A different approach to bus routes

A few days back the Human Transit blog superbly outlined the basics of designing bus routes – using Halifax in Nova Scotia as the example. There are some excellent “basics” outlined in that post: the need to identify choke points, the need to have good “anchors” at each end of your route, the benefits of bouncing routes off at right-angles once you reach the edge of a grid system and so forth. What seemed perhaps most obvious of all is how each route is designed to achieve a number of different things – not just to drag various people from around the suburbs and take them into the city before turning around and doing the same thing. The first route the blog post looks at is perhaps the best example of this:

While the whole peninsula is fairly high density, the main patronage attractors are within the various shaded areas – education facilities, employment zones, hospitals and so forth. The red circles represent the chokepoints on entering the island and the “T” represents transfer points. What I like about this route is how – let’s say during the morning peak – there would be strong flows of passengers both ways along the route – because it doesn’t simply terminate in the middle of town and then head out again, it passes through the city. With transfer points at both ends of the route you would have a lot of passengers on the bus right to the end of the line (which is good for efficiency) and because it keeps to a very low number of streets it’s a simple and easily understood route.

You would struggle to find too many routes like this in Auckland. Most bus routes seem to very much “peter out” at their suburban terminus, while through-routes are extremely rare as well. This means that our system has huge inefficiencies, in the form of empty buses close to the end of their runs, and then by having to run many ’empties’ from the city centre terminus back to the start of the route.

When I wrote this post about the possibility of using the Wellesley Street corridor for most North Shore buses, there was a lot of interesting discussion in the comments about sending some of those North Shore buses further south. The 881 service from the North Shore to Newmarket via the University and Hospital is apparently very popular – and many have thought that it might make sense for the Northern Express to continue to Newmarket. Personally I view the NEX as part of the “Rapid Transit Network” and see no point in duplicating RTNs between Britomart and Newmarket (we have the train line of course), so I would do things another way.

My route, as shown below, basically brings two routes together: the main ‘non-busway’ QTN route on the North Shore and the future Manukau Road b.line service between Onehunga and the city.

If we start with the ends of the routes, we have two obvious major transfer points: Onehunga in the south and Constellation bus station in the north. As I outlined in my blog post about Mangere bus routes, I see most of them feeding into Onehunga in the long run – allowing transfers onto train for the fastest Onehunga-downtown trips – or onto a Manukau Road b.line for intermediary trips. Manukau Road is a major arterial that clearly requires a high frequency bus corridor in just the same way as Dominion Rd, Mt Eden Road and others do.

In the north, while the busway will obviously be used for most trips heading to or from the city, there will similarly always be the need for a service linking together all the town centres and various trip generators on the North Shore. So if we’re going to need both these routes – primarily not for fast trips to the city centre from outlying areas but for trips along the route, for trips that may occur outside the peaks, for trips in the reverse peak direction and so forth – why not join these two routes up so we offer even more options? The route above would allow one to travel from Takapuna to Epsom, or from Royal Oak to Milford – but without the inefficiency that a normal ‘everywhere-to-everywhere’ style of service pattern tends to generate. Run this route at 10 minute frequencies off-peak and you create a really strong north-south bus corridor across the whole city that can be useful for a vast number of different trips.

I suppose that on the down side it would be a fairly long route and with that comes potential for unreliability. But because there would hopefully be enough patronage generated by the route (in both directions and right to the ends of it) it should be able to support high enough frequencies that make unreliability less of an issue.

This is quite a dramatically different way to operate a bus route in Auckland. Do people think it would work? It seems critical to me that it has a fast route through the city centre – so people travelling from Takapuna to Epsom don’t spend half their lives stuck at traffic lights downtown – but it seems potentially a pretty efficient way to provide for a lot of different potential trip options.

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