One of the biggest obstacles in improving the ridership of transit buses on Penang Island is the lack of visibility of route networking.

After decades of misrule under Koh Tsu Koon, the island is now left with only four transit stations making the built environment totally transit unfriendly. The half-century-old centralised hub-and-spoke model that uses Weld Quay (Jetty) as the central hub for interchange has reached the limits of its scalability.

If you ask a commuter to travel from Air Hitam to Gurney Drive without travelling via Weld Quay or Komtar using bus interchanges in the most efficient and effective manner, no one will come out with a good answer.

When a commuter faces this problem, how do you expect the car users to opt for bus transits? If a commuter is forced to make bus interchanges at Weld Quay or Komtar, the trip will prove to be time consuming.

A primary expectation for better transit ridership, total time-to-travel, is becoming an important issue as the working class segment of the public has woven travelling into their everyday lives.

Bus transit ridership will only improve if the route networking visibility is improved. Rapid Penang inherited the old route networking topology of hub-and-spoke model.

Although RapidPenang CEO Azhar Ahmad strongly supports Bus Rapid Transit, he is constrained by the non-availability of land.

This can be seen from his plan to implement Bus Rapid Transit along the Jelutong Expressway from Pengkalan Weld (Weld Quay) to Bayan Lepas. This is one of the transit corridors where the state government still has limited land for used as transit station.

To solve the traffic woes on Penang island, the first thing that needs to be done is to discard the hub and spoke topology for route networking.

The hub-and-spoke model is most frequently compared to the point-to-point transit model (daisy chain model).

Benefit of hub and spoke model

• The small number of routes generally leads to more efficient use of transportation resources. For example, buses are more likely to travel at full capacity, and can often travel routes more than once a day.
• Complicated operations, such as package sorting and accounting, can be carried out at the hub, rather than at every node.
• Spokes are simple, and new ones can be created easily.
• Customers may find the network more intuitive. Scheduling is convenient for them since there are few routes, with frequent service.

Drawbacks of hub and spoke model

• Because the model is centralised, day-to-day operations may be relatively inflexible. Changes at the hub, or even in a single route, could have unexpected consequences throughout the network. It may be difficult or impossible to handle occasional periods of high demand between two spokes.
• Route scheduling is complicated for the network operator. Scarce resources must be used carefully to avoid starving the hub. Careful traffic analysis and precise timing are required to keep the hub operating efficiently.
• The hub constitutes a bottleneck or single point failure in the network. Total cargo capacity of the network is limited by the hub's capacity. Delays at the hub (caused, for example, by bad weather conditions) can result in delays throughout the network. Delays at a spoke can also affect the network.
• Cargo must pass through the hub before reaching its destination, requiring longer journeys than direct point-to-point trips. This trade-off may be desirable for freight, which can benefit from sorting and consolidating operations at the hub, but not for time-critical cargo and passengers.

For Bus Rapid Transit to perform like a Light Rail Transit system, transit stations need to be established. A Light Rail Transit system uses point-to-point transit model or daisy chain model for route networking.

Point-to-point transit refers to a transportation system where a plane, bus or train travels directly to a destination, rather than going through a central hub.

Advantages of the point-to-point transit model

The advantage of a point-to-point system is that it may minimise connections and travel time. The visibility of the route networking is clear. Commuters will find it easy to plan for the traveling.

Disadvantages of the point-to-point transit model

The frequency of trips may be reduced because a point-to-point system requires a large number of combinatory, as the number of transit station pairs is increased by many magnitudes.

One crucial component of transit-oriented development is the transit station.

Due to lack of land, the state government needs to work with property developer in town planning to build transit stations and transit stops.

Transit oriented development should be featured prominently in all the local plans while all transit station and transit stop identified.

A transit station should have the capacity to accommodate long queue of transit buses during peak hour. It should be designed in such a way to facilitate shuttle buses, feeder buses, taxi or private vehicles that can go off regular routes to pick up and drop off passengers within a defined service area and ferry the commuters to their destination.

It should provide sufficient parking space for vehicles waiting to pick up the commuters. It should be built with proper landscaping to provide scenic views. There should also be commercial outlets.

The transit station should be modeled after Rest & Service Areas while the transit stop should be modeled after the lay-by areas of the North-South Expressway.

Not only will it serve as a drop off and pick up point, it will also serve as a rest area with scenic view for leisure and recreational activities.

Such activities around the transit station or the transit stop enlarge its scope from being a transit point to an enlivened public space in the city.