Sorting out North Shore buses

For a number of years I had the misfortune of being stuck catching Birkenhead Transport buses between the North Shore and the city – for university or work. Now there were many good aspects about Birkenhead Transport buses: such as the smallness of the organisation which meant you often knew the driver. However, there were also a number of highly annoying things – like the 1950s ticketing system, the lack of integration with other tickets around Auckland and the huge hike that I had to do between the city bus stop on the corner of Victoria and Albert Street and the university.

In more recent years there have been some efforts to get around this problem through the 971 and 972 buses that provide a direct link between areas served by Birkenhead Transport and the university. But in other respects they just add to the confusion as their route through the CBD is vastly different to ‘normal’ Birkenhead buses. Perhaps as a result of this, just about every afternoon 971/972 bus I’ve ever seen has been pretty empty.

The lack of access to the university was not the only annoying thing about the route taken by Birkenhead buses in the CBD. There was also the trip down Albert Street, which could on a bad day take around 15 minutes. This has been partly fixed by the Albert Street bus lanes, although the complexity of traffic operations there mean that the lanes are extremely stop-start: and there are still some really nasty bottlenecks around the corner with Customs Street, and then (once the Birkenhead buses have done their silly loop down to Quay Street) at the corner of Hobson Street and Fanshawe Street.

The poor routing through the CBD for North Shore buses is not confined to Birkenhead Transport either. Most North Shore buses end up having to do a long trek along Albert Street before joining the highly congested Customs/Fanshawe Street area and making their way out of the city (obviously the reverse in the morning, although CBD congestion never seems so bad in the morning peak). The routes for a decent chunk of North Shore services is shown in the diagram below:
One thing that immediately becomes clear when looking at the diagram above is just how indirect it is. The other thing that’s obvious is how complicated the routings need to become in order to provide a service to the university (and, in the form of the 881, to Newmarket).

Surely there’s a better way to do this? And remember it’s not just the services in the diagram above that could be simplified. Add in Birkenhead Transport buses, add in other North Shore buses – pretty much everything except the Northern Express which has a pretty simple route. Surely there’s a way to take a bit of pressure off Albert Street, which gets pretty congested for buses even with its bus lanes at peak times. Surely there’s a way to provide better direct access between the universities and the North Shore (a significant patronage pattern) and a way to simplify the system so there’s one major bus stop to turn up at to catch all these buses – so in many cases you can just get the next one that comes along.

Well I think what we need to look at is directing the buses along a route that is probably very similar to what I’ve drawn in the map below – effectively a major route along Wellesley Street.
The route is in green, and effectively follows Fanshawe Street, right into Halsey Street and then straight through into Wellesley Street. The buses could then either turn around by doing a Princes Street, Alfred Street, Symonds Street. Wellesley Street loop, or continue over State Highway 16 and turn around somewhere over by Grafton Road. Significantly sized bus stops (they’d have to be considering the large number of buses using them) would be located roughly in the vicinity of the red dots that are on the map above: meaning one just off the motorway on Fanshawe, another on Wellesley Street near the intersection with Sale Street, a third around the corner of Albert Street and Wellesley Street (probably a bit further east than what I’ve drawn so that it’s nice and close to Queen Street) and the last one right in the heart of the universities (or potentially on Alfred Street outside Auckland University’s main library).

It would be necessary to improve the bus priority along this route. Bus lanes already exist along Fanshawe Street, but would need to be added to Halsey Street. One of the two right-turn lanes from Fanshawe into Halsey Street would probably need to be made bus only, and the left lane of Halsey Street (which is currently left-turn only into Victoria Street) would need to allow buses to travel straight ahead – and probably be a bus lane. For outbound buses, parking along the edge of Victoria Park would probably need to be restricted at peak times to provide a bus lane. Along Wellesley Street, you would probably need bus lanes in both directions – ideally at all times but definitely at peak times. Finally, you would need lengthy and very high quality bus stops as they would be used by a very large number of services.

The only disadvantage I can see is that you would create more of a separation between these services and Britomart train station – making transfers between the two more difficult. In the longer term this won’t matter as the route will pass very close to the Midtown train station – and allow for excellent bus/train transfers at that point. I think in the meanwhile the advantages of this route would probably outweigh the disadvantages – but there would be certain drawbacks.

I hope that Auckland Transport is looking at making improvements like this. Many of our bus routes take complex, convoluted and plain illogical routes through the CBD that seem to result from little more than being historic relics of the past. It’s time we took a good long look at how to improve buses in the CBD to reduce delays, improve access and create a better and more user-friendly system. I think this would be a very significant step in the right direction on that matter.

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