Thursday, March 26, 2009

Black Line Inbound Schedule (Part 6)

Station

Inbound

Inbound

Inbound

Inbound

Greensburg

0530A

--

0630A

--

Irwin

0544A

0600A

0644A

0700A

Pitcairn

0555A

0611A

0655A

0711A

Braddock

0606A

0622A

0706A

0722A

Wilkinsburg

0615A

0631A

0715A

0731A

East Liberty

0621A

0637A

0721A

0737A

Downtown

0630A

0646A

0730A

0746A


Station

Inbound

Inbound

Inbound

Inbound

Greensburg

0730A

--

0830A

--

Irwin

0744A

0800A

0844A

0900A

Pitcairn

0755A

0811A

0855A

0911A

Braddock

0806A

0822A

0906A

0922A

Wilkinsburg

0815A

0831A

0915A

0931A

East Liberty

0821A

0837A

0921A

0937A

Downtown

0830A

0846A

0930A

0946A

2 comments:

Oreopithecus bambolii said...

One of the most useful comments, I thought, made by the consultants for the Port Authority's bus evaluations was that routes should "operate on clockface headways"---that is, every 10, 15, 20, etc. minutes, and easily figured by someone who doesn't have access to a schedule.

Some of your schedules do this well, for example your New-Ken inbound service. However, some don't, and I think I see why: you've tried to have, for example, the service outbound from Oakland, or inbound from Irwin, start a half-hour after the service outbound from Downtown/IB from G'burg. However, because the start points are different distances away, you end up with oddball headways once you get onto sections that are shared between the differently endpointed services.

Instead, I'd suggest finding the first common point--Washington Blvd for the outbound NK service--figure out when the first train will get there (27m after leaving Hazelwood), and set the schedule so the next train will arrive 30m after that. The first train leaving Downtown should arrive at Washington at 457pm, so it should actually leave Downtown at 439, not 430. Or, perhaps someplace should be found for the train to stop or layover between East Liberty and Washington so that it can still leave DT and EL at 'memorable' times (:30 and :40) but still get to WB, Oakmont, and NK 30m after the last one.

Of course, if the outbound trains won't pick people up past Lawrenceville/EL, it becomes less of an issue for this train, but is still a problem on the Greensburg line, where an Irwin-originated inbound train arrives at (say) Braddock 16 minutes after a GBG train, but the next one wouldn't show for 44 minutes. Better to have the GBG trains leave at :14, so that the rest of the stations can have standard 30m headways, rather than try to do math or wonder if the last train came from GBG or Irwin...

One last note: many people still are at the office for 8 or 8.5 hours. Many of the people in my office, for example, arrive at 7 and leave at 3. Inbound schedules that arrive at 630 will be great for them, but even those who would be inclined toward mass transit won't be interested in waiting an hour or more for the first train home at 4....

East Busway Blogger said...

Thanks for the comment. I think you went more in depth than I did! I have to admit, that I have no background, and have no experience in this area, so I was going off the cuff.

I will definitely re-look the schedules to see how to change them to have them make more sense.