Auckland Transport are reminding people that from this Sunday the changes to bus routes in the city centre takes place. That means changes to both bus stops and also the start of the new bus lanes that AT have been installing in recent weeks.

Maps of the new bus routes are below:

Temporary City Bus Routes

There are big changes coming to the central city from this Sunday 18 October with more bus lanes and some bus stops moving.

Auckland Transport has added more than 1.2km of new 24 hour a day, seven days a week, bus lanes to the city centre to minimise effects on bus timetables when construction starts on the City Rail Link (CRL).

In November, a new stormwater main being tunnelled under the eastern side of Albert Street between Swanson and Wellesley Streets for the City Rail Link will affect traffic lanes at these and the Victoria Street intersections.

Some bus routes and stops are being moved to new locations away from these construction works.

The new bus lanes are on:

  • Fanshawe Street between Daldy and Halsey Streets.
  • Halsey Street between Fanshawe and Victoria Street West.
  • Victoria Street West between Graham and Queen Streets.
  • Wellesley Street West between Sale and Queen Streets.
  • Mayoral Drive between Cook and Wellesley Streets.
  • Hobson Street between Wellesley and Victoria Streets.

On Street changes for CRL works

General Manager AT Metro Mark Lambert says the bus lanes separate buses from other traffic, enabling them to bypass traffic congestion so they have shorter journey times and can keep to their timetables. “This encourages more people to use buses, which in turn, means fewer cars on the road.”

The new bus lanes operate 24 hours a day and motorists who are turning left can only enter a bus lane 50 metres before the intersection.

There also changes to bus stops in Queen Street, Quay Street, Lower Albert Street, Albert Street, Victoria Street, Mayoral Street, Vincent Street, Fanshawe Street, Sturdee Street.

The InnerLink will no longer travel along Albert Street. It will use Queen Street instead.

AT has ambassadors out and about in the city to help people. Affected bus stops have posters with information detailing the changes to that particular stop.

As I’ve said before I think these changes are going to cause a lot of disruption and frustrated people – both public transport passengers and those that drive. This is will likely be the loudest over the coming weeks and be heightened by it appearing that not that much is going on as most of the works initially won’t be that visible. It’s not till around May next year that the actual physical work starts to build the tunnels.

It will be interesting to see how Auckland Transport responds to the public over it all.

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38 comments

  1. What happens to buses from shore that go to University. Or the 881 that goes up Symond street and on to Newmarket?

  2. NEX is still business as usual.

    I agree about the confusion from next week. I regularly take a western bus affected by this, and there is no detail on the buses themselves about the change, other than a generic poster about bus stops changing. At the bus stop outside Vodafone this morning, there were AT staff handing out brochures advising of the changes, so hopefully at least some people will be aware.

  3. I’ve just driven across downtown on Wellesley St this morning, and it’s a mess of little sections of bus lanes that aren’t continuous, an invitation for people to either not respect the bus lanes or weave in and out of them, which could be dangerous. AT really needs to make these bus lanes continuous.

  4. Dear God could they not have taken the opportunity to put bus lanes in Queen St? About to get 3 frequent routes (Inner Link, City Link and the airport express) condemned to crawling along at less than walking speed delaying literally thousands every day.

    1. Apart from other motor vehicles using Queen St I would argue that the crawling speed, that I have regularly experienced, is the traffic lights in Queen St. That is quick intersection light phases followed by lengthy waits for the next light owing to double phased pedesrian crossing phases and no synchronisation between the lights at all the intersections themselves. Then it’s buses holding each other up at stops processing passengers. And finally a 30 km/hr max speed.

      In other words the standard Auckland crap traffic light system aggravated by other factors! I gave up on using buses in Queen St because it’s less frustrating to walk.

      1. Why do you call them double phased pedestrian crossings? Isnt there at least two vehicle phases between each pedestrian phase? Id call that half phased, or double vehicle phasing.

        1. Queen/Customs intersection is a single ped phase intersection i.e. all vehicle movements get a turn then peds get a turn.

          With the double ped phase intersections half of the vehicle movement phases happen, a ped phase happens the other half of the vehicle movements happen and then another ped phase happens

  5. It’s times like this I’m glad I don’t work in town.

    I wish all parties the best of luck for the disruption over the next 5 years.

    1. It times like this im glad i cycle to work in town. No change and plenty to do afterwork. Just got home from the art week late night gallery exhibitions. What a wonderful town and about to get a whole lot more vibrant once the CRL is in.

  6. Might have been an idea to stagger the changes in over the past couple of months so that people have time to get used to the changes.

  7. that’s a significant reduction in accessibility for Shore passengers, principally due to the bus stop locations, it would be a considerable improvement to let them use the Hibiscus Coast stop by Albert St and even better to stop on Queen St, otherwise there’s nothing between Hobson St and Mayoral Drive, it’s nearly a kilometre between inbound stops

    1. Huh? it’s a 600m walk from Hobson to Mayoral on Wellesley. Inbound buses – 300m ***downhill*** in both directions is bad? On the outbound journey, there’s the Civic stop and Nelson St stop, I think the bus stop locations are actually well thought out. I don’t think that sending the buses down to Queen Street and up Wakefield is a good idea, but hey let’s see what happens. Bus drivers might just choose to go Mayoral drive anyway. What is bad about this plan is that people from the lower Albert St area / Britomart are going to be penalised for making transfers at Victoria Park. Until the zonal system is implemented, they should let people ride between Midtown / Britomart to Victoria Park for free to allow transfers without incurring penalties.

  8. So most people can now know what its like to be served by a midtown route, gonna annoy the hell out of people transferring to/from other modes… e.g. train or ferry at britomart. Also a bit concerning for those with mobility issues.

  9. I dont know accurate the maps are but taken on face value they really show how spread out departure/terminating points are especially related to the trains and ferries. And how poor the system is when it comes to transferring to other routes if the Auckland CBD is not your destination and you have to use buses. To me it shows what a miss mash our bus services still are.

    When is there going to be a centralised bus terminal/hub if they are serious about PT in Auckland?

    1. I think the new stops have potential , they just have the wrong busses stopping at them. Busses from shore could come in on fanshawe st, up queen and stop midtown. The busses from the south that stop at midtown should instead carry on through town and stop at vic park. That way you have the routes all cross over for transfers without the need for one mega central terminal.

      1. I think the return from the Shore is excellent. The bus regularly gets stuck in Fanshaw St and at the bottom of Albert St. It will get to Midtown much quicker by the proposed new route. Bit further for people to walk if they are heading to Britomart, but better for those of us transferring to other bus services at Victoria St. I found it was quicker to get off the Takapuna bus at Fanshaw St and walk up Franklin Rd/Ponsonby Rd and home to Kingsland than it was to stay on the bus as it ground its way through the central city and then the Western line buses ground their way up Symonds St. Not much fun in the wet though!

        1. To Kingsland, how far is that on foot? That must be at least half an hour of walking.

          Indeed having all buses go more or less via Britomart is a crippling limitation for any public transport coming from the North Shore.

          On a map you see another problem. When you go from the CBD to Kingsland, you have the spaghetti junction in your way.

          You can also thank the Northcote point residents for not having a station near Onewa road, where you could transfer on a bus going via Ponsonby Road.

        2. Of course the CRL solves all this. Britomart only looms as central to everything because our best Transit system absurdly terminates there. Getting through the next five years is the problem, and there is probably no way that it’s going to be anything but suboptimal till, with great relief, this critical break at the heart of our whole transport system is fixed.

          Going to be like a dam bursting.

          BTW, is it just me, or has almost all resistance to the CRL dried up recently? Feels very very quiet, except for the looney fringe, of course…?

        3. I’m waiting to see the outcome of the promised business case before deciding one way or the other, but am not convinced from what has been produced so far.

        4. What, about the CRL? Good grief; there isn’t an investment anywhere in the country that comes close in terms of value. Will our usual analyses understand that? I doubt it. Transformation is beyond them, long term value is beyond them.

          Show me a city of 1.5 mil anywhere on the planet that can get a whole Metro system by just building a short tunnelled section; AKL has the great good fortune to be able to transform its physical condition and radically upgrade its accessibility at relatively little expense. Should be the envy of cities everywhere. Yet, insanely, we dither, while highly paid state apparatchiks desperately try to conure justification for a city ruining, vastly more expensive, and backward looking, road Harbour crossing.

          I admire your faith in our structures and systems, but the evidence suggests the playing field is tilted by what we usually do.

      2. There has long been huge political barriers to using Queen St properly. The retailers especially have long fought to retain private cars and ban buses. And still do. Clearly getting the cluttering cars out of the way and running Q St as a Transit Mall [people, deliveries, and Transit] is the most obvious solution to circulating, turning around, Shore and other buses. Get the cars out.

        I hope that the only reason the proposed buslanes on Queen stop where they do is because they intend to finish the job but are moving carefully to not frighten the shop owners with too much reason all at once. Using the two blocks with lanes to argue for the next [obvious] step. The savings in bus overhead alone surely will make it a no brainer.

        1. in my day at Auckland City Council it was the urban design people that strongly opposed “walls of buses” on Queen St, but somehow an LRT vehicle didn’t meet the same objection

          my supposition that urban design should meld appearance with functionality was sadly misplaced

        2. Well they are half right. A wall of diesel buses is horrible. But they’re only a wall if we don’t give them the priority to keep them moving!

          While LRT is better in three ways; Quiet fume less electric drive, fewer, but bigger vehicles, much nicer vehicles. However to have to wait for these to be installed to get a functioning system for our only city of scale is insane.

          Anyway the best way to make the case for this investment is to run the buses in a simulacrum of a LRT pattern and build the ridership and landuse pattern.

  10. I catch the 095 bus home to Whenuapai, the only service to that suburb. The last bus of the day left Britomart at 1710 each day which I could barely catch as it was, now they’ve moved the stop half way up Albert Street without adjusting the timetable! I’m now forced to drive to Constellation Park and Ride just so I have an option to get home again. Very inconsiderate of whoever made these changes.

    1. While that sux Matthew, is there not a bus you can catch from Whenuapai to Constellation? Or you could drive down to Westpark Marina and catch the ferry into the city (it’s quite popular and probably faster than what you are currently doing).

    1. Gosh, you sound sad and pessimistic. Is everything going to heck? And not like when you were young, and kids these days…?

      Cheer up. The city endures. The city IS compromise, construction, occasional confusion. It works despite AND because of it. Any city muddles through, good cities muddle through well. But they all muddle and iterate and complain and act and react constantly.

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