An interesting press release came out from the NZTA today.
NZTA funds support upgrade of busy Auckland commuter route
The NZ Transport Agency has approved $1.14m in funding to help in the design of a significant upgrade of one of Auckland’s busiest commuters routes to improve travel for bus passengers to and from the CBD.
The $1.14m is a 53 percent share of a $2.16m design project led by Auckland Transport to improve a 4.2 kilometre-long public transport corridor along Dominion Road, a key section of the bus route between Auckland International Airport and the central city.
The Regional Manager of the NZTA’s Planning and Investment group, Peter Casey, says the NZTA has identified the Dominion Road upgrade as a strategic project to help improve Auckland’s public transport system.
“Supporting Auckland Transport and Auckland Council deliver key projects like this has winning advantages for people. They get more choices about how they travel, and improvements in public transport will help reduce the number of cars on roads and motorways and ease congestion,” Mr Casey says.
The design phase of the project will take about a year. In that time, plans and costs for the upgrade will be finalised. The key feature of the project will be an extension of dedicated bus lanes already in place along Dominion Road. The upgrade is planned to deliver several benefits for people:-
- More frequent buses and a two minute reduction in journey times along the road
- Increase the number of people using buses during peak hours by 82%
- reduce the number of people travelling by car during peak hours by 20%
- provide parallel cycle routes to make cycling safer
Auckland Transport chairman Dr Lester Levy welcomes the NZTA’s funding announcement.
“Dominion Road is one of Auckland’s iconic roads and Auckland Transport is delighted to have received NZTA funding to enable us to move into the detailed design stage of the project. Once complete, the Dominion Road upgrade will see bus services improved, village centres upgraded and through the parallel cycle routes, improved safety for cyclists travelling to and from the City,” Dr Levy says.
Mr Casey says support for this first stage of the upgrade complements other public transport projects the NZTA helps fund like the improvements to the city’s rail system and the introduction of integrated ticketing.
In the three years between 2012/15, $3.4b will be invested in the Auckland region’s transport systems through the National Land Transport Programme. The NLTP is a funding partnership between the NZTA and local authorities like Auckland Transport and Auckland Council. The region’s committed and recommended investment includes $1.6b for state highways, $968m for local roads and $890m for public transport. The investment includes funding for Dominion Road when re-construction of the route starts.
There were two things that caught my attention. Firstly let me say that this is a positive thing but I found it odd as I can’t recall ever seeing a press release from the NZTA about funding the design stage of a local project before. The funding agreement usually goes on behind the scenes and the agency doesn’t make a song and dance about it. In fact for a local project, it is normally Auckland Transport that makes the announcement and a brief mention is made of the funding arrangement. This makes me worry that perhaps this announcement is just a PT washing exercise. Of course it could be the start of the agency communicating more but time will tell.
The second and perhaps more important thing that caught my attention was impact that this project is likely to have on public transport. When the current incarnation of the project was announced last year, some of the key features were that the bus lanes would be extended through intersections rather than stopping short like they currently do.
This release suggests that those extended bus lanes will take two minutes off the journey time along the road which is according to the current timetables, a reduction of around 7% (current trip time is listed as 30 minutes). Even more impressive is the suggested increase in peak bus patronage of 82%. I’m not sure what time period that is over but it is a fairly massive increase. Dominion Rd is without a doubt already our best bus corridor outside of the Northern Busway. At peak times the bus lanes are moving far more people than the general traffic lanes do and that will obviously only continue to increase. To put things in perspective, Dominion Rd buses move about the same amount of people as the Northern Express does.
This upgrade will likely only continue to cement Dominion Rd as one of the most prominent PT routes in the city.
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What’s good about NZTA making a song and dance about design funding is that they clearly support the project generally which hopefully means they’ll fund their share of the construction bill without demanding a lower quality option.
What? This project already IS the watered-down version. The full upgrade was approved by Auckland Council at $100 million, and would have included wide bus lanes for the whole project. Now it gets new bus lanes only in the southermost part. Better/wide bus lanes for the rest of the scheme were cut to save approximately 40 million, screwing bus passengers of that upgrade, and incidentally also forcing cyclists to ride in bus lanes too narrow for cyclists and buses to coexist effectively.
If they’d water this scheme down more, they’d basically have to cut the footpaths too…
Actually there is very little difference between the options for bus operations. What the $40m on widening would do is make room for cyclists.
At the end of the day forty million bucks for cycle lanes is a big call.
So, given that bus lanes exist there now, what does $40M give us?
I thought that the bus lanes were being extended under this plan?
The bus lanes are being extended to make them fully cominuous, including right through the intersections where now the stop short.
There is also a full streets scapes upgrade, paving, lighting, planting etc.
Plus a cycle corridor is being made parallel.
So it’s not all PT spending. I disagree with the description of the cycle corridor. It is a windy, longer route than Dom Rd. It’s either mix it with the buses or weave your way around the local streets.
PT wash, pure and simple, sadly. Not sure if it’s a pre-election stance (look; we’re doing PT projects!) or it’s post-election insurance (look; we managed to support PT projects, even under National!) but you’ve got to look at the money: $1.14 million is chicken feed to NZTA v. $12 billion in RoNS. Good to see there’s a bike in the visual spin, and even a couple of pedestrians braving the sewer. The reality is that Dominion Road, much like the rest of Auckland, will continue to be dominated by single-occupancy, private motor vehicles until such time as its citizens finally grasp the nettle and realise how fundamentally destructive this modal reliance has been on our environment, community and well-being. It’s a cynical gesture by those in power. I presume the upgrade image has been sponsored by Westpac and ANZ, the only identifiable corporate entities!
In some ways this is a summary of the context in which all PT projects in Auckland operate. The dramatic difference in funding between modes will always serve to undermine the sincerity of public transport works in the region no matter how well intentioned they may be. After all, if they do represent a serious push towards and alternative transport view, why are they not backed with similarly serious money?
Funny how one single outcome can have such a wide ranging range of opinions.
I say “Stone The Flaming Crows”, thank The Lord the Nzta has ponyed up the dough.
Now perhaps we will actually see something happen on this corridor.
Mr Casey has provided cash, I can only hope there are deliverables on set time frames conditional on the money being made a avalable.
For too long it has been what we could do, get on and deliver, I am growing old waiting. If they take the cash, hold their feet to the fire
Upgrade? Looks more like a sidegrade. Pretty much sums up everything that’s wrong with transport in Auckland for me. Dominion Road should be an iconic Auckland boulevard that we find ways to get traffic off not add more onto… whether cars or buses.
Also – saving 2 minutes? Seriously? Margin for error stuff surely…
And as usual not a pedestrian crossing in sight, just those favourites of Auckland – the pedestrian ‘refuge’. If we had a sane NZTA they would have been funding trams down the middle which would have provided enough space for cycle lanes down each side. Narrow car lanes and plenty of pedestrian crossings. Alas all we get is a resealing and reprint of what is a fairly ghastly road.
If an 82% or there abouts increase in pax occurs that will indeed be a strong argument for conversion of this route to higher capacity electric modern Light Rail.
Once, that is, the mode bias of the current government is removed and transport investment priorities become based on logic and analysis…
If the passenger totals are even clos to double they would have to go to light rail surely. The buses would have to be hitting capacity?
Is there a capacity advantage to trams? My understanding was it is only the corridor that really matters.
In an unconstrained corridor there is no capacity advantage of trams over buses…. however this is not that, it is quite constrained at one chain (~20m) from building line to building line for the most part.
The benefit of trams here come down to width, depending on the specs chosen a tram lane could be as little as 2.7m wide. You can’t get that tight with a bus because buses don’t have the rails to keep them on track to the millimetre. With trams here they could probably add the cycle lanes without widening.
This is a linear corridor, buses will all be running the same pattern so they should never need to overtake, much like a tram can’t anyway. The capacity advantage comes at stops, in particular trams can easily have three or four double doors per side that open simultaneously along a level boarding platform. You can do much the same with extra long or multiple buses, but it becomes that much harder when you only have so much room to play with. The common feature of trams with doors on both sides helps too, you can build a less space intensive central island platform if that suits best.
Also, you can have an articulated 4 car tram, or 4 car double decked tram quie easily operate the same headways as a single bus.
Trams do have higher capacity per hour in practice. In theory you can pump as many people down a busway but it has to be so damned ugly.
“Like” what Bbc said. These original Auckland arterials are perfect for light rail – partly because many of them used to have something very similar. We could probably bring back a similar network to the one our bungling forefathers ripped out, approx 70 kms, for way under $2 billion. Which ain’t much in the scheme of things…
Hi, Good job for Dominion Road. As a user of buses from the Northwest, I can’t help but see an irony in the enthusiasm to cut 2 minutes off one section of a bus journey. The same agency’s rebuild of the motorway around Westgate has had the result of delaying buses behind the onramp signal, and has built a section of bus lane citybound which has not been allowed to be used for nearly two years. The combined effect of both on a moderate-to-bad morning is to add 10 minutes-plus to a one kilometre section of bus journey.
So median bus lanes are definitely not a goer then?
They have been out of the option for at least a year now. Despite what the press release says about “design”, this is really just ensuring decisions taken long ago get moved into detail – detailed enough to actually build it, i.e. including every little last catch pit that has to be relocated, drawing up min-numbingly conplex plans showing how thick the bitumen is going to be along thousands of cross-sections all along the road etc… Nothing massive is going to change anymore.
That is a very impressive video they have there in the way they have reproduced the existing roadside. I suspect it took quite a bit of effort and most likely outsourced to India.
Won’t be long before people start getting hit by buses along there. The design leaves no margin for human error.
Are they being hit now? It’s the same
width lane.
The “parallel cycling routes” are hardly parallel, more in the same kind of direction.
Imagine there were more bikes on Dom Rd than cars, so AT announces that they’ve made Dom Rd bikes and PT only, but they’ve also considered the needs of motorists by designating a special car route through the back streets. Car drivers would of course consider themselves blessed to have had their needs catered to.
Cycle and PT only roads? Let’s do it.
As far as I have seen, all AT will be doing for the cycle route is putting some signs up. No traffic calming, no cut through’s, or any of the other proven ways from around the world, that make cycling safer.
Bryce – I have seen some info on what is proposed for those alternative routes and it involved some quite considerable traffic calming and cycling features. It was more than I was expecting so if it stays like that, hopefully people will be pleasantly surprised when it is finally shown to the public
Thanks Matt. I remain hopeful.
The images I saw made it very clear that cyclists had priority. AT are planning on spending something like $5m-$10m on these routes which as you probably know can go a long way for cycling infrastructure, especially when it is being implemented on back roads that already have low traffic volumes. I think they are also quite aware that the end result needs to be good to make up for not having dedicated infrastructure on Dominion Rd itself.
Was that in one of their business reports?
Agreed with Bryce, is there a source available?
No source available sorry, it isn’t in the public domain yet.
I have seen the plans for the cycle routes. It isn’t 5-10 million by a long stretch, but its a long way better than nothing. Maybe half the way between nothing and a proper “bicycle boulevard” as they would build it in Portland? Dom Road itself still rankles – lets hope the alternative routes go a way to healing that.
there are several bus guidance systems that could reduce the width needed for bus lanes,
apart from O-Bahn which wouldn’t work here other systems use buried wires or magnets or painted lines which are read optically
the clear advantage of these systems is that the bus can be driven off the path to avoid an obstacle and then rejoin it
There was a light rail system designed for Dominion Road in the1990’s. It would now connect really well with the new central rail connection. It popped around the back of the Valley Road shops to let people off outside the Countdown and did the same at the Balmoral shops. I am sure one of the old Auckland City transport planners has a copy somewhere. It got shelved in the Banks years.
Knowing that we don’t have the budget for it, it would save a lot of headaches for Dom Rd users down the track if we were looking to put LRT in now rather than spending $40M now and then, possibly, tearing the road up again in a few years.
I guess that the important things is that the current works shouldn’t prevent the trams being put in later.
(As far as I can tell they don’t) It is shame that we aren’t doing the trams now, but it would probably double the cost as we would need to put them in at least down to Aotea square before they were any use, and if they go that far they may as well go to Britomart.
Not doubling the cost, merely bringing forward the investment time frame.
I’ll get shot down but, if we think we will need LRT along Dom Road in the near future (10 years or so) it probably makes a lot of sense to build a LRT line from Dom Rd and down Queen St now rather than focussing on electrification to Pukekohe (ideally do them both). Build it once and do it right as the old saying goes. If you’re going to rip major parts of the road up you might as well only inconvenience the commuters and shop owners once.
I like the idea, but as Sailor Boy says at least nothing they are doing now precludes light rail. In fact I think it is better, there is no need to widen for light rail (even with cycle lanes… I think). If they had spent the extra $40 million to widen the corridor for buses and cyclists, then that would have been wasted money in one regard. They would be very unlikely to invest in *redoing* a hundred million dollar project any time soon, but they might invest in *further enhancing* a cheaper project.
As you guys say it probably needs to go right along Dominion to the middle of town (or probably Britomart) to be much use. According to the back of my envelope that is a $250 million job at least, a hell of a lot to drop on one bus route in one go.
In that light, I think any Dominion Rd tram has to start at Wynyard. A tram from Wynyard to Britomart is a relatively affordable chunk that makes a fair amount of sense on it’s own, so start with that. Stage 2 extend it up Queen St to K Rd. That’s an expensive section too, but a relatively short one and it could be tied in with some of these CBD upgrades that are being planned. A city tram from Wynyard to K Rd via Britomart and Queen St makes a lot of sense.
Then as a third stage, extend down Dominion Rd. Maybe just to Balmoral as a first stage, but probably the whole way to Mt Roskill.
It would be a lot easier to covert the Dominion Rd bus to a tram if the line already went to K Rd. If you had to add on the cost of a Queen St tram and some sort of waterfront line or station at the same time it might never happen.
Yep, if we go from the North we can do incremental, Wynard to Britomart, then on to Aotea, then K road (station), then do all of Dominion road in one go. If we go from the South we have to do the whole lot all at once in a city which currently has fewer than 500 people using a tram per day.
The designations for those behind the back stops has now been removed. I actually think that plan is a good example of what was wrong (and still is to some degree) with traffic engineering in NZ. The behind the shops thing was really just so that stopping trams didn’t interfere with the movement of cars. It showed that PT users weren’t considered important enough so was hidden away. This is the same thinking that gave us bus interchanges in places like Onehunga and Otahuhu that are hidden away behind the back shops rather than being out the front on the street.
Also just for clarification, even if that scheme, or a new one were to be implemented it wouldn’t be able to use the CRL as they are different technologies. It could connect to a tram line down Queen St and along the waterfront to Wynyard Quarter though which is something I think should happen.
would interchange well at the Newton station though. Hope some work is done at the Mt Eden overbridge in the meantime, not sure how many Mt Eden and Dom Road users realise they can get the train with an easy transfer there.
Yes the old idea of pulling trams off the street and through various signallised intersections to a winding rat run round the shops was bonkers.
Each of those diversions could have added five or six minutes to the running time, three of them could almost halve the speed of the route.
Much better to just keep the trams on the main road, even if that does mean slightly less priority for cars.
One advantage of light rail is it is easier to link with traffic signal priority. As the vehicles are so much larger and might be running every 3-5 minutes, rather than 1 a minute for buses, is easy to have traffic signal priority.
Also interesting to see the Airport bus mentioned. Any airport bus running in this corridor would soon catch up to a regular Dom Road service but worry NZTA will use this upgrade as RTN to airport…