AT’s bus lane review

Auckland Transport has been spending much of the last eight months putting together a comprehensive review of how bus lanes operate around Auckland. I must say that I was pretty worried about the possible results of this review: because it arose out of yet another NZ Herald war on bus lanes and because there was quite a bit of talk about “alignment” between what the various old councils did. We do have T2, T3 and bus only lanes around Auckland, with some of the bus lanes operating at different hours from others. While at first glance this may appear somewhat confusing, there is a logic behind what has been implemented (well, usually) so turning everything into T2 lanes or T3 lanes or bus lanes would probably be a dumb idea.

Fortunately, I’m actually pleasantly surprised by the outcome of the review. You can read it here. As well as largely recommending that the current extent of bus lanes stays in place, it very helpfully does two important things:

1. Clearly articulating the process through which bus lanes and T2/T3 lanes are implemented
2. Making a number of very helpful suggestions about improving the signage of these lanes

Bus lanes have had an ugly tendency to become political footballs over the last few years, and seem to draw the particular ire of those who get snapped driving in them when they shouldn’t. Frustratingly, this has held back the expansion of the bus lane network in Auckland, which is a great pity as if there was one single way to quickly and cheaply improve Auckland’s PT system to a pretty vast extent, it would be to dramatically increase the bus lane network. Hopefully this document outlines the framework by which that can happen.

From the executive summary, the goals of the review are highlighted:

 The first is outlined in very general terms, that we have limited ability to widen our roads yet as Auckland grows over the next few decades we will need a PT system capable of carrying 200 million trips a year or more. This is a useful reminder of the basic reason behind bus lanes: to get more out of the street network, to utilise the limited roadspace we have in a much more efficient way.

One thing the review also had to look at was what to do about a number of existing bus lanes where previous council decisions had left some question marks over them. Thankfully, this analysis was done in a sensible way and the current configurations have been retained (with Tamaki Drive’s temporary T2 lane becoming permanent). This has been based on a good process of analysing the roads in question: The really interesting numbers relate to the percentage of people carries on the bus/T2/T3 lane compared to the general lane, but also to what’s called a “productivity level”, which takes the speed of the people into account. For Remuera Road we see that only around a third of people travel in the bus lane, but because under the T2/T3 scenarios traffic conditions in the general lane are worsened, we actually see the bus lane providing the highest productivity figures.

This is shown in the tables below, which highlight how Remuera Road’s carrying capacity is maximised in the bus lane configuration:

 Another interesting thing to note from the first table is confirmation that more people travel on the bus lane than the general lane for Dominion Road, that Onewa Road’s T3 lane carries the vast majority of person trips at peak times and that 72-78% of person trips along Fanshawe Street are by bus. The latter reinforces my belief that PT modeshare for people living on the North Shore and working in the city centre must be extremely high.

Moving along to the process of implementing more bus lanes, one thing very helpful that the review document does is note that the long term goal is to analyse the entire Quality Transit Network to see whether it should have bus lanes, with the assumption being that over time it is most likely that the whole QTN would. This network is shown as the green lines in the map below:

 As I noted above, the review also outlines the process by which Auckland Transport will go through for these QTN route to see whether they should be a bus lane, a T2/T3 lane, a freight lane or remain a general traffic lane. The diagram below looks quite complex, but I think is a really useful step-chart to analysing this issue: And finally, the review also provides some good clarification on what should be included in the signage (including on the street) to clarify where lanes begin and end, where you can turn in to them to make turns and so forth. I think some of the suggested results of this thinking are a really good step forwards: I would personally prefer to see more green paint on the road, but I understand that can be pretty expensive to do and very difficult to maintain.

So overall I’m pretty pleased with the review document. I also very much hope that now it has been completed we can start again looking at various routes around the region which would fit the requirements for bus lane implementation. Most of Manukau Road seems a pretty obvious first candidate.

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