North Shore New Network Consultation

The next round of consultation for the New Network starts today and this time it’s the turn of the North Shore. This follows the consultations for South Auckland, West Auckland, Hibiscus Coast and Pukekohe/Waiuku.

Like pretty much every other area of Auckland, the existing bus network on the North Shore is a confusing mess – akin to spaghetti that’s been thrown at a map. There are a huge number of services that often do only minor variations. There are also a lot of situations where services overlap to provide frequency to some areas but at the expense of legibility for customers. An example of this is Takapuna where there is a frequent all day service already but it is made up by a plethora of different routes, many of which also serve other parts of the North Shore. If you’re standing on Albert St wanting to get there you catch the bus destined for Takapuna then catch one of the buses to the East Coast Bays, Forrest Hill or to Waiwera but whatever you do don’t get on the bus marked Takapuna (922) which reaches its destination only after an arduous detour through Northcote and Hillcrest.

The map for the proposed new network is below which is proposed to be rolled out in 2017.

As with all of the proposed new networks, the first thing you notice is that the map is considerably cleaner and easier to read and that in itself is an improvement however there are a couple of improvements I think could make things even better – some easier than others.

Transfers vs direct services – We’ve talked a lot before about how the focus on being able to transfer easily to expand the usefulness of the network is the right approach however I wonder if there aren’t still too many long routes that go all the way to town, especially at the peak. Those resources could perhaps instead go to providing more localised services that visit busway stations or hook into the very frequent Onewa Rd services.

Onewa Busway Station – The network really highlights how useful the originally proposed busway station at Onewa Rd would be. With this network someone from say Northcote to get to Constellation or Albany is quite difficult and the fastest option would probably be to go to Fanshawe St then transfer on to a Northern Express service. With a busway station just south of Onewa Rd it would allow people to transfer easily between very frequent services and open up those two parts of the network much better. Note: this busway station was opposed by many of same people that have opposed Skypath out of fear their streets will be full of parked cars.

There is more to the new network though. You may have noticed from the image above that there are three different Northern Express services planned. This is because AT say they are also changing where buses go on the south side of the harbour. All North Shore buses will eventually take one the three routes are shown below:

They say there will be three different routes which they say:

The benefit of operating buses on these 3 separate paths is that we can better match the number of buses with the number of passengers. In this way, services will be less likely to be overcrowded for people travelling to end destinations such as Newmarket.

However I’m not convinced that’s a good idea. Why not just use those extra services to make things less crowded for everyone while at the same time extending either of the other two services to Newmarket. Those wanting to go to Ponsonby would transfer like they’ll be required too on weekends not to mention those other routes generally have better bus priority. Due to the City Rail Link works that start early next year, AT will be changing existing routes in the city to one of the three above by the end of this year.

In every New Network consultation that’s taken place so far there’ve been a few changes in the way it’s handled and in this one there are a few new aspects that AT have added that I quite like. One is this before and after map highlighting just how much the service is improving. Red is Frequent routes with a minimum of 15 minutes during the day, Blue is Connector routes which have a minimum of 30 minutes during the day and most are much higher in the peak while Green are other services.

There’s also this table which highlights what kind of frequencies and span of service can be expected from each route.

Lastly here are some figures on how the changes to the network will impact people. Within 500m of a frequent route:

• the number of people living will improve from 6.2% to 32.3%
• the number of jobs will improve from 18.5% to 50.3%

There are more stats here.

It will be interesting to see how the consultation goes. Go to AT’s site for more information including public events and to give feedback.

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