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By Peter M, on April 17th, 2012 I was going to put much of this in a comment on Matt’s post of a few days ago asking how people get to work, but I think it raises issues that will be of general interesting to quite a few readers, so I’m making a post out of it. I catch the bus to work, from Pt Chevalier to the university – which means that my logical route is that of the Outer Link: it’s not too far away from offering me a ‘door-to-door’ service, at regular frequencies, across a vast span of service. About as good as I could ask for right? Well, in theory yes. But in practice unfortunately the Outer Link doesn’t seem to work as well as it should. Let’s run through the issues briefly:
- It’s painfully slow. Especially outside the peak hours (when you’d think it would be faster) the trip can take almost an hour from door to door, which really drives you nuts and has pushed me back onto other Great North Road buses in recent times (even though they leave me with a much longer walk)
- Related to the above, but it’s incredibly annoying that the buses keep stopping to “keep to their timetable” over and over and over again. I’ve been on a bus that took stopped along Meola Road to catch up to its timetable, then stopped in Westmere, then stopped in Ponsonby, then stopped at Queen Street for an age. There’s nothing more frustrating than sitting on a bus going nowhere when there’s really no reason for it to go nowhere. (I know this helps avoid bunching, but there surely must be better ways of doing this than having your bus stand still for half its trip continually needing to wait for the timetable to catch up to it.)
- The service span in the evening is actually fairly poor, with the last bus leaving the city to Pt Chev at 11pm. This is at least half an hour earlier than most other “last buses”, without any particularly logical reason for such an early finish.
So those are the issues with my regular trip. I think most of the issue is with the regular stopping to catch up to its timetable – as this along with a lack of bus lanes along key parts of the route (going up College Hill towards the Ponsonby Rd intersection, going along Jervois Road between Ponsonby Rd & Curran Street) contributes to the slowness.
The other ways in which I think the Outer Link needs further refinement is on the section I don’t use as frequently: between Pt Chev and Newmarket along the ‘southern leg’. I’ve done this a few times (although not all the way) and once again it is a pretty painfully slow trip – largely due to those annoying stops, but also due to the bizarre route the bus takes. In particular, the section of the route highlighted in orange below is just plain daft: A route that’s meant to be going ‘east-west’ is pretty dumb if it spends most of its time traveling north, then south and then north again (or the reverse). The Mt Eden Road section is particularly counter-intuitive as if you want to head towards Newmarket and Parnell you actually need to be catching a bus heading in the complete opposite direction away from them. All this slow running must also add a huge amount on to the operating costs of the route – particularly pointlessly as the Balmoral Road section just duplicates the 007 route.
There seem to be two possible ways of fixing this issue – the first is pretty simple and from memory is what was originally meant to happen: a simple ‘cut through’ by the College of Education. This is shown below and makes pretty good sense: The bus spends much more of its time going east-west and much less of its time going north-south, which means more efficient operation, a more logical route and, most importantly, much faster travel times for passengers. We could take this one step further though: We make a few tradeoffs here. We serve Kingsland instead of Balmoral and we put the bus along Sandringham Road instead of Dominion Road. It also travels along Walters Road instead of Balmoral Road. Advantages are servicing Eden Park, a connection to rail at Kingsland (so potentially a useful rail feeder service from the Walters Rd/Valley Rd area) and less duplication of the 007 route along Balmoral Road. There’s also a fairly logical east-west route all the way from Kingsland to Manukau Road that the service would take.
Don’t get me wrong, the Outer Link route is definitely a step in the right direction and it seems like its model of a bus every 15 minutes, any time, is catching on. But that’s not to say it’s perfect as I think the route could and should be improved further in a number of ways – as suggested by this post.
By Matt L, on April 5th, 2012 At the transport committee the other day we leant about our sexy new trains but that wasn’t the only interesting presentation that was given. Auckland transport gave an update on what is happening to improve buses across the region including a sneak peak of what the future network could look like. There are a few key things that are combining to enable us to provide a better bus system, the first is integrated ticketing (not much mention needed there) and the second is the new contracting model PTOM which was discussed by Peter the other day. With AT able to sign new contracts they have finally taken the opportunity to take a clean slate approach to the bus network.
One of the requirements of PTOM is that AT divide up areas into units with each unit containing one or more bus routes and a full timetable (so no cherry picking of services by operators). AT has chosen to divide the city into 50 units and each unit will be contracted out separately through a mix of tendering and negotiation with existing companies. The contracts will include revenue sharing between AT and the operators and have incentives built as well as KPI’s and penalties for not meeting requirements. Due to the size of the task AT will be spreading out the contracting and changes over 3 years with 1/3 done this year, 1/3 next year and the last lot done in 2014.
In previous PT plans AT had split the network up into three levels:
Rapid Transit Network
- Rail & Busway = right of way and frequency
Frequent Transit Network (previously known as the QTN)
- High Frequency Bus (& ferry) network: connected routes at least every 15 minutes, 15 hours / day, 7 days / week
Secondary Network (previously known as the LTN)
- Local / feeder / shuttle services
- Peak only services
- School services
Here is a diagram showing the kind of thing they are hoping to achieve:
So instead of a network that has lots of services going everywhere but low frequencies, we can with the same amount of resources make a network that with some simple transfers allows much higher frequencies. Even taking into account the time of the transfer this can often lead to faster journey times (perhaps they could be improved with pulse timetabling).
Based on how planned funding and continuing on with how we have been developing our rail network currently it is estimated that we would end up with following high frequency network. It contains the busway, the rail network, the link services and only 10 other arterial routes.
 Ignore the dotted lines However by applying the methodology pointed out just before we would get a high frequency network that looks like this: (remember services on this network would be running at least every 15 minutes for at least 15 hours a day and for 7 days a week)
As you can see it is vastly different and my understanding is that the population covered by the ‘frequent’ network is around three times the business as usual version. There would also be secondary services that fill in many of the gaps that run at a lower frequency as well as peak only services and school routes. Here is an idea of what the total network could look like when secondary services are added (this image only focuses on the isthmus and west). The red routes are the high frequency ones shown above while the blue and purple routes are secondary or tertiary routes. The blue lines actually operate at worst at every 30 minutes 7 days a week
Here are some of the benefits and issues that AT identified
- Less duplication, especially in rail corridors and on North Shore
- More consistent service levels – “all day” network of frequent services which can be relied upon for many journeys, not just at peak commuting times
- Improved reliability
- Trade-off between frequency and “one-seat” for some journeys
- New ways of designing passenger infrastructure to facilitate bus – bus transfers at key intersections
Speaking to the presentation they said that this fantastic new network not only dramatically improves services but also uses the same amount of resources as the current inefficient network does. They also identified that changing the network so drastically may see a temporary dip in patronage but that over the long term it not only recovers but grows at a faster rate and this has been witnessed in many cities overseas. There will of course be people upset about having their bus stop and route moved so there will be quite a bit of consultation later in the year.
You can watch the presentation here.
I really get the feeling that over the next few years we are going to see absolutely massive improvements to out PT system. By 2016 we will have a completely redesigned bus network, rail will be electrified and most of the new trains will be running, we will have integrated fares that make paying easier and through better contracting we should hopefully see the level of subsidies required start to plummet. It could turn out to be one of the most important periods in Aucklands transport history.
By Peter M, on April 3rd, 2012 Last Friday saw what seemed like a belated announcement – that the Public Transport Operating Model (PTOM) had acquired all its necessary approvals and will be implemented in the relatively near future. PTOM is the system under which bus and ferry services will be contracted by regional councils (or Auckland Transport). The announcement was welcomed by Auckland Transport and NZTA, although questioned by the Green Party as missing the big transport questions faced at the moment: booming public transport use and stagnating traffic volumes (while funding priorities are the complete opposite to these trends).
The contracting of bus and ferry services has been an ongoing argument in New Zealand for pretty much the last 20 years. The current/previous system effectively prohibited the logical planning of public transport networks, by splitting individual services into either commercial (run without a subsidy and over which the transport agency had almost no control) or contracted (operated with a subsidy and therefore much more control). The cabinet paper on PTOM describes the problem with this system:
At the moment, public transport services are delivered through a mixture of commercial and contracted services. It is up to operators to identify what services they wish to provide on a commercial basis (ie without public subsidy). A commercial service can be a single timetabled service running from one point to another (for example the 10.48 am from Smithville to the city). Regional councils then determine what other services are necessary to the urban public transport network. These services are then ‘contracted around’ the commercial services to fill service gaps.
The practice of registering single timetabled services as commercial has hampered regional councils’ ability to provide an integrated public transport network and achieve network efficiencies, as these services are not under contract with the regional council and do not have to conform to service standards or fare standards. The presence of commercial registrations has also arguably contributed to poor tender outcomes (on average just over one bid per tender in Auckland and Wellington) and higher prices than in regions where competition is more robust. This has led to increased tensions between regional councils and operators.
The 2008 Public Transport Management Act (PTMA) sought to resolve this problem, but the operators moaned and the new government reviewed the legislation before it could even be given effect to. The result of the review is PTOM – which is described in quite a bit of detail in this earlier blog post.
From reading through the most recent cabinet paper on PTOM many of the most important gains from the PTMA seem like they’ve been retained, although there are a few little nasty parts of PTOM which may hold back our ability to truly achieve the kind of improvement to our public transport system that is so desperately needed. Before I get into those details, let’s start with outlining what we really need from the contracting system:
- The ability to plan an integrated network (therefore, the ability of the public transport agency to define the routes and timetables of every single service)
- The ability to implement integrated ticketing and integrated fares (therefore, the ability to ensure operators accept the integrated ticket and fare system)
- The ability to share risks and rewards from higher or lower patronage between the public transport agency and the private operator. This provides an incentive for both parties to grow patronage while also ensuring an ability for ‘cross-subsidy’ from the more commercial to the less commercial routes and means no more ‘cherry picking’ of the most commercial routes by operators.
- The ability to measure performance standards and include matters like punctuality (measured properly, not this rubbish) in contracts.
So what’s the good news about PTOM in achieving these goals? Well a few paragraphs from the executive summary of the PTOM cabinet paper answer a few of the questions above:
The introduction of PTOM represents a fundamental shift in the delivery of urban bus and ferry services. Under PTOM public transport services, that form part of the region’s urban public transport network, will be grouped together into units and provided under contract with the regional council to enable stronger network co-ordination and a basis for joint investment. This replaces the existing practice ofoperators being able to register single timetabled services on a route as commercial, and regional councils having to ‘contract around’ these services with subsidised services — a practice that led to poor tender outcomes and network development.
Units will be operated on an exclusive basis for the duration of their contract, and where appropriate procured through a mixture of competitive tendering and direct negotiation based on unit performance. Sufficient units will have to be put out to tender to ensure confidence in costs. Operators will still be able to set up new public transport services outside of the existing urban public transport network. These services will be exempt from contract and will not have exclusive operating rights (ie other operators will be able to set up competing services).
Both legislative and administrative changes will be required to implement PTOM. PTOM encompasses a range of planning, funding and procuring tools that have been developed with the needs of the three largest public transport markets (Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch) in mind. Many of these tools may be utilised by smaller markets, but not all will be mandated through legislation. I recommend that amendments to legislation be kept simple and limited essentially to the introduction of the unit concept and the requirement for all public transport services to be under contract with the regional council unless exempt.
Properly implemented, PTOM will introduce competition to the system by incentivising operators to compete for exclusive operating rights and directly negotiated contracts. Contractual arrangements allow regional councils to prevent exploitation of these provisions through regulating fare setting and use of cost benchmarking.
The rest of the cabinet paper further answers the questions I set earlier in the post. By combining all services along a particular route (or group of routes) into a single unit, it’s possible to plan a logical network (at least within units), the ‘cherry picking’ issue is resolved, units will be operated on a risk/reward sharing basis – giving all parties an incentive to generate more patronage. All units (except exempt services, which I will get onto soon) will be contracted – meaning that even commercial units will need to provide for the timetable and route structure decided upon by the public transport agency. All units (once again, except for exempt services) will need to accept integrated ticketing and be included in integrated fares networks – should the PT agency want them to be.
So that’s the good news, and largely ticks all the boxes above. Units will be incentivised to become more commercial, by having fares cover an increasing proportion of their operating costs, because the more commercial a unit is, the more likely it will be contracted through direct negotiation rather than by open tender. Operators dislike open tenders because it introduces significant risk of losing the tender for that area.
Theoretically, the system sets up a framework to get better value for money from our spend on public transport services. Now I have little doubt the government has done this because they want to reduce spending on public transport, so it’s possible to throw even more money at their pointless and stupid Roads of National (Party) Significance – but improving cost-effectiveness of PT services by enabling better network planning has significant benefits regardless of this. With patronage increasing so fast in Auckland, a most cost-effective contracting system means that for any additional funding (and PT funding will not decrease in Auckland while patronage is growing so quickly) we should be able to get more extra service for the same amount of money. All we need is a different government in 2014 (something that’s looking increasingly likely) to boost funding for public transport and we have the ability to create a vastly better system.
That’s the good news, so what are the catches? Well as PTOM is meant to be a giant compromise between all parties, there are a couple catches to be aware of.
- Exempt services. A number of PT services will be exempt from PTOM and while some of these are rational (like inter-city services) others make less sense, except as part of a fairly messy compromise. Bus routes that are currently fully commercial at all times will be exempt (this includes the Airbus in Auckland), while perhaps more significantly ferry services that are fully commercial will similarly be fully exempt. This includes the Waiheke Ferry – which means that there will continue to be little, if any, control over how that ferry operates in terms of its fares. It may also include the Devonport Ferry, if that runs on a fully commercial basis at the moment.
- An aspect of the transitional arrangements which seems to allow for a proportion of units to be rolled over to the existing operator for an incredibly long 12 year contract without open tendering. This is seen as a concession to reflect the existing investment in commercial services – but sounds pretty bizarre. I just hope the roll-over of these contracts allows for full network planning to occur and also allows for some assurance that a competitive price is achieved.
Overall, it seems like PTOM is a step in the right direction – although that will largely be dependent upon whether we really do achieve the efficiencies the system is designed to achieve, how the units are structured in terms of their interaction with one another, whether the ‘catches’ listed above turn out to be particularly problematic and whether any of the efficiencies gained are spent on further improving the system to reflect rapidly increasing patronage, or whether they are siphoned off to be flushed down the toilet on another pointless RoNS project. So to an extent, we will have to wait and see.
By Guest Post, on March 24th, 2012 This post is by Peter, and follows on from his previous post about feeder buses.
Toronto is the biggest city in Canada, and is an interesting case-study because – for such a large city – it has a relatively small ‘rapid transit network’. The Toronto Subway has about 70 kilometres of in-service track (with 69 stations), while the GO Transit commuter rail network doesn’t really offer the level of service and frequencies we would associate with ‘rapid transit’. Like many Canadian cities, Toronto does a lot with its relatively limited system – especially when it comes to integrating its bus network and feeding into the rapid transit system. Weekday daily ridership in 2010 averaged 948,100 on the subway, with frequencies up to a train every 2 minutes and generally no worse than a train every 5-6 minutes. Here’s a map of the subway and rapid transit network:
The Toronto system is also incredibly smart in its use of feeder buses to the rapid transit network. This passage from Paul Mees’s book “Transport for Suburbia” highlights a comparison between Toronto and Melbourne, when it comes to the role of feeder buses:
The real difference between Toronto and Melbourne is not in the share of residents living within walking distance of rail stations: the share in Melbourne is actually higher, at 20 per cent to Toronto’s 15, because its rail network is much larger and has many more stations. The critical factor is the behaviour of the 80-85 per cent of residents who didn’t live near stations. In Melbourne, these residents rarely used public transport, especially outside peak hours: across the day 69 per cent of rail passengers walked to the station and 17 per cent travelled by car. In the part of Toronto served by the TTC, residents who lived beyond walking distance from stations used public transport nearly as often as those who lived nearby: only 20 per cent of rail users walked to the station and a tiny 3 per cent took cars. The big difference was in the use of feeder buses (and trams): 76 per cent of TTC rail passengers travelled to the station in this way, against only 10 per cent in Melbourne.
So we know the vast bulk of passengers on Toronto’s rail system get there on the bus – that’s a heck of a lot of transfers happening! TTC statistics back this up – highlighting that across all forms of the public transport system there are really high rates of transfers. In 2010 there were 1,512,000 average daily ‘linked’ trips (i.e. that number of fares collected), but once you include transfer trips there was an average of 2,508,000 daily trips. While some trips involve more than a single transfer, if we were to assume that each trip only had the one transfer, the numbers indicate that around 65% of trips involve a transfer/connection.
How does Toronto operate a system based so significantly around transfers, while at the same time obviously ensuring that it’s an attractive enough network for very high ridership rates? That’s a question obviously worth exploring in more detail. Let’s start with what Mees says about how Toronto’s system works – largely coming from his previous book A Very Public Solution:
The TTC’s bus network operated as an extension of the subway system, linking it to the whole of the city. This enabled the provision of a ‘Paris Metro’ style frequent rail service, running every five minutes or better until 1:45am seven days a week. Frequencies like this would require extremely high densities if patrons walked to the station, but the TTC’s rail-bus strategy circumvented the density problem… Because of the economical densities of patronage generated by the feeder bus network, the Toronto subway returned an operating surplus, which helped defray the loss incurred by the buses. Conventional economists might object to this apparent cross-subsidy, but in reality the performance of the two modes cannot be separated: the rail service would not carry enough passengers to make a profit without the loss-making buses that fed it. The net result was that Toronto’s much smaller rail system outperformed Melbourne’s large network, by using buses to extend its reach.
The system relies on making these feeder buses work well, of course. Some key points relating to Toronto’s system are outlined by Mees:
- Main bus routes operate at high frequencies (every 10 minutes or better) across the whole span of service.
- The network follows the grid street pattern, allowing straight and logical links with the subway stations (which are generally located at the intersection of key arterial roads).
- Free transfers between services – to the extent that at most subway stations the buses actually enter the ‘fare paid’ part of the station, avoiding inconvenient and slow ticket checks.
- Bus to bus transfers are facilitated by physical design: stops located immediately adjacent to intersections where routes cross, approach and departure side stops on wide roads eliminate the need to cross wide streets.
So what does a Toronto feeder bus service actually look like? Let’s take the 36 route for example, which is shown in blue in the picture below (the rapid transit system is shown in the various colours each line is generally depicted in): 
The 36 route has a few little variations – some buses branching off at various points as you head west, but generally follows what’s shown above: a straight and logical route that not only provides good east-west connections, not only feeds people into the Yonge-University-Spadina Line at Finch Station but also connects to a vast range of north-south bus services. In effect, with just one transfer, anyone living on this bus route has access to anywhere on the entire inner-western part of Toronto. Plus, for really common trips – such as those trying to get to the subway – the route offers the fastest and most logical option. No winding your way randomly through the suburbs here, just a direct route straight to the subway system.
As I said earlier, there’s a little bit of complexity with the route having a number of branches, but even those are handled in a way that’s pretty easy to understand:
 
Even though this route is really quite far out into the suburbs (remember the map earlier in the post to give a clue about its location in Toronto), it can support fantastic frequencies by doing so many different things and doing them so effectively.
So I think we can learn quite a lot from Toronto when it comes to feeder buses. Firstly, ideally the routes should be useful for something other than just being a feeder service (likely, especially if the interchange point becomes a retail/office/housing hub). Secondly, the process of the transfer is made as easy as possible – through high frequencies, station design, integrated ticketing and even at some stations bringing the bus effectively “into” the subway station. Thirdly, the route structure itself makes sense and is pretty attractive for travellers – being straight, direct, quick, easy to understand and logical.
Note: I’ve never actually been to Toronto, so all of this thinking just comes from reading books and looking at a lot of maps on the internet. If there are any locals, or people who have visited Toronto and wish to add to the points made or dispute them, I’d most welcome it!
By Guest Post, on March 20th, 2012 This is a Guest Post by commenter Peter, who has written previous posts here and here.
There has been a lot of discussion in recent months about the need to improve Auckland’s bus network so that it integrates with, rather than duplicates, the rail network and also the Northern Busway. Auckland Transport’s board papers for their meeting this coming week seem to indicate that this process is finally happening – as Matt pointed out in his post earlier this week, we see the following:
The PTNP will define a new connected and integrated network for public transport in Auckland of:
- Rapid Transit Network (RTN) of electrified and modern rail services and Busway services.
- A connected network of high frequency bus services along key arterial road corridors, supporting and integrating with the RTN – 15 minute worst case frequency seven days a week between 7am and 7pm – plus some high frequency ferry services
- Secondary routes of lesser frequency ferry and local feeder bus services connecting to the RTN and high frequency bus network, school bus services and peak only services.
- The main benefits of the new PTNP will be to simplify the network, remove the “spaghetti” A-B bus routes, remove duplication of services and provide high frequency services that are convenient and reliable. This in turn will create resource efficiency “savings‟ that can be used to focus bus resources where the demand and congestion relief is most needed – on key arterial corridors.
It seems fairly likely that turning a number of existing “long-haul” bus routes into feeder services to both the rail network and the Northern Busway will be a key part of this plan. Logically it should, because as many people have pointed out earlier it’s just silly for us to run bus routes that completely duplicate our rail corridors doing the same “long-haul” job that we’ve spent billions of dollars on the rail network to do.
However, this “trunk and feeder” approach generally hasn’t worked well in Auckland so far. We have a few feeder buses that run around the North Shore at the moment, and the general conclusion that I’ve come to from discussions with various people is that they’re rubbish. And because they are rubbish, nobody uses them. Here are two of the feeder services into Albany and Constellation stations: The 880 route (the red one) takes almost an hour to complete its giant circuit of this part of the North Shore, and only runs at 30 minute frequencies – fine if you’re heading into the city where you can transfer onto the much higher frequency Northern Express: rubbish if you’re heading out of the city and just miss your connecting feeder bus to take you home. Furthermore, Constellation and Mairangi Bay are the 3 stage boundaries, i.e. an express from Mairangi to the city is three stages. However for some infuriating reason all the 880 route along Maxwellton Dr falls into the ‘upper zone’ of the North shore, while Constellation is still in the lower zone. The end result is a longer, slower and less direct 839 from Mairangi to town on a lower zone pass, but using the feeder and transfer to the NEX for a quick trip needs the more expensive upper and lower zone pass. The 887 bus (the blue route) takes 40 minutes to complete a pretty incomprehensible route, and also only runs every half-hour – making it hopeless for returning trips.
So we haven’t got feeder buses right on the North Shore. Does that mean feeder buses in general are always going to be almost completely empty and utterly useless, or is there a better way we can do them? Looking overseas, we find that in cities like Perth, Vancouver and Toronto, the majority of people catching the train have actually arrived at their station on the bus – suggesting that feeder buses to rapid transit is quite possible. But how?
Taking a look at Perth’s bus network gives us some clues about how to run better feeder services – here’s a section in the very northern area that feeds into Clarkson Railway Station.  Tracing the individual routes takes a bit of work (and there’s a typo which doesn’t help), but generally they follow fairly logical routes feeding into Clarkson Station in the bottom-right of the image. With some exceptions they take the fastest trips while still offering a fairly decent coverage of the area. Looking at a timetable, we can also see that some care and thought has gone into integration with trains: The connections also work in the outbound direction: What’s interesting in comparing Auckland with Perth is a fundamental difference between a busway and a rail line – that being that you’ll probably always be running much higher service frequencies along a busway than a railway line (simply because you can’t fit anywhere near as many people on a bus). The lower train frequencies make it a bit easier for connecting feeder buses, because you can time your feeder to connect to your train (and vice-versa), even at fairly low frequencies. With a busway, it’s likely to be much more difficult to match the frequency of your feeder with that of your trunk route. The Northern Express runs at 5 minute frequencies or better for much of the day these days, and although you wouldn’t need any feeders to match that frequency, you would need them to be coming at worst every 15 minutes to ensure that non-timed transfers didn’t result in particularly long waits.
In future posts I’ll try to look at how Vancouver and Toronto operate feeder buses to their rail networks, and perhaps look at how Brisbane operates its southeast busway in a bit more detail – to really explore how we can make feeder buses to rapid transit work.
By Guest Post, on January 25th, 2012 This is a Guest Post by William Stewart
When I first moved to Christchurch after leaving Auckland in 2004, I was amazed by what was then to me, the best execution of public transport I had ever seen. The biggest barriers to me in using public transport have always been ease of use, comfort and affordability.
No-one’s going to use a bus system which is complicated, illogical and difficult to find out which bus route to travel on or where to catch your bus. The core of the system in Christchurch was the Central Bus Exchange, a staging area through which almost all buses (excepting the Orbiter outer ring service) in the city were routed through. Having all the bus stops in (or beside) one building meant that transfers were easy, that you didn’t have to walk far to get between stops and the easy to understand maps helped visitors and new PT users find their bus stop. Compared with Auckland’s multitude of departure points from Downtown, Mid City, Civic Center, Albert St, it does make it a lot easier to the non native user to find their stop. Aiding ease of use were large electronic signage which clearly and accurately display arrival times of all buses using the Exchange and what platform they depart from. Each platform also had a smaller sign which displayed only departure times for that particular platform. While electronic signage is becoming increasingly common in Auckland over the last 10 years, because all of Christchurch’s CBD buses depart from the same place, every passenger has access to the signs, as opposed to many of the inner city stops in Auckland (i.e Albert St, Customs St) which don’t, and all to frequently have had their printed timetable vandalized.
After you’ve made public transport easy to use, you also have to make it comfortable. Your own weatherproof clean car with padded chairs is always going to be more attractive then a bench (if you’re lucky) on the street with possibly no rain cover and definitely minimal wind cover. Once you add in the dangers of being alone at a bus stop late at night in town, the litter, stench and graffiti that plagues our inner city stops, public transport can become a very unattractive option. With the Bus Exchange, Christchurch was able to provide a modern and comfortable venue for PT users. You could wait indoors for your bus, safe from rain or wind or excessive heat thanks to the interior air conditioning, relaxing on padded chairs in a security patrolled safe and well lit environment. We are seeing more and more people realize that these are the type of facilities that needs to be offered to PT customers. With the development of New Lynn, Britomart and Manukau, Auckland is getting there. Unfortunately these are all mainly beneficial to train users, there isn’t really anything which offers the same level of ease to bus users. Which the construction of Britomart I had hopes that they would better integrate the bus system with the train station, but that hasn’t happened. New Lynn is primarily a train station and while the bus station is integrated, it is designed for people to sit outside for their bus rather than in.
Here are some photos of the old bus exchange: 
Christchurch also meets the third tenet of providing an attractive choice to private transport which is affordability. It’s not really relevant to the Bus Exchange but Christchurch does enjoy integrated ticketing based on a time scheme rather then zonal. Users may travel on any number of buses for 2hours and pay only $2.30. If they travel longer, they pay $4.60, the daily max charge.
With the events of 22/2/11, Christchurch lost much of its city center including the bus exchange. We had a temporary bus exchange for a few months which filled an emergency requirement. 
Thankfully October 2010 bought an improvement with a purpose built Temporary Central Station. I haven’t had a chance to use this new exchange extensively as a passenger, but I believe it will certainly fill the gap until we get the promised brand new under-grounded (so that emerging buses do not impact pedestrian movement) bus exchange at some future point. Another major impact the earthquakes had was on traffic within the city. With the central city cordoned off for well over 8months, and the central part of the city still cordoned off, traffic every where else in Christchurch has been chaotic with all of that throughput which usually uses the city center’s 4 one way lanes redirected to roads which are not designed to handle that quantity of traffic. This isn’t even mentioning the fact that due to having to bypass around the giant rectangle of closed city center added more time to every journey. This understandably had a massive impact on the bus times and for the first few months after the quake our services were unreliable, always late and very inconvenient.
With the gradual reopening of the city center, timetable adjustments which reflect increased journey times and some central city through roads being opened, traffic is slowly getting back to normal. With a bus exchange located once again in the city it makes it easier to get cross town and transfer between routes. While most shops and businesses have relocated out of the city center, the bus exchange being back does mean that people can once again easily commute into town. This will play a crucial role in the rebuilding of our CBD. Here’s a comparison of diagrams of the old and new interchanges: And some photos of the new temporary interchange:
By admin, on January 23rd, 2012 I’m not going to repeat the excellent Guest Post review of the book Human Transit – other than to note from what I’ve read of the book so far I agree with pretty much everything in the review. It is a very good book. It is a book that should be widely read by those involved in public transport planning, as well as by anyone who find themselves interested by public transport, how it works and how it could work better.
One part of the book that I found particularly interesting, perhaps because it fits with some of the critiques I’ve made of Auckland’s bus network in previous posts (for example: here and here) relates to the question of how much emphasis we should put on peak travel against all day travel. The question occupies chapter 6 of Human Transit, which also provides some useful insights into this issue.
At a basic level, most public transport has times of peak demand which correspond with the beginning and end of the working day. Human Transit notes that the peaked systems (those with the biggest difference between peak and off-peak demand) are almost always systems serving low-density suburban areas – where driving all day is easy and it’s only congestion (or parking costs downtown) which encourage people onto public transport during peak hours. Auckland’s North Shore is a pretty good example of a highly ‘peaked’ public transport market, with very strong demand for public transport to the CBD during peak hours (to avoid congestion and having to pay for parking) but pretty weak demand outside the peak because the public transport system isn’t particularly useful for trips other than those heading to the CBD.
There’s nothing particularly new about all this. Where life becomes interesting is when we start to look at the cost-effectiveness of adding services at different times of the day, or alternatively where we decide to cut service if we need to save money. Human Transit tells us an interesting story in this regards:
In the early 1980s, when I was an undergraduate intern in the planning department of Portland’s TriMet, I remember a day when the manager of scheduling was tearing his hair out in frustration. The agency faced budget cuts and was having to cut service, but the general manager (the chief executive officer of the agency) had instructed them to cut only outside the peak. “Don’t cut the peak,” he had said. “The peak is our bread and butter!”
But as it turned out, there was no way to protect the peak service from cuts and still save any money. They could cut midday service, but this would turn all-day shifts into peak-only shifts, which would make those shifts more expensive to run. This effect was so pronounced that it cancelled out most of the cost savings from the service cut.
There are many reasons why peak services are more expensive to run than off-peak services. Labour is one matter, getting the buses and trains back to the depot when empty (those dreaded “not in service buses”) is another, but perhaps the most significant is the cost of the bus or train fleet that must be owned to provide that ‘peak of the peak’ service frequency. Increasing off-peak frequency generally only requires a bit more fuel and staff cost (and may not even require that if staff are heading back to the depot anyway, or have contracts requiring minimum shift times). Increasing peak frequency typically requires buying more vehicles (be they buses or trains), hiring more drivers, running more ‘out of service’ kilometres and entering into increasingly complex and inefficient rostering procedures. The book picks up on this issue:
Fleet size depends on how many vehicles you need at once, and that, of course, depends on your peak service, not your all-day pattern. Many transit agencies must purchase, license, store and maintain a vehicle that makes only one round trip per day. That’s a huge inefficiency compared to an all-day operation whose fleet may work 10 to 20 hours each day.
I think it was Paul Mees’s book “Transport for Suburbia” which compares Vancouver’s West Coast Express peak-only commuter train with the Skytrain system on this issue. On average, each West Coast Express train has its seats filled around twice a day – one trip in during the morning and one trip out during the evening. In contrast, each Skytrain has every seat filled something like 50 times a day because they operate at high frequencies all day long, providing service for far more trips than just commuting ones. That makes the Skytrain system incredibly efficient to run, even if overall it may not seem as “crowded” during very peak times as the West Coast Express train.
What the book goes on to highlight is that if we are looking to improve the cost-effectiveness of our system, we shouldn’t focus on cutting services outside the peak (even if the buses or trains are fairly empty), but rather look at services during the peak that aren’t at maximum capacity:
…if you see a transit vehicle running nearly empty during the peak period and in the peak commute direction, you may be seeing some actual waste. Suppose that a commuter express bus, doing a long run from a distant suburb into the city, carries only fifteen people, less than half a seated load. If the transit agency is looking at its cost-effectiveness fairly, this situation should look much much worse than a bus with fifteen people at noon, running on an all-day, two-way line. For this one commuter express run, the agency has spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the bus, thousands more for the land on which to store it, and thousands per year to maintain and operate it, including penalty rates for the driver who works a brutal schedule and is kept from spending time with family most days – all to serve only fifteen people!
In this previous post, I compared bus frequency across a number of central isthmus routes: 
Perhaps the most interesting observation of the above (along with Dominion Road’s excellent inter-peak frequencies) is how service levels drop away dramatically after 6pm, which encourages people to travel home during the evening peak. A thorough assessment of whether each and every one of the peak hour services is needed may end up freeing up resources to run a huge number of inter-peak and evening services – at the cost of just a few peak time buses.
The 15 minute frequency all the time of the Outer Link bus is a pretty extreme example of an ‘un-peaked’ service, but is a key element of the route’s success. We are able to afford to run a good frequency service around much of the inner isthmus, even on a Sunday night, because we don’t have the extremely high costs of additional peak services (aside from a couple, to ensure the route can keep to its timetable in peak hour traffic). While those Sunday night buses might generally be empty, over time the guaranteed frequency of the service means that people will learn to trust it and rely on it – influencing land-use patterns, decisions people make about where to live and decisions people make about how many cars to own. The Outer Link’s constant timetable and its regular frequency are all made possible by squeezing the peak a little bit harder (lower frequencies at peak time on some services in the area than there used to be), so we have achieved a really high-quality service at relatively low cost. I suspect though that some additional peak time services, for capacity reasons, will be required inevitably.
This is not to suggest that we should go cutting peak time services ‘willy nilly’, because – after all – the TriMet General Manager was correct in saying that serving the peak is the ‘bread and butter’ of public transport, to an extent. However, it’s worth keeping in mind the cost differences of running peak and off-peak services, so you don’t get quite so grumpy next time you see a predominantly empty off-peak bus, or have to squeeze onto a peak time bus. Even though such an outcome looks inefficient, looks can be deceiving.
By Guest Post, on January 22nd, 2012 This is a Guest Post by Matt. (Yes a lot of Matts comment on this blog, this is by “handlebars Matt”).
Human Transit is Jarrett Walker’s blog, which he calls the professional blog of a public transit planning consultant. Human Transit – How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives is his book distilling his blog, and the essence of his philosophy of public transport planning. The book, and his views are based on where he’s lived and worked (Portland, Sydney, Vancouver amongst them) and his examples are from West Coast North America and Australasia, and therefore will not be so remote from readers in Auckland and Wellington. He even acknowledges that some people call it public transport, and in some cities they even drive on the left. He’s worked in various cities and hints at some of the arguments and debates that he’s witnessed over the years. Whatever his frustrations may have been, he wished that everyone was arguing from the same place with the same language and the same understanding of the basics. This is a book about those basics.
It’s a short book, and an easy read (which I finished today, appropriately on a train). You’ll not struggle with convoluted language. It uses simple and clear prose. This is a bit of a blessing since this is essentially a book about the geometry of transit, a topic which could be as dry as Weeties in a milk drought, but here it isn’t. I think anyone could read this. And I think a lot of people should. It would be nice if more people understood the trade-offs that a city makes when they plan and fund their network. You’d hope this was known like the backs of hands by people who do the actual planning. One look at the average city map (like Maxx’s Southern Suburbs map) shows that there is a lot of room for taking on more of the book’s key messages.
Some of his topics will be familiar to readers of his blog – legibility of maps, and frequent network maps is important, and the ease of making connections (with a short spiel on smartcards and integrated ticketing) facilitating a grid of rapid services which give the rider the freedom of personal mobility to move around their city. Coverage in a network can be given by local, meandering services, but ridership is increased by frequent connected services linking the major nodes of the city in a grid. In a flat city with many nodes of activity this would be a rectangular grid, but in a city like Auckland with a strong CBD, and it’s unique topography, a spider’s web network of rapid services would fit (that’s my observation and not one from the book). It is making the same point as Paul Mees in his book A Very Public Solution (and more recently, Transport for Suburbia); a network of frequent interlinked services is possible in dispersed cities (like Australian, US, Canadian and NZ cities) even with low overall density if the local density around the stops is higher.
Like his blog the book is technology neutral. He doesn’t care whether trains are better than buses. He cares about whether they have their own right of way, whether their crossings are at grade or not, the frequency of service, and the span of those services. He talks about planning for all day products, and not necessarily concentrating on the peaks. The book does ignore technology, but there are aspects of technology that are relevant in regards to capacity, e.g. passengers per hour (train lines can carry more passengers than a dedicated bus lane perhaps) and in some ways technologies aren’t solving the same problems. Replacing the Wellington Cable Car with a bus for instance isn’t possible as some technologies have different capabilities. Somehow, interesting as they are, I think those kind of discussions would have got in the way of the lessons that are in the book.
Another thing missing perhaps was much talk of the stations and stops themselves, other than to say they must respect the passengers, and be safe and pleasant places. There was only passing mention of bicycle and car park and rides and kiss ‘n rides. Again maybe this is my bugbear and is a detail left for elsewhere.
Frequent readers of Human Transit, or other urban transit blogs may think they know it all already. You probably do, but still read this book. Seeing the rules of transit planning distilled down to simple heuristics, and understanding that some things (like coverage and ridership) are tradeoffs, all in the one place may be useful to you. Lessons learned for me are the language of describing the different delays that a service may encounter and the “be on the way” rule. If you’re planning a passenger generator (like a university) don’t build it on a cul-de-sac or on top of a hill. (He mentions the currently in the news Simon Fraser University in Vancouver in regards to this). Another example of his “be on the way” rule was the dreams unfulfilled of Peter Calthorpe designed Laguna West south of Sacramento. It had me breaking out Calthorpe’s The Next American Metropolis and checking it out on Google Maps. His example of Fresno, California left me scratching my head though. 6-8 lane boulevards are just not the New Zealand experience.
All up this book is a practical vision, working inside political realities, where a city can intensify development opportunities, by choosing the geometry and frequency of its services, that result in more efficient public transport opportunities that give people true freedom to have the mobility of their own cities. It is a very human philosophy and should enable us to share a language to ask for what we want.
For Auckland if the political reality is a central government that is not going to come to the party on rail improvements then what lessons could we learn from this book about how we could have a frequent grid? For all NZ cities how do we get bus priority and, where useful, buses in their own dedicated lanes? We often accuse the central government of “being dumb”, but how, faced with that reality, could we be smarter? This book should help.
By admin, on January 20th, 2012 This will be my last blog post about bus route changes, as the blog transitions towards being run by Matt, Stuart, Patrick, Nick and whoever appears out of the woodwork in the future. I still have a few more posts to write over the next week, but they will focus on other matters – including a look back at my involvement in this blog.
Anyway, there is one last bus route idea that I want to post about, because I think it’s potentially a really important next step for our bus system in the southern part of Auckland. I’ve touched on this matter a bit before to an extent, when looking at suggested bus changes for Mangere – but this post focuses on proposing one particular bus route, which I’ve called the “Southern Link”.
Aside from the strong north-south connection across much of southern Auckland, provided by the railway line and Great South Road, most of the rest of the area has relatively poor public transport. The bus routes in Mangere are so confusing as to be almost incomprehensible, the public transport in Auckland’s southeast is notoriously horrible and much of the system seems to still be based on the incorrect assumption that everyone’s trying to get downtown. I have heard (although it’d be great to see data confirming it) that fewer than 5% of people living in Mangere actually work in the CBD, with the Airport, East Tamaki, Manukau, Wiri and Penrose being much more common employment locations.
Compounding the issue of poor public transport throughout much of this part of Auckland is, inevitably, the socio-economic situation that many residents in South Auckland face. Compared to most of the rest of the country, Auckland is an increasingly polarised city – with an increasing number of very well off people, an increasing number of very poor people and a decreasing number of those in the middle. For southern parts of Auckland, poor public transport means they need to rely on driving to work – which can mean the cost of feeding the car competes directly against the cost of feeding the kids; or leads to them being trapped in an ugly cycle of high-interest debt to buy/fix the car that is considered so essential for getting them to work.
It is for this reason that improving public transport is seen as a key part of the Auckland Plan’s “Southern Initiative”. If improved public transport in this part of the city can reduce the reliance of its residents on that expensive second car or on increasingly costly petrol, then the socio-economic benefits may be immense. Of course in order to achieve this, a system needs to exist that is of sufficient quality (convenience, speed and price) for residents to trust it enough to use on a daily basis. Looking at the very low modeshare of PT in many parts of southern Auckland suggests to me that we’re quite a long way from achieving this goal.
For this post, I’m mainly going to be looking at parts of South Auckland that are generally to the north of Manukau and aren’t particularly close to the current railway line (except where it’s possible for a route to cross the line and enable transfers). This creates the following major centres that we probably need to base our thinking around: Onehunga and Botany are clear connections to more CBD-focused parts of the public transport network. Botany will be connected to Panmure through a busway in the future, while Onehunga has rail links to the city and also high-frequency routes along Manukau Road. Otara, Otahuhu and Papatoetoe aren’t identified because they’re relatively close to the existing rail corridor or Great South Road and can probably be predominantly served by routes focused on there. East Tamaki is just a horrific place to try and serve with high-quality public transport – something that needs resolving in other ways to this proposal.
In addition to the locations above, you can add in secondary centres and you start to get an idea of a general ‘swathe’ along which we may be looking to put our route: A really critical element here is connecting the airport – as a major employment hub – with other parts of the city where its workers are likely to live, as well as other employment hubs. Another critical point is to ensure that we can run the route at a high enough frequency to encourage people to simply “turn up and use it”. Therefore, it needs to be a single route and needs to serve enough places to generate a level of demand that can justify something like the Outer Link’s existing timetable: a bus every 15 minutes at all times on all days of the week.
My most likely route follows the course outlined below: In general, the route is a fairly simply “U” shape, with as few “higgledy piggledy” sections to it as possible. To serve Mangere Town Centre it needs to veer off the ideal route to an extent, but this is a fairly minor detour. Around Flat Bush it might also need to veer off Chapel Road – depending on how public transport is structured in the yet to be developed town centre. Aside from that, the route generally follows main roads along a fairly logical path to make it easy to understand for users. At the Onehunga end it should connect to buses along Manukau Road (hopefully in a timed fashion, but frequencies should be good enough for that to be a bonus rather than critical) while at Botany it will also connect to buses heading into the city or to other parts of southeast Auckland.
The other major hub is Manukau, where the route could connect to rail, a high frequency bus along Great South Road and all the buses further south that should feed into Manukau in the future. The route is intended to provide relatively quick service between points that are relatively far apart – so bus lanes would be advantageous where this can easily be done, or where it’s found to be necessary to avoid traffic delays. Bus stops might also be spaced a bit further apart than normal to facilitate faster travel – although this is helped by the big gap between the airport and Puhinui, as well as (to a lesser extent) gaps to the north of the airport.
If we branded the service as the “Southern Link”, gave it new and dedicated buses and put it on a “15 minute anytime” timetable I’m pretty sure it would be successful – and a good forerunner to build demand for Airport Rail and future rail between Botany and Manukau. Of course we will need a lot of other routes in this part of Auckland, but I think this could form our high frequency backbone of the network to supplement the north-south corridor – with most of our other routes feeding off either of the two.
By admin, on January 13th, 2012 Auckland Transport has confirmed that the proposed changes to the 020 route, including shifting its terminus back to Westmere shops, will occur on February 7th. Here’s what the 020 route will be: The proposed 020X route has also been finalised – to operate as every second run during peak times. It will follow this route: As always, there’s no perfect route – with this result being a balance between restoring accessibility to K Road from Grey Lynn while providing a quick trip at some times of the day for commuters who value speed. In an ideal world the 020 route wouldn’t be quite so indirect, and it will be interesting to follow whether there are any future changes to speed it up a bit.
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