More route simplification – New North Road

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). Somewhat unsurprisingly, that contributes to what should be a very simple bus route map looking rather complicated indeed. Starting at the city end, like I did for Sandringham Road, we can see that once again there are three different routes into the CBD when really there probably only needs to be one. Back when Symonds Street did not have bus lanes there would have been huge time advantages catching the 200 bus, but now it seems to be a rather pointless complication. It also seems very odd to have a “Limited Stops” bus start its run so close to the city – surely the point of express/limited stops buses is to give people further out a quick run into the city? The 205 bus is much like the 202 bus, mainly for Auckland Girls Grammar Students. Therefore I’d look to simply replace it with a school bus.

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:

During off-peak times there would effectively be two service routes to run: one following the main route and one that makes the detour to St Lukes. Obviously you’d only bother with the St Lukes detour during the mall’s opening hours. At peak times you may want to mess with the stopping pattern a bit, perhaps running express buses that are non-stop between Mt Albert Road and Symonds Street, supplemented by “short-stoppers” that only run between the city and Mt Albert. Either way you’re left with a maximum of 4 different route names (core, express, St Lukes and short-stopper), down from the 17 that we have now.

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?

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