There was an article in today’s Herald by Brian Rudman that not only refers to this blog, but also refers to one of my biggest annoyances when it comes to catching my regular bus: the extraordinary unreliability of the service when it comes to the length of time it takes to get from Customs Street up to Victoria Street.
The night of this brave statement, I arrived at my bus stop to find a grumpy crowd of regulars seething about having waited more than 20 minutes for a Link or an 004/005 bus to take them home.
Both services were supposedly running a bus every 10 minutes at that time of night.
The next evening, a bus in North Star livery turned up. Climbing aboard, we were greeted by that damp public urinal smell that makes one nervous about sitting down…
…My route must be the shortest and simplest in the book. Up Hobson St from the bottom of town, right into Victoria St East, then straight ahead up College Hill to Herne Bay.
Yet the combined expertise of NZ Bus and assorted local body agencies has, from time immemorial, been unable to provide a regular, reliable timetabled service.
What ordeals customers on more complicated and outlying routes must face I dread to imagine.
Brian and I happen to catch the same bus route, and on some occasions the same bus. Usually he catches it from outside the TVNZ building on Victoria Street, while I sometimes wander up there or sometimes wander down to the Customs Street stop (it generally depends on whether I’m in a hurry and whether I have the energy to climb up Victoria Street). The 004/005 bus almost always leaves Customs Street on time in the evening, but while on some days it zips up Hobson Street quickly, on other days it gets stuck in traffic and can take up to 20 minutes to make the few hundred metre journey from Customs Street to Victoria Street.
There’s one simple reason for the massive variety: Hobson Street does not have bus lanes. Sometimes the traffic from the motorway onramps at the top of Hobson Street tails all the way down to the bottom of the street – the bus gets stuck in that and we’re pretty much stuffed. But what makes the whole process utterly infuriating is that parallel to Hobson Street is Albert Street – and Albert Street has bus lanes! You could easily shift the outbound service to Albert Street – and as there are no bus stops on Hobson Street nobody would be inconvenienced. Furthermore, you could put a bus stop on Albert Street (right outside the NZ Herald building there’s one – which would make Mr Rudman very happy indeed) – improving the accessibility of the 004/005 outbound for people working in the CBD. Something like what’s shown below:
The blue line obviously indicates the new route the bus would take outbound. The red star shows the new bus stop location (the orange star shows existing locations). So let’s see:
- This would improve reliability as the bus would be able to use the Albert Street bus lane.
- This would improve accessibility through the new bus stop on Albert Street.
- This would improve travel speeds through the use of the bus lane.
- This would inconvenience nobody as there are no bus stops on Hobson Street.
Why hasn’t Auckland Transport done this already?
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Let’s bombard their inboxes! Oh wait, that’s Spam.
Something needs to bee done though, I agree. NZ Bus actually get benefits, less fuel costs, less grumpy drivers etc. So, it’s really a win-win and a very simple idea that will deliver a few good benefits.
Because that’s the way the bus route worked in 1954 and absolutely nothing has changed since then :-). Seriously though Auckland Transport and bus companies need to sit down and work out a bus network now!. This is something that could be set up before the end of Len Brown’s first term and would have such a profound influence on transport in Auckland, as such it should be a priority for him.
As I’ve mentioned before there used to be a bus stop just before Wyndham Street on Hobson Street, that used to make it a nightmare in the evening as the bus went up the left hand side of the road to Wyndham and then had to cross to the right hand side to turn into Victoria Street.
Our bus system has evolved over a long period of time and I’m pretty sure demographics and populations have changed since most of the routes were set out. Why is it that we can spend $100s of millions in fixing the road systems when for a few million we could get a study done to re-route and re-timetable the bus network to optimize PT in the city? Since Mayor Len is pro-PT we should be sending a petition to him to champion.
That seems to be a nice simple solution to the problem which means it is unlikely to actually happen. The only question I do have is how busy is the Albert St bus lanes at that time of day? Providing they have the capacity then there shouldn’t be any issue and it could be a nice quick and easy win. Also I have seen Rudman catching the bus from Customs St before (I saw him just this week) and it actually closer to the Herald building than the TVNZ stop is anyway plus is easier to get to as he would only have to cross Swanson St which is pretty easy.
It might be time to ban parking in say Albert St (Plenty of parking building around) and convert it to bus (centre) and one lane of cars each way and continue it eventually to the suburbs via Mt Eden Rd, Dominion Rd, K Rd, Sandringham Rd/New North Rd and Gt North Rd to the outer suburbs,
I would suggest also that a dedicated bus route down the centre (remove central barrier) to the airport and on to ther Manukau rail station would be a great start. This will then allow up to 10 years to design and construct a rail or a dedicated O’Bahn system. With not a huge amount of money and some creative thinking especially of road parking around the townships along Dominion Rd and we could have the start of a great commutor bus service throughout Auckland something like the K transitway system video in the article below.
Tinkering with hard dividers on George Bolt is risky. That road has a bad history of fatal car crashes, and serious crashes still occur semi-regularly on surrounding roads. If a central bus lane were installed, it’d have to be done with physical separation to ensure there’s not an increase in serious crashes – this time involving buses.
The Northern Busway seems to do okay in that regard, how would the two be different in terms of opposing buses?
Northern Busway is separated from other traffic, though. It’s the sociopathic toe-rags who crash on George Bolt, and they tend not to drive buses. Plus buses have innate physical characteristics that make them unlike vehicles of choice for boy-racers.
I took John Dee’s post to be suggesting removing the hard median and replacing it with painted bus lanes that are unseparated from other traffic, which is begging for them to be used as a race track with the inevitable fatal results.
I don’t know if there are many parking spaces in Albert Street and it does have (rather stop-start) bus lanes. I’m not sure if Albert Street would be wide enough to have a hope of doing centre bus lanes.
Said it before, I’ll say it again, put bus lanes on Hobson and turn Albert Street back into a normal street. The latter isn’t wide enough for bus lanes, hence the joke “stop start” lanes you refer to.