Last month, probably due to my travels, I missed out reporting on a quite interesting study that Auckland City Council has led into improving the flow of public transport in Auckland’s CBD. A summary of the report can be read here. The study analyses ways of trying to get around a pretty intractable problem with Auckland’s CBD at the moment: in that it gets incredibly clogged by bus traffic, particularly during the evening peak hours. This is set out in the “issues” that the study looks at:
I’m glad that these issues are being looked at. Wander around the CBD at 5pm and the number of buses that are sitting on the side of the road is quite incredible. While it’s obviously a good thing that people are using public transport, and much of the problem would be solved by more space being dedicated to buses compared to general traffic, the current situation doesn’t work well at all.
The report proposes seven main action points – these are detailed below:
Setting aside Action 1, which seems to be a rather strange and pointless action, I’ll work through the others. Action 2 is particularly interesting, given that the Public Transport Management Act was supposed to sort out these problems. Let’s hope the new Auckland Transport CCO has the ability to implement the changes that ARTA is unable/unwilling to touch – which relates to the ability to tell bus operators where to locate the routes, something highly necessary to achieve integrated outcomes.
I really like the idea of simplified routing. The current number of routes through the CBD is a complete mess, and includes stupid outcomes like my 004/005 bus having to travel up the congested Hobson Street rather than along Albert Street’s bus lanes! The plan for simplifying routes is shown below:
There are a few things I like about the map above. The first is that it includes Hobson Street as a key north-south public transport route – hinting once again that this road might be turned into a two-way boulevard from the one-way de-facto motorway it currently is. The second thing I really like is the focus on Wellesley Street as a useful crosstown bus corridor – linking the university with North Shore buses. As a lot of bus catchers from the North Shore are headed towards the university, it would make huge sense to take pressure off Britomart and off Albert Street by instead running the majority of North Shore buses along this alignment. Many could even continue over Wellesley Street, up Grafton Road to the Hospital and on to Newmarket easily too.
Shifting away from having Britomart as the only bus hub is also a good idea – with the obvious location for a second one being somewhere on Mayoral Drive behind the Aotea Centre (in the current council carpark). Even now Britomart can get horribly congested, with buses having to wait many phases to get onto Customs Street (why don’t they make the bus phase longer I wonder?) Such a bus station could link in well with a future Midtown railway station in this area.
The study also looked at off-street layover areas for buses. There are many advantages of being able to store buses in the CBD during the day, as otherwise you need to run a lot of empty trips back to the suburbs after the morning peak and then into the city before the afternoon peak. All this empty running adds to operating costs and inevitably means that we can’t provide as good a public transport system for the money we do have to spend. Yet at the same time we don’t really want to clog up the sides of all our inner-city streets with buses – so finding a place to store them during the day is damn useful. A few possible sites were identified in the study:
Getting better buses on the road is an obvious outcome, but unfortunately can’t happen overnight as we still generally need as many buses as we can get to handle the peak time loads.
The last major action point, to reduce dwell times, is quite interesting. In terms of reducing time spent at stops, this is something that I’ve talked about at length previously and is the great opportunity that integrated ticketing will provide for. It also relates to operating some bus routes “through the CBD” rather than into the CBD and then back out the way they came. I am a big fan of through-routing, although it needs to be done with caution as very long routes mean increased unreliability of service.
Overall, this is a useful study with useful suggestions about how we might better manage buses in the CBD. However, it seems that even with all the measures implemented we are going to end up with huge bus congestion in the CBD in the future. This is perhaps one of the strongest arguments for both the CBD Rail Tunnel and North Shore Rail: that they will enable us to reduce the number of buses headed for the city centre, and instead focus buses on feeding the rail system – which itself carries people into the heart of Auckland. After all, there weren’t that many buses around the centre of New York City when I visited last month – most people caught the subway in the inner-city.
Processing...
Ironically whilst the Auckland Council appears to be looking for places in the city to store buses Infratil is looking for ways to sell off all its depots and/or redevelop them to make money. Their proposal for the new convention centre was on top of their current Wynward bus depot for instance.
Britomart should not be a terminus for services but just a major stop. If bus routes could be extended so the terminus is on a quiet (dead zones) side street. As an example services coming up Queen St could terminate at the tank farm. This would be an easy and cheap way to extend PT to this part of the city.
Also services coming down Tamaki Drive could be extended down Hobson st so they terminated around the Cook St dead zone.
These proposals also have the added advantage of extending the reach of the rail network to those who work in the CBD but far from Britomart.
Legibility is very important for making these things work probably. The Auckland City bus stop maps are terribly confusing. All buses going down the Central Connector should depart from the same stop so someone can easily get off a train/NEX and onto a bus to the University or Newmarket. This can be done if buses dont terminate at Britomart.
Be careful with buses feeding rail though. Passengers loathe transfers. The commercial bus services that have variously run in Wellington (The Flyer, Wainuiomata express, Kapiti Commuter express) demonstrate this. People will do the feeder if they don’t have a car based alternative, but the generalised cost of the feeder is quite high. Better to have a seat on a bus that to get up and stand for a train and face maybe/maybe not getting a seat on a train.
What it does show is the point some have been making for a very long time. The Auckland transport problem is NOT commuters heading for the CBD because the public transport modeshare is high (on bus), which raises the fundamental question as to why spend a fortune on rail focused on doing just that. One problem I have with the rail advocates is that they are designing a system to fit around a legacy rail network built generations ago, rather than establishing what existing travel patterns are and designing a system around that. A public transport system which largely delivers mass transit to 12% of commuters isn’t going to solve Auckland’s problems, and it almost seems like wilful blindness to ignore this.
Passengers don’t loathe transfers in Toronto, where 70% of those using the subway started their trip on a feeder bus.
Passengers don’t loathe transfers in Perth where the new northern and southern lines have been hugely popular through areas with far lower population densities than Auckland.
Passengers don’t loathe transfers in New York, where they may go from a local to an express and back to a local all on the same line if it saves them time.
There’s nothing inherently bad about transfers – you just have to make it easy and you have to make it worth the while. Transfering from a slow bus to a fast train potentially gives the passenger a time gain: you just need to make sure the train is fast!
Precisely.
As a user of an all-bus transit system for most of my transport, I am in a system which relies heavily on transfers – but it works because the system’s frequency is strong enough to make it work (my main route of choice has one bus every five minutes during the week and Saturdays, and every ten minutes on a Sunday). The bus system smartcard is not stored-value (more like a permanent go-anywhere monthly pass), but it is a big part of how the bus system works well.
The other point, in reply to Scott, is that travel patterns are not carved in stone. There is no reason why the region should have only twelve percent of its workforce in the CBD. Glasgow is at the centre of a region of about 1.7m people and its CBD has about twenty percent of the region’s employment, or around 150,000 jobs. As a result, the regional rail network carries around 50m passengers a year, and public transport, as a whole, is how some 60 percent of the CBD workforce get to work.
(For the statistics wonks, of which I am one: Glasgow’s central railway stations manage some 35,000 incoming passengers in the am. peak, not including the inter-city traffic, but the key driver is the number of CBD jobs).
I also think that it’s misleading to state that the CBD rail tunnel or other proposed rail projects only benefit those working in the CBD. The big advantage of the rail tunnel is that it enables us to run trains at frequencies higher than 1 every 10 minutes. This helps no matter where on the rail network you’re travelling.
Other projects like rail to the airport also provide access to huge employment nodes like the Airport itself and also the Airport Oaks industrial park. North Shore Rail, or a busway extension (more feasible in the short term) provides rapid transit access to Albant, and the Manukau link provides access to Manukau City.
Indeed, the Manukau extension is mostly about bringing people to Manukau to the new university, the mall and the town centre.
He appears to be the only person around who still thinks that a rail system is about feeding commuters to downtown… but admins plans, my own plans, the conceptual plans of the ARC/ARTA etc, they are all comprised of a web of interlinked rail routes connecting at key nodes to provide a network covering all of Auckland.
Liberty seems to dredging out all the old crap about how people ‘loathe’ transfers, etc. I do note from his blog he is now living in London. One only assumes that he never uses the tube (how can you without tranferring), but rather bought a car the moment he arrived and is happy to pay the congestion charge every day!
And people don’t loathe transfers in london. There simply is no alternative. Rail lines are thin slivers, the chance that where you are going is on the same line as where you are is so slim. But it’s the transfers which mean you can get to almost any part of the city with one change.
Which is why i don’t like the model where everything terminates at britomart. It halves the number of route intersections compared with making the routes carry on through the city.
Surely the cost of feeders is less than the marginal cost of providing extra car parking spaces. In most places all the easy land near the station is used for parking, and any expansion will be very expensive.
Also Wellington does not meet the criteria for quick, comfortable and penalty free transfers.
There has also been issue with peak time rail overcrowding which means that few people want to transfer onto an already packed train at Petone, which is the last stop in the Hutt.
‘One problem I have with rail advocates is that they are designing a system to fit around a legacy rail network built generations ago, rather than establishing what existing travel patterns are and designing a system around that.’
The problem with road advocates is they always claim that the current pattern is permanent and it is impossible to design for a better one. In fact, transport patterns are always dynamic and are largely shaped by what is available and convenient. The recent improvements in Ak’s wildly incomplete rail system have led to a big jump in use, it is sensible to conclude that a more complete, better service will continue this trend. To argue otherwise is simply to betray an ideological opposition to public transit: is this your real view Mr Liberty?
Here’s one system which relies heavily on through buses. The city’s physical area is about the same as Christchurch; the population is a shade udner half a million people; the bus system carries 110m passengers/year; and to give the map some scale, the distance between the airport and the central city is around six miles, and between the central city and the harbour about three miles.
http://www.lothianbuses.com/images/stories/pdf_downloads/ROUTEMAP101010.pdf
So it can be done in systems which carry far more people than Auckland’s.
One thing I observed in Melbourne that we could implement quickly and cheaply in Auckland is simply where the buses stop. The trams in Melbourne pick up and set down passengers AT the lights not between them. They then have a clear run between stops/lights. Looking at say Ponsonby Rd, the bus stops could be removed from between intersections, increasing parking spaces and de-cluttering the streets of expensive, unattractive and vandal attracting shelters. Extend the footpath at the intersections out to the first traffic lane at the intersections and make these the stops, removing one car park. Car drivers would soon learn to choose the other lane if frustrated by the stopping busses. The busses stopping time would be potentially halved. Especially if this was coordinated with transit passes so the driver is involved in less money changing. Intersections mostly already provide cover and other amenity, not to mention more useful destinations for pedestrians. Furthermore the buses would not spend time and stress leaving and rejoining the traffic lanes. In time this lane could become a dedicated bus lane. No more frustration for bus drivers and riders caused by finding their stop used as car parks as there no longer would be any. Throw in priority for buses at the lights [the driver could engage a transponder when ready] and bus speeds would increase significantly, and therefore, I predict, patronage. Removing the general opportunity for car drivers [like me] to look forward to stops to overtake the bus, would help lower frustration and acceptance [eventually] on the part of car drivers of the buses, especially as the busses will be moving with the traffic at similar speeds.
Let’s try it on the Link?!
Of course there would be some outrage from some car drivers as it does involve a shift of priority, for the only possible advantage in the current sitting of stops is the idea that it keeps busses out of the way of cars. It would also have the general benefit of simplifying the streetscape. And be a way to begin to get a tram-like service without the expense. Other routes? Dom Rd?
When I lived in London the key to my complete dependence on the tube and busses was transfers between lines and modes. This worked well because of integrated passes, which almost everyone used and high frequency. Even though the tube was crammed and the busses slow. Incidently this was when you could jump onto the old Routemasters whenever they were stopped, which was often as this was before recent reductions in car traffic, and narrow medieval lanes.
When are buses going to be able to phase the traffic lights green so they don’t always hit the red light due to bus stops causing them to drop out of the ‘green wave’?
I don’t think our traffic lights have that capability yet. And the tricky part is finding a system that can’t be hijacked by private citizens, which has been a problem in the US.
You would think the signal buses send out to indicate where they are so the bus stop indicators know how far away they are could be adapted to talk to traffic lights too.
They do “http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/auckland/transport/buses/realtime.asp#how”
It’s not very aggressive though, it will prolong a stale green for up to 10sec or shift the cycle a little if the light is red
I like Luke’s idea of having Britomart as a major stop, rather than a terminus.
The by-product of this would be a much more pleasant environment for the square out the front of the station. Its a bit of a mess with buses all lined up there waiting, and certainly not people-friendly – as it should be so close to the waterfront