The Network Effect: An Auckland Example

I’m reading Admin’s copy of Transport For Suburbia by Paul Mees and it is a cracking read full of information and examples about Auckland and the rest of the world. The book makes a few points that it goes into in detail:

• While density can help make the provision of public transport easier, it is by no means the most important factor. Integration of fares, timetables and ticketing (integration) and having well planned routes, with frequent services and easy transfers (transport policy), is.
• A single public planning agency, with legislated powers, is required to allow integration and effective transport policy.

On the first point, in the past I have been one of the biggest supporters of radical changes to increase density such as eliminating minimum parking requirements (instead of amending them to maximum parking requirements) and ripping up the district plans and replacing them with high density TOD plans, part of my suppressed Libertarian, burn the castle down if you don’t like the curtains, desires. After reading this book, while I do believe we need parking reform and better district plans, it is obvious there is massive latent potential to increase PT use in Auckland using our current resources and densities do not need to increase massively to allow it. Admin posted on this first point earlier, in a post called Density is not Density. It didn’t attract too much comment but I recommend you re-read it again as it is one of the most important posts on this blog so far this year.

After I finish the book I’ll post on the case for, and importance of, a single public planning agency.

After making the case for the first half of the book that density should not be an excuse for poor PT he then goes into detail about how one might provide such a service, again Admin has posted on this in a post called Squaresville: The Network Effect. Again I suggest you re-read this post. So how would this potentially operate in Auckland? I’ve had a look at one of the oldest areas of Auckland and one of the best served by PT, the area on the isthmus NE of SH16 and SH1 over to the shore, generally known as the “Western Bays”. These are the current bus routes:

As far as Auckland bus routes go this area isn’t too bad, patronage is high in comparison to other parts of the city, there aren’t too many meandering back street routes (except the 011, seriously who is using this service by choice?) but there are some curious things here:

• Why would you have the 025 and 024 start from different places a 100 or so metres from each other?
• Why wouldn’t you combine the 004 and 005 service, or the 015 and 017?
• Why would you start the 027 from the end of Garnet Rd when the 035 travels along here, surely the 027 could be combined with the 024 and 025 and start at the end of Richmond Rd, are there that many people catching the bus from Garnet Rd to Douglas St that we need to provide a separate service?
• Is it really necessary for 9 CBD focused bus routes to originate in this area that then have to clog up limited CBD road space before returning?

You get the idea. All these numbers (buses with numbers ranging from 004 to 199 operate in this area) and different services provide only confusion and low frequencies for individual services – disasterous for patronage. How could you re-organise the assets servicing this area to make PT more attractive to patrons? What would you need organisationally to make such a change happen?

Now this isn’t a serious proposal as it doesn’t take into account the Link or services running along Great North Rd that originate from outside the area and all CBD buses run down Queen St (given my undying love for the Central Connector I would probably run them all down there) but gives an idea of how the network effect might work.

All the routes currently in the area are condensed into 6 routes, 3 CBD focused (the 1-blue, 3-black and 5-orange) and 3 cross-town (2-red, 4-pink and 6-green) routes. These would then run at 15 minute intervals from 0600 to 2400 7 days a week, with 7.5 minute frequencies from 0700 to 1000 and 1600 – 1900 Monday to Friday. All houses within the area are within 500 metres of a bus route. All CBD focused buses now terminate (or pass Britomart) rather than stopping all over the CBD. We’ve also eliminated all the buses clogging town by through routing the shorter CBD focused routes.

So we’ve basically turned bus routes into tram routes while having the advantage of flexibility that a bus can provide (i.e. it can drive around another broken down bus) and used the same amount of resources to increase frequencies by consolidating routes, this consolidation and renumbering has also reduced the confusion for the user, in particular the casual user, but the obvious problem is we now have created a system that requires transfers for many users, how do we overcome this problem?

We solve it by making transferring as easy as possible and this takes co-ordination. The purple squares show the 9 interchange points we have created by operating the bus system in such a manner and this is where the case for a single public planning agency comes to the fore. If you look at the cross-town 6 bus, originating from the end of Pt Chev Rd and toward Mt Albert Rd, the only way for a CBD commuter from Oliver St to get to town is to transfer to a 5 bus at the intersection of Pt Chev Rd and Great North Rd. They are only going to do this if; the ticket they buys on the 6 can be used on the 5 and doesn’t cost anything extra, the timetables are co-ordinated and the driver of the 5 bus knows to wait for the 6 and the walk between buses is safe, comfortable and quick. That type of integration takes a single planning agency.

So will this system work and will people really transfer? Will the greater frequencies and ease of understanding outweigh the hassle of transferring? Well if Auckland looks at Zurich we can see the answer is undoubtedly YES! The Zurich region is a similar size to Auckland and they have far more PT infrastructure but the principle demonstrated here is the modus operandi of their single public agency the ZVV. The result – patronage per capita is 10 times higher than Auckland.

This type of system also focuses investment for the Council, we now only need to provide bus lanes on 8 streets in the area to have ALL buses running in bus lanes and 9 locations to invest in excellent bus stops and transfer points. Not exactly expensive stuff compared to motorways and rail lines.

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