Improving the CBD section of the Northern Busway

I was having a discussion with someone last week over the question of how necessary a North Shore Railway Line is. I certainly agreed with them that it was the lowest priority of the “big three” rail projects that Len Brown has promoted (behind the CBD Rail Tunnel and rail to the airport). The main reason for this is, of course, that the North Shore has a pretty good quality, pretty brand spanking new, busway. However, I did point out an issue that I have noted before: that the busway is only as good as its weakest link – and that weakest link (being the section between Fanshawe Street and Britomart) is actually pretty substandard at the moment.

A comment on the CBT forums by regular contributor (both to this blog and to the CBT forum) Andrew reinforced my view that unless we do some serious work to the Fanshawe to Britomart section of the Northern Busway, we are going to have some big problems in the near future. Here’s what he said:

Between around 4pm and 5:30pm it takes the Northern Express about 12 minutes to get from Albany to Akoranga, then 10-15 minutes to go 7km from Akoranga to the start of Sturdee St.

It then takes about 15 minutes to travel 600m from the start of Sturdee St to Britomart.

Not only are the huge delays between Sturdee Street and Britomart a great annoyance for people catching the bus into town at this time of day, the slowness must make running regular buses at high frequencies on the Northern Express hugely more inefficient. If it takes buses nearly 45 minutes to make the Albany-Britomart run, instead of the 30 minutes it should take them (if it weren’t for the congestion in the CBD), a large number of additional buses need to be rostered on to keep up the four minute frequencies that operate at this time of day. That’s wasted money for no real benefit whatsoever.

So what can we do about this? In the long run, the inefficiency and low capacity of the CBD section of the Northern Busway might well speed up the need to progress rail to the North Shore. But in the shorter term that’s not really a viable financial option – and the more we can squeeze out of the Northern Busway, the more we can delay the need for rail to the shore and the more money we have available for other transport projects.

Thinking about this, I started to realise that we could tie better bus priority along this section of CBD streets with a couple of other projects I have in mind. The first being making Hobson and Nelson streets two-way: which would clearly require changes to the intersections they have with Fanshawe Street at their northern end. The second change that I’d like to see is the removal of the “Lower Hobson Street viaduct”. This horrible thing: The Lower Hobson Street viaduct was designed to provide a better connection between the Port and the Harbour Bridge, so that trucks didn’t have to travel along Customs Street. However, since the Port-to-Northern motorway connection has been built, trucks no longer have to use this route and the viaduct is now a fairly unnecessary blight on our urban landscape. Getting rid of it would be fantastic in opening up the historic Tepid Baths to having greater prominence too.

The map below shows the current route of the Northern Express service through the CBD. A huge number of other North Shore buses take the same route. Red shows where the Northern Express has its own dedicated lane, aqua shows where it must share roadspace with general traffic.For a route that’s supposed to form a key part of the “Rapid Transit Network” – and the Rapid Transit Network is supposed to be completely separate from other traffic – this is pretty pathetic. It’s easy to see how big delays would occur for this service when it has to share the roadspace with general traffic for so much of its route. I haven’t caught Northern Express buses in the evening peak, but I used to catch Birkenhead Transport buses that took a similar route out of the CBD and they certainly spent a lot of time stuck in traffic on the Lower Hobson Street viaduct trying to turn into Fanshawe Street.

So looking at our options for improving this, one thing stands out straight away and that is the oddness of having Sturdee Street run right next to Fanshawe Street for a lot of its length. Sturdee Street (which the Northern Express bus uses inbound) generally seems to have far more road capacity than it ever needs, while if you fiddled around with the lane configurations along Fanshawe Street you could probably squeeze in another lane. Therefore, the idea is to run buses in two directions along Sturdee Street, use the remaining space along that street for a relatively narrow connection street and have Fanshawe Street between Hobson and Albert Street become the main cross-town two-direction route. This means that buses would follow the route shown below (a zoomed in PDF of the route and some of the necessary road changes can be viewed here):I can see a few potential difficult stops here. The corner of Nelson and Fanshawe Street would have a lot of different phases to its lights and potentially cause congestion, getting a two-way street along Fanshawe between Albert and Hobson will be a tight squeeze. The access to the Downtown carpark would need to be reworked (or we could just redevelop it into something more useful). All up, there would be reduced road capacity, there would be more congestion for people driving between the North Shore and the city.

But there would be far better bus priority. Buses would zip along the section of Sturdee Street between Nelson and Albert because there would be no intersections for them to negotiate. Ripping out the Lower Hobson viaduct would revitalise the area and the narrowing of the part of Sturdee Street that remained open to vehicles would humanise an area of the CBD that is currently very hostile to pedestrians.

In the end, I think that this is an excellent example of the tough choices that we will need to make in the future to give public transport better priority in the inner city. As an increasing proportion of commuters to the CBD use public transport it makes sense to dedicate more roadspace to them. This will inevitably cause congestion for those who continue to drive – but that’s something we need to weigh up if we’re going to be improving PT through on-street measures rather than through underground railway lines.

Share this