Auckland City Council ruins Dominion Road bus lanes

Wow this is a really really bad week for buses, and public transport in general, in Auckland. As I noted yesterday, the crazy idea of HOVs being introduced to the Northern Busway has reared its ugly head again – and the excellent busway may be ruined through the introduction of up to 360 vehicles per hour on the busway – around one every 10 seconds. And now, further analysis of the minutes of Auckland City Council’s Transport Committee meeting shows that the Council is wanting to change the Dominion Road bus lanes into what is called “bus T2 lanes”. Here are the relevant parts of the meeting’s minutes:

That the Transport Committee endorse the design scheme consultation for the midblock widening works comprising a separate bus T2 lane and cycle lane along the length of Dominion Road (between View Road and Denbigh Ave) noting that this includes removal of on-street parking along Dominion Road and report back to the Transport Committee August/September meeting.

That the Transport Committee endorse the consultation required to confirm the operational requirements for the bus T2 lanes in terms of hours of operation, the provision for T2 vehicles and alternative use of the lane when the bus T2 lane is not in force, through consultation with the business association, land owners and other stakeholders.

This is utter insanity! The very reason Dominion Road needs upgrading is because it carries a huge number of public transport users and they need “better bus lanes”. Buses run along Dominion Road every minute or two in the peak direction – as high a frequency as you would find anywhere in Auckland. Even during off-peak times we now have a bus every five minutes along Dominion Road. In many ways it is Auckland’s best bus route – and therefore not surprisingly it needs an upgrade.

So the idea of actually getting rid of the bus lanes and replacing them with “bus T2 lanes” – which I guess means that buses and any cars with two or more people can use them – is craziness. T2 lanes certainly have their place, along routes with not so many buses they are a good way to encourage car-pooling and utilise road space more efficiently. I support the T2 lanes along Tamaki Drive (although I was annoyed that funding for turning them from bus lanes into T2 lanes came out of the public transport budget) because only eight buses per hour run along there. But they simply do not make sense on Dominion Road – because there are so many buses! The entire point of a bus lane is to give public transport users a time-advantage over people driving, so that we encourage more people to get out of their cars and use public transport – so that congestion can be eased overall, and so that we can get better value for money out of our public transport expenditure.

Despite my previous protestations over the Auckland Transport CCO, I am starting to think that we need it as soon as possible, to kill off utterly stupid decisions such as this one from being made. Bring on November 1st; let’s just hope public transport in Auckland hasn’t been killed off by then.

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