Improving North Shore buses

Overcrowding on various North Shore bus services, but most particularly the Northern Express, led the Auckland Council Transport Committee to make a number of recommendations at their meeting last week on suggestions to Auckland Transport on ways to alleviate these issues. Here’s an excerpt from the minutes of that meeting:

There are a number of very useful suggestions here (although expansion of the Albany Park & Ride, no matter how worthy a project, seems only likely to increase overcrowding on the Northern Express service). We absolutely could use the Northern Express bus stops in town a lot more efficiently (I’ve talked about that previously) while incentivising off-peak travel would be greater for ‘spreading the load‘ and avoiding the worst overcrowding during peak times.

But one thing in particular caught my attention, and that is number 3 – the promotion of alternative bus services to the North Shore. A very large number of buses currently use the Northern Busway – shown in the map below as a good illustration: While I personally think the busway is exceedingly underused during off-peak times, during the peak all those 76X, 85X, 86X, 87X and other express buses use extensive portions of the busway to speed up their travel. I assume that in the mornings the bus loadings end up relatively well spread because people just jump on the first (non-full) bus that comes along. The problem is that in the city these buses spread out all over the place: all the Onewa Road buses stopping way up near the corner of Victoria Street and Albert Street, the express buses stopping somewhere else, the non-express buses probably stopping in a third place and so forth. This probably means that in the afternoon/evening peak, working out which stop to go to ends up just being a bit too complex – so everyone heads to the obvious one where you know the buses run at high frequencies: the Northern Express stop.

To get around this issue, and properly encourage the use of other North Shore bus routes so we can make most efficient use of our resources (rather than having heaps of people stuffing themselves onto some buses while others run with empty seats) what we really need to do is making the catching of those other buses simpler. Ideally, all the non Northern Express services (with the exclusion of the 962 and 966) could follow the same route – most probably being Wellesley Street (with excellent bus lanes obviously). We could then end up with a much simplified network of North Shore buses in the city centre as shown in the map below. The dotted lines indicate possible extensions of some services to Newmarket and the possible additional Northern Express services in the rather more distant future when the CBD Rail Tunnel is completed and the service could link to Aotea Station as well as Britomart Station: Clearly a large number of buses would be operating along this red route – so you’d need all-day bus lanes plus other bus priority measures at the intersections. For turning around the buses, it may not be that desirable to have them all running through Alfred Street in the heart of the university – but a number of options could be looked at, including potentially storing the buses down on that random piece of empty land next to Stanley Street ready for their return journey. You would also need pretty massive bus stations – but this could be provided on Wellesley Street fairly easily I think at various points. Halsey Street would also need a bus lane, but this seems feasible from what I’ve looked at in the past.

Another big advantage of this proposal is that it would remove a huge number of buses from Albert Street, which is already struggling to cope with its traffic plus its buses (a situation only likely to get worse as most of the Queen Street buses will shift onto Albert Street under the current proposed changes). We would also see a significant improvement to the bus connection between the university and the North Shore – a pretty massive patronage generator at the moment.

I wonder if there’s a hope of making this the next big job for Auckland Transport once they’ve got through implementing the Outer Loop and its associated changes.

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