Regular readers of this blog may recall that I’m no particular fan of the Outer Link bus. While I think the concept is really nice, and the regular off-peak frequencies also are a great step up from what most of Auckland gets, the service has a number of significant flaws that have actually put me right off from catching it in recent months.
I was thinking about what has put me off catching the Outer Link in a bit more detail the other day, and I realised that perhaps its biggest flaw is that we simply never know how long the trip is going to take. There are a few reasons for this:
- The lack of a timetable not only means that it’s difficult to plan when to turn up at the bus stop, but also we lose the other useful piece of information from a timetable: the likely arrival time. The MAXX website journey planner is worse than useless so this is quite a problem.
- Even if the Outer Link buses are scheduled to operate at 15 minute frequencies, almost more often than not this turns into having “two buses every half hour” as they follow each other around the circuit.
- Perhaps as an attempt to minimise the bus bunching (although it never seems to work) sometimes a bus will continually stop at all these hold points along the journey. Waiting on Meola Road for 5 minutes while a stream of cars zip past you is about the most demoralising feeling one can get as a bus user. It’s almost like NZ Bus and Auckland Transport are trying to tell us to get back in our cars.
- On other occasions, the bus will just zip along its whole route – completing the trip incredibly quickly. While this is nice, it’s also completely impossible to predict and therefore I’ve usually budgeted for the worst case scenario and find myself a whole heap early (which isn’t necessarily a problem, unless it means I could have slept in a bit longer).
I think that most of these problems arise from the Outer Link being a circuit/loop route. Most bus routes have recovery times at the ends of their journeys which means that if a bus does run a bit late it’s still able to start its next journey on time. Furthermore, if the bus runs on time or early, then the passengers don’t need to sit around going absolutely nowhere so the timetable can “catch up”. I think the other problem with the Outer Link is that along its route there are hardly any bus lanes and hardly any infrastructure improvements were undertaken when the route was introduced. So there are many points where you can get significant delays from tricky right-turns or where occasionally the traffic is incredibly slow (but not always), leading to significant reliability problems.
While there are things that probably could be done to the Outer Link in the short-term to improve how it works (bus lanes, new traffic signals, more services on to reduce the chance of giant timetable gaps, better management of frequencies and perhaps even a published timetable), ultimately I think that the route needs to go. The Inner Link really is about the maximum length for a “loop route”.
At the end of the day, I want to know how long my bus trip will take – door to door. And using the Outer Link is utterly hopeless in performing this task.
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A similar situation arises with certain Birkenhead Transport services that wait at Highbury for what seems like an eternity. I don’t know whether this is because they are ahead of schedule and so they wait at Highbury, a major stop, to ensure passengers catch the scheduled bus. If that’s the case, then the timetable needs to be redone. Just the other night, we waited for a transfer too, so all of us on the bus (about half full) waited around 7-8 minutes.
At other times, the bus leaves before the scheduled time from Highbury and doesn’t wait, and as we all know, those PIDS lie, so you don’t actually know whether you’ve missed it or not.
Have a look at the draft new FTN map – the Outer Link is indeed gone, replaced with two end-to-end routes and serving Glen Innes.
Just two buses? I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen no less than *three* Outer Link buses following each other nose to tail. To this day I still can not understand why neither the driver(s) nor the control room people (i.e. the people that I assume monitor the Outer Link buses, if they have them!) have arranged for at least one of the buses to be held back (after transferring passengers of course to the ‘lead’ bus) to reduce the needless waste of petrol this must be for NZ Bus.
Agree with the schedule, though I should point out Google Maps seems to suggest routes following a schedule published by AT which seems to line up with the times buses are held at timing points. It’s worth a look if you want to find out what the times are like at a certain timing point.
The draft PT map (or untangling the spaghetti map) does indeed get rid of the Outerlink, to be replaced with two cross town links – one for the top half of the ‘circle’, the other for the bottom half. There will only be two Link buses proposed – the Inner and the City Link.
It used to take me 30 minutes to get from St Lukes to Newmarket on the timetabled 006 bus. I never struck an instance of the 006 being missing or late – it was always at the St Lukes stop every half hour.
Now I have to allow an hour for the same trip on the Outer Link. I just don’t know when to turn up to the stop. And even allowing an hour I have several times been late.
I think the Outer LINK probably is going to have to go.
How about route 1: Pt Chevalier -> Westmere -> Jervois Rd -> Wellesley Street -> University -> Parnell -> Newmarket. Route 2 could then be a restructured and extended 006 route, that doesn’t take such a silly route.
I haven’t taken the Outer Link since last year: http://fullerswatch.blogspot.co.nz/2011/12/joys-of-outer-link.html
What is particularly frustrating is that each Link Bus is equiped with GPS and Internet connections. When you are on the bus you can actually see where you are, why don’t they publicise this information? If I could look up online where my bus is in real time I wouldn’t spend time at the stop waiting for it. (the “real time” boards are notoriously unreliable). What baffles me as well is why they are so unpredictable. These buses run the same route every 15 minutes, with a little bit of extrapolation I’m sure they could come up with a slightly better estimate than what is currently on the boards.
I still don’t understand why the bus isn’t given priority traveling through Victoria Street or Wellesley Street (its current route). Yesterday I saw two Outer Link buses bunched together on Wellesley Street and in the time I parked my car 500 metres away and walk back to the gym they hadn’t even moved 200 metres – this is ridiculous. Surely it would make sense to have a bus lane along one of the busiest stretches of road.