Like Jeremy and the Admin I am a big fan of Paul Mees’s writings on the network effect, particularly his latest book ‘Transport for Suburbia’. I recently studied a transport planning paper with him which basically followed the same flavour of the book: through the use of a network and transfers you can gain the go-anywhere convenience of the car while keeping the move-lots-of-people-in-the-same vehicle efficiency of public transport. Now Paul is the first to admit he didn’t invent this principle, it has been around as long as vehicles have, but perhaps he is the first to get it all down in one place as a cohesive mechanism that can allow fast, effective public transport to be provided for all manner of trips in a city in a cost effective manner. I thought I’d have a go at putting the theory into practice, using the North Shore of Auckland as a test case.
Why the Shore? Well it already has the busway in place with a series of interchange stations, and more importantly it has its own integrated ticket (the Northern Pass) which allows for unlimited free transfers in a given amount of time. So it’s a great place to start for an integrated bus network. Auckland actually has the legal means to create an integrated network through the gross contracting provision of the PTMA (provided it isn’t repealed), plus it has the organisational means to do so through ARTA or whatever the successor organisation is in the unitary council.
One thing Dr Mees promotes is a clean slate approach, ignoring all the historical reasons for bus routing (things like routes established by competing companies decades ago, for example) and going for what suits best here and now. So I’ll be taking a more or less clean slate approach.
So lets begin by putting the busway on the map, with fast frequencies and regular interchange station this is pretty much perfect the way it is. For better coverage I have added the busway station at the end of Onewa Rd that was planned by never built, plus the proposed new busway station at Rosedale Rd. Also shown is a black line indicating some motorway based BRT along the Upper Harbour Motorway for an express connection to West Auckland, plus the main ferry terminals are also shown.
For the second step I have added in four more major north-south routes. These are basically rationalisations of the existing services on Beach Rd, East Coast Rd, Glenfield Rd, plus a new service between the Busway and Glenfield Rd. Nothing especially revolutionary here, just streamlining the various infrequent routes into four major trunk routes. For example the 858 and 839 have been combined to form a single Beach Rd route with double the frequency. I have jigged these slightly away from a true north-south row so that they each interchange with the busway at some point, and so they can interchange with each other at appropriate points like at the regional centres of Takapuna and Albany. I have also extended the Beach Rd route (it doesn’t really matter which one) all the way to the city to provide enough capacity across the harbour.
For the third step let’s add in some lateral feeders to the busway. For this I have simply extended some routes on an approximately east-west axis along arterial roads from each busway station. As well as getting people to the busway, these routes provide cross town services and link together the major north-south routes. That’s three trip types provided for and three sources of patronage to hopefully keep the buses reasonably full all day long.
Lets have a look at the busway and the feeders and do some sums. Each of those crosstown routes averages around 10km in length. At typical bus speeds of 20km an hour it would take you half an hour to go end to end, or 15 minutes to get from one end to the busway station (which are more or less in the middle of each route).
So if we assume each route has a ten minute frequency then the average wait time for any given bus would be five minutes. An average scenario for making a trip anywhere on the Shore using the busway and these red feeders would be something like this:
1. A five minute wait for a feeder bus at your origin.
2. Fifteen minutes on a feeder to get to the nearest busway station.
3. A five minute wait for a busway bus.
4. A busway trip of about ten minutes to the busway station closest to your destination.
5. A five minute wait for the feeder bus.
6. Fifteen minutes on a feeder bus to your destination.
All up, this is a maximum average travel time of 55 minutes to get between any two points on one of the red lines. That doesn’t sound too amazing, but it is pretty much a worst case scenario that is certainly a lot better than currently. If someone today told you they could go from say Northcross to Birkdale in under an hour by bus you’d have to call them a liar!
So that’s just with the busway and feeders, add in those arterials and the trip times would probably get a lot shorter. Lets view this as an integral network with all the parts in place so we can see the real grid effect:
According to Google maps those lines represent 157km of trunk bus routes (excluding the off-road busway and the motorway-based Upper Harbour BRT), multiply that by two for both directions and that give 314km of one-way bus route.
Let’s assume again an average on road bus speed of 20km an hour once traffic lights and stops are take into account, i.e. one bus can cover 20km of route each hour. If we wanted to service the full 314km of route on an hourly basis we can therefore divide the route length by 20. This gives us 15.7, or in real terms we would need sixteen buses to cover that above system with one-hour frequencies.
Now one hour isn’t nearly good enough for transfers, not unless we had a very well co-ordinated pulse timetabling system which to be honest probably requires a level of planning and coordinating that Auckland can only dream of. So let us run with the other option, high frequency. With a bus every ten minutes (at least) on each line transfers should be quite easy, as the average wait time would only be five minutes at worst. So for one bus every ten minutes we need six buses an hour, so multiplying out 16 buses by 6 gives us 96.
Therefore to run the above system at minimum ten minute frequencies on all lines we would need ninety-six buses on the road at any given time. This is in addition to the Northern Express busway service and a similar route on the Upper Harbour Motorway. That sounds quite a lot, but how many buses run on the Shore at the moment? A full analysis of timetables could reveal how many buses are on the road on the Shore at any one time, and if I’m ever sick in bed for a week I might try and work it out. But for the meantime, a quick poke around the websites shows that Northstar (the North Shore wing of NZBus) has 134 buses that run public services on the Shore. The other main player in local services in Birkenhead transport which reports over 50 buses. Ritchies also operates on the Shore but we can leave them to run the Northern Express which I have excluded from the analysis. So what we are looking at here is definitely within the realms of possibility, a system requiring 96 buses when the area already has over double that number on the road.
Now obviously the proposed network isn’t fully complete, there would be plenty of services to slot in between the trunks. This grid has spacing of about 1.5 to 2km wide, so ideally we’d need double the number of routes on the grid (to give about a .8-1km spacing) so that nowhere on the shore was more than about 500m from a bus stop.
I imagine there would need to be greater than ten minute frequencies at peak times, plus a range of express buses to the CBD. Having express buses isn’t exactly consistent with the network effect, but I believe they are warranted at peak times on the North Shore to take people to the CBD. This is not simply for CBD workers, but because all connections from the Shore to the rest of Auckland must go via the CBD (or the Upper Harbour) due to the harbour bridge, so it makes sense to provide express links to the central interchange point. I think the ideal routing of express buses would be to follow the one of the lateral routes exactly to the nearest busway station then down to the CBD, in order to keep things consistent. This way during the off-peak you can take exactly the same route, the only difference is you need to make a transfer at the busway station rather than going direct.
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Even if you double the number of “trunk routes” so that you have a ten minute frequencies both N-S and E-W within every 500m of every house on the NS, you would obviously double the route kilometers and buses required from 95 to 190, plus say 20% down for maintanance etc, so say 230 buses… The beauty of the PTMA is you just tender these routes and if more buses are required it is up to the bidders to acquire those buses, the higher patronage and all fares going to ARTA/AT (cross-subsidisation) should cover the higher expense, if they do in fact cost more to operate…
Lol, I was actually thinking of doing almost this exact post followed by one for West, Central, East and South Auckland… Ideas for your next 4 posts there Nick… 😉
I like the idea of the 4 key north-south corridors. I do wonder whether the North Shore would suit more of a hub-spoke system of bus routes rather than a grid system – perhaps more efficient?
My word the roading patterns on the North Shore are a mess.
I like what Nick has proposed, it enables great travel around the Shore while catering sufficient capacity to the CBD via the RTN and a few of the N-S, E-W routes and the ferries as well as a connection to West Auckland…
It’s actually five north south corridors, the central rapid transit corridor and two trunk corridors either side. I’ve been thinking about improving the resolution of the grid and I’m not sure if it is possible on the north-south axis. Basically trying to put any more north-south routes in would require some serious meandering. For example it would be simply impossible to add another route between East Coast Rd and Beach Rd, there just aren’t really any roads to run it on. It’s not such a major as the North Shore is only six to eight kilometres wide, so five routes means any one point should be no more than 700m from a major north-south route.
There is a lot more potential to add more services on the east-west axis to get a bus close to any point on the Shore. In theory every single bus stop should be an interchange point between the two axis, but in this case it would probably still work well as the limited number of north-south routes would be offset by the capacity and quality of the main busway running north-south. It would be something of a hybrid between a pure grid and a trunk-and-feeder topology.
Perhaps an appropriate layout would be to have the seven busway stations serviced by two lateral feeder routes each (with the station at the centre at the feeders extending either side), basically double what I have above. In this way each station would have it’s own hub-and-spoke network of four feeder lines, which would also network with the main north-south arterials and provide the lateral rungs of the network.
If you look at the road network on the Shore in context of the terrain it starts to make sense. The major arterials follow either ridge lines or valley floors. In that way a network based around arterial roads is going to be the best for servicing the places people actually live, work and play.
Ah yeah of course there are 5 north-south lines.
I really do like this proposal Nick, though I am really curious about how many buses would be required to operate it. My gut feeling is that creating this system would involve a heck of a lot more resources than are currently used on the North Shore… although I could be wrong.
Well using the rule of thumb of buses achieving 20km/h in revenue service, then we need .6 buses for every kilometre of route that we want to run at ten minute headways in both directions. Each ten kilometre long feeder line needs six buses to operate.
As I pointed out this means to operate the above base network (excluding the Ritchies run NEX) at ten minute frequencies would take half of the combined fleet of Northstar and Birkenhead buses (just under a hundred buses on the road at all times). This leave the other half of the fleet to add capacity to the busiest lines and operate peak hour expresses. So I’m not sure if it would require any more physical resources, and if there are the predicted gains in patronage then the demand for economic resources expended on subsidies would drop. We need to remember that a lot of peak bus services currently run full one way but more or less empty back, while a lot of interpeak services have very low utilisation rates. So there is actually a lot of wasted capacity out there on the road at the moment, and a network based reorganisation could redistribute that capacity.
Perhaps the best idea would be to take the current level of bus resource use on the North Shore and see what kind of transfer network that would allow us to run, that might be quite surprising. So using my rule of thumb above the 184 buses run by Northstar and Birkenhead Transport on the Shore would translate to just over 300km of bus route running ten minute frequencies both ways at full utilisation. Or with five minute frequencies we still have 150km or route to play with, and this is in addition to the Northern Express on the busway itself.
I think there are definitely some easy improvements to made.
To give an example, the 952 bus, goes from midtown to Glenfield via Northcote shops and Hillcrest. It runs twice to the city in the morning and twice back in the evening. It is generally only half full at best in the evening. However, the 911 bus runs from Takapuna to Glenfield along basically the same route as the 952 and is half-empty as well. So it would be fairly easy for 952 passengers to catch the NEX to Akoranga Station and then transfer on to the 911. Hey presto, 4 under-used buses off the road.
MAXX I think are proposing to axe the 952 service, which has upset quite a few people. But surely the 911 should be encouraged as an alternate route, meaning the 952 would be redundant?