A few days ago I took a broad look at how Auckland benefits from its bus priority measures, as well as where we might see further bus lanes in the future. In this post I want to focus on what might be our first steps towards expanding the city’s bus priority areas. The critical areas which generally meet the requirements outlined by Auckland Transport for being a candidate for bus priority measures.
A lot becomes fairly obvious simply by looking at our existing bus lanes (or T2 lane in the case of Tamaki Drive) - focusing on the isthmus area for now (thanks to commenter “Miggle” for doing the hard yards in compiling this):
While there are quite a number of bus lanes around this area, what becomes fairly immediately obvious is their discontinuity. Dominion Road, north of Mt Albert Road, and Great North Road – between Pt Chevalier and the CBD, stand out (along with the Central Connector) as the most continuous – but even they have critical gaps. Buses along Dominion Road get held up at the various town centres along the route because the bus lanes simply run out. The same for Great North Road, where the bus lanes run out at critical points like the Grey Lynn shops and around the intersection with St Lukes Road.
For other important routes, like Mt Eden Road and Remuera Road, the gaps are bigger. While it’s likely to be a struggle even keeping the level of bus priority we have along Remuera Road (the locals get annoyed at not being able to drive little Timmy to school easily every morning), Mt Eden Road seems a pretty obvious candidate for some improvements to the extent of its bus lane system – with there being a huge gap just to the north of Mt Eden Village. Within the city centre there are also critical gaps in the bus lane system: like along Fanshawe Street between Albert and Hobson streets, or along Sturdee Street (which is supposed to be part of the Northern Busway RTN).
Then there are street which have a large number of buses, but very little priority (if any). Manukau Road is a pretty obvious example of this – having a very surprising lack of bus lanes. Customs Street in the city centre is another example: being a street that must carry hundreds of buses during peak times, but without any form of bus lanes along its entire length. Great North Road through Waterview is also a long stretch of road that really needs bus lanes (and will get them to some extent from the Waterview Connection project).
So as a first step of expanding the bus lanes network within the isthmus, the map below shows the key improvements that I think should be prioritised (the numbers don’t necessarily indicate which ones should happen first – that’s an interesting debate to be had):
A brief description of the proposals are outlined below:
- Customs/Fanshawe/Sturdee street bus lanes – between Nelson Street in the west to Anzac Ave in the east. You probably need 24 hour bus lanes in each direction along here due to the sheer volume of buses. The western part of the route acts as an essential part of the Northern Busway connection between Britomart and the harbour bridge.
- Wellesley Street. Described in further detail here.
- Karangahape Road between Ponsonby Road and Pitt Street (and turning into Pitt Street). Over 100 inbound buses travel along this section of Karangahape Road between 7 and 9 am. Although there’s some level of priority in the lane with all the bus stops, this really isn’t good enough for a street that carries so many buses. Pitt Street has plenty of width to provide high quality bus lanes to link with Vincent Street.
- Great North Road through Waterview. The Waterview Connection motorway project will add some bus lanes at the northern end, but it should be a priority to extent these right back to Blockhouse Bay Road, because buses experience huge delays along this stretch of road every day. Plus there are a lot of buses using this corridor from west Auckland.
- A pretty short stretch of Sandringham Road, from the shops south to Mt Albert Road. This would be pretty simple to implement.
- This applies to the two sections of Mt Eden Road highlighted in red. As one of Auckland’s two b-line routes, the extent of bus priority along Mt Eden Road is pretty pathetic, while there is plenty of room in the road reserve to add the bus lanes without taking general traffic lanes away (particularly in the northern gap).
- Manukau Road. Although many Mangere bus routes should probably terminate at Onehunga rather than running all the way into town, we will always need a high frequency route along Manukau Road and it deserves quality bus lanes to support that route. I must say I was pretty damn surprised to discover that Manukau Road doesn’t already have bus lanes – at least in the same way that Mt Eden, Dominion and Sandringham roads all have.
What have I missed – and what might be priorities in other parts of Auckland?
I think there’s a serious gap in the bus lanes through Newmarket. Buses take about as long to traverse Newmarket as the journey time from Britomart to Khyber Pass Road.
There’s also there gap on the stretch of New North Road through Eden Terrace, holding up Sandringham Road, New North Road and some Dominion Road buses. The road is narrow here, but I think there’s easily enough space for bus lanes.
Good work on all this Miggle, lots of detail to take in. Just to fill in one of the critical gaps identified in the post, there are now some priority lanes north of Mt Eden village, extended last year. Can’t remember if they are in both directions though, I used to get off just at the point that the southbound one started on the way into the village, commences at the top of Bellevue Road.
I also saw over the weekend that there is a new hatched box across on Mt Eden Rd southbound into the village at the intersection with Valley Road – a location where Admin noted that the Outer Link would hit delays.
Auckland Council are clearly thinking about some of the choke points and doing some minor fiddling – would be good to see more holistic measures.
I’ve edited the extension into the map.
I agree Newmarket is an obvious pinch point where bus lanes are necessary both due to delays and the sheer volume of buses.
It will be a challenge to implement though.
Wouldn’t just getting rid of on street parking do it? There is a lot of off street parking in the area so hardly seems necessary in comparison to bus priority. Even when I drive to Newmsket I never think of parking on broadway.
Street parking provides a nice buffer between the traffic and the footpath. If you got rid of it you would have to be really careful you didn’t make the footpath a nasty place to be.
The waterview connection only provides a couple of hundred metres of bus lane in one direction only.
Bus lanes are needed on Gt Nth Rd at least as far as the interestion with Ash Street.
I believe this stretch of road was labelled the busiest in Auckland for some category or other by the ARC, and top priority.
I think the waterview connection was resposible for delaying upgrades, as it was once going to be largely cut & covered. It’s in sore need of a fix up.
I don’t know if it holds up buses much but when at Kingsland on the train in the mornings I always see a line of cars then just as they pass the station heaps of them move into what was the bus lane and it is often backed up from the lights back to the station. Perhaps the lane needs to be extended all the way to the intersection with New North Rd.
Yes my understanding is that the New North & Sandringham intersection creates big delays back along New North through Kingsland.
Newmarket, most notably Khyber Pass between Broadway and Park Road, is the top priority in my mind.
My Father has recently begun driving for Waka Pacific, and uses this section every day. They are given a full half hour to get from Britomart to Newmarket in the afternoon, and need every minute of that. At other times they are given 15 minutes, and he says thats usually impossible to achieve. For comparison, our incredibly slow (especially there) trains can do the same trip in 7 minutes- dispite some really slow speed limits around Newmarket, the sharpest turns on the network, and the steep grade.
For comparison, the second 2 thirds of the central connector- from Grafton Road to Britomart, takes about 5 minutes.
Ultimately, almost all buses should terminate at NM station because of these conditions, and the benefit to conditions in the CBD that would result. Theres a train from there almost every 5 minutes, so waiting time would be neglegable- and, its even a fare stage. I can see 3 reasons why we cant- all very solvable
1) The rail network does not have the capacity to handle another 1750 passengers per hour
2)it would be about the same trip length for those who work uptown… though with 2 transfers
3)we need some pretty decent bus stop infrastructure at Broadway/ Teed Street…current integration with Newmarket station is shocking!
1 and 2 can both be solved by the CBD link…. seems to be the answer to pretty much everything.
Sam, I agree, but you can thank the handing over of all the railway land in Newmarket to Fay Richwhite to asset strip for why it is now incredibly hard to build any kind of bus train interchange there.
replacing the parking with bus stops would be fine I think…. 3-4 on each side of the road? Remuera Services can use their existing stops.
At Least one positive that has come out of that ugly apartment complex is the residential intensification around the station though- no doubt everyone who lives there catches the train at least occasionally.
What about those people travelling to non-Britomart stops – e.g. universities? These currently outnumber those travelling all the way to Britomart.
That’s why you couldn’t do it until you have the CBD link…. Or would the walk up wellesley street not be as good as the current system, despite the time saving? Keeping in mind that most would probably transfer to train much earlier than NM- even now, when I come from howick to uni, the slow diesel train to britomart from Panmure + bus up Symonds is at least 20 minutes quicker than the bus all the way in the mornings
One of the strangest and senseless things the human body does to itself is to store fat in its arteries. This can and frequently does cause its own demise.
Where did we ever get the notion that parking on a road is a good use of the road surface? Allowing a single car to block a whole lane is strange and senseless. Wheels need smooth surfaces to run on but parking doesn’t require that. Parking wastes a lane for several hundred metres in front of and behind the car. Daft.
One place that you have missed is the southern end of Dom Road. I have been told by someone at Auckland Transport that that section (which has either no, or substandard bus lanes, depending on where you are) based on bus speed measurements, actually is where more bus delays occur than further north (I presume more delays per length total – of course further north there are also spots with real bad delays).
Yeah true good point. Dominion Road between SH20 and Mt Albert Road really needs bus lanes.
It has some already in that section. But they are 3m or less wide (!) and south of SH20 there’s also quite a chunk of Dom Road, and I presume (don’t know) still a heck of a lot of buses.
Something needs to be done at Main Highway/GSR city-bound. That intersection and through Campbell Rd/Woodbine St is horrendous. Beyond there is the GSR bus lane, but all non-express H&E buses and 5xx buses come up Main Highway and get no priority whatsoever through the intersection and the traffic can be horrendous. Ellerslie village is also a choke-point for evening peak traffic, but there’s not much room to try and address it given that there’s precious little parking on side streets if all the parking on Main Highway is removed, and there’s also the intractable issue of the motorway over-bridge.
So first of all, great read.
One thing. The Manakau road bus lane. I live in Mangere (don’t even get me started on how terrible the bus service out here is) and I know for a fact that buses would get choked at the end of you proposed bus lane there, thanks to Royal Oak. Its faster (shaving about 5 minutes normally) to go via Queenstown/Pah/Manakau road buses from Onehunga, then via Manakau road due to that mess around Royal Oak roundabout. Just my thoughts.