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More Transit for the Same Cost? Auckland Plan Shows How

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Auckland: How network redesign can transform a city's possibilities


10/10/2012

Read More: http://www.humantransit.org/2012/10...sign-can-transform-a-citys-possibilities.html

Draft Auckland Regional Public Transport Plan: http://www.aucklandtransport.govt.n...ages/regional-public-transport-plan-2012.aspx


When a public transport network has grown cumulatively over decades, but has never been reviewed from the ground up, it can contain an enormous amount of waste. Careful redesign is the key to unlocking that waste and generating vast new public transport mobility. Our new plan for Auckland, New Zealand, now open for public comment, is a dramatic example of what can be achieved.

- The network still includes coverage to all corners of the city that are covered now, and ensures plenty of capacity for peak commuters into the city. But meanwhile, it defines an extensive network of high frequency services around which future urban growth can organize to ensure that over time, more and more of the city finds public transport convenient. What's the catch? Only the geometrically inevitable one: more people will have to make connections from one service to another, and the fare system will need to encourage rather than penalise that.

- Whenever someone tells you that it's too expensive or hard to encourage people to make connections, ask them how expensive it is to run the only the first network above while spending enough money to run the second. Networks that are designed to prevent transferring must run massive volumes of half-empty and quarter-empty buses and still have trouble delivering frequencies that make the service worth waiting for. The waste involved can be colossal, as you can see from the amount of service we were able to redeploy in more useful ways with this redesign.

.....




If you want to get around Auckland at any time of day, on a service that's coming soon, here's where you can go on today's network (or more precisely, a "business as usual" network extended to 2016)

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Under the proposed plan, which costs no more to operate than the existing one, here's where you'd be able to go, at any time of day, on service that's coming soon.

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By streamlining it calls attention to the logic to the network -- a logic that's sometimes easy to lose track of when following the details of every right and left. Look at the whole thing: http://www.aucklandtransport.govt.n...tedTravel/Documents/rptp/frequent-service.pdf

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I've been reading about this issue on and off for a while now, mostly because of some general similarities between Auckland and Toronto, and while I don't have experience with what the transit system there is actually like, it seems like this proposal is one of those 'it'll work great ... when it works' ideas.

For one thing, this plan still relies mostly on buses, and while they appear to have had some success with busways/bus lanes and a recently instituted commuter rail service, Auckland appears to have pretty bad trafffic (part of the problem is the topography) and 'frequent service' doesn't mean much if buses are caught up in congestion.

Some more background and opinion:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10838396

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10839074
 
Bad traffic indeed, been living here for a little over a year and while you can get most places either by rail or bus to the central city, it is only during the 7am to 7pm times and after that its quite tough to get around (No public transit after midnight either except for a few drunk busses). The city is built for cars unfortunately and while some bus lanes do exist, they aren't consistent in terms of a right of way and are frequently late and unreliable. The proposed city rail link will hopefully make it easier for people to switch from the car.
 

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