Analysing buses in the city centre

I have done a number of blog posts in the past about how important it is for us to take a completely new look at how we operate buses in Auckland’s city centre. The current system is inefficient, confusing and creates huge congestion at peak times, particularly in the evening peak. There’s no absolute necessity for buses in Auckland’s city centre to work so badly, as fundamentally we have a pretty helpful street network for an efficiency bus system – a lot of good north-south and east-west arterial roads in the downtown core:
So we have five mean north-south routes and four main east-west routes. Nelson and Hobson Street are mainly used by vehicles, Albert and Symonds mainly by buses and obviously Queen Street is the core pedestrian route. So we use our north-south routes fairly efficiently – each road being reasonably specialised in what it’s trying to achieve. While I’m not a fan of Nelson and Hobson Streets, they do seem reasonably effective at fulfilling their role of being a defacto motorway.

The east-west routes though tend to have no specialisation. Aside from a small bus-only section of Wellesley Street (westbound between Mayoral and Queen Street), all the east-west roads try to provide for a lot of traffic, a lot of buses (in some cases) and a lot of pedestrians (generally very poorly).

 The green line show the routes taken by the majority of bus routes, with the black lines being the busiest car routes (at least from my observation). It highlights a big issue that leads to huge delays for buses and cars in central Auckland: the issue of Fanshawe Street (particularly the westbound section from Albert to Nelson) and Customs Street. This is because a very busy cross-town car route coincides with a very busy east-west bus route.

While the City Centre Master Plan proposes a ‘down-tuning’ of most streets within the city centre, so that it can be a place of people rather than just vehicles, improvements for pedestrians are particularly prioritised along Queen Street, Quay Street and Victoria Street. Overlay that onto the more car-centric streets above and we’re starting to see more specialisation of east-west streets: Symonds and Albert streets still shine through as obvious bus routes, but for our east-west routes it seems that we have fewer options. Wellesley Street seems fairly obvious as a bus option (at least west of Mayoral Drive) while in the northern part of the CBD we probably end up making a choice between Quay Street and Customs Street. Do we want a lot of buses mixing with people along Quay Street or cars along Customs Street? While neither is ideal, I lean towards mixing cars and buses along Customs Street (although limiting it as much as possible) as Quay Street is something special that we should look to prioritise pedestrians along as much as possible.

Overlaying where we should focus buses on in the city centre creates opportunities for a system that seems fairly logical: The only places where we end up with significant “overlap” is a section of Customs Street and a section of Wellesley Street. In terms of our bus routes we have options of running north-south routes through the city via Wellesley Street, other services could come down Albert Street before heading back along Symonds Street, or potentially linking through to the North Shore via Wellesley Street. The point being there are a lot of options.

Yet again, it highlights the importance of focusing on Wellesley Street as an important bus route and working out ways of providing bus priority measures along it that can handle a huge number of buses in the longer run.

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