.
EDIT: The Frontrunner has stops north and south of the loop. Two BRT buses theoretically could provide 120 riders on same the northbound Frontrunner train. With trains running at 30 minute intervals and the BRT at 10 minute intervals (and yes, 1 bus load at each transfer point has to wait 20 minutes due to different time schedules), the total load capacity from the BRT to the Frontrunner at the two transfer points is 6x 60 people per direction, or 720 people per hour for both directions.
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