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By Peter M, on April 10th, 2012 Brian Rudman didn’t hold back in his column yesterday criticising Auckland Transport for folding under pressure of the utterly retarded Orakei Local Board, and agreeing the get rid of the Remuera Road bus lane and turn it into a T3 lane:
To eastern suburbanites stuck in rush-hour traffic on Remuera Rd, it seems there’s nothing more infuriating than being passed on the inside by a busload of commuters from less-salubrious suburbs to the south.
Local politician Ken Baguley has been on his hind legs about the inequities of it since the Remuera Rd buslane was first signalled at the old Auckland City Council back in February 2008. For four years, he and his fellow “victims” have been banging on about the evil bus lane, and finally they’ve worn the transport bureaucrats down.
Last week, Auckland Transport (AT) raised the white flag and proposed a compromise which the locals grabbed.
Instead of having to live with a nasty bus lane, Remuera will be graced with a T3 lane instead, an exclusive lane for Mummy to rush her two kids back and forth to school in the Remuera tractor, which buses will also be allowed to share.
While Remuera Road is not exactly a Dominion Road or Fanshawe Street in terms of the number of buses it carries, it is an important and increasingly popular bus route. In fact, bus use in Auckland is booming at the moment, which makes Auckland Transport’s decision even less logical, as Brian Rudman’s article points out:
What’s depressing is that AT’s backdown comes on the heels of burgeoning public transport patronage figures. If these statistics signal anything, it’s that as new life and regularity are pumped into Auckland’s long-neglected public transport network, new customers do, in rapidly expanding numbers, climb aboard the buses and trains and ferries.
The actual performance of a bus lane compared to a T3 lane obviously remains to be seen – and for that reason it’s good that this is just a trial. But the principle behind this just feels like a step in the wrong direction, especially when we are likely to need to significantly grow the bus lane network over the next few years.
I thought we were meant to be improving public transport in Auckland, not undermining it? Auckland Transport need to grow a spine on issues like these.
By admin, on December 13th, 2011 On the weekend there was an open day about AMETI’s Panmure section, outlining to the community some of the most recent design tweaks and providing some confirmation about key elements of the proposal, such as the addition of a bus/cyclist bridge across the Tamaki River, adjacent to the current Panmure bridge. This is detailed further in Auckland Transport’s media release:
Auckland Transport is planning to build a new Panmure Bridge for a future busway and a shared cycle/pedestrian path.
The proposed new bridge would be built on the northern side of the current one, which would remain open to provide the same number of lanes for general traffic.
It is one of the AMETI transport projects, which are aimed at dealing with congestion problems in the eastern suburbs to unlock the economic potential of the area. A strong focus is on giving people more transport choices by improving public transport, cycling and walking facilities.
Plans for the proposed new bridge, which are subject to consents and funding approvals, were shown at an AMETI information day in Panmure on Saturday which was attended by 200 to 250 people.
The new Panmure Bridge would have two busway lanes for the planned busway between Panmure, Pakuranga and Botany. It would also have a 4.3m wide shared cycle and pedestrian path, which would be separated by barriers from the busway.
All other vehicles would continue to use the current bridge.
There are also some pictures: It is great to see that the high-quality bus infrastructure will run across this new bridge, a step forward from the Northern Busway situation where bus priority simply disappears along some of the most critical parts of the supposed RTN route (like the Harbour Bridge and the Fanshawe Street onramp).
The bridge will form a critical part of what looks like a pretty continuous busway from Panmure all the way to Botany:
Auckland Transport Major Projects Manager Rick Walden says a new Panmure Bridge is being proposed because the existing bridge has no room for the future busway.
“The planned urban busway would run between Panmure Station, Pakuranga and Botany. To provide frequent services there needs to be dedicated lanes so buses aren’t caught in other traffic.
“Panmure Bridge is also the only place for people in the area to walk or cycle across the Tamaki River. At the moment it is unpleasant to walk and there no dedicated cycle facilities.
“A new cycle and pedestrian path would improve safety, as well as encourage more people to walk or cycle between Panmure and Pakuranga.”
Some good thought has gone into the sections of the busway between Panmure town centre and the bridge too, so that we have a nice continuous busway rather than something which stops and starts all the time (as happens with traditional bus lanes):
 As I noted in my previous post, the place where I think a bit more design tweaking is necessary is around the Panmure interchange – which still struggles to easily provide for people transferring between bus and train, particularly from/to RTN buses that will come along the busway from the southeast.  If the stops are located closer towards “J” than “H” in the final scheme then things should be pretty good. While this may seem like a small detail, if we are going to encourage more people to accept transferring between services (as we must) then we need to make that transfer as simple and painless as possible.
Another concern I have is the move to split the pedestrian crossing of Ellerslie-Panmure highway into two sections. As a pedestrian there’s nothing more annoying than only being able to get across half the road in one phase of lights – then having to wait seemingly forever in the middle to complete what should have only taken a few seconds. You just need to see all the people who sprint dangerously across St Lukes Road between the mall and the shops down Wagener Place to realise that double-legged pedestrian crossings are an incredibly stupid idea. That said, clearly things will be far far better for pedestrians than they are now. It’s just a shame to get 95% of the way there and then stuff it up.
A lot of comments in my previous post focused on the provision of a third track through Panmure station. Auckland Transport have provided some clarification on this matter:
The AMETI plans definitely do include provision for a future third rail line. Although putting this in will be a decision for Kiwirail, the new bridges that will be built at Mountain Rd and Ellerslie Panmure Highway are designed to allow for that as well as electrification. The station plans being developed also allow for it.
And as background for you, Auckland Transport is aiming for a major upgrade of Panmure Station since it will be one of the key transport interchanges in Auckland with the busway coming into the station. It is likely to be of a similar standard to New Lynn, but we can’t finalise any plans until working through funding discussions with NZTA.
This is good news on both counts I think.
By admin, on December 11th, 2011 At last Wednesday’s meeting of Auckland Council transport committee there was an update about progress that Auckland Transport is making on the Panmure busway section of the AMETI project. Back in April this year I looked at this project in quite a bit of detail, noting that things have come a long way in the right direction from the days where we were expecting no more than basic bus lanes out of the $1.3 billion being spent on AMETI.
The busway section of the Panmure part of AMETI will be in phase two – shown in green below: The details on the busway doesn’t seem to have change too much from where things were in April, which is probably a good thing as it means the route is now pretty set and decided upon: Where a lot of work seems to have been focused on is the Panmure station interchange, and we see some pretty detailed designs for the station/bus interchange now. This is a very good thing as hopefully it means the thinking is shifting towards running many more buses as feeder services to Panmure – where people can change onto the train to complete their journey. The designs look pretty good too: Let’s hope the bus stops for the RTN services (which will come from Flat Bush, Botany and Pakuranga) are put as close to the train station as possible. It also looks like there’s some real integration with land-use around the interchange – although I am not entirely sure of the likelihood of much of this development happening anytime soon, as Sylvia Park continues to destroy the viability of Panmure’s town centre.
It also looks like some serious thinking has gone into the design of Panmure station, bringing it up to a standard akin to New Lynn station – befitting its role as a key transfer point: There is significant funding set aside for AMETI in Auckland Council’s draft Long Term Plan, although many of the most expensive parts of the project are (thankfully as they mostly consist of huge road widenings) not scheduled for construction until after 2020. However, I think that the rate AMETI’s construction proceeds is likely to be very dependent on the funding NZTA has available to assist the council, through its subsidising role. As we all know, NZTA’s funding for local road projects is very much squeezed in the latest Government Policy Statement, while lower than expected fuel fax revenue is likely to place their ability to contribute to the project in even greater question.
By admin, on December 9th, 2011 There’s something of an ongoing debate in public transport circles over whether improvements should be ‘service led’ or ‘infrastructure led’. What I mean by that is whether we focus on improving service levels to a level where infrastructure investment becomes justified, or whether we look at infrastructure investment as happening first, with service levels being adapted to fit in with that infrastructure.
A good example of the debate is looking at the proposed Pakuranga to Botany busway. It’s clear, as I have explained many times before, that southeast Auckland needs some significant PT investment because it’s the most car dependent part of the city – leading to massive congestion problems and incredibly slow bus journeys. It’s crazy that someone making a trip from Howick to the CBD takes longer than from Pukekohe.
Yet if you look at service levels, nothing would really tell you that this part of the city has a need for priority bus lanes, let alone a busway. Taking a point along Ti Rakau Drive quite near Edgewater Drive, we see the following current service levels:
- 680 – 20 min peak, 30 min off-peak, hourly after 8pm
- 681 – 20 min peak (offset by 10 min with 680), nothing else. Only northbound in AM peak, southbound in PM peak
- 561 – four peak services each way only (though southbound in AM peak, northbound in PM peak)
Compared to the huge number of services along a route like Dominion Road, a service-led approach to infrastructure investment would be unlikely to mean that we’d invest in an RTN quality busway along Ti Rakau Drive. You could say that in order to justify a busway along Ti Rakau Drive we need to first significantly boost bus frequency to grow patronage, but on the other hand perhaps the real problem here is that people are being put off catching the bus because it gets stuck in traffic and therefore ends up being so slow and unattractive to everyone who owns a car. So we end up in a bit of a “chicken and egg” situation, if we focus too much on service-led improvements in my opinion.
That said, I think the proposed AMETI busway potentially falls into the trap of focusing a bit too much on infrastructure led improvement, and (as yet) too little on the service side of the debate. Existing bus services in relation to the proposed busway (in its full proposed extent, from Panmure to Botany) are shown in the map below: From Panmure, the buses then take around 35-40 minutes to get into town (according to the timetable, this seems optimistic?)
With the busway in place, I think you’d want to significantly change the way buses operate in this part of Auckland, focusing much more on having routes feed into Botany from the south, southeast and northeast, before continuing along the busway to Panmure. I’d then probably turn those buses around and send them back the way they came – getting people to transfer onto the train or onto a b.line service to town along Ellerslie-Panmure highway and Great South Road. (Alternatively you could continue the southeast services to Ellerslie and have people transfer onto either southern line trains or Great South Road buses). The shorter trips would allow us to run much higher frequencies than we have now, really starting to take advantage of our significant investment in the AMETI busway.
Ultimately, I don’t necessarily think that either a sole focus on ‘service led improvement’ or ‘infrastructure led improvement’ is going to serve us ideally. We need to integrate the two of them. In the case of the AMETI busway proposal, I think the greater than normal focus on infrastructure improvement is probably justified – simply because the current situation is so bad for people in southeast Auckland, that you really do need a ‘game-changer’ to make their trips significantly faster. Nevertheless, if the busway is built without a comprehensive overhaul of how routes in that area are structured, then it’s likely to be an incredibly expensive failure. Particularly if we continue to run our buses from the southeast all the way into Britomart and back: forcing low frequencies and very slow trips.
Of course, another matter that will need a lot of thought when it comes to the AMETI busway is how our land-use plans integrate with it. At the moment I don’t see its path as being particularly PT friendly (it travels through low-density residential and horrifically road-centric commercial development). With some clever thinking, it could become a pretty useful high-density corridor of development, but without that land-use integration once again the busway appears likely to under-deliver.
By admin, on November 19th, 2011 Many of the debates over the City Rail Link’s cost-effectiveness have revolved around the question of rail capacity. At what point does the railway network, without the CRL, become overloaded? How many people will be discouraged from taking the train because of this overcrowding? If they go back to driving, what congestion would they create? If they go back to catching the bus, what congestion does that create? All these sorts of questions are at the core of how, in particular, the Ministry of Transport undertook its review of the project’s cost-benefit analysis.
That’s how you end up with complicated tables like this:
 In case you’re wondering why there’s nothing for the eastern line, it’s because the Ministry of Transport’s analysis showed that even without the City Rail Link, there was enough capacity in the rail network for Eastern Line trains right through until 2041. Yes, seriously.
A lot of the detailed analysis of the City Rail Link’s cost-benefit ratio confuses me, because – as I explained in this recent post – all the analyses make one big assumption: that car and bus capacity is unconstrained. What that means is that the modelling used to estimate the number of people catching the bus, train or driving into the city centre in future years does not have, as a part of its workings, anything which says “at a certain point the roads will be full of buses and cars and you can’t fit anymore in.”
What this means is that all the business case assessments of the project so far assume that the number of bus passengers in particular, will increase dramatically in the future – both in the “2041 with the CRL” and “2041 without the CRL” scenarios:
You get some idea what this might mean on the ground through the maps in this report, prepared by NZTA to inform the Waitemata Harbour Crossing Project. Firstly, looking at the number of buses we have not along key routes in the AM peak: The colour of the arrows are explained further in the table below: What this suggests is that above 80 buses an hour you start to get issues, and over 100 buses an our things really start to get problematic – requiring multiple lane busway operations that simply aren’t feasible in Auckland’s city centre.
Keeping this is mind, if we look at the “2041 no City Rail Link” scenario, we can see that the number of buses that would flood the city centre is completely infeasible: If running over 100 buses an hour along arterial roads is problematic, then running two or three times that number along Symonds Street, Albert Street (both ways) and Fanshawe Street is, quite frankly, impossible. As someone I was talking to earlier this week said, as this point you’d need people sitting on the roof of the bus for such a scenario to make sense. So the map above makes a good argument for the necessity of the City Rail Link (and possibly also a North Shore Line).
However, it’s the next map which is perhaps even more interesting – the number of buses in the “2041 with City Rail Link” scenario: While buses coming in from Grafton Bridge have reduced down to a more feasible level, we still have a completely impractical number of services coming in from Upper Symonds Street, we will have a huge number of services both ways along Albert Street and, obviously, we’ve done nothing about the North Shore issue.
The impossibility of running so many buses along Albert and Symonds Street, even in the “with CRL” scenario, means that these passengers would have to travel by some other means. Travelling by car is pretty infeasible, as we will have dedicated so much roadspace in the CBD to bus lanes to handle the North Shore buses, as well as whatever we find to be the actual maximum number of buses from the south and west the city’s streets can handle. Also, if we’ve started giving effect to the City Centre Master Plan, much more of our city’s roadspace will be dedicated to pedestrians. The train is the only feasible alternative.
This potentially has a huge effect on assessing the cost-effectiveness of the City Rail Link. Let’s analyse what the capacity of the city centre for buses and cars might actually be:
- In 2010 there were around 34,000 car (including drivers and passengers) trips into the CBD at peak times. If we think about the City Centre Master Plan reducing roadspace throughout many parts of the city centre (like Quay Street, Queen Street, Hobson/Nelson streets and Victoria Street), as well as having to give up roadspace to bus lanes to accommodate the significant increase in bus numbers, I think a future car capacity of the CBD is unlikely to be much more than 30,000.
- In 2010 there were 23,000 bus passenger trips into the CBD at peak times. Most of these end up along Fanshawe, Albert and Symonds Street, which are all getting reasonably close to that 100 buses per hour capacity limit where things start to not work particularly well. Improved bus routes within the CBD (such as taking all North Shore buses off Albert Street and sending them via Wellesley Street instead) should allow for a fairly significant increase to this number, but certainly not more than half as many buses again. So let’s say a capacity of 35,000 trips at peak times.
If we set these car and bus capacity constraints, we see a huge impact on the number of rail trips. The three assessments done disagree on the total number of trips into the CBD at peak times in 2041 (excluding walking and cycling), but we can take an average of the three to come up with just under 105,000. Assuming ferry patronage increases from 3,000 to say 5,000 – you start to see that the rail system will have to take a pretty massive number of trips.
In the “2041 with CRL” scenarios, none of the assessments done suggest that rail will have this many trips – simply because they haven’t recognised the capacity constraints on the city centre’s road network. Therefore, all the assessments have under-estimated the impact of the project, they have significantly under-estimated rail patronage and therefore it is likely that they have all under-calculated the project’s real cost-benefit ratio.
By admin, on October 30th, 2011 An article in Friday’s NZ Herald noted that someone called Tony Randle had taken a detailed look at the business case for the City Rail Link, and by re-analysing the numbers has come to the conclusion that a bus tunnel option (which was looked at in the business case)
Tony Randle believes a business case for Auckland’s $2.4 billion central city rail tunnel proposal under-cooked the costs to make it look more attractive than an underground bus system serving more people.
He said presumed costs of a bus tunnel considered in the business case were exaggerated…
…The $5 million business case, commissioned by KiwiRail and the former Auckland Regional Transport Authority, said a 3.5km rail tunnel from western Britomart to Mt Eden could be built for 60 per cent of the cost of a 3km bus version.
But Mr Randle said that was largely because of the “unjustified and undocumented” inclusion of a duplicate bus tunnel and nine extra busways, and a failure to provide for extra bus passengers to complement the rail project.
This assessment is pretty unusually detailed – you can read the whole thing here – so it’s worth looking at in a bit more detail. Here’s some more from the Herald article:
Mr Randle has prepared an 89-page critique of the rail project in his spare time assisted with data which he said he received from Auckland Transport only after the Ombudsman intervened.
He said the net present cost of a rail tunnel, estimated in the business case at $1.52 billion, worked out at $2.24 billion if a realistic level of bus infrastructure was added and operating cost errors rectified.
The net cost of a bus tunnel would be $1.85 billion, compared with the business case estimate of $2.64 billion.
Mr Randle said the rail tunnel had been assessed in isolation, without assuming investment for a doubling of bus passengers needed even if the trains carried a capacity of 24,900 people through it a day.
Bus patronage into central Auckland was predicted to grow from 23,180 passengers a day to 42,814 by 2041 even if a rail tunnel is built.
A more realistic bus tunnel option would be much fairer in providing a rapid transit service to more commuters across more of Auckland than any rail system.
As I said above, a bus tunnel option was looked at in the initial business case. The rough location for the tunnel is shown below: linking the Northern Busway with a pile of bus routes at its southern end: The bus tunnel’s operation was described in the Business Case’s alternatives assessment as follows:
A two-lane CBD bus tunnel would have ample capacity to accommodate the expected up to 534 bus movements per hour (two directions) assuming no crashes or breakdowns. The capacity constraint for the bus tunnel would be the operation of the bus stations as well as the level of traffic congestion on the shared road corridors beyond the tunnel. Efficient operation of the bus stations would be critical and would require active management of bus and pedestrian movements. Bus stations of this type are proven technology in New Zealand, though operating costs are high.
However a bus tunnel of this length would require safe exits in the case of fire, necessitating fire-proof separation. Each separate direction would then need to allow passing in the case of breakdowns, so would probably need to be two lanes, implying two by two-lane tunnels.
Extensive bus tunnels on the other hand are not used to date in New Zealand. In contrast to surface streets where options may exist for buses to bypass congestion, crashes or broken down buses, this may not be possible in a two-lane tunnel, so the efficient operation of the underground facilities would be susceptible to breakdowns and other incidents. In Seattle for example, a single bus breakdown has blocked southbound bus operations for 40 minutes during peak times.
One of the big issues raised in Mr Randle’s report was that he couldn’t understand why the bus tunnel had been costed at the price of two two-lane tunnels. The paragraphs above explain the reason for this pretty well I think. The real issue with a bus tunnel is what you do at the southern end of it with all those 500-odd buses an hour (things are handled fairly well at the northern end with the Northern Busway). The Business Case says that the following would be necessary: When I first read through the Business Case the bus tunnel idea had me quite intrigued – that was until I saw the map above. Constructing a full blown busway along New North Road all the way out to Mt Albert and down Great South Road all the way to the Harp of Erin, just past Greenlane. That includes a full busway through Newmarket, which seems a bit hard to envisage. Not only would these busways be incredibly expensive, their urban impacts would be pretty severe. It’s also pretty dumb to duplicate the existing rapid transit corridors to the west and south (those being the railway lines).
Along with the cost of the bus tunnel, the other main point raised by Mr Randle is the issue of what extra bus infrastructure will be needed if the rail tunnel is built. He argues that the business case says very little about how an additional 19,000 bus users will get into town at peak times above current numbers, even if the rail tunnel is built: I actually agree that the business case has a problem here. If the number of bus travellers into the city centre is going to more than double by 2041 – even with the City Rail Link – then that’s not going to work without significant extra bus infrastructure. However, I don’t necessarily think the answer is building more bus infrastructure – especially to the south and west – but rather to reconsider how we operate our bus services from these areas. After all, if we’re going to invest around $2 billion in our rail network then we’d be stupid to continue to undermine this investment by running a huge number of buses the duplicate our rail services – so obviously we’d turn many of those route (especially the long-haul ones) into feeder routes, where people would transfer onto the rail network.
So ultimately I don’t think that we would necessarily see another 19,000 bus passengers by 2041 with the City Rail Link in place. It seems to me that most additional patronage would come from the North Shore (potentially highlighting the need for North Shore rail if the city can’t cope with that many buses) and from inner parts of the isthmus, which may require routes like Dominion Road to be upgraded to light-rail if it can’t cope with the additional buses. What we don’t need are busways duplicating the inner parts of the southern and western lines – which is what Mr Randle’s document suggests: While Mr Randle’s assessment points out a flaw in the project’s business case, that it says we’re going to have nearly 20,000 more bus passengers into the CBD without highlighting how we’re going to deal with those passengers, I think ultimately his analysis falls into the same trap as the Ministry of Transport’s review of the project – they assume that bus numbers can and will increase without constraints. The Ministry of Transport preferred the surface bus option, without realising that the city’s streets don’t actually have unlimited capacity to cope with buses (or to question whether we might want 1000 buses an hour grinding along Fanshawe, Albert & Symonds Street). Mr Randle’s point is a little smarter, but once again misses the point (though so did the original business case) that the number of people on buses isn’t just a natural outcome, but something we can influence. If we want to cap the number of buses entering the city centre at peak times then we can, shifting more to feeder buses.
Ultimately a bus tunnel isn’t a sensible option because it puts more traffic onto our roads, particularly those arterials to the south of the tunnel, rather than the rail tunnel which eases pressure on the roads. A rail tunnel can unlock latent capacity throughout the entire network, enabling all that existing infrastructure to be used much more efficiently – rather than something which requires us to duplicate huge chunks of our rapid transit system.
By admin, on October 28th, 2011 I just noticed today that Auckland Transport have come up with a bit of information on a proposed upgrade to the notoriously congested Te Atatu Road, between the motorway interchange and the roundabout with Edmonton Road. My understanding is that at peak times this is one of the most congested parts of the roading network – in some respects having similarities to Onewa Road on the North Shore as it’s the only connection to the motorway for a pretty large chunk of West Auckland. Here’s a map of the area the upgrade covers: The need for the project is pretty obvious as the stretch of road suffers from really bad congestion problems as well as safety issues. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to cross at peak times. Here’s some background information from the AT website:
Te Atatu Road is a regional arterial road which provides a gateway for some 38,000 vehicles per day that access the North-Western Motorway (State Highway 16), Te Atatu, Henderson and greater Waitakere.
This part of the road network has a high incidence of accidents, with some 170 reported crashes occurring in the past five years. Although none of the crashes was fatal there were a high number of accidents involving turning rear-ending, and overtaking collisions. There were unfortunately a number of serious injuries involved.
There is also considerable congestion at peak hours along the project corridor, and travel times can be inconsistent for those using the road.
The NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) is also planning to upgrade the Te Atatu Road Interchange as part of the State Highway 16 Waterview to Te Atatu widening section between approximately 2013 and 2014. The upgrade of the Te Atatu corridor will support the improvements planned at the motorway interchange.
I would say that some upgrade to Te Atatu Road is utterly critical to occur at either the same time, or before, the northwest motorway is widened. It’s fairly typical of NZTA to widen their motorways in a way that will inevitably dump a huge amount of traffic onto particular local roads (think Maioro Road, Tiverton Road & Wolverton Street). In terms of safety, wow 170 accidents in the last five years along a pretty short stretch of road seems really high.
The project description makes some promising noises about public transport benefits too:
Features
The project will:
- Address road safety concerns
- Provide road improvements for all modes of transport
- Enhance public transport infrastructure
- Encourage modes of transport other than private motor vehicle
- Upgrade pedestrian facilities
- Expand Auckland’s cycle lane network and connections with the regional cycle network
- Provide easier vehicle access and turning for connecting roads off Te Atatu Road
Design components
Te Atatu Road:
- Cycle lanes in both directions (on or off road)
- 2 to 3 metre wide flush (painted) median
- 2.4 metre wide footpath on the West side and 1.8 metre footpath on the East side
- New traffic signals at the Edmonton Rd/Flanshaw Road intersection
- Upgraded traffic signals at Vera Road/Jaemont Avenue and Covil Avenue intersections
- Street landscape treatment/planting where possible
- Northbound bus advance lane on Te Atatu Road at the approach to the North-Western Motorway (SH16) eastbound ramps.
Edmonton Road:
- Cycle lanes in both directions
- 2.5 metre wide flush (painted) median
- 1.8 metre wide footpath on each side
- Street landscape planting where possible
Sounds reasonably promising. Great that there will be cycle lanes (although would a two-way protected cycle-path on one side of the road be better than suicide lanes next to 35,000 vehicles a day?) Great that there will be a median strip making life easier for pedestrians and making turning movements safer for vehicles. Potentially great that something’s said about bus priority, particularly in the ‘features’ part of the project.
So let’s look at the maps and see where the bus priority is:
For the full size map click here. From what I can see, bus lanes are provided in one place only – on the westbound off-ramp. A transit lane is proposed on the city bound onramp, and that’s it. A cross-section view confirms that in reality there’s not much priority for buses in this project at all: Looking a bit closer at where the northwest cycleway crosses Te Atatu Road also highlights another problem with the proposal – that cyclists will need to cross four sets of lights (which of course will be timed to benefit cars not the cyclists) before they can continue on their journey: Unfortunately, much like many other transport projects in Auckland, it seems as though this is a classic example of “PT-wash“, much like ‘greenwash’ trumpeting the public transport credentials of a project when the actual benefits to PT are negligible or non-existent. And this is really a pity, because I wonder whether an Onewa Road T3 solution here could work quite well.
By admin, on September 16th, 2011 If you’re looking for a great example of how a vastly improved public transport system has transformed a city – Bogota, the capital of Colombia in South America – is a great example. And here’s a neat video from Streetfilms on the Transmilenio BRT system that Bogota has constructed over the past decade:
While I get annoyed at people who think that Bogota is proof that BRT is always better than rail (Bogota is a pretty different place to Auckland) there are some aspects of Bogota’s system that clearly have filtered through to projects like the Northern Busway, and could be further implemented in future bus priority projects. It’s interesting to see where things are going for TransMilenio too.
By admin, on September 5th, 2011 Tomorrow I’m giving a presentation to the Auckland Council Transport Committee, on behalf of the Campaign for Better Transport, about bus priority measures in Auckland – why they’re necessary and where priorities to improve them should be. The presentation is somewhat in response to a lot of opposition to bus lanes that emerged at the last transport committee meeting – particularly from some of the North Shore Local Boards, as well as Councillor George Wood and (perhaps most determinedly) the Orakei Local Board.
Some of the presentation, which you can read here from page 6 onwards, was formulated out of a couple of my recent blog posts – and the feedback in comments from those blog posts was really useful in putting it together.
I won’t run through the entire presentation in this blog post, but just comment on a few of the key slides. The first is obviously looking at the big picture and thinking about the massive role that buses have to play in boosting Auckland’s public transport patronage over the next decade, if we’re to get anywhere close to the aspirational goals the Mayor and Council has set: As you can see, even with fairly optimistic patronage forecasts for rail and ferries, in order to boost total patronage by the kind of levels desired, we will have to make catching the bus a lot more attractive and get a lot more people choosing to take the bus.
Indeed, if you look at Auckland’s past patronage trends, what happens to bus patronage has an enormous effect on whether our total patronage goes up or down: After discussing some bus priority success stories (like the Northern Busway and Dominion Road), the presentation moves on to summarising the key reasons why improving bus priority is a good idea: Perhaps the key reason is the last one: that it’s cheap and fast to do. I have long said that the single thing Auckland could do to increase its public transport patronage the most over the next couple of years, at relatively low cost, would be to significantly expand its bus lane network. It’s worth remember though that bus priority measures do not begin and end with bus lanes: you can also have buses communicating with traffic lights to ensure they get the green, you can get stop boxes at intersections to help buses get a head start on other vehicles, or you can go right the way up to providing infrastructure like the Northern Busway.
Some priority routes for improvements are suggested: a few in the suburbs but particularly in the city centre as that’s where bus numbers are highest and the amount of delay from having no bus lanes is most acute: 
As I said earlier, improving bus priority is not just about bus lanes, but also about improving signals so they give priority to buses, as well as identifying choke points for bus routes and eliminating them. So a few suggestions are provided in that respect: It will be interesting to see how things go tomorrow. If you want to come and see, the meeting is in the Reception Lounge of the Town Hall from 2pm onwards.
By admin, on August 28th, 2011 One consequence of the recent bus route changes has been to shift even more bus routes onto Albert Street – as the 020, 030 and Inner Link have been shifted off Queen Street, while the 005 has been shifted off Hobson Street and Queen Street. At first glance that is not a bad thing: Albert Street has bus lanes while neither Queen nor Hobson streets do – so these routes should enjoy faster travelling times than they used to. However, it has seemed to me after a few days of observations, that Albert Street is really getting to the point of being tremendously overloaded in terms of the number of bus routes it has to handle. Furthermore, Albert Street’s bus lanes aren’t actually particularly high quality.
The map below shows in green the extent of the Albert St bus lanes, as far as I can ascertain. While they are reasonably continuous, major pinch-points exist around the corner with Victoria Street for southbound vehicles and around the Customs Street intersection for northbound vehicles. Having so many West Auckland buses turning right into Victoria Street, then using Hobson Street to get up to Pitt Street, rather than just going straight up Albert and Vincent Streets, is a bit bizarre and probably slows then down a lot. But ultimately, I think by having most buses from West Auckland, the North Shore and (now) the Western Bays all using one route in central Auckland is problematic. Particularly because, unlike Symonds Street, its bus lanes aren’t of a particularly high quality either.
Another weakness of Albert Street is that it has no bus stops between Wyndham and Wellesley streets on its souther side: a core part of the city centre where people can’t even get on the bus. This is due to the stupid slip-lanes in both the two blocks, which not only destroy Albert Street’s urban form, but also narrow its roadway width and prevent the location of any bus stops.
 In short, we’re asking too much from a street that, while in some respects is pretty good for public transport (in terms of its proximity to many high-rise buildings where people work and less conflict with pedestrians that Queen Street) is certainly not ideal.
There are two steps that I think should be taken to improve this. The first is to send all those West Auckland buses up Albert & Vincent streets, rather than take the huge dogleg via Hobson Street. This should speed up their trips times quite a lot. The second is something I’ve been talking about for a while now – to shift all the North Shore buses other than the Northern Express to travel via Wellesley Street – along a route somewhat similar to this (though I haven’t yet resolved how to turn them around at the university, so let’s just set that issue aside for now): Dedicating Albert Street to West Auckland buses, while making Wellesley Street the main route for North Shore buses, should also help make it easier to understand Auckland’s bus system – along with the obvious advantage of providing a direct link between the North Shore at the university (with some buses extending to the hospital, Newmarket and potentially beyond). But perhaps most importantly, it would ensure Albert Street can operate more efficiently for all users, as it wouldn’t be quite so overloaded.
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