Continuing on with my series of post about simplifying the structure of Auckland’s bus network, I thought that after a couple of reasonably simple routes (Sandringham Road and New North Road), I thought I’d take on a really horrible challenge: the eastern isthmus area of Auckland. Why do I say “really horrible”? Well, this is what the existing route structure looks like (focusing on the area to the east of the motorway):
As someone recently put it quite aptly, it looks like someone threw spaghetti at a map of Auckland and that became the route network. Apart from Ellerslie-Panmure Highway, Remuera Road and (to a lesser extent) Tamaki Drive, there aren’t many core bus routes here like you get on the other side of the isthmus (where you have a whole succession: Great North Road, New North Rd, Sandringham Rd, Dominion Rd etc. etc.) This lack of structure to the street network makes life much more difficult when it comes to putting together an effective bus network, but I guess on the other hand we have the advantage in this part of Auckland of a railway line running through the middle of the area we’re looking to serve. This is shown in the map below:
So the green lines form our “Rapid Transit Network” (RTN). Add to that the major radial suburb to CBD routes that would form a good part of our “Quality Transit Network” (QTN), which largely travel along the three main routes I noted above: Ellerslie-Panmure Highway, Remuera Road and Tamaki Drive. This is shown in the map below:
As per my previous diagram of how I think Auckland’s bus routes should generally work across the isthmus, there would be a number of cross-town routes of QTN standard that would supplement these radial routes to form something of a real network effect. The result would be this:
Now there are some pretty big “holes” in there between routes, so for those areas we would need to apply the third tier of the system, the “Local Connector Network” (LCN). Now I must admit I’m really not sure of the best way to apply LCNs to the system: whether they should run in short loops, whether they should try to follow a straight line or whether higgeldy- piggeldy is OK. I have added in a few LCNs that I think could be useful in providing a service to the gaps in the above map. Generally they feed into railway stations or into the higher frequency QTN network:
Putting it all together, and adding in some possible route number to make the system more easily understood, I think that this is a reasonably first crack at it. Note the new train station (which would require some alteration to the train tunnel in that location!) which I think is necessary to provide useful connections to the bus network in the area. This largely makes up for the fact that Meadowbank Station is pretty terribly located for connections to buses.
A a bit of a disclaimer I must admit that I have never lived in this part of Auckland, and have only ever caught buses around here extremely occasionally – so I am by no means an expert and by no means do I think that I’ve necessarily got this 100% right. It’s an interesting start though, and sure is a lot easier to understand than the current map!
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It was very useful to see the discussion that my post on simplifying the Sandringham Road bus routes generated, generally more on the positive side that we need to focus on creating a system that is easy to understand and which has good frequencies and connectivity; rather than a system that has a tonne of routes that run once a day, but might provide you with an option that requires less of a walk to get there. There’s no doubt that route simplification has winners and losers, and that the “loss” can be quite visually obvious – in that there used to be a route that ran quite close to your house and now you’re going to have to walk further. The fact that your trip (and the trips of many many other people) will now be faster because the route is no longer so higgledy-piggledy, and that you can have better frequencies because of saved resources, in my opinion would outweigh the costs – but it’s not so visually obvious. The need for simplification in further enforced by one look at the number of bus routes there are throughout Auckland as a whole – which has been very usefully put together here. I didn’t count them, but apparently there are over 400 different bus routes in Auckland. If we look at New North Road routes, we see there are 17 different bus route numbers (including express buses). Shifting further out from the city, we once again run into the St Lukes problem. My word that mall is just completely and utterly in the wrong place when it comes to public transport! The St Lukes Road/Morningside Drive detour isn’t quite as annoying as is the St Lukes detour for the 233 bus (in that at least you vaguely keep going in the right direction), but it still adds unnecessary diversion and complication. I think once again in the longer term you could look to eliminate the diversion once there are high frequency cross-town buses running along St Lukes Road, but unfortunately in the meanwhile the detour would have to remain. The next bizarre detour is taken by the 215, 216 and 219 buses, which head off on a strange sojourn around the back-streets of Mt Albert. These routes all only operate at peak times and the detour must be annoying as hell for people further out on the route (I suspect they avoid these buses in their droves). Because the area served by the 215, 216 and 219 buses (by the way I can’t actually work out what the difference between a 215 and a 216 bus is – the 216 never seems to terminate!) is in good proximity to the Baldwin Ave railway station, all three routes are completely unnecessary. So that does away with them quite nicely. The next split is at Avondale, where some buses go to New Lynn and others head up the Rosebank Peninsula. My feeling is that because the Western Railway Line (which actually parallels the bus route quite closely) goes to New Lynn, it’s actually completely unnecessary for the buses to go there as well. So my feeling is that all New North Road buses could head up the Rosebank Peninsula, at least to where the 211 currently terminates. Without knowing what kind of patronage there is on the very end of the 212 route I’m not sure about how far up this peninsula the services would need to go – and I realise that we end up in the somewhat annoying situation of not having a proper “anchor” at this end of the route, but I think that’s unavoidable. So ultimately, I think we can end up with effectively one core route again – just like we did for Sandringham Road. It would be as shown in the map below:
I think it’s probably worth reinforcing some of the reasons why we would do this, other than so it is easier to understand (which is important in and of itself). The New North Road buses at the moment are incredibly unreliable. The 224 bus, which comes all the way from Henderson for some reason (even though a train runs between Henderson and New Lynn) is almost always 15 minutes late by the time it reaches Mt Albert: meaning that you’re “bus every 15 minutes” actually turns into “two buses at the same time, every 30 minutes”. Even at peak times, because the buses all start their runs in such diverse places, by the time they get to stops like Morningside (where I caught many New North Road buses from over the years) they have managed to bunch up terribly, meaning that you can have 15-20 minutes waits for a bus at peak times, and then have 5 come along at the same time. While some level of “bunching” is inevitable (although faster boarding can reduce it significantly) have a single and simple route, where the buses are separated by a set amount of time over and over and over again should help reduce this problem to some extent. So if we set this against my “faster, more reliable, more convenient and more affordable” criteria for assessing public transport – I think we do quite well. The trips are faster because we remove many of the higgledy-piggledy routes and because we probably have more express buses for those further out and more short-stoppers for those further in (reducing the chances of full buses passing you by). Extending bus lanes is also essential to improve speeds. The service is far more reliable because the routes are generally shorter and because they are simplified I imagine it’s easier for the bus company to “recover” from a problem like a broken bus, because the next bus doing the same route won’t be far behind. In terms of convenience, I accept that this might be somewhat reduced in terms of “I have to walk a bit further to the bus stop”, but this could be counter-balanced by how easy the system is to understand now and how it lends itself to easier transfers because of greater frequencies along the whole route. And in terms of affordability, I think that it is a more efficient use of resources because the routes are shorter, because they are faster and more reliable, which could mean that fares can be kept to a lower level than would otherwise be the case. What do others think? A key aspect of ‘the network effect’, which I have blogged about quite a lot in recent times, is the need to simplify route structures. Auckland’s current bus system looks very much like someone threw spaghetti at a map, a million different routes going all over the place – with the key thing being that because there are so many bizarre routes, they can only be run at fairly low frequencies. But there are other disadvantages of having a complicated route structure:
So there are two main elements to what I call “route simplification”, one is to get rid of the vast array of route numbers that are only ever-so-slightly different to each other: and the other is to make the route more easily understood by its users. If we look at the Sandringham Road bus routes, I think that both methods need to be used to simplify this route. Let’s start by looking at its map: So we have 10 different routes that constitute the “Sandringham Road buses”. The 202, 240, 241, 243, 246, 247, 248 and 24F. Even trying to make some sense out of the difference between these routes is a challenge: at the city end the 202 goes via Bond Street and Great North Road into the CBD, the 240 and the 24F go via Ian McKinnon Drive (which means that the routing on the main map is actually wrong) and the rest go via Symonds Street. The 24F and the 240 differ only in their stopping patterns: in that the 240 starts its run at Mt Albert Road whereas the 24F is non-stop between Mt Albert Road and K Road (I think). The 241, 246 and 247 seem to be the most obviously stupid routes of the lot, in that they’re exactly the same except for slight differences in where they end (and slight differences in the route that the 241 takes going via Owairaka Ave). The 233 goes via St Lukes, but is otherwise identical to the 243. The 248 takes the most higgledy-piggledy route imaginable through the back-streets of Blockhouse Bay before terminating there, while the 249 for some bizarre reason continues on from Blockhouse Bay to New Lynn – although you would have to be absolutely retarded to ever even consider taking the 249 between New Lynn and Midtown, as it spends half its time heading in completely the wrong direction. If this was an isolated example of the completely unnecessary complexity of Auckland’s bus network, then perhaps I would think that it was just funny. Unfortunately, almost every single route in the city is stupidly and unnecessarily complex like this Sandringham Road example. So what can we do about this? I think if we start at the city end and work our way outwards it should become obvious that these ten routes can be simplified down significantly. To start with, having both the 202 and the 240 as ‘alternatives to Symonds Street’ seems pretty unnecessary. Having caught the 202 a few times, it seems that it basically serves as a “bus to Auckland Girls Grammar School”. Perhaps that means it’s necessary to retain, but certainly I don’t think we need both the 202 and the 240. Working our way further out, the next snag is the “what the heck to do about St Lukes?” problem. While the 233’s detour to St Lukes is useful if you’re visiting the mall it’s a damn pain in the neck if you’re not. Hopefully in the longer term we will be running very frequent cross-town buses along Balmoral Road so this detour won’t be necessary, but in the meanwhile probably our fundamental off-peak distinction along Sandringham Road will be between St Lukes buses and non St Lukes buses. It’s annoying, but because the mall does generate significant patronage there’s not much that can be done. Further out, we see that the routes start to diverge like mad after the Sandringham Road/Mt Albert Road intersection. As I mentioned above, I think the 241, 246 and 247 could be completely eliminated and folded into other routes as they add nothing but complexity to the system. The 249 is similarly pointless, as the Portage Road, Bolton Street areas will (hopefully) be served by local routes feeding into the New Lynn train station from its surrounding areas. Which leaves us with two main routes: the Tiverton/Wolverton route of the 233/243 and the higgledy-piggledy route of the 248. Now I always thought the 248 was completely necessary as it was “the Blockhouse Bay bus”, but actually it turns out there other buses go to Blockhouse Bay: most notably the 258 which uses Dominion Road. Comparing the times between Blockhouse Bay and the city along both the 248 and the 258, and it does seem the 258 is a bit quicker (and hopefully if the Dominion Road bus lanes are improved and not destroyed, that speed advantage would become even greater). So do we even need a Sandringham Road bus route that goes to Blockhouse Bay? Perhaps not, especially when the Green Bay buses provide an “along Blockhouse Bay Road” bus route (although they’re another example of a series of routes that desperately need simplification and better frequencies:
During the opening hours of St Lukes Mall probably every second off-peak bus would travel via the blue detour, at least until we figure out a better way of dealing with this issue. And during peak times probably a few buses could travel via the green route rather than the red one. But otherwise pretty much every single bus would be travelling this core route, which is “anchored” at each end strongly by the CBD and New Lynn (the reason I have it terminating at New Lynn is so it’s useful for passengers wanting to travel there from along the route). Apart from a rather annoying detour to ensure that it passes through the Owairaka shops the route is also pretty damn straight, which means relatively quick travel times. At peak hour I think you could run some of your services as “express”, meaning that they wouldn’t stop on the city side of Mt Albert Road, and complement them by running services that start at Mt Albert Road, but ultimately that is just messing with stopping patterns and the route simplicity itself is maintained. There does remain one rather under-served “hole” around Boundary Road, but otherwise I think between this route, the existing 258, the Green Bay routes and the 009 cross-town route the area is fairly well covered, and in a far more simple way than we currently see. I think we end up with four route numbers (core route, route via St Lukes, shortened route between Mt Albert and city and route via Bond Street and Auckland Girls’ Grammar) plus an express version of the core route. That’s a lot better than what we have now I think. Now we just need to get bus lanes along the whole thing! As I noted in a recent post about ARTA’s “Regional Public Transport Plan“, I support much of the thinking behind their three tiered hierarchical route structure that they are seeking to achieve, which has three main levels:
However, as I also noted, I worry about the implementation of this plan, and in particular of the “middle level” of the hierarchy: the Quality Transit Network or QTN. As shown in the map below (the green lines) the QTN is fairly extensive, comprised of many of the higher-quality bus routes feeding the CBD in the isthmus, a cross-town route or two on the isthmus and then a sparser, but still fairly extensive network linking parts of North Shore, Waitakere and Manukau cities that are not so well served by the RTN. In my mind, a QTN should be a high quality bus route that is easy to make sense out of, has plenty of bus priority (bus lanes along most if not all its length at peak times) and comes at high enough frequencies for people to not have to worry about timetables: no matter what time of day it is. ARTA’s description of the RTN/QTN/LCN hierarchy, in terms of their minimum service guidelines, do not seem too different to this: Also seeing 60 minutes in the frequency column of the QTN, even if it is just for ferry services (somewhat understandable I guess) and new services (an outright joke, surely you would want to make your new services particularly attractive to drive new patronage), is extremely disappointing. Overall, actually all the minimum standards for QTN frequencies are disappointing. A service that operates only every 20 minutes during the inter-peak and every half hour in evenings and at weekends is hardly “quality” in my opinion. They’re certainly not “turn up and go” in any way, shape or form. I do wonder whether the low minimum service frequencies for QTNs outlined in the table above result from a potentially misguided consideration that the RTN frequencies need to be better than the QTN ones. Obviously the RTN is the “backbone” and in many ways “best” of the public transport system, but because it is largely rail based it is simply not feasible economically to run the kind of frequencies that are possible to do so on a bus-based QTN route: both at peak times and other times. While I would ideally wish to see trains running at 15 minute frequencies during all off-peak times, I realise that economically it simply doesn’t make sense for us to do that for a great number of years yet. However, on the Quality Transit Network, such frequencies aren’t an impossibility: and probably Auckland’s only current QTN (Dominion Road) already has 5 minute inter-peak frequencies on weekdays, 10 minute frequencies on Saturdays, 20 minute frequencies on Sundays (and late at night on weekdays and Saturdays) and only ever goes down to 30 minutes late on a Sunday night. In short, I think that for QTNs “frequency” is actually one of the most important things to get right, along with having good bus priority during peak hour (and if possible at other times too). The QTN will never be as fast as the RTN, because it doesn’t have its own right-of-way, so perhaps there’s a little more leeway for the RTN to have slightly lower frequencies than the QTN: where its comparative slowness needs to be “made up for” by ensuring the buses come along frequently enough so your wait isn’t too long. I do look forward to seeing how the first few QTNs go – to see whether ARTA can find that “middle ground” effectively between the RTN and your “bog standard” bus route. Getting the QTNs right, largely through a huge expansion of Auckland’s current bus lane network and the application of “the network effect” to the QTNs on Auckand’s isthmus, is a pretty critical part of what I think Auckland needs to focus on in the next five years, if we want to get the most “bang for our buck” in trying to improve public transport. A couple of weeks ago I got to meet Jarrett Walker, the guy behind the excellent “Human Transit” blog. We had a number of transport geeks in the same room, and unsurprisingly the result was a pretty interesting conversation. There was one thing in particular that Jarrett mentioned, which I think is certainly worth repeating, and that is: “the quality of a public transport system should be measured by how it performs at 7pm on a Sunday night, rather than at peak hour.” I completely and utterly agree. “But why?” I hear you ask. “Shouldn’t we really be far more concerned about the quality of the public transport system at peak hour when it’s most well used?” The answer to that is quite complex, and delves to the heart of the question “what are the benefits of a good public transport system?” Is it just to “knock the top off” peak hour congestion, or do we want public transport to offer a true alternative to driving, a system that makes it possible for people to live decent lives without having to own a car and use for the majority of their trips – whether to work, school, play, visit friends or whatever. Is it to offer a transport system that will encourage a more sustainable urban form, that lowers our environmental impact and our reliance on fossil fuels? In many ways it comes down to whether we’re just providing commuter transit, or whether we’re providing urban transit. From my perspective, I think that public transport is important because of its ability to drive more sustainable urban forms, and (mainly in overseas cities) its ability to allow people to live a full life without a car. Of course it’s also important to “knock the top off” peak hour congestion, as we’d need twice as many lanes of roading into Auckland’s CBD (and goodness knows how many more carparks) if it weren’t for our public transport system, but my issue is that generally when we look at public transport, the sole focus is on what happens at peak hour (the economic evaluation manual for public transport just about completely ignores off-peak issues). The reasons for trying to make public transport an attractive option for non-commuting, non peak hour trips, become fairly obvious when you read the following tract from the excellent book Asphalt Nation by Jane Holtz Kay:
There key statistic in my opinion is how low the percentage of trips for commuting is – at only 22.5%. While I’m not exactly sure of the figures for Auckland, one would guess it might be relatively similar. Which means that three out of four trips taken are not for work purposes, they’re not commuting trips. So our obsession with only providing public transport for commuting trips means that we’re basically ignoring three-quarters of the potential market for public transport, three quarters of the potential opportunities to reduce our oil dependency, our CO2 emissions and so forth. Furthermore, there are some distinct operational advantages that arise from having a greater focus on capturing off-peak, non-commuting trips. Of course, there are many difficulties, but I will look at the advantages first.The most obvious advantage is that you’re unlikely to need to buy any more buses or trains, or built anymore tracks or busways – peak hour requires so many buses, trains, tracks and so forth that during off-peak hours you can simply use what you’ve already got more frequently and therefore utilise that investment more efficiently. “Commuter focused” systems are inherently pretty inefficient: all the buses and trains spend half their times on the road/tracks near empty, because they’re returning from their peak load trip, while having a lot of rolling stock or infrastructure capacity that is only needed a few times a day is also a very inefficient use of that investment. Offering a better off-peak service, in a way that can attract more patronage, is actually likely to be a fairly inexpensive undertaking – as the only extra costs are for staffing and fuel. But how can we make public transport more attractive for off-peak, non-commuting trips? Well this is where the network effect becomes most important. These kinds of trips usually have very dispersed destinations, they are often “spontaneous trips” where you don’t want to have to check timetables and is easily understood (because you might be taking somewhat unusual/infrequent trips). So you need a public transport system that has high frequencies, is simple to understand and can take you “from anywhere, to anywhere”. These are the three three issues that traditional public transport struggles to provide for, but at the same time are the main gains from applying the network effect idea. Ultimately, if you just want public transport as a tool to ease peak hour congestion, then what will really matter is what happens during peak hour. But if you really want to use public transport as a tool with wider benefits: to reduce oil dependency, vehicle emissions, provide people with a real alternative to owning a car and to drive more sustainable urban forms, then we really need to think a lot more about what we do with public transport “off peak”. Because, after all, three out of every four car trips aren’t for commuting reasons. Humantransit has a great post on cul-de-sacs and what is known as the “radius of demand”. In short, the post highlights how disconnected street networks make it much more difficult to adequately serve areas with good public transport, because what should be a relatively short walk ‘as the crow flies’, becomes a really long walk to the bus stop/train station because the street network won’t allow you to make the trip in a more direct manner. This is excellently illustrated in the diagram below. This is reason number one why gridded street patterns are very useful. They improve walking accessibility to public transport stops & stations. Reason number two why gridded street patterns are useful is when it comes to designing effective public transport networks – particularly if we’re trying to create a “network effect“. This is relatively well illustrated in a recent post I did on trying to adapt the network effect idea into a redesign of Auckland’s isthmus bus routes, where I eventually came up with this:
The idea is to create something of a “grid” of service patterns, so that north-south routes are complemented by east-west routes to create a network/web of routes allowing “anywhere to anywhere” travel. This works OK in the centre-west part of the isthmus, where the main street form something of a “super-grid”, especially around Balmoral, Mt Eden, Sandringham and so forth. But in the parts of the Auckland isthmus to the east of State Highway One it is much more difficult to achieve such an outcome, because the main streets do not form a grid, but rather seem to meander all over the place. This same issue also makes it a quite challenging to create a network effect on the North Shore (and undoubtedly also in Manukau and North Shore cities). In contrast, if we look at Vancouver’s street pattern it’s easy to see how the network effect has worked so effectively: This is why I find it so depressing to see new parts of Auckland have street patterns like this: Street patterns matter. A lot. Another interesting part of the information I got from NZTA via my OIA request relates to the public transport upgrades being planned for Manukau City – in particular the steps being taken to implement a “Quality Transport Network” (QTN) between Manukau City and Botany Town Centre. This is the first stage in implementing what is going to eventually be a Rapid Transit Network between Panmure and Manukau City via Botany and Flat Bush (which I think should be constructed as a railway line, but anyway). The map of the proposed upgrade is included below: The figures in the boxes are the number of buses per hour at peak/off-peak times – meaning that along the core QTN there is to be a bus every 10 minutes during peak times and every 15 minutes off-peak. Hardly fantastic frequencies, but certainly getting close to respectable. One of the things that I sometimes worry about when it comes to QTNs is that we will end up identifying all our current reasonable frequency bus routes as QTNs, when to me a quality transport network means something better than what we’re used to. To me it means bus lanes for extensive periods of the day, real-time information along the whole route, potentially distinctive buses, high frequencies and so forth – basically a fast and frequent service. Fortunately, it seems as though in this case we will be seeing a decent amount of physical infrastructure works to support this upgrade, as shown in the information below: However, in the longer term I must say I’m a little surprised that the NZTA board paper on this project doesn’t seem to make much mention of the fact that this route is meant to be part of the Rapid Transit Network in the longer term. That means the long term plan is to either have a full busway between Manukau and Panmure via Flat Bush and Botany, or to have a railway line. Obviously that project will be really expensive and will take many years to implement, whereas that part of Auckland desperately needs a QTN now, so I understand the smaller steps being taken. But surely you would want to be really careful to ensure that any QTN works being done now will assist in the construction of a future rapid transit network? Surely this $23 million would be the first little contribution towards a much bigger project in the future? I don’t hear much about that. Nevertheless, it is very promising to see that a part of Auckland that desperately needs better public transport will be receiving it in the not too distant future. With the Manukau Railway Station becoming a giant transport interchange perhaps it won’t be quite so much the big flop I was worried it might be. The Public Health Advisory Committee (PHAC) has released a very interesting study into the linkages between urban environments and wellbeing, entitled Healthy Places, Healthy Lives: urban environments and wellbeing. During my university studies I did quite a lot of research into what we call “Health Geography” – looking at how different environments affect different health outcomes. There are obvious linkages, like if you live in a polluted area or on a damp house then chances are you’ll have poorer health on average than someone elsewhere, but other areas of linkages are a bit more complex, and interesting. Particularly when we look at analysing the links between urban form and health outcomes. Here’s an interesting extract from the PHAC’s study:
There’s certainly nothing here that we didn’t know already, but what this report does is put a few numbers on these effects:
It’s not inconceivable, nor illogical, to wonder whether the Ministry of Health should be funding the construction of cycleways around our major cities. The study also looks at what overseas cities have done to make themselves “more healthy”:
A number of recommendations are made: Looking at how we might structure a public transport network to better promote good health outcomes, I think one gain through “The Network Effect” that is not particularly well explored is that having a sparser, but higher quality, public transport network means that people are likely to, on average, walk more. If my bus stop is a 5 minute walk away, but the bus only comes every 20 minutes, chances are I’m going to spend 5 minutes walking to the bus stop and then at least 5-10 minutes waiting for the bus (I’ll make sure I get there early so I don’t miss it). On the other hand, if my bus stop is an 8 minute walk away, but the buses come every 5 minutes, then chances are I’m only going to be spending a couple of minutes waiting for my bus, more than making up the extra time spent walking. In other words, on average people will spend more time walking and less time waiting – which is probably a better health outcome without being a worse public transport outcome. If you throw into the mix the ability to ride your bike to a public transport stop/station, and make it easy to do so (bike racks etc) then once again you’re tapping into health benefits as well as transport benefits. It makes me wonder whether health effects should be a negative in the cost-benefit analysis of motorways. A few days ago Nick R wrote an excellent post in which he applied Paul Mees’s “network theory” of bus routes to Auckland’s North Shore, to come up with a basic “grid” structure that could serve the whole area effectively, and potentially in a way that would use the same or less resources than are currently required. There have been enough posts about the network effect recently that I probably don’t have to explain the idea too much, other than to reiterate that it’s based around transfers between routes, simple route structures and high-frequencies – to create a system that can actively compete against the car for speed, cost and convenience in cities with dispersed residential and employment patterns. I’m going to look at the Auckland isthmus area. Out of all parts of Auckland this is the area where I think a “network effect” approach could have the most advantages, because there is a basic grid street network structure throughout at least part of the isthmus, and there are a number of employment nodes – meaning that the current “suburb to CBD” route focus has its limitations. First of all, let’s not forget that we have a three line (plus Onehunga, to be opened soon) rail network within the isthmus. Usefully, where a strong grid street-network is least evident (in the eastern part of the isthmus) the rail network offers an excellent line to base bus routes around. So let’s look at the rail network first:
Turning to bus routes now, I have added to the map what I think are the eleven key suburb t0 CBD bus routes throughout the isthmus. I suppose if I were creating a true grid I would make these ‘north-south routes’, but as a significant number of public transport users really do want to get to the CBD, I think it’s useful to have these routes, which are significantly simplified versions of the majority of the existing bus network (and very reminiscent of the old tram system). Each route would run at 10 minute frequencies, seven days a week, plus more frequent during peak times. They would be supplemented by less frequent feeder routes to main interchanges (Local Connector Networks according to ARTA). Hopefully some of the routes could be “through-routed” from one side of the CBD to the other: The key to making this a network is in the next step, where we supplement all these suburb-to-CBD routes with cross-town services, to truly create a system where people can go from anywhere to anywhere. Cross-town routes are less likely to be profitable that the red-routes shown above (at least in the shorter run), but they are critical in making the system more attractive and useful as a whole. Four main cross-town routes, plus the Link Bus, are shown in the map below: Put everything together and you have, what I think, is a fairly simple yet comprehensive network. I absolutely recognise that you would need to supplement these base services with local connectors – generally linking under-served areas with the nearest railway station or high-frequency bus route interchange. Overall there are eleven red routes, four blue routes plus the link bus. That’s 16 routes to run at 10 minute frequencies (higher at peak times). I reckon that’s possible using a similar level of resource to what we have now. It’s got to be more easily understood than what we have now: One particularly interesting element of the NZTA Research Report into creating better public transport networks that has been the focus of a few posts recently is the comparison made between Auckland and Vancouver. While Vancouver is a larger city than Auckland, with a population of over 2 million, as the graph below shows there are a number of similarities in terms of its urban density and the strength of its CBD (in terms of its regional share of employment) that would show it to be a good test case for looking at what Auckland ‘could’ be. So what’s the difference here? Well for a start Vancouver avoided building masses of motorways, and in particular didn’t build any motorways within close proximity to its CBD. That is clearly shown in the map below: So how on earth has Vancouver got such excellent public transport statistics out of what seems to be such little investment in expensive infrastructure like underground railway lines? And how come it seems to emerge near the top of every “quality of life” survey when logic tells us it should be choking in traffic congestion due to there being so few major transport corridors – roads or rail? The answer is in its superbly organised public transport system as a whole, but particularly in the structure of its bus system. Here’s a map showing the bus routes throughout a fairly central part of Vancouver: Here’s what the NZTA research paper has to say about the comparison between the two cities:
It gives us a hint of what the benefits of applying a network based system in Auckland might be. Clearly low urban densities and a weak CBD are not a barrier to far higher public transport statistics, and does not mean you have to build motorways like crazy for your city to work. Vancouver has done it, why not Auckland? |
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The main streets form a superb “super-grid”, allowing many north-south and east-west routes to operate efficiently, linking together to create a network that truly allows anywhere to anywhere travel. Furthermore, within each “super-block”, the street patterns a simple and gridded, allowing very quick access from wherever you live to both a north-south and an east-west route.
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