Auckland Transport Blog

As I detailed a few days ago, transport academic Paul Mees – in his most recent book – outlines why it is essential to have a “transfer-friendly” public transport system – using the example of Squaresville. Mees notes that in conventional transport planning, transfers are treated as barriers, whereas if you take a “network effect” approach to public transport planning – the transfer actually becomes an opportunity. Transfers are the means to link what would otherwise be a collection of individual routes. Of course trasnfering is inconvenient, but if we minimise the inconvenience (through integrated ticketing, timetable alignment and so forth) then the benefits of a true network effect should significantly outweigh the costs of the transfer inconvenience.

There’s a challenge to being able to create a network effect, as many commenters on my previous post pointed out. We just don’t have the money to add all these extra routes, so how can we introduce something of a network effect without destroying the existing network. This is where we have to start making trade-offs, looking at what routes on the existing network need to be redirected or replaced by other routes that will support a true network. Do we want more routes but lower service frequencies (meaning a shorter walk to the bus stop or train station, but a longer wait when you get there), or so we want the opposite: fewer different routes but higher frequencies?

Mees picks up on this:

“…the central challenge is to provide sufficiently high occupancies to support high system-wide service levels, on cross-suburban lines as well as radial lines, and to low-density as well as high-density areas. This challenge is met by offering a sparse, but high-quality, network comprised of relatively few lines operating at high service levels.”

This is basically the opposite of the situation you have in Auckland at the moment. Auckland has an enormous number of bus routes, with the aim seemingly to provide a service within a few hundred metres walk of each and every house in the city – but not to worry about whether that service comes every 10 minutes, or whether it only runs once a day.

Mees continues:

A sparse network concentrates services, allowing higher frequencies and longer operating hours. It is also simple and stable, and thus easier for passengers to understand. Ease of understanding, or legibility, is not regarded as important in traditional public transport systems designed for regular commuters or ‘captive’  patrons, as it is assumed people will use the same services every day and become used to any quirks or complications. But region-wide networks are for everyone: regular users, occasional travellers, people visiting unfamiliar parts of the city, hikers and tourists. They must be stable and comprehensible, just like a road system. The model is networks like the Paris Metro and Zurich trams system, rather than the bewildering tangle of low-quality lines in cities as diverse as Auckland, Canberra and Manchester.

I would certainly agree that, in Auckland, public transport works a million times better for your regular commute – where you know the particular bus that you should take, where it will go and how long it will take – than it does for random trips to the mall at the weekend or other non-commuting activities. The system is too complex, the frequencies are too low and the services are too unreliable for other trips.

So what does this mean? How should we change our system to make it work more like a network?

This means that a public transport network should be comprised of fixed lines that follow the same routes, with the same stopping patterns, at all times. Special routes that only operate at peak hours, and separate night or weekend networks, should be avoided. If services are added at peak period, or thinned out at night, this should be done without disrupting the basic line pattern. A good example is provided by the suburban rail system, or S-Tog, of Copenhagen. There are seven main lines, and on most a mixture of express and stopping trains operates. The stopping patterns and even the departure times are the same all day long, every day of the year. On most routes 10-minute services are provided on weekdays and during shopping hours on Saturday; frequencies drop to 20 minutes at other times by the simple process of deleting every second train. Only two lines have additional trains in peak period, and these are slotted between the regular services without breaking the basic pattern. The entire system-wide map and timetable takes up a single, letter-sized sheet of paper.

I have long stated that I think it’s crazy for us to have separate Saturday and Sunday timetables – so crazy that it almost seems to be an intentional attempt to make public transport confusing and put us off using it. I think it would also make a lot of sense for the weekend timetables to be the same as the weekday off-peak timetables. So you would have your “core timetable” with peak services simply added on top of it.

But what about route planning? Particularly when it comes to planning bus routes, the temptation is always to depart from the principle of simplicity because you can. You can run a bus down most roads, so therefore there is the temptation to try and get your route as close to as many people as possible, even if that results in long, circuitous routes. Mees says that this is the wrong approach:

“…bus planners should design routes as if they were operating trams or trains, with simple, direct structures and as little duplication and overlap as possible. This involves… the ‘one section one line’ principle. Each corridor is provided with a single service, closely spaced and overlapping lines are avoided because, as the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) says, ‘parallel routes… split the potential demand resulting in many routes competing for the same passengers and no route attracting enough demand to warrant a high frequency service.’

When a number of routes converge on a single corridor, the same principle can be applied. While in theory, 20 bus routes running hourly down a joint corridor means a service every three minutes, in practice it means bewildered passengers. A single line running every five minutes would use less resources but provide a better service.

We see this route convergence in a few places in Auckland. Perhaps most notably, on Great North Road and Great South Road. Theoretically there should be a tonne of buses along these routes, but in reality chances are they’re operated by a variety of different companies – so your ticket won’t be valid on half the buses going through. Furthermore, it’s also quite likely that because of no alignment between routes, there will be 15-20 minute gaps, and then five buses will come all at once. Pretty hopeless really.

So simplicity is the key here in my opinion. Looking at the buses that run in my corner of Auckland: Jervois Road routes, Richmond Road buses, Williamson Ave services and Great North Road to Pt Chevalier services, it does seem as though there’s quite a significant amount of route duplication and overlap. As a result of there being so many different routes serving this corner of Auckland, all services run at pretty rubbish frequencies: generally a bus every 20-30 minutes at off-peak, evenings and weekend times and not too much better during peak periods. Following the guides detailed above, it seems altogether possible that we could probably cover this area with two services: a CBD to Pt Chevalier via Ponsonby, Herne Bay and Westmere route: and a CBD to Westmere route via Ponsonby and Richmond Road. Combining the resources of four routes into two would mean that it would be quite feasible to run services at 10 minute frequencies, seven days a week – putting these routes up there with Dominion Road as some of the best serviced in Auckland. That would mean no need to check timetables, and surely attract a significant amount more patronage without really making people walk much further to catch the bus (as places losing services like Great North Road and Williamson Ave are already well covered by longer-distance routes).

Over the last few weeks I have been putting together a series of posts about Paul Mees’s new book Transport for Suburbia: beyond the automobile age. It really is an excellent book, and I am getting to the real ‘meat’ of the book about how we can actually make our public transport systems drastically better. A key part of improving public transport systems in cities with relatively dispersed trip patterns (ie. Auckland) is what Mees calls “The Network Effect”. The network effect happens when you make it easy for people to transfer from one service to another, as it brings so many more locations within relatively easy public transport access.

To illustrate the network effect, Mees uses the hypothetical city of “Squaresville”, which is illustrated in the diagram below: The Squaresville scenario is basically the worst possible situation for traditional public transport, with trips having absolutely no pattern at all. Mees explains further:

The city has a grid road network, with ten north-south and ten east-west roads, at intervals of half a mile or 800m. travel patterns are completely random, with no dominant pattern of movement. Each of the city’s 100 square blocks produces 100 trips a day: one internal trip (made on foot), and one external trip to each of the 99 other blocks of the city – giving 9900 external trips in total.

Squaresville has ten bus routes that grew up in a free market environment, with each operated by a different firm. There is one route along each north-south road, reflecting a past era when this was the dominant pattern of movement (Figure 9.1A). This means that each resident of Squaresville has a bus within 400m walking distance, but can only reach the nine other city blocks lying along her or his bus route, giving access to 900 daily trips out of the total of 9900. Assume that public transport attracts a third of the trips it can theoretically serve, this gives a total of 300 trips (a third of 900), or a city-wide mode share of only 3 per cent.

This would be a fairly good approximation of the current bus system in Auckland I think. There are many “suburbs to CBD” routes running roughly parallel with each other, but very few crosstown services linking them up. Furthermore, the cross-town services that do exist generally run at very poor frequencies, take bizarre backstreet routes (yes I’m looking at you 008) and integrate extremely poorly with the suburb to CBD routes.

Mees continues:

Now, imagine that the government of Squaresville wants to do something about the low rate of public transport use in the city. It pays the bus operators to double service frequencies on Squaresville’s ten bus routes (Figure 9.1B). With a typical demand elasticity of 0.5, this would increase patronage by half, to 450 trips per day or 4.5 per cent of the market. Occupancy rates will fall, since patronage has grown more slowly than service levels, and fare revenue will not cover the extra costs. Subsidies will rise, cost-recovery will worsen and so will greenhouse emissions per bus passenger. Public transport is still of marginal importance, but it has become less efficient in economic and environmental terms.

One could argue that this has been what has largely happened in Auckland over the past decade. We’ve spent more and more money on the existing services, and while that has certainly led to some level of patronage increase, we haven’t really made the kind of gains we would have expected. This is clearly shown in the table below, which shows that over the past decade subsidies for public transport have increased from $45m a year to $145m a year, while patronage has only grown from 44m trips a year to 58m trips a year – barely keeping up with population growth. Is there another way? Returning to Squaresville, Mess suggests so:

Imagine instead that the additional buses are used in a different way. Ten east-west routes are introduced to complement the ten existing lines and create a grid network, as shown in Figure 9.1C. The number of trips served directly doubles, to 1800 [as there are now 20 routes], but by transferring between routes, passengers can now access the entire city, so the network also serves the remaining 8100 trips. Squaresville’s planners do everything possible to make transfers convenient, providing integrated fares, convenient facilities and coordinated timetables. But since so many transport analysts say that passengers dislike transferring, let’s assume that the mode share for trips requiring a transfer is only half that for direct trips, that is one-sixth. So the total number of public transport trips is one-third of 1800 plus one-sixth of 8100, giving a total of 1950.

Under the second model of service provision, public transport’s mode share has jumped dramatically, from 3 to 20 per cent. Service has increased 100 per cent, but patronage has grown 550 per cent, giving an elasticity of 5.5. Increased revenue would more than cover the costs of the additional service and occupancies would rise substantially, reducing subsidies and greenhouse emissions per passenger.

Now while Squaresville obviously isn’t real, I think it shows that dispersed trip patterns certainly does not have to be the death-knell for successful public transport. There’s an interesting comparison in terms of how airlines operate – in that you don’t expect to be able to fly directly from New Zealand to a great number of random places in Africa – for example – because the demand would be too low for a direct service. Nobody would wait a week for a direct service when there are much higher frequencies that involve transfers at major hubs like London or Singapore. Mees uses the example of direct airline services between Australia and many European cities to make this point clearer:

There were once infrequent direct services between Australia and other European cities, but this was at a time when fares were so high that airlines could run half-empty planes and still make money. The transfer at London or Singapore is one of the costs of the dramatic fall in real airfares in the last three decades, but it has also allowed Australians easier access to a larger range of European cities.

The point is that to achieve efficiencies and allow services to be provided at regular intervals to an incredibly wide range of places, transfers are necessary. Just as they’re necessary in the airline business, they’re necessary in public transport. Of course there will be the “cost” of the annoyance of having to get off one bus and onto another (or onto a train), but if that ‘cost’ means the benefits of being able to simply walk up the road without checking a timetable, jump on a bus you know is coming every 5-10 minutes, get off somewhere and jump on another bus almost immediately and that process will get you just about anywhere, surely it’s worth it?

Auckland City Council owns five parking buildings within the Auckland CBD – Fanshawe Street, Downtown, Victoria Street, Civic and Karangahape Road. All up, these parking buildings provide quite a few thousand spaces in the CBD. I must say I have always found it rather strange that Council does own car parking buildings – as after all does it not contradict with others plans and strategies they have to minimise the number of people driving themselves into the CBD?

While I certainly am not generally an advocate for councils selling off their assets, I wonder whether there are good grounds for an exception to be made here. Is it perhaps a bit of a conflict of interest for council to retain its parking buildings? Another interesting issue to look at is the value of the various car-parking buildings owned by council. The ARC’s “Region Viewer” website has some very interesting information on property valuations, and gives us an insight into what Auckland City Council could potentially make if it sold its parking buildings.

I get the following valuations of the parking buildings:

1. Fanshawe Street: $15.6 million
2. Downtown: $68.5 million (see image below)
3. Victoria Street: $40.4 million (see image below)
4. Civic (can’t really be separated from the Aotea Centre above it, so wouldn’t bother)
5. Karangahape Road: $9.1 million

Here’s an image of the Downtown carpark, showing the valuation: And Victoria Street: That’s $133.6 million all up. You could buy back a pretty big chunk of Auckland’s buses for that price.

It’s interesting to see that people are still ignoring the signs that say Grafton Bridge is for buses only. A NZ Herald article explores the issue further:

Lucrative bus lane

New bus-only lanes on Grafton Bridge have helped swell Auckland City Council coffers by $1.7 million since they were introduced in December.

More than 11,000 drivers have been stung for using the bridge between 7am and 7pm, when both lanes of the central city bridge are reserved for buses.

A senior councillor admitted the signs alerting motorists to the change were inadequate.

“The signage needed to be upgraded, without doubt,” said transport committee chairman Ken Baguley.

“I’ve suggested to officers that, with the benefit of hindsight, you’re not alerted to the fact that it’s a bus lane very well.”

[rest of article here]

I’m surprised the number is that low actually. The one time I caught a bus across Grafton Bridge, on my way to the opening of the Newmarket train station, there was someone on the bridge taking photos of cars travelling across it when they shouldn’t have. In the mere time it took the bus to cross the bridge I saw three or four cars travelling across it in the opposite direction. A cool $600 of revenue in just a couple of minutes.

While obviously it’s important for the signs to be clear, I think that the high number of people crossing the bridge in their cars does show a bit of contempt for public transport amongst car drivers in Auckland. Hopefully the $150 fine is useful ‘education’ for them. I also wonder whether the hours of operation for the route being bus only (7am-7pm Monday-Friday) confuse some people into thinking that it’s OK to cross when it isn’t.

From another perspective, it’s quite a useful source of funding for council. Maybe once we have the Super-City operational we’ll see that funding going back into public transport services.

An interesting article appeared in the Dominion Post today, and is also on the “Stuff” website, raising the question of whether Auckland’s public transport system will be able to cope with the influx of visitors expected for the 2011 Rugby World Cup. The article quotes a July 2009 ARTA report, which raised some serious issues and problems, stating that with expected public transport demand during the RWC being four times what is typical, the system would not be able to cope. Here’s the full article:

Auckland is not ready to cope with tens of thousands of international visitors set to flood the city for the 2011 Rugby World Cup, a report reveals.

Transport Minister Steven Joyce and Auckland Mayor John Banks say they are confident the city will be prepared, but a draft transport strategy released under the Official Information Act shows transport planners are worried.

The Auckland Regional Transport Authority report, written last July, warned of complacency over demand for services.

“During presentations and meetings with decision-makers an attitude of `this is a small increase in business as usual’ has been encountered,” the report says.

“The levels of patron movement and operational standard [needed for the RWC] are in reality significantly above what is currently delivered.”

The cup is the third-biggest sporting event in the world and is expected to attract a television audience of up to four billion, plus 60,000 overseas visitors.

The influx of visitors would place more than four times the demand on public transport than Auckland had seen before.

“In a number of areas there are limited people who are able to perform tasks that are either needed, or may be needed,” the report said.

Nearly 2km of roadside parking had to be found around Eden Park for 130 buses and the entire fleet of 38 Auckland trains would be needed on match days.

Mr Joyce said last night the report showed there was “considerable work to do”, but good progress had been made since the report was written.

“There are a number of organisations with a lot of skin in this game, the Government not the least one, so I think everybody is pretty focused.”

Mr Banks said $58 millon was being spent on the Eden Park precinct and thousands were expected to walk from the central city well ahead of game kick-offs.

It would take about 30 minutes to walk to the ground from a central city hotel with widened footpaths and improved signs.

“It’d be a great walk.”

It seems to me as though there are two ways of looking at this – either from an optimistic point of view that we’ll “manage to get by”, or a pessimistic point of view that “it’ll be a total disaster”. At the moment I am probably sitting on the fence, and I think there’s probably a fairly even chance of either of those two outcomes happening.

Which is the problem really. It would be pretty terrible PR for the whole country if our train system was to grind to a halt just before the World Cup Final, with thousands of people potentially not being able to get to the seats they’ve paid thousands of dollars for… and so forth. Yet it seems to me as though there’s a reasonable chance that might happen, as at the moment we have regular signalling and points failures on the rail system – and that’s without the huge pressure that will be placed on it by having four times the number of people using public transport compared to normal.

So what’s the real problem here, and what could be done over the next 18 months to sort it out?

There are a few aspects of this mess which we can’t really do anything about now, as it’s too late. This includes having electrification ready for the World Cup, which should really have been the number one priority, but somehow ended up below the Mangere Bridge duplication (somewhat understandable), the Victoria Park Tunnel (useful if tourists somehow bring their cars with them on the plane) and the Newmarket viaduct replacement on the priority list. Up until early last year it was possible that we’d have at least some of electrification (Otahuhu to Britomart and Britomart to Morningside) completed, but then the government went and changed the funding structure for the project (which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing), and took a year to work out the details. This has meant that we’re likely to struggle to complete electrification by 2013, let alone 2011. We should have also taken the opportunity of the RWC to really do something about creating a proper transport interchange around Eden Park, so that the ground could handle a massive number of buses linking it with other parts of Auckland. Unfortunately, and rather stupidly, that was the first thing to get the chop when money got tight for the stadium upgrade.

Nick R, a regular commenter here, and on the Campaign for Better Transport Forums, details the “missed opportunity” (in transport terms at least) that this World Cup has been (taken from a post on the CBT forums):

It simply beggars belief that the powers that be have done basically nothing to prepare for the world cup except build a pedestrian underpass at Kingsland station, which in itself is only a token effort to manage what will be a serious safety issue due to the huge peak crowds attempting to use a small two track suburban commuter station.

Meanwhile all the rhetoric of ‘getting it done before the RWC’ has been used to justify over half a billion dollars of motorway works at Mangere and Victoria park, but surely not even the National party and NZTA actually believe that these works are needed for the cup. Even they must be aware that foreign tourists don’t bring their cars with them and any festival/event goers tend to use public transport anyway.

Typical Auckland, the opportunity to seriously improve the public transport system and urban environment to support a major international sporting festival, but instead half a billion is spent of freeways. And they are happy spending $390 million to add 12,000 mostly temporary seats and a fancy facade to Eden Park , yet the initially planned transport interchange around the No.2 ground was the first thing to be dropped when the penny pinching started.

Can you imagine what the primarily British and other European visitors are going to think when they arrive in Auckland and start figuring how to get to the stadium from their hotel?

Well at least they have several options:
-Catch a supremely overcrowded late train that is liable to catch on fire, be stuck at signals for half an hour, or otherwise never make it at all.
-Walk for 45 mins to an hour across a hilly, rainy, pedestrian unfriendly city, somehow finding their way around the central motorway junction and through suburban Mt Eden.
-Hire a car, drive it four kilometres through gridlock and try and find a park on the side of the road somewhere in Balmoral or Morningside.
-Catch a bus, sit in it for four kilometres of gridlock then be dropped off on the side of the road somewhere in the vicinity of the stadium.

Nevertheless, given the fact that while it’s satisfying to grumble about the stupidity of past decisions, it doesn’t really help us in the present, what can we do between now and September next year to – shall we say – improve the likeliness that we’ll ‘scrape by’? A few things come to mind.

Firstly, the integrated ticketing project simply has to be fully completed by then. Everything I have heard from ARTA suggests that the project will be ‘substantially progressed’ by the time of the World Cup – which means something very different to completed. It beggars belief that we can build the entire Victoria Park Tunnel project in less than two years, but can’t roll out an integrated ticketing system during the same time period. Ensuring ticketing simplicity for people who aren’t used to the public transport system will be one of the most important factors that determine how the transport system is seen by visitors – and by the world in general. I can easily imagine British newspapers laughing at the fact that their bus ticket covered travel on these four bus companies but not those other three, on some trains but not others, and perhaps on some ferries but they really weren’t sure. If there’s any transport project that needs to be completed by the time of the World Cup, it is integrated ticketing.

Secondly, we have to sort out the signalling and points issues that seem to be causing massive delays on the rail system on an almost weekly basis. One of the most disheartening aspects of these problems is that they often seem to happen to the newest parts of the system – Newmarket and Britomart. Now while I realise rail signalling is complicated, it’s clearly not impossible to get right. Considering that Tokyo shifts three times as many people on their train system in a day as Auckland shifts in a year, I don’t see their system being plagued by signalling failures all the time. So what we need to do is to absolutely 100% ensure that we have the best possible signalling system, that it’s well bedded in, that we’ve solved all the gremlins and – perhaps most importantly – that we have a Plan B for the times that something goes wrong. While we’re at it, how about a Plan C and a Plan D? Backups on backups on backups, I really don’t care how much redundancy there is in the system, one suspects that we’ll need it – because it is absolutely essential that nothing goes wrong for people travelling on the train from the city to Eden Park and back.

Thirdly, let’s create a “bus only” path between the CBD and Eden Park for match times. I don’t know what the best route would be – perhaps Sandringham Road, New North Road, Ian McKinnon Drive and then to Queen Street – but having such a route would make it fast and easy for people to travel between the city and the ground. You can also have a bus leaving every 20 seconds or so after the game, whereas the trains will only be coming and going every 5 minutes (which makes me wonder why we can’t have trains more frequently than that, probably Britomart’s lack of capacity again).

ARTA have made a press release saying that they are going to be ready for the RWC, and that they even have someone in a role dedicated to ensuring our public transport system is ready for this big event. I certainly do hope they’re right, and to be fair on ARTA a lot of the stuff-ups (like electrification) haven’t exactly been their fault.

Getting the signals and points right is KiwiRail’s job, creating a bus-only path between Eden Park and the city is probably Auckland City Council’s job (for now), but ensuring that integrated ticketing is finished is most certainly ARTA’s job between now and next September. I’m sure they could do it if they really tried, I mean heck – it’s not like we’re asking them to build a motorway tunnel or anything like that.

New York is finalising plans to create the first, of half a dozen BRT lines in the city, on First and Second avenues. The lines are not “true” BRT as they will not be fully grade separated or prioritised such as the lines in the first city with BRT, Curitiba, Brazil (or Auckland’s own Northern Busway) but rather similar to our green bus lanes only with stations to speed up loading.

What can Auckland learn from this process?

Here is a look at what the streets might look like when finished:

BRT or fancy bus lane?

This is “Option B” of the two under consideration by the NY Department of Transportation in the project named the Select Bus Service and what isn’t shown in the image is that this and Option A both have the bus lanes shared with right turning traffic at every intersection and bicycles with left turning. The other option actually has parking on the outside of the BRT lane! Very poor as the aim is to reduce the travel time and increase the ridership.

To me this is still a very car dominated landscape with four lanes of traffic, a lane for parking, narrow sidewalks and what I essentially consider ordinary bus-lanes with the only improvements being stations, faster loading and articulated buses.

The lesson for Auckland, if we choose to develop this level of bus service between busway and bus lane, is that:

1. Bus lanes must be continuous, as grade separated as possible, with lanes extending up to the intersection;
2. Priority at traffic lights;
3. Pre paid stations with front and rear loading;
4. Specifically branded articulated buses and the elimination of parking.

Something to keep in mind for the upcoming Dominion Road upgrade, one of the best candidates for this type of intermediate service methinks.

As I have mentioned previously, Dominion Road probably already has one of the better bus routes throughout all of Auckland. But it’s about to get even better! From February, there will be inter-peak buses going along this route every 5 minutes between Mt Roskill shops and the CBD. Yes, that’s a service at 5 minute frequencies.

Here’s a link to the new timetable, and an extract from it:

I am thoroughly impressed.

The Dominion Road corridor is probably the most well-served bus corridor in Auckland (except for ones like Great South Road where you have a tonne of disparate routes converging) with over 30 buses along that route reaching the CBD between 8am and 9am during the week. That’s over a bus every 2 minutes, which means that at peak times the existing bus lanes are getting pretty close to capacity. Auckland City Council have plans to widen Dominion Road so that improved bus lanes can be constructed, but not until 2016. The project generally involves the following aspects:

Widening parts of Dominion Road

Sections of Dominion Road, between View Road and Lowery Avenue, will be widened by around one to two metres. This will accommodate four metre wide bus lanes, and more and better bus stopping facilities. The width of the new lanes is sufficient to allow cyclists to share the lane with buses.

Bus route deviations at Valley Road and Balmoral shops

Two features of the original Dominion Road passenger transport improvements were the proposed route deviations off Dominion Road near the Valley Road and Balmoral Road intersections and shopping centres. These were developed to avoid demolishing character buildings in the two shopping centres, and will each offer improved bus trip times and reliability if they are introduced.

Since the original scheme was developed 2003-2004 the need for better urban design features around the shopping centres and along the length of Dominion Road has been recognised. Consultation undertaken in 2005 also revealed that many people were also keen to see an improvement in the design of the paving, planting and seating facilities for example. To incorporate many of these urban design features, the original scheme for the deviations behind the shopping centres is currently under review. The review will enable Council to consider other ways of using the space behind the shopping areas and take international best practice into account while still delivering a sound solution for improving passenger transport along Dominion Road.

The table below shows the timing of the various parts of this project: While this is certainly a good project, it does make me wonder whether simply widening the bus lanes and threading them behind the shops at Valley Road and Balmoral Road is going to achieve what we need out of this corridor – and in particular whether it will interact with the land-use plans for the Dominion Road corridor and provide for the significantly higher capacity that is likely to be needed in the future.

The diagram to the left shows the Dominion Road corridor, broadly outlined. Dominion Road does stretch further south than this, all the way to Hillsborough Road actually, but I think the main focus is on the area north of Mt Albert Road, as that’s where the current squeeze on the road is most acutely felt.

The three red crosses indicate that three shopping centres along Dominion Road – Valley Road shops, Balmoral shops and Mt Roskill shops (heading north to south). Although there are these three distinct centres, I tend to think of the Dominion Road corridor as quite a continuous stretch of fairly intensive development. In particular, north of Balmoral Road there are shops which line Dominion Road for most of the distance from there to its northern end. This is no surprise as development stretched out along this route when it was a tram route.

There are three options I suppose when it comes to improving public transport along this route – the improved bus lanes as proposed, a light-rail/tram line and a (underground) heavy rail route. These options are detailed below:

1) The current bus-based proposal, as shown above, includes wider bus lanes and dedicated bus lanes behind the two shopping centres. Its cost is about $50-60 million I think. The wider bus lanes and especially the bypassed shopping centres would offer some improvements in capacity of the road, but I suspect that if we had significant intensification along this route we might eventually see it becoming fairly overcrowded. An advantage of a “bus based” system is that the buses can run with varying ’stopping patterns’, some being express services, some only stopping in a couple of locations and others starting their run fairly close to the city but stopping everywhere.

2) A tram route would possibly run along the same route as the bus lanes, or alternatively down the middle of the road. I know that internationally there is a preference to run trams down the centre of roads, and perhaps that might be prefered. I would suspect that this option would be much more expensive – perhaps twice the price for infrastructure works as well as a decent amount of money to purchase trams/light-rail vehicles. In terms of capacity though, generally light-rail can carry around double the number of people per hour as a bus based system – as modern trams are often triple-articulated making each vehicle able to carry a couple of hundred people at capacity. I suspect that constructing a tram line along this route would also stimulate quite a lot of intensive redevelopment – which once again is something that Council’s plans seem to want.

3) The third option is a fully underground railway line, probably with stations at Valley Road, Balmoral Road and Mt Roskill, before linking up with a future Avondale-Southdown railway line next to the Mt Roskill Motorway. This line would obviously be incredibly expensive – perhaps in the region of a few billion dollars – but would offer a massive capacity increase compared to both bus-based and light-rail systems. One problem with it though is that having only three stations means that there would be a lot of people living between stations who wouldn’t be particularly close to the line – and we would probably have to provide a bus service along the route still – potentially not the most efficient outcome. If this option was ever chosen I imagine that massive intensification around the three stations would be needed to provide the number of required people within walking distance of the stations .

I probably lean towards option 2 as my preferred choice. The linear type of development that exists along Dominion Road makes on-street light-rail more suitable than heavy rail in my opinion. In terms of comparing a tram and bus-based system, I do think that a tram line is more likely to encourage intensification along the corridor than simply improving the current bus lanes. The additional capacity offered by light-rail also suggests that this might be a smarter option in the long term.

I’m keen to hear what others think though. This project is likely to be one of the next major public transport projects in Auckland (excluding rail improvements), so it’ll be interesting to see what happens there. The changes in local government arrangements in Auckland will make it possible to readdress whether the current option is the best one.

Last week I wrote quite a long post about “cross-town routes” and how important they are in connecting up the suburb-to-CBD routes so that you can create a network allowing people to travel from any part of the city to any other part of the city without having to travel into the CBD and then out again. The critical part of this was the use of transfers – where people start their route on one bus (or train) and then transfer to another in order to finish off their trip.

Now transfers are seen as something to generally “avoid at all costs” in the current structure of Auckland’s public transport system. There are a number of reasons for that, as I will explain in the moment, but overall it’s generally considered to be an enormous pain in the neck to have to make a transfer. Therefore, our current bus routes are generally designed to enable us to avoid transfers as much as possible by creating long and windy routes that attempt to serve all possible destinations, and by having an enormous number of different routes. The consequence of having so many different long and confusing routes is that we spread the resources very thinly, and therefore the frequencies that can be offered are generally pretty pathetic.

Clearly, transfers are annoying. However, if you look at overseas cities with successful public transport systems you’ll find that transfers happen all the time. People don’t think twice about changing lines on the London Underground or the Paris Metro, around 70% of people using Toronto’s subway system arrived at the subway station on a bus, while the majority of people using Perth’s train system did the same. So clearly, while transfers are annoying, they’re certainly not something that kills your system’s popularity altogether. The key is to make the transfer as painless as possible. There are three important elements to this in my opinion:

1. Make the ticketing of the transfer simple and seamless.
2. Make the timing of the transfer as least annoying as possible.
3. Make the physical process of the transfer as easy as possible.

Integrated ticketing, and particularly time-based ticketing (where you buy an unlimited number of trips within a two hour period within a certain distance), is critical to accomplish the first element. At the moment Auckland is utterly useless at this – in that every trip you have to pay again and again and again, and if you switch from bus to train (or vice-versa) you can’t use your same pass, your daily pass might be valid on some bus companies but not others…. it’s horrific. However, fortunately that is being sorted out – and we should have integrated ticketing…. well, some time in the next few years. Shifting Auckland from a “stage-based” fare system to a “zone-based” system will also be a critical part of making transfers easy – as that will enable the ‘time-based ticketing’ I have outlined above.

In order to get the second part right (and not have situations like we’re finding at the current Newmarket train station where there’s no alignment whatsoever between the timetables of southern line trains and western line trains - to make transfering easy) the wait between getting off your first service and getting on your second service must be minimised. I would suggest a maximum waiting time of 5 minutes, otherwise I imagine that people are simply not going to bother with the transfer. There are a couple of ways to do this: either by carefully aligning arrival and departure times (easier for trains services than buses, which are affected by traffic) or ensuring that your frequencies are high enough that it doesn’t really matter whether the timetables are aligned or not. I would suggest that a service every 10 minutes is probably the minimum level of service if we’re not going to worry about trying to align timetables. Pulse timetabling is a bit of a combination of the two, where you have a number of services all arriving around the same time – to make life relatively easy for transfering, but not dependent on one service linking up. I would suggest that ideally we would be able to run services frequently enough to not worry about aligning timetables or having pulse timetables (the London Underground solution), but if that’s not possible then doing pulse timetabling or timetable alignment.

Which brings us to the third necessary part of making the transfer easier – the physical process of transfering. In a rail context, the ideal situation is a “cross-platform transfer”, where you simply get out of your first train, wander across the platform and get on your second one. This might only take 20 seconds if the train is waiting there for you. I think either Hong Kong or Singapore (or both) was smart enough to make all (or almost all) their subway line interchanges into cross-platforms transfers, and it works incredibly well for them. In a bus to rail, or rail to bus, context I would say it’s critical to get the buses as close to the train station as possible. If possible, it would be great to keep the buses within the “fare paid” zone to keep things really simple.

For bus-to-bus transfers, things are a bit trickier. Often you’re going to have a transfer point at a big intersection, which means that to change buses you’ll have to cross many sets of traffic lights and it’ll take forever. A solution Vancouver operates is having bus stops both before and after the intersection, to minimise the number of streets you have to cross over. This seems like a sensible solution. Alternatively, it might make sense for one of your routes to take a small detour into a specified “transfer zone”, like a bus station or simply a stretch of route used by the other service so that effectively a “cross-platform” transfer is possible. Let’s have a look at how that might benefit one of Auckland’s future transfer nodes – Point Chevalier.

In the map below, Point Chevalier shops are shown along with the main existing bus routes that run through it. There are a great number of routes that I’ve indicated in blue as Main West services. Almost all of West Auckland’s buses pass through this point, so there’s excellent frequencies (particularly once we have integrated ticketing as Ritchies, NZ Bus and Urban Express services all pass through here). The green line indicates what I consider to be Auckland’s most successful cross-town route – the 007. The red and aqua lines indicate buses that serve Unitec and Pt Chevalier beach. The aqua route – the 043 – is a pretty pathetic service that runs hourly during the day only on weekdays.

In a previous post, I explained why I think the 045 route should probably be altered quite radically so that it is combined with the 005 route. Basically, by combining these two routes (effectively by extending the 005 along Meola Road to Pt Chev) you could create one service with excellent frequencies rather than two services with fairly rubbish frequencies. Furthermore, as there are already a million buses going along Great North Road, it would hardly miss that 045 service. The 043, as I note in the image above, is pretty rubbish and could probably be done away with altogether if it was easier to transfer between the “Main West Routes” and the 007 Crosstown Route. So ultimately, we may well end up in a situation where there are only two routes going through Pt Chevalier: an obvious east-west route (all the West Auckland buses) and an obvious north-south route (the 007, with much much better frequencies).

Now if this were to be implemented there’s an obvious problem to overcome: making is physically easy for the transfer to be made. Integrated ticketing can be sorted out, the 007 is likely to form part of a future Quality Transit Network so we would have high enough frequencies to ensure the waits when transfering were acceptable. But to complete the job we need to ensure that the physical process of transfering is easy. And unfortunately, that’s currently not the case. In the maps below I show the location of each existing bus stop, and the process of transfering from each service to the other one. As the table below shows, each transfer involves a walk of around 200m plus the crossing of up to two main roads:

So once again I think “how could we make this easier?” A 200 metre walk, plus waiting for up to two phases of lights to change in your favour, might take around 5 minutes and would certainly put a lot of people off transfering between services in this location I think. It’s also not particularly obvious the connections between the two sets of bus stops, while the location of the hugely bus intersection makes it difficult to shift them closer to each other. In order to find a solution it’s necessary to step back a bit, and in my opinion look at whether we perhaps shift the location of the 007 route a bit. The map below shows how this route could be altered in such a way as to provide much more simple transfers between services at the Point Chevalier shops: The red stars show where the two bus stops are, and as there’s already a pedestrian traffic light crossing between the two, each possible transfer would be just a very short cross of the road (if that) away from each other). Now of course there are a couple of drawbacks of this option.

1. By making the green crosstown route zig-zag down Moa Road you do lose some of its legibility and a trip along it would take longer than if it went straight down Pt Chev Road.
2. You’d need to install traffic lights at the corner of Moa Road and Great North Road. Interestingly enough, the 007 used to somewhat follow the route shown above, but because of the lack of traffic lights trips were really unreliable and it was a bit of a mess.

Overall though, I think the advantages would outweigh the disadvantages here. Because we are near the end of the cross-town route (it would fully end at Pt Chevalier beach), I think there would be a lot of transfer passengers and perhaps not so many people continuing right through from south to north. So the advantages of an easier transfer may outweigh the disadvantages of a slower trip.

This will be just a short post from my phone.

Just turned up at my bus stop to catch the 5.15 bus home. At about 5.14 two buses turn up, a 005 in front of a 004. Everyone gets on the 005, as do I. The bus driver doesn’t say a thing.

I sit (on a really hot bus by the way) and watch as the 004 with nobody at all on it pulls out to start its run. Everyone now waits in the hot bus for 10 minutes. Driver doesn’t say a thing.

Hopefully we’ll be on our way soon before I start to cook.

What idiots. Surely the driver of this bus should have told everyone he was not leaving for another 10 minutes, but that the bus behind was leaving immediately.