Almost all of Auckland’s buses serving the inner-city make their way into the city along either Fanshawe Street (for North Shore buses), Albert Street (for West Auckland buses) or Symonds Street (for South, East and Central Auckland buses). I would guess that Symonds Street would definitely have the greatest number of buses out of any of these streets – and is a particularly popular location for people getting on and off the bus as it runs right through the middle of the University. However, until very recently, there was no real priority for buses along this utterly critical corridor. As I spent a reasonable number of my university years catching buses home along Symonds Street, I learned what a mess this situation had created. At least half the length of the bus trip was taken up simply getting up Symonds Street in the evening peak: buses would not have enough room to all load passengers at the same time so sometimes would end up stopping in the middle of the road as they couldn’t fit in the bus stop, at other times it just seemed like the traffic lights with K Rd and Grafton Bridge (near the top of Symonds St) would take forever, creating utter gridlock further down the street.
Fortunately, Auckland City Council have finally got their act together and are doing something about this, in creating the Central Connector. While this project is supposedly designed to create a ‘busway’ linking Britomart with Newmarket, in reality all its generally doing is turning the outside lanes along its course into bus lanes. The map to the left shows its route and where the bus stops will be located.
Whilst I was originally sceptical of the project, largely because it duplicates the route of a train line from Newmarket to Britomart, I think the main effect it will have is (hopefully) improving the flow of buses up Symonds Street. I had a think about it last night, and by my estimates around half of the buses that go up Symonds Street aren’t even ones that continue to Newmarket. These buses continue up Symonds Street, eventually branching off onto Mt Eden Rd, Dominion Rd, Sandringham Rd or New North Rd. With peak hour frequencies along each of these routes generally meaning a bus every 2-3 minutes, you can see there will be a lot of people who benefit from the project.
However, as with any project there’s always the down-side of the construction period. While there aren’t too many heavy earthworks needed along Symonds Street, it seems like there is quite a lot going on which has required a narrowing of the street. Last night I caught a bus back home from the city and got caught up in the mayhem this has created. It probably took twice as long for my bus to get from the central city up to the top of Symonds Street than it did for it to do the rest of the journey. Hopefully this situation doesn’t continue for the duration of the Symonds Street roadworks (which are meant to finish by June next year). Perhaps it was just a particularly bad day? Or perhaps whoever does traffic management on the project needs to get more stuff out of the way by peak hour.
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