The NZ Herald today reports that the idea of a Northwest Busway along State Highway 16 is to be referred to Auckland Transport for their investigation. This happened as a result of MP Phil Twyford making a presentation to the Transport Committee yesterday.

The article says:

Auckland Transport will be asked to investigate a call for a busway down the middle of the Northwestern Motorway.

That follows a presentation to the Auckland Council transport committee yesterday by Labour list MP and Te Atatu candidate Phil Twyford, who says the northwest is cut off from the rest of the region “to an almost ridiculous degree”.

Mr Twyford, who said the proposal originated with the Campaign for Better Transport and had support from western business groups as well as three local boards, won a committee resolution for officers to seek a report from the council-controlled Auckland Transport.

The Northwest Busway idea is something that I’ve blogged about on many occasions in the past. In particular, to support Westgate as a high priority metropolitan centre it has seemed pretty obvious that there needs to be a rapid transit connection to the city centre and other major development nodes around Auckland. It’s somewhat tragic that NZTA never properly considered including this as part of their Waterview Connection project (which massively widens the Northwest Motorway between St Lukes and Te Atatu). But maybe there’s at least some hope the motorway could be future-proofed for a rapid transit option in the future.

The article continues:

He said the $350 million proposal would complement the western railway line, which went nowhere near Te Atatu and the high-growth northern sector of the former Waitakere City. He preferred it to run down the middle of the motorway and said it would cut the typical bus trips from Westgate to central Auckland from about 60 minutes to about 18 minutes.

Modelled on the successful Northern Busway and the removal of 8000 cars each morning from harbour bridge traffic, it would have six bus stations, including one at Pt Chevalier with a possible connection to the airport via the future Waterview motorway tunnels.

The Draft Auckland Plan’s transport map for Auckland’s future does seem to have a pretty obvious gap in the proposed RTN that would be usefully filled by the Northwest Busway:I just can’t see myself how a bus-based RTN from Westgate that runs along part of SH16 but then heads along Lincoln Road to Henderson before transferring onto the train for the continued journey can really be considered an acceptable way to connect Westgate as a metropolitan centre with the rest of Auckland.

What would be most interesting to learn from Auckland Transport’s analysis of the proposal are options for staging the project, including some clarification on what will actually be provided between Westgate and Lincoln Road (along the section of SH16 that is classified as an RTN) as well as how this might be integrated into utilising the bus shoulder lanes across the causeway and Great North Road’s bus lanes into a makeshift ‘first step’ towards an eventual busway along the whole route that operates similarly to what we have on the North Shore.

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22 comments

  1. The other RTN gap is in the Southeast. Where Nick R’s genius rail line from Botany to GI is the perfect solution. The way to work towards that is to get the Manukau branch extended along the existing RTN designation to Botany first, then the gap becomes obvious.
    Anyway, that’s a great idea on its own once the Southwestern or Airport Line is in it would do wonders to help mend the separation down south that SH1 causes. And a direct line to the airport and Manukau City will be clearly beneficial.

    Meantime a busway on the Nothwestern is low hanging fruit, especially as it can first be just Westgate to Pt Chev with enhanced bus priority on Gt North Rd thereafter. I suspect there will be no stopping NZTA with their car first scheme now though…. without, say, the intervention of the minister….. Now what are the odds of Joyce saying, ‘good thinking Phil, I’ll make that happen’?

    1. Yeah hooking that proposed southeast RTN more to the north and linking in with Glen Innes seems fairly obvious from looking at the map above – although it obviously means you miss Pakuranga and Panmure.

      1. Josh, there would still need to be proper bus privilege from both Botany to Panmure [a la the better bits of AMETI] and on the Pakuranga Highway from the Highland Park Station, to Pakuranga Town Centre and Panmure

      2. Yeah I guess I have a vague hope that we might end up with both the bus solutions currently being explore and a rail option in the longer run.

        1. It’s the way to transform Botany from being a largely identity-less sea of carparking into a transport hub and dynamic commercial centre for this region. Ironically it is all that underused land with asphalt that means there is the space to do it: Busway to Pakuranga Town Centre and Panmure [and Sylvia Park?] and rail west to Manukau City and Airport and east to Highland Park, and the CBD. Perfect way to mend a poorly connected place and to up the whole region’s viability. The key is to designate these routes now, and get a programme sorted. Bus privilege first.

  2. I want to thank Josh and Transport Blog for providing the inspiration and much of the thinking behind the Busway Plan I presented to the Council transport committee. Dr Chris Harris has also been a big contributor. And of course Campaign for Better Transport has also been pushing the idea for some time. It has been very satisfying to see the Plan get loads of local support in the West. People have had a gutsful of the traffic congestion that blights suburbs like Te Atatu and Massey, and as with Auckland as a whole they understand that we simply cannot just continue building more and more motorways. Onwards and upwards.

    1. Thanks for dropping by Phil. I still hold out some hope that if we can get the project in the Auckland Plan, then push NZTA to build a proper busway at least between Lincoln Road and Westgate, it will become more and more obvious how logical and sensible the Northwest Busway is. It’s great having an MP pushing for it.

    2. This is how the South East Busway in brisbane got done…. and it has been a HUGE success!
      Carries ~ 7 lanes worth of traffic into the city.

      How about that… for just a little more money you get far far more capacity than a motorway lane.

  3. I think the way forward for the Northwest and Botany corridors is to get some decent ‘low hanging fruit’ bus lanes happening soon but to allow for proper RTN by 2040, much like is on the cards for the Northern corridor.

    Beyond the CRL and airport lines establishing real RTN elswhere could be difficult. While travelling I used some rail systems in Kuala Lumpur and Copenhagen that appear to be just what the doctor ordered for these corridors, i.e where high capacity metro style rapid transit is ideal yet where classic heavy rail may be prohibitively expensive to build. I’ve been researching this and putting together a post on the topic which I put up shortly.

  4. I like Phils idea of a pedestrian/bus bridge accross the Whau River a lot better. IMO buses should go through residential areas. The NW Motorway runs through wetlands. So where would the bus stations go? They would all end up in teh middle of no where.

    You could use the new Whau bridge to connect the Te Atatu/Glendene/Glen Eden/Henderson buses to a station in the Rosebank light industrial area. Then you could run a direct service into town along a dedicated busway. The Westgate, Massey, New Lynn and Avondale buses could terminate/pass through there as well. Thats a lot of buses that could use the busway.

    NZTA should be happy with this plan as well as it would take a lot of presure off the Lincioln and Te Atatu Rd interchanges- which are basically traffic disasters. No amount of widening are going to make tehse interchanges any better.

  5. Just how bad are the current 080 and 090 services at the moment? I checked out Maxx for a trip from Westgate to Auckland Uni and it came up with these routes with a travel time of 1 hr 19 mins (walk from Britomart) and a cost of $7.20. Can we start with these routes that use the motorway already, or are these optimised already?

    1. The northwest of Auckland certainly has some of the worst bus services in all of Auckland. The 080 and 090 services are, amazingly enough, a big improvement from what the area had to put up with until a year or two ago.

      1. Indeed they were, much simpler and easy to use. They still leave a lot to be desired though, they still meander a lot through the likes of Henderson. Especially on the 090, you get SO CLOSE to the motorway then veer off all the way to Henderson and back.

    2. How bad are the 080 and 090. They are shockers. As a comparison, on a good run the 060 X which goes from Westgate via the NW motorway, then off at Waterview, gets me to midtown in 35 minutes. That includes the new delay created the the new ramp signal at Westgate, and the bus trawling for farea along Great North Road. Even completing the shoulder bus lane which exists in parts, could get the Westgate to CBD down to a reliable 30 minutes, maybe less. There is huge potential to improve those Northwest services even short of the full-blooded busway project, but it’s
      just not on anyone’s radar. The shoulder bus lane is on NZTA’s plan for some time after 2018. If we’re lucky, and the funding doesn’t evaporate

  6. Copying my post from AKT:

    I’ve spent a lot of time taking the Te Atatu Peninsula buses, and they are dire.

    My experience wasn’t helped by the fact that I was travelling in the opposite direction, from K-Rd to the Peninsula and back again in the evening, so was totally stuck with hourly service only. Even worse, if I missed the 5.45 bus back to the city, there wasn’t another one until 7.45.

    It’s also really slow, with a lot of fluffing around in backstreets around the northern end of the peninsula, then stopping at most stops on the way back in between Pt Chev and K-rd. On a bad run, you’d stop at every single stop – highly frustrating. Average trip time was at least 45 minutes, plus a heap more waiting since the route was horribly unreliable and 15-20 minute waits were common, with longer waits not unusual either.

    Travelling via Henderson is a stupid idea. There is simply no room for bus lanes along most of the route to Henderson without buying up probably a hundred million in houses – the bulk of the direct route is winding 2 lane suburban road, and it’s also insane to travel so far out of the way. An off peak journey from Peninsula to CBD is just over 15 minutes by car. Peak time car travel from Peninsula to Henderson is more than that.

    I’m not so sure a fully grade separated busway is the way to go, but certainly something bigger and better than shoulder lanes could achieve much of the benefit for a fraction of the cost.

    One thing I’ve never seen mentioned is the possibility of a ferry service – supposedly Hobsonville is going to be a 20min ferry to the CBD, Te Atatu is much closer but I suspect the water is too shallow for a ferry terminal to be possible.

  7. the centre of a motorway is the worst place to put a busway, they require significant structures to get buses and passengers to and from them and if you want to minimise cross-sections, crossovers at each end of a station to get the bus doors to a centre platform

    at least a busway alongside a motorway gives opportunities for land use development and intensification, building passenger loads bot to and from the station precincts,
    central busway is merely a CBD orientated passenger sewer

  8. I would look at extending the Onehunga- Avondale RTN to Westgate via Rosebank and Te Atatu in the northwest and to either Flat Bush or Botany via Highbrook. That will improve commuting to the industrial area. Plus operationally having one cross town line will be easy to operate. Mind you the time horizon may be a long way off.

  9. This seems like another of those ideas, like the airport rail link and the city rail loop, that look and feel right and shouldn’t have to be studied to death. When you look at it, it just makes good sense.

  10. Here is the kind of rubbish public transport that Te Atatu residents have to put up with..an hour to get to Eden Park (including a 21 minute walk). I wonder why people continue to use cars????

    Walk 112 metres to 697 Te Atatu Rd (2mins)Show Walk Map50875087Map Data – Terms of UseMap DataClose▼
    ——————————————————————————–
    6:07pm 6:20pm048 – Britomart To Te Atatu Peninsula To Britomart
    Go West

    A large part of Britomart Transport Centre will be closed from midday Friday to 6am Monday

    Please click here for details

    Departs from 697 Te Atatu Rd (Stop 5087)
    Arrives at 285 Great North Rd (Stop 8109)
    $0.50
    $0.30 (child)
    ——————————————————————————–
    Walk 1424 metres to Eden Park (21mins)

  11. I know this has probably been investigated before but, how about a single lane busway that changes as the flow changes? ie. a ‘master’ station at Waterview and another at Westgate. Those buses travelling against the flow use the standard lanes and the ‘bus lane’ to be used by the buses travelling with the flow. Controlled by gates.
    I know it sounds crazy but surely it would chop a vast sum of the build price and give a 75% solution to the problem?

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