I don’t complain too much about my regular bus service – because, generally, it is pretty good. In the year and a half or so that I’ve been catching Herne Bay buses I could probably count the number of seriously late morning buses on one hand – mightily impressive for Auckland.
However, there’s one aspect of my local bus service that annoys the hell out of me – and unfortunately today it reared its ugly head again resulting in a trip home from work that should have taken less than 20 minutes actually taking over 40 minutes. The problem lies with the part of the route coloured red in the map below:
For some never explained reason, while citybound buses travel via Queen Street, buses heading out of the city travel via Hobson Street. I can somewhat understand the desire to not go via Queen Street, as that gets very congested and can take buses a very very long time to negotiate during peak times (thanks to there being no bus lanes for some crazy reason). But Hobson Street gets very congested in the evening peak too. Take, for example, my experience this evening:
5.17pm – arrive at bus stop D20. Must have just missed the 5.15pm 004 bus, but that’s OK as the 5.25pm 005 bus isn’t too far away.
5.26pm – the 005 bus arrives about a minute late, no biggie there. It takes a couple of minutes to load and then sets off.
5.28pm-5.38pm – bus sits at the intersection of Albert and Customs Street while about five phases of traffic lights change. We can’t go anywhere because the way ahead is blocked. Some bus drivers would have turned into Albert Street to utilise the bus lanes and avoid the chronic congestion ahead. Unfortunately, our bus driver isn’t smart enough to do this.
5.40-5.55pm – bus crawls up Hobson Street at an extremely slow pace. By the time we get to Victoria Street there are about 20 people waiting at the stop outside TVNZ. One tells me that he’d been waiting for around half an hour.
5.55-6.05pm – bus does the entire rest of its trip, dropping me off on Jervois Road.
The incredibly stupid thing about this (and it happens again and again) is that Albert Street doesn’t suffer from the congestion that Hobson Street does, and (perhaps most importantly) Albert Street has freaking bus lanes! Instead of taking us half an hour to travel from Customs Street up to Victoria Street, we could have done that trip in about 4-5 minutes via Albert Street. To make matters even more stupid, there aren’t even any bus stops on Hobson Street because the bus travels in the right hand lane. So shifting it to Albert Street would inconvenience absolutely nobody. In fact, you could even add a bus stop on Albert Street and make the route much more accessible to people in the central part of the CBD.
It would be so easy to fix this problem, there are heaps of advantages and no disadvantages. The fact that the change hasn’t been made says a lot about Auckland’s public transport system. The powers to be just don’t give a damn.
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He 🙂 Maybe you could get all the users on your bus to fill out a postcard and send them all to the Auckland TRansport agency? Or call the Aucklander – they love this kind of local story from a local person.
I noticed that even the buslanes on Albert St were quite busy this afternoon, I walked out of work on the corner of Swanson St and there were 6 buses lined up back to back at the lights to head up Albert St, perhaps those drivers were trying to use the buslanes to their advantage as well.
Given there is what 6, 8 lanes on Hobson Street I really don’t know why one hasn’t been made a bus lane already. Albert Street bus lanes were a joke, they have stuffed up traffic management (i.e. you can’t turn right at any of the intersections on Albert Street now) for short little bus lanes doing very little.
Put bus lanes on Hobson Street and run all the buses along there.
You’d need to make Hobson Street two-way first though…
…. hey, now that’s an idea!
Josh, as a user of the 005 I’m with you on this one also. Try following the process of phoning Maxx and also contact NZ Bus to get this changed. (I’m not saying the process will work, but it will be interesting to see what kind of response you get!)
The 005 is operated by both the Metrolink and North Star business units of NZ Bus:
http://www.metrolinkbus.co.nz/about-us/contact-us.php
http://www.northstarbus.co.nz/about-us/contact-us.php
I’m still waiting for a response to my last complaint on exactly the same problem. But yeah, will do it – again!
Under the header ‘Useless buses’ there are plenty of examples.
The 028 “Express” to Grey Lynn takes just as long if not longer to get to Richmond Rd from Queen St than the standard 024 because it stops at every stop. The last time I took this bus home it was nearly 15 minutes late just getting to Wellington Street.
If a bus route is labelled ‘Express’ there should be some curtailing of bus stops to ensure a speed differential.
Also, my elderly mother lives in Buckley Rd in Epsom. The stop for bus 297/298 is immediately across the road, and the route transits through Newmarket to Queen St. But since the route goes via Gilles Ave it is useless for a mobility challenged person. You would expect private vehicles to use Gilles Ave, but buses should provide better service to the public by using main thoroughfares for access to business and retail outlets. She drives her car instead.
Talking of response times – have people noticed how slow the Auckland Transport folks are at responding? I noticed that they give themselves 10 (business) days to respond – and they certainly seem to use/need that time!
(Admittedly, the “We have received your email, we will respond whatever…” pro forma emails the previous Councils sent you under their “We will respond with 2 days!” policies weren’t very useful either)
The bus route 005 (before the 004 existed) used to have a stop on Hobson Street just below Wyndham St, I caught it every day for about 10 years. Almost nobody ever got on or off there so it must have been abandoned. But this I believe is the reason that Hobson St is used over Albert St. The change should be made to Albert St as it would help include more of the city in the route at no loss to anyone else.
If we are going to concentrate the bus routes into one CBD road it has to be Hobson or Nelson. Why ruin Queen and Albert Streets which can’t even fit a median strip if you put four lanes into them?
The Birkenhead to city services often suffer this same problem. I’ve been on services that ran twenty minutes late purely on account of congestion on Hobson St. The thing is like five lanes wide, surely dropping a bus lane on the left-lane wouldn’t be such a big deal.