Guest Post: how can we make feeder buses work?

This is a Guest Post by commenter Peter, who has written previous posts here and here. 

There has been a lot of discussion in recent months about the need to improve Auckland’s bus network so that it integrates with, rather than duplicates, the rail network and also the Northern Busway. Auckland Transport’s board papers for their meeting this coming week seem to indicate that this process is finally happening – as Matt pointed out in his post earlier this week, we see the following:

The PTNP will define a new connected and integrated network for public transport in Auckland of:

•  Rapid Transit Network (RTN) of electrified and modern rail services and Busway services.
• A connected network of high frequency bus services along key arterial road corridors, supporting and integrating with the RTN – 15 minute worst case frequency seven days a week between 7am and 7pm – plus some high frequency ferry services
• Secondary routes of lesser frequency ferry and local feeder bus services connecting to the RTN and high frequency bus network, school bus services and peak only services.
• The main benefits of the new PTNP will be to simplify the network, remove the “spaghetti” A-B bus routes, remove duplication of services and provide high frequency services that are convenient and reliable. This in turn will create resource efficiency “savings‟ that can be used to focus bus resources where the demand and congestion relief is most needed – on key arterial corridors.

It seems fairly likely that turning a number of existing “long-haul” bus routes into feeder services to both the rail network and the Northern Busway will be a key part of this plan. Logically it should, because as many people have pointed out earlier it’s just silly for us to run bus routes that completely duplicate our rail corridors doing the same “long-haul” job that we’ve spent billions of dollars on the rail network to do.

However, this “trunk and feeder” approach generally hasn’t worked well in Auckland so far. We have a few feeder buses that run around the North Shore at the moment, and the general conclusion that I’ve come to from discussions with various people is that they’re rubbish. And because they are rubbish, nobody uses them. Here are two of the feeder services into Albany and Constellation stations: The 880 route (the red one) takes almost an hour to complete its giant circuit of this part of the North Shore, and only runs at 30 minute frequencies – fine if you’re heading into the city where you can transfer onto the much higher frequency Northern Express: rubbish if you’re heading out of the city and just miss your connecting feeder bus to take you home. Furthermore, Constellation and Mairangi Bay are the 3 stage boundaries, i.e. an express from Mairangi to the city is three stages. However for some infuriating reason all the 880 route along Maxwellton Dr falls into the ‘upper zone’ of the North shore, while Constellation is still in the lower zone. The end result is a longer, slower and less direct 839 from Mairangi to town on a lower zone pass, but using the feeder and transfer to the NEX for a quick trip needs the more expensive upper and lower zone pass. The 887 bus (the blue route) takes 40 minutes to complete a pretty incomprehensible route, and also only runs every half-hour – making it hopeless for returning trips.

So we haven’t got feeder buses right on the North Shore. Does that mean feeder buses in general are always going to be almost completely empty and utterly useless, or is there a better way we can do them? Looking overseas, we find that in cities like Perth, Vancouver and Toronto, the majority of people catching the train have actually arrived at their station on the bus – suggesting that feeder buses to rapid transit is quite possible. But how?

Taking a look at Perth’s bus network gives us some clues about how to run better feeder services – here’s a section in the very northern area that feeds into Clarkson Railway Station.  Tracing the individual routes takes a bit of work (and there’s a typo which doesn’t help), but generally they follow fairly logical routes feeding into Clarkson Station in the bottom-right of the image. With some exceptions they take the fastest trips while still offering a fairly decent coverage of the area. Looking at a timetable, we can also see that some care and thought has gone into integration with trains: The connections also work in the outbound direction: What’s interesting in comparing Auckland with Perth is a fundamental difference between a busway and a rail line – that being that you’ll probably always be running much higher service frequencies along a busway than a railway line (simply because you can’t fit anywhere near as many people on a bus). The lower train frequencies make it a bit easier for connecting feeder buses, because you can time your feeder to connect to your train (and vice-versa), even at fairly low frequencies. With a busway, it’s likely to be much more difficult to match the frequency of your feeder with that of your trunk route. The Northern Express runs at 5 minute frequencies or better for much of the day these days, and although you wouldn’t need any feeders to match that frequency, you would need them to be coming at worst every 15 minutes to ensure that non-timed transfers didn’t result in particularly long waits.

In future posts I’ll try to look at how Vancouver and Toronto operate feeder buses to their rail networks, and perhaps look at how Brisbane operates its southeast busway in a bit more detail – to really explore how we can make feeder buses to rapid transit work.

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