I have often moaned about the poor quality of the maps that we use for our public transport system. I mean just look at the map below – doesn’t it make your head spin:
Part of the problem is undoubtedly the bus network – a complicated mess of routes, many of which travel higgledy-piggledy all over the place without much logic to them at all. But even ignoring that particular fact, the map above fails to tell us much about the city’s bus system because it misses an utterly critical factor: how frequently do they run? You get hints that buses are probably fairly frequent along Ellerslie-Panmure Highway: simply because there are a huge number of routes, but overall I think the above map is pretty damn useless except for someone who has recently moved to a house and wants to know whether there’s a route that serves their place.
A good contrast to the above map is this one of San Francisco, which comes from here. (PDF here or click for larger).
The map has some key characteristics – perhaps most importantly that routes only end up on it if they have a decent level of frequency (at worst one bus every 15 minutes I think), while also the different modes of transport are clearly distinguished. I think in Auckland it would be good to distinguish on our maps between RTN routes, QTN routes and LCN routes.
I suppose San Francisco has a natural advantage in that its grid street layout makes it fairly straightforward to provide an excellent quality transit network, while the offset alignment of Market Street (the main PT spine) allows a variety of routes to feed into it at various points. So it’s a good network that’s already easy to understand – but the map highlights its strengths, rather than the Auckland map, which hides the city’s few good bus routes amidst a sea of rubbish twice a day routes.
Some of the more recent maps at bus stops are an improvement, but overall I think we can do better. Perhaps Auckland Transport are hesitant to do something like this as the list of routes that operate at 15 minute frequencies, 7 days a week, is embarrasingly small.
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The San Fancisco map doesn’t have all it’s PT services radiating out from one terminal, i.e. like Britomart.
I prefer the Auckland map, as it shows clearly exactly where the buses run, and by showing all the roads, I can also see how to get to the nearest bus route. The SF map would be meaningless to someone not familiar with the street layout or terrain.
To see where a bus runs, you need to basically trace it all the way along its route. A more stylised version allows you to glance at where you want to go, see the colour line you need to be on and then scan over the map to figure how to get onto that line (despite the longer description here, it is a quicker process). A balance between stylisation and geogrpahical precision does need to be found — I wouldn’t go as far down the stylization path as the london tube map, but think the paris maps are pretty good.
Actually, I wonder if you need both types of maps, because they perform different tasks for the traveller.
@Geoff, I disagree. If I am standing in the place where the text “One Tree Hill” is, right by the 392 route, from the information in that map, how can I tell which bus would get me away from there more frequently – the 392, or the Gt South Rd buses? Or the train?
Were it that I didn’t know better, I’d look at that map, hunt my way to Main Highway, and assume that with so many routes through it I could get a bus pretty much the moment I stepped out my front door. But, no, especially on weekends, and twice on Sundays. I’ve a plethora of routes that run past my house, and still had to wait over 20 minutes (as scheduled!) for a bus on a Sunday afternoon.
The comment that a map with only 15-or-fewer-minute frequencies would be very, very bare indeed is entirely accurate, because I think the only corridor that’d achieve that for 0600-2300 Monday-Sunday is b-line. Sure as hell there’s nothing out here in the boonies of central Ellerslie that gives me that kind of coverage, which is rather infuriating given how. many. bloody. routes come right past my house. I remember one unfortunate Friday night where I wanted to get home from town at the wholly unreasonable hour of 23:00, the trains weren’t running (yeah, go figure!), the next 5x bus wasn’t due for another hour!, and I was suffering a bad case of CBF around trying to figure out where the 4xx buses leave from (don’t get me started!). So I caught a cab, fortunately doing a fare split with another person who was in much the same predicament but also much further from GSR so didn’t have the 4xx buses as an option.
Our entire bus system is a complete joke. The shambolic stop configuration around Britomart is horrendous, and that it can be a whole hour between buses leaving the city on a Friday night is just ridiculous. I hope you’re reading this, Sharon Hunter, because I’m quite certain I’m not alone in viewing AT’s grasp on how abysmal Auckland’s bus services truly are as being only marginally better than is Joyce’s grasp on how vital the CRL is to the long-term future of Auckland’s economy.
I have much the same, two coloured lines with lots of numbers leading directly from my house to Constellation busway station… but any time except the weekday peaks there is only one bus an hour.
I’m not quite that poorly-served, but for being on a convergence path for a number of routes the actual frequencies are pretty average. Weekends are the most annoying, again because of the number of routes and the pitiful service frequencies, but even during the week it can be 15 or 20 minutes between buses.
What stunned me recently was wanting to get to Kingsland last Saturday evening, and discovering that there was one train per hour outbound from Newmarket on the Western Line. I wanted to get there at 7, so not exactly a late night, and still the services were completely useless. In the end I caught a train to Britomart and got picked up by my partner as she came back from the Shore. Extra petrol for her, hassle for me. We have a horribly long way to go before life without a car is really viable in Auckland.
Three words: bicycle, raincoat, and prayer 😉
Yeah, but nah. I’m pretty dedicated, but riding in the rain is not at all fun when one has glasses. There’s also the OMFG-it’s-raining-and-my-driving-skills-are-now-inadequate-to-even-get-a-restricted-car-licence syndrome that is observed on Auckland roads.
There ought to be a 50 going through Ellerslie at 11:30 on a Friday night and also a 680 which I believe leaves at 11:20.
Whatever the precise timing, it was something like 50 minutes until the next bus from that stop. Far, far, far too long for a Friday night, especially when we’re talking about six or eight routes leaving from the same place.
Living in Newmarket I always wonder why there are so many buses, half empty, with always different and changing numbers passing in Broadway. Then I saw the mighty 312 route in this map, doing a beautiful loop around Onehunga, and I understood this network was designed by Jackson Pollock Himself. No other explanation why that bus needs to come all the way to the city.
The explanation for why it comes to the city is that transfers are bad and must be avoided. The sooner AT goes to a gross contract model and brings in real integrated fares, the better. Once that happens, all of these nonsense routes (and the 312 is a complete abomination if one is unfortunate enough to have to catch it) can be scrapped and replaced with feeders to train stations.
If we’re talking about these nonsense routes, one factor which has contributed mightily to their retention is inertia. I was using the buses in Auckland thirty years ago, well before the onset of the more commercial model, and apart from the fares and the livery on the buses, just about everything else is the same.
I think there’s a way to square the circle of retaining the current commercial regime with the desire to have better ticketing etc. What I would do is break up the isthmus services into two: main road services which would do just that, no diversions into heaven knows where, and invite the bus companies to register those commercially. Then I would have a second tier of services, the local connector runs, and those I would provide as free services; meaning that we are spared the need to have fare integration systems. The additional passenger revenue of these nooks & crannies services is not really that great, I suspect, so there may be not that much to lose.
Also, there is still a case for running bus services parallel to the railway lines, as these work well for passengers travelling between stations.
I’m sure inertia is a huge part of it, but there’s also the reality that we’re only recently at a point where trains are viable, and now we’ve got commercial bus operators who cannot be forced to run only feeder routes instead of running long-haul commercial services.
As for retaining the long-haul routes, there’s still no good reason to have them mirroring the train lines. The solution to passengers who’re between train stations is to have feeder routes that loop past two or three stations, or just have some services that are pure loops to handle the between-stations scenario.
The model I’ve in mind is to have a service that runs, say (using an area with which I’m very familiar), Market Rd, GSR, Station Rd, Rockfield Rd, GSR, Campbell Rd, Wheturangi Rd, Market Rd… That encompasses Remuera, Greenlane, Ellerslie and Penrose stations, but would be only about a 20 minute loop if there were proper bus priority measures right down GSR. Another service could run Onehunga Mall, Neilson St, Captain Springs Rd, Church St, GSR, Rockfield Rd, Mays Rd, Mt Albert Rd, Onehunga Mall… That takes in all the Onehunga Line stations and Ellerslie, mimicking very little of the route of the other service but again taking care of passengers between stations and also only taking about 20 minutes if there’re proper bus priority measures on GSR, Church St and Onehunga Mall.
I think the best option would be to have local maps showing all the routes with their timetables and then a high frequency map showing the rail lines, the Northern Express, the LINK Buses, and the B-Line (which I would like to see to be extended to include Onewa Rd, Sandringham Rd, Manukau Rd and Remuera Rd) routes only.
Something needs to happen with GSR. It’s ridiculous that it’s such a high-volume corridor (especially north of Harp of Erin, but even from as far south as Papatoetoe) but has no bus priority for most of its length, and no commitment to high-frequency services despite it requiring only timetable reconfiguration to offer at least “no more than 15 minutes” levels of service.
Yes you could look at adding Great South Rd and New North Rd and perhaps East Coast Rd as well. Longer term you could look at adding routes such as Richmond Rd, Tamaki Drive and some cross town routes.