The plan to jump-start faster bus services to West Auckland

Thursday, 28 November 2019

Sections of bus lane on the northwestern motorway currently end near off-ramps

Auckland Transport hopes its bid to jump-start a mothballed motorway bus lane project to the West could get underway early next year.

The council agency has released to Stuff details of its plan to urgently improve bus services to the rapidly growing West and northwest, as talk of a permanent rapid transit system slides further into the future.

Upgraded bus priority on the northwestern motorway will be a far cry from the dedicated Northern Busway

Despite the outer-West and northwest being a regional growth area, public transport has languished, with a busway proposal sidelined and a Government promise of early light rail now looking unlikely.

A six-page briefing by the council agency to Transport Minister Phil Twyford and Mayor Phil Goff laid out a staged boost starting with joining-up disconnected sections of bus lane along the northwestern motorway.

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'Over the next 30 years, forecasts project that three times the number of people will travel along the northwestern corridor each day,' said the AT paper.

'There is now an urgent need to make improvements in the bus network, as growth continues and travel conditions worsen.'

AT had a re-designed bus network to the northwest ready to go years ago, but could not implement it without the upgrades to NZTA's motorway.

'We are aware that the delivery of a permanent or long-term rapid transit solution may be some time away,' AT's chief executive Shane Ellison told Stuff.

The short and medium-term plan by AT would have express bus services along the motorway, connecting with local services at 'pop-up' hubs set-up at the Te Atatū interchange and at Westgate.

Ellison thought the the construction of simple bus hubs could happen soon, depending on whose land was involved at the interchange, and getting design and resource consents through.

AT's briefing paper said those simple improvements would allow a revamped bus network to 'mimic the performance of a Bus Rapid Transit solution' between Westgate and the CBD.

Ellison said the agency and NZTA were already working on details of the early stages, and the plan would be considered next week by AT's board.

There is nothing new in the idea that buses could use the existing shoulders of motorways, as priority lanes.

The Auckland Regional Council succeeded in getting bus designations on some shoulders on both the northern and northwestern motorways from the early 1990s.

The success of the northern motorway lanes in providing faster journeys than in general lanes contributed to the development of the dedicated Northern Busway which opened in 2008, and now carries 6.5 million passengers a year, with extensions and new stations being built to the north.

There was no evolution though on the northwestern motorway, where bus services were poorly patronised through much of the 1990s.

Focus turned to the northwest from the early 2000s with the development of the Westgate retail and commercial centre, creating a regional growth centre.

However little has changed for bus priority, with only disjointed sections of shoulder bus-lane built in the major rebuild by NZTA of the northwestern motorway, a project nearing completion at the Westgate end.

Auckland Transport is responsible for the region's bus services, but depends on NZTA willingness to build bus priority on the Government-owned motorway system.

NZTA has had other priorities. A short section of purpose built shoulder bus-lane completed in 2011 was intended by NZTA to be left unused until the entire motorway project was completed in 2020.

Only the intervention of AT saw that commissioned in 2013, cutting around 5 minutes off bus travel times on the most congested morning peaks.

NZTA and AT began early in 2018 to look at a low-cost way of joining up motorway shoulders to create continuous bus-lanes across the region's network.

However, in the most recent update obtained by Stuff under the Official Information Act, the programme had shrunk with only one portion of the northwestern, around the Patiki Road on and off-ramps, still under consideration and potentially ready early in 2020.