A CTC17 team looking at improving travel in Aberdeen by finding which routes are in most need of improvement
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Many people travel several miles to work every day. Ideally, they would have access to efficient public transport (of safe active travel routes) that are comparable in convenience to private car usage. In practice, public transport options are often much slower than travelling by private car.
Red: population centres, Blue: industrial locations, Green: retail locations
We identified a set of locations marked as population hotspots and compared these with locations of locations of heavy industry and centres of large-scale employment - when considering that all bus routes travel through the city centre, making short journeys from suburb to suburb very lengthy - a full hour longer in some cases.
The goal of this project is simply to identify the routes where the greatest improvement could be realised. This involves identifying routes where the greatest discepancy exists between private and public travel times. This will be done for routes between the most populous places where people live and key employment locations such as industrial estates.
This image illlustrates the typical differences between travel times by different modes. The red area shows the limits of where you can travel within 30 minutes starting from the centre of Mannofield. The blue area shows the destinations possible by car within 30 minutes from the same starting point.
Image generated by https://app.traveltimeplatform.com/
- Nestran Bus documents https://www.nestrans.org.uk/projects/buses/documents-bus/
- Aberdeen City Region Strategic Transport Appraisal: Pre-Appraisal https://www.nestrans.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/AbdnCRD_Options-Report_v2_Issued_190809.pdf
- Assessing the State of the Bus Network in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire https://www.nestrans.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/5aapp-State-of-the-Network-Report_Final.pdf
Essentially, Aberdeen has no circular bus route and would benifit greatly from such a route, both clockwise and anti-clockwise, perhaps also including a system of both inner and outer-circle routes, allowing for much quicker transit between suburbs and out-of-centre zones without having to cross into the centre.
This may also cause a reduction in overall bus traffic through the city centre, and a reduction in car usage in the peripheral road network of the city.