The Western Express, the precursor to a proper busway, and other changes to West Auckland bus services are now a year old and Auckland Transport says they’ve been a smashing success, with ridership up 45 per cent higher than what was expected.
Auckland Transport’s (AT) new North West bus network has exceeded expectations and delivered more than 5 million passenger trips in its first year.
A year ago today, AT launched its flagship Western Express (WX1) bus and the 11T and 11W buses, which run between Westgate, Lincoln Road, Te Atatū and the City Centre in both directions every 5 to 10 minutes from 7am to 7pm, seven days a week.
Along with other new or re-designed routes, the new North West bus network was expected to hit 3.5 million passenger trips within its first year.
“It’s fantastic to see the new bus services have smashed their target,” Waitakere Ward Councillor Shane Henderson says.
“That’s 5 million fewer car trips on our roads, which is the sort of progress we need to be making to meet our climate goals and to unlock West Auckland’s potential.”
AT’s Head of Public Transport Services Planning and Development Pete Moth says the numbers speak for themselves.
“When people have access to frequent and well-connected public transport, they’ll vote with their feet. Being able to just turn up and go gives people the freedom to travel wherever they want, whenever they want.
“It’s really great to see so many people taking advantage of these new services for a mix of different purposes, travelling to other parts of the city as well as shorter local trips,” he says.
In a separate Instagram post last week, Pete Moth included some additional figures
Celebration time! The Auckland North West bus network, which went live almost 12 months ago, has hit 5 million boardings. Our passenger forecasts were predicting around 3.5m by this stage, so we are around 45% ahead of targets.
Some standouts from the routes that were amended in November 2023:
- the 11T/11W routes (Westgate-City via Great North Rd)) have collectively carried the most passengers, more than 800,000
- the WXI (Westgate-City via Motorway) has carried 795,000
- the 120 (Constellation-Westgate-Henderson) has carried 750,000
- the 14 (New Lynn-Lincoln interchange) has carried 655,000
- the 13 (Te Atatu Peninsula-Henderson) has carried 645,000
Of the 21 routes that we amended, 16 are exceeding targets, and only 2 are below target patronage levels. a
A question and a few comments about these numbers:
- With the ridership on the 11T/W, it would be interesting to know how much is from the Northwest vs from along Gt North Rd.
- The Northern Express services first started running at the end of 2005 and it did so using only the Albany and Constellation stations and then used shoulder lanes on the motorway to get to the city before the busway itself opened in early 2008. It wasn’t until over a month after the busway opened in April 2008 that it surpassed 800k boardings.
- The 120 is currently the busiest bus route that isn’t run as a frequent service and busier than a number of frequent routes include the 20, 31, 32, 35 and 68.
- AT’s bus data to the end of September breaks routes down by region. You can clearly see from that the impact the Northwest bus changes have had and ridership on West Auckland buses as a whole is now 13% higher than it was pre-COVID. Buses in the South (+1%) and Waikehe (+23%) are also above pre-COVID levels.
I plan on doing a deeper dive in to some of these numbers in an upcoming post.
Despite the celebration, things aren’t perfect but there are more improvements coming for the northwest soon too, with AT noting:
More public transport improvements are still to come in the North West, including:
- A network of bus priority and T2 lanes to improve the speed and reliability of buses
- A new bus station at Westgate
- Running some bus services more often
- Introduction of a new frequent 12 service, replacing the 120 between Henderson, Westgate and Constellation, which will run at least every 15 mins, 7am-7pm, 7 days a week.
- 40 new electric buses from April 2025 on the WX1, 11T, 11W and 12 bus routes
- NZTA is currently exploring a busway to run along State Highway 16 from Brigham Creek to the city centre
The next big changes to PT in general will be this Sunday with the breaking up of the Outerlink and a range of other enhancements to isthmus services that combined should help deliver more ridership growth.
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Surely it’s success should be significant incentive to increase bus priority measures between the upper and lower parts of the CBD, and onto the motorways, where required?
Yes. So here we are, heading to the crunch foreseen back in the 2013 City Centre Future Access study. The city centre was always the constraint on a bus heavy transit system, this is, after all, why light rail was proposed for NW, Isthmus, and Shore transit growth, the areas outside the rail network.
True the pandemic and the resultant work-from-home demand softening has delayed these impacts, though as the city grows and city centre fails to evaporate (as some still fantacise), they are still coming.
Expect more battles over street space like the recent one about extending K Rd bus lane hours. Wellesley, Albert, Symonds, Customs, and K, will likely all have to become close to bus only. These are the geometric needs of a max-bus rapid transit policy.
At least if the e-bus roll out can be continued (this has lost climate funding under new govt) some significant negative impacts of this are meaningfully reduced.
But expect street space wars, with drivers, for service and delivery, and place and ped space, which of course will be level headed and calm, as they always are.
Totally agree, randomly caught the 195 toward Pt Chev the other day and even though it wasn’t a super congested day, the constant weaving, stopping, pulling out, cars blocking, changing lanes, all just to go from Lower Albert to Ponsonby Road was slow, and not particularly pleasant from a rider point of view – didn’t help the bus felt ancient.
Separation is really the only way to get a decent system
Good news. I would hope that in further improvements, AT tries to get some Vision Zero into the interchanges. Pete, any chance…?
AT should really be recouping the cost of fixing PT on the NW by charging Beca, given that consultancy did the traffic report for the Waterview Connection, using modelling in a way that misinformed the decision-makers and was well-known to be wrong.
Yes sadly there was a person on foot hit by a car on the Te Atatu Interchange this weekend. As I ride my bicycle through here each day I note ( and report) the extremely regular ( every single time) that drivers exiting SH16 from city to head to Te Atatu South speed up to go through a red/amber light often on their phones. The WX1 network has vastly increased the number of people on foot having to cross these motorway off ramps- maybe review the signal set up here?
Oh dear. And Road Safety Visibility is so low (despite commitment by AT “in full and without question” to increase it) there could easily be more people being hit that we don’t know about.
The design never had safety at its heart.
I wonder what the specific reasoning is for the limited time that the bus shoulder is allowed to operate. If a vehicle breaks down it pulls over into the shoulder and a bus has to go round it – this would occur whether it is in operation as bus lane or not. Very often see buses slowly moving in heavy traffic outside the operating time while the bus priority lane is deemed out of bounds. Surely our PT system should operate in a way that shows drivers that a PT system improves journey times more than just at peak.
What this tells us is that people will use a bus if it is more like a train – frequent and direct with less stops. There are some very quick wins that could be had all over Auckland, but AT isn’t interested because they don’t cost billions of dollars.
We could have most of the advantages of Dominion Road Light Rail using buses if AT did the following:
– Bus lanes 24×7 (build a few alternative carparks on side streets if they have to)
– Remove a few stops
– Route the buses down Ian McKinnon Drive / Queen Street instead of the current detour down View Road
– Terminate them further into the city than Midtown (or even combined it with the NEX).
– Bendy buses / all door boarding
– Electrification
Yes, better more train-like and frequent bus services attract users strongly.
But this: ‘but AT isn’t interested because they don’t cost billions of dollars’ is nonsense.
I can assure you AT’s PT planners would love to do all these things and more but are constrained by two big things:
1. budget
2. competing demands on space
Both constraints are real and pretty much constant, but it matters hugely what the higher order strategies, plans, and budgets are. How available funding is, and for what (opex v capex), and who has final say on how bits of our public realm is used.
Most of those things should cost very little.
Why would “competing demands on space” prevent 24×7 bus lanes but not Light Rail?
Why can Light Rail have less stops but not buses?
Why can light rail use Ian McKinnon Drive / Queen Street but not electric buses?
I am pretty sure the reason none of these things get done is because they aren’t a big enough project to care about. Or because they would dilute the business case for LR, but LR is dead now regardless.
You may notice we don’t have light rail, not least in part due to opposition from the current uses of that contested space.
Anyway, LR is red herring here, it long ago ceased being an AT project, they are busy running the buses not plotting LR.
AT recently failed to get 24 hour bus lanes on K Rd, not because ‘it doesn’t costs billions’, but because of opposition.
Budget is very tight just to maintain current service levels let alone make changes.
Among the funding sources recently killed are the ‘Low cost, low risk’ and the ‘AKL Network Optimisation’ programmes. Both of which were focussed exactly on high value low cost changes.
It is the very high cost low value RoNS obsession in government that is creating that sucking sound taking all the funding away from making a better more efficient and effective city, in key incremental ways, not some conspiracy at AT.
Great points Patrick. However when you say “It is the very high cost low value RoNS obsession in government”, I have been posting pretty much this same message on this site for over 15 years now (it used to have more changes like no cash payments, but that has been done since). AT may be cash strapped now, but they have had money in the past and not done it. For one AMETI they could have done 30 of these.
Has anyone done any analysis on actual bus loadings ,(how the patronage numbers stack up against the available seats). Presumably this is monitored,to build the case for double deckers. Double deckers look good flowing down a busway,but are much less attractive ,stacked end to end on city streets. The CRL will alleviate stacking of trains,l wonder how much AT, Council are prepared to invest ,to alleviate bus stacking ?.
“Has anyone done any analysis on actual bus loadings ,(how the patronage numbers stack up against the available seats). Presumably this is monitored, to build the case for double deckers.’
Yes. A team within AT does this every week, across every route. The info drives decisions such as, increasing frequency, increasing the number of buses on a route, whether to run more buses during peak times, when to add longer three axle buses, when to add double deckers ( a separate team then handles double decker clearances, ie moving shop canopies, moving street signs, trimming overhanging trees, reinforcing road gutters, drains and corners, training drivers etc ) The double decker bus can then be ordered from a bus manufacturer
When’s the last time a major PT project in Auckland DIDN’T significantly exceed expected patronage
Clearly our modelling is garbage as it consistently underestimates demand which makes projects harder to stand up or builds them to too small a scale
Northern Busway
Britomart
Western Line Duplication
Electrification
Every time the model undercooks usage
Because every model “conservatively” bases itself on historic, car-focussed conditions. If you assume positive change (whether for active modes, or PT) you are accused of being too aspirational.
or of “social engineering”
Modelling does seem to be garbage, (same with flood modelling). Ends up costing more not far down the track, like the underestimating how popular the Western line would be = having to build more platforms and not putting in a bus lane when they did the North Western motorway extension to Brigham Creek.
Funders, especially Govt. are so sceptical of project business cases that modelling is obliged to be conservative. Too many good projects get squashed that may well have delivered better results than presented.
Depends who the modelling is being done for, seems in some cases its engineered to suit the agenda of the customer (eg flood modelling being done so a developer can fill in 7 hec of flood plain next to the Kumeu River for housing behind the shops at Kumeu creating a pinch point in what was once a huge amount of flood plain)
In a world where AT has very constrained bus opex and some big growth on radial routes, it must be time to reconsider through routing of services? Terminating everything in Downtown / Midtown is just crazy. There’s been plenty of reasons put forward for why this won’t work – imbalanced demands / frequencies, missing bus priority for reliability and contractual complications, but surely all these could be worked through if AT wanted to? CRL is about to deliver through routed trains (removing the Britomart bottleneck), about time that AT got its head around the same for its buses?
Bus interchanges and routes are being significantly rejigged around CRL. Waitematā, Te Waihorotiu, Karanga-a-Hape, and Maungawhau Stations will each have its own expanded interchange, and city bus routes are being realigned around those. Routes along Wellesley, Customs, Symonds, and Albert Streets and Karangahape Rd will all have priority bus lanes.
“it must be time to reconsider through routing of services? ”
This is already happening.ie through routing the Tamaki Link.
Through routing assumes that someone in Mt Eden wishes to travel to Northcote each day. The concept of transferring from one route to another, replaces the need for through routing.
The core assumption is that terminating services (with associated time spent on turnaround etc) in the most space-constrained part of the network is sub-optimal. Evryone getting off and a bunch of different people getting on in the CBD isn’t a particular issue. Buses parked there is.
Would a combined NX1+WX1 (B1 & B3 on SvdW’s new map) route work in this respect? Rather than terminating both services at Lower Albert Interchange, why not through-run from Westgate to Hibiscus on a single service?
Some good numbers from this and can only get better.
That 120 turning into a frequent 12 couldn’t happen soon enough. It should of been from the start. I wonder when it will be? It originally going to be when this Western Express was introduced but …..funding restraints. I thought yesterday it was going to be starting on the 17th, along with some other timetable changes that they have put out, but seems not after all.
Nice to see two lanes liberated this morning
this is awesome news. The numbers for the 11 buses say it is the most popular route. It would be greatly appreciated therefore if they could put them on more frequently. For whatever reason I find myself constantly waiting 20 minutes for either of the 11 this buses at the Lincoln Rd interchange around 3pm to 4pm weekdays, maybe they get held up with school students. Whatever.. end result I now have to allow an extra half an hour to get to my work at Western Springs in the afternoon. Its a right pain and ultimately quite wearying.
Same issue with Route 14 in same time window. Issue is lack of any form of bus priority on Lincoln Rd and buses get stuck in school peak traffic heading towards the interchange, so cannot start return services on time. Solution – the T3 lanes that have been on the drawing board for ever.
hell, go one step further, in an ideal world Lincoln Rd should have a Eastern Busway style median busway running up and down its length. seems like something AT wants for the long term Upper Harbour BRT corridor so why can’t they do it at the earliest opportunity instead of “waiting for an arbitrary level of demand”
Just wondering how 3.5 million passenger trips on buses equals 5 million less cars on road. Apart from bad math, the presumption that every person uses a car is complete fallacy.
it is interesting to note the 11’s popularity which must be boosted by its street running; which begs the question how much more ridership would the WX1 get if it had stations at Royal Rd, Point Chev, Western Springs & Bond St to stop at
I think a lot of people get the 11 due to better bus priority between k road and Waterview interchange. The WX1 is a slog in both directions at peak. AM peak there is no priority between Waterview and st lukes. PM peak it sits forever at the on-ramp signals at Newton on-ramp, then a barely usable sliver of bus lane to st lukes and nothing to waterview.
Could easily mitigate most of this but instead it’s seemingly ignored…
is the 11 faster between downtown and Pt Chev than the WX1 at peak times? fascinating
Yes, good point re extra stops but still express.
What’s to “explore” in a busway from Brigham Creek Citybound? Theres already a shoulder, bit of paint and signs and buses could use it next week when lanes are congested. This sounds like a repeat of 5-10 years of lost pragmatic opportunity between Westgate and Wateview/city centre.
Anyone used the te atatu interchange and found the air quality to be really bad? I cycle through and hold my breath. Can’t help but wonder if people in Te atau would prefer the comfort of getting on the one bus to the city, over transferring at the interchange. Certainly prefer riding in the rain to driving or using the bus. Maybe they should shut down the cycle lane to get another boost to the bus numbers.
Bus stops between 120 and WX1 at the Westgate are quite far. I wish AT to develop a centralised bus stop (station) at the West gate for a more convenient connection. There is space available behind the library.
Great news!
(now put bike racks on the buses please)