Connecting Suburban Towns to City Centre Through Express Buses Increases Inefficiency and Raises Route Profitability Issues

Multiple ways exist to organise a bus-based transport system connecting suburban towns to the city centre as well as between different suburban areas of a larger city. One approach uses the hub and spoke model that connects individual suburban towns to the city centre. Another approach uses a mix of hub and spoke as well as bus routes that connects different suburban towns without passing through the crowded city centre. Finally, to help increase accessibility of city centre to residents in suburban towns and reduce travel time, express bus routes that traverse expressways to fetch passengers from towns to city is another option. This option deserves greater attention as it harbours inherent inefficiency and profitability issues despite its stated goal of connecting towns to city in an expeditious manner. Specifically, by providing an expressway-based route that connect specific suburban town to the city centre, this model suffers from a lower passenger load compared to bus routes that pass through two or three suburban towns enroute to the city centre. Such a passenger load profile meant that the express bus route is only well utilized during peak hours and only on weekdays, which holds significant profitability issues for the route given that unlike conventional bus routes that do not use the expressway, express buses have a much lower chance of picking up new passengers along the bus route. While express bus routes would dovetail with a city’s ambition of expeditiously bringing passengers to and from city centre and specific suburban towns, it necessarily meant that a larger number of dedicated express bus route each serving a dedicated town would be needed. This holds two challenges, one of which is the need to equip the bus fleet with more buses with attendant higher capital and operating cost outlay, which raises questions of whether the overall bus system requires substantial government subsidies. The second related challenge is the inefficiency inherent within such a bus system where buses are under-utilized for most of the off-peak hours and the fuel needed to operate express bus route for each passenger kilometre. Compared to bus routes that traverses a few towns prior to terminating at the city centre or ones which pass through the city centre enroute to another part of the larger city, a bus transportation system reliant on express bus route is inefficient in terms of asset utilization and provides poorer connectivity options for passengers. In addition, such an express bus-based hub and spoke model is not robust against unexpected traffic jams on expressway along the route, providing passengers few options to opt for alternative but slower routes to the same destination. Collectively, poor utilization of buses plying express routes raises profitability and inefficiency issues that would likely require eventual government subsidies to remain viable and operational