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Straighten Auckland Bus Services
This is a map of Auckland's tram routes when it had tram routes. These routes shaped Auckland's development for many years. The car and motorways have shaped Auckland since. We do have a rudimentary public transport system, primarily based around a cluster of bus services that have been developed over time. Many cities have developed this way. Many cities have rationalised and developed their bus services. Auckland planners are considering what's best for the future of Auckland's bus services. I've spent some time looking at it....
This map (which you can expand by clicking) is built up from the bus maps provided by Auckland Transport. Apart from the Northern Busway - and even including it - you can see that each bus service (which has a unique number) is represented by a line on the map. Thus the more services that run along a corridor, the thicker the corridor, made up of a rainbow of different services. This is one of the reasons why Auckland's bus services are not intuitive, and are difficult to understand for new users and tourists alike. 
This map shows the approximate geographic areas of responsibility of the different bus operators which contract to Auckland Transport to provide subsidised bus services. The fact that there are a range of different operators, each with contracts which are a form of property right, presents a challenge to those seeking to rationalise bus services. Interestingly, when I visited Curitiba with a study group we learned that there had been hundreds of bus operators, and that these were rationalised to less than a dozen. Key in that restructure was the idea that bus services should be in the form of a network, and that buses did not stop in the city centre, instead they went through the city centre, allowing passengers to change there etc. This experience was fundamental to my understanding of what = a rational bus system.
This map is my arterial simplification of the Auckland Transport bus map listed above. Other factors that have been taken account of in this rough map - which essentially shows the roads that have the most different bus services running along them - includes that the routes should not directly compete with rail services, and also that they should echo the historic tramline layout. So this map is a bus network map.
This map is a close up of the map above. It shows the main arteries of the bus network. These arteries could contain end-to-end high frequency services by rationalising the bus services that run along those corridors. For example, the Northern Busway service - run by Ritchies - should not terminate in Auckland CBD, it should run through the CBD and along one of the other arteries (eg to the airport, to Howick, or Flatbush). This would require a shared contract between the operators who currently provide services on just one of these arteries. I am sure that incentives could be found to make this a worthwhile development for operators - without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. 
And then Auckland could have a high frequency public transport bus system that was a genuine network. An arterial bus network. Without complexity. Not everybody would benefit in this rationalisation, but it would deliver a network system capable of considerable expansion, and which would be far more reliable - provided the inidividual arterties were properly protected from congestion, and freed up for buses.
Straighten Auckland Bus Services
This is a map of Auckland's tram routes when it had tram routes. These routes shaped Auckland's development for many years. The car and motorways have shaped Auckland since. We do have a rudimentary public transport system, primarily based around a cluster of bus services that have been developed over time. Many cities have developed this way. Many cities have rationalised and developed their bus services. Auckland planners are considering what's best for the future of Auckland's bus services. I've spent some time looking at it....
This map (which you can expand by clicking) is built up from the bus maps provided by Auckland Transport. Apart from the Northern Busway - and even including it - you can see that each bus service (which has a unique number) is represented by a line on the map. Thus the more services that run along a corridor, the thicker the corridor, made up of a rainbow of different services. This is one of the reasons why Auckland's bus services are not intuitive, and are difficult to understand for new users and tourists alike. This map shows the approximate geographic areas of responsibility of the different bus operators which contract to Auckland Transport to provide subsidised bus services. The fact that there are a range of different operators, each with contracts which are a form of property right, presents a challenge to those seeking to rationalise bus services. Interestingly, when I visited Curitiba with a study group we learned that there had been hundreds of bus operators, and that these were rationalised to less than a dozen. Key in that restructure was the idea that bus services should be in the form of a network, and that buses did not stop in the city centre, instead they went through the city centre, allowing passengers to change there etc. This experience was fundamental to my understanding of what = a rational bus system.
This map is my arterial simplification of the Auckland Transport bus map listed above. Other factors that have been taken account of in this rough map - which essentially shows the roads that have the most different bus services running along them - includes that the routes should not directly compete with rail services, and also that they should echo the historic tramline layout. So this map is a bus network map.
This map is a close up of the map above. It shows the main arteries of the bus network. These arteries could contain end-to-end high frequency services by rationalising the bus services that run along those corridors. For example, the Northern Busway service - run by Ritchies - should not terminate in Auckland CBD, it should run through the CBD and along one of the other arteries (eg to the airport, to Howick, or Flatbush). This would require a shared contract between the operators who currently provide services on just one of these arteries. I am sure that incentives could be found to make this a worthwhile development for operators - without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And then Auckland could have a high frequency public transport bus system that was a genuine network. An arterial bus network. Without complexity. Not everybody would benefit in this rationalisation, but it would deliver a network system capable of considerable expansion, and which would be far more reliable - provided the inidividual arterties were properly protected from congestion, and freed up for buses.
This is a map of Auckland's tram routes when it had tram routes. These routes shaped Auckland's development for many years. The car and motorways have shaped Auckland since. We do have a rudimentary public transport system, primarily based around a cluster of bus services that have been developed over time. Many cities have developed this way. Many cities have rationalised and developed their bus services. Auckland planners are considering what's best for the future of Auckland's bus services. I've spent some time looking at it....
This map (which you can expand by clicking) is built up from the bus maps provided by Auckland Transport. Apart from the Northern Busway - and even including it - you can see that each bus service (which has a unique number) is represented by a line on the map. Thus the more services that run along a corridor, the thicker the corridor, made up of a rainbow of different services. This is one of the reasons why Auckland's bus services are not intuitive, and are difficult to understand for new users and tourists alike. 
This map shows the approximate geographic areas of responsibility of the different bus operators which contract to Auckland Transport to provide subsidised bus services. The fact that there are a range of different operators, each with contracts which are a form of property right, presents a challenge to those seeking to rationalise bus services. Interestingly, when I visited Curitiba with a study group we learned that there had been hundreds of bus operators, and that these were rationalised to less than a dozen. Key in that restructure was the idea that bus services should be in the form of a network, and that buses did not stop in the city centre, instead they went through the city centre, allowing passengers to change there etc. This experience was fundamental to my understanding of what = a rational bus system. 
This map is my arterial simplification of the Auckland Transport bus map listed above. Other factors that have been taken account of in this rough map - which essentially shows the roads that have the most different bus services running along them - includes that the routes should not directly compete with rail services, and also that they should echo the historic tramline layout. So this map is a bus network map. 
This map is a close up of the map above. It shows the main arteries of the bus network. These arteries could contain end-to-end high frequency services by rationalising the bus services that run along those corridors. For example, the Northern Busway service - run by Ritchies - should not terminate in Auckland CBD, it should run through the CBD and along one of the other arteries (eg to the airport, to Howick, or Flatbush). This would require a shared contract between the operators who currently provide services on just one of these arteries. I am sure that incentives could be found to make this a worthwhile development for operators - without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. 
And then Auckland could have a high frequency public transport bus system that was a genuine network. An arterial bus network. Without complexity. Not everybody would benefit in this rationalisation, but it would deliver a network system capable of considerable expansion, and which would be far more reliable - provided the inidividual arterties were properly protected from congestion, and freed up for buses.
4 comments:
Excellent post, especially the map showing how operator boundaries frustrate the planning of orbital services that cut across these slices.
One caution in your abstracted map: The piles of route numbers on a segment don't necessarily indicate that the corridor is major or heavily served. The Whangaparoa peninsula has oodles of route numbers and almost no service. Route numbers just indicate complexity, usually derived from the number of branching patterns. What really matters is all-day frequency, which may happen all under one number or a combination of many.
In addition, once you streamline the system in this way other important links become possible and fundable, including major orbitals. New services also come to make sense because they have strong frequent corridors to connect to -- the so-called "network effect."
Happy holidays!
main issue I have here is the CBD focus of the network.
Aucklands public transport does not cater well for those who work outside the CBD.
Network needs to be based around nodes at places like Manukau, New Lynn, busway stations, Panmure, and Greenlane.
Major employment areas like Greenlane have good north-south services, but dreadful east-west services, because of the CBD focus of the network.
When the trams ran in Auckland, people shopped at their local grocer, butcher, dairy and hardware store and only went to “the big smoke” to visit John Courts or Smith and Caughey or to see if Rock Hudson would finally nail Doris Day. Then we had fifty years of the City of Cars which produced malls and mega stores and put the local shops on life support. The only evidence for your transport redesign seems to be tram lines from that bygone age and routes from our current inadequate bus system.
I live in Mt Eden and the only time I go into Queen Street is to the annual film festival or to a public lecture at the University. I go to St Lukes (library, movies shopping), Royal Oak (Pak ’n Save), Mt Roskill (Bunnings) and Newmarket (dentist, movies , shopping). If you think I’m going to bus down Dominion Road, into the City and out again to get to these “sideways” destinations you’re wrong.
Over at ATB Nick R hit the nail on the head when he said:
people will generally use the transport that is easiest for them; they will do whatever is cheap, convenient and actually gets them where they need to be on time.
So instead of hypothesising that Queen Street is at the centre of some celestial transport sphere how about researching where people actually want to go and using that as evidence for your redesign?
These are constructive comments. They all suggest a need for orbital routes, to deliver lateral connections. That is a big part of the Curitiba design. The thing to remember in any redesign though is where the buses go today - albeit inefficiently. That is, they deliver people to the Auckland CBD, and points along the way. The purpose in my redesign is to rationalise some of those corridors/routes - and to increase their carrying capacity - and to deliver frequencies of 10 minutes and less. That gives a service that is "convenient and gets there on time", but not to all destinations. What the bus operator map doesn't show well are the inner-outer link loop services (yellow band under the other operator sectors). It would be a challenge to rebuild the bus network from scratch, so incremental change is likely. Question: do you build the radial bones first, or the lateral orbitals? I suspect it's the radial bones that come first, and which don't assume buses stop and park in the CBD centre. This will deliver one-trip, through-CBD connectivity for some trips. Another thought: instead of pure orbitals (which are difficult given Auckland's isthmus topography), there can be high frequency cross town connector services.
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