@colemagoo: Improving the West-South public transport connection
Dreaming of ways to improve the West-South connection with minimal changes.
This is a guest post from Cole. It originally appeared as an X/Twitter thread and has been adapted and republished here with permission.
I’ve been dreaming of a short-term solution to the misery that is West<->South trips via PT, presuming that Avondale-Southdown is a decade away at best. The goal here is to deliver time savings while only requiring minimal infrastructure changes.
At the moment, this journey takes over an hour by PT as you have to go all the way to Newmarket and back in.
The Proposed Route
The proposed route, with stops in yellow and existing bus priority highlighted in green
An alternate solution is to run an express/limited stops bus along SH20, to service major transfer points along the route. Google estimates that the route above takes 40 minutes on a good day or over an hour at peak for private cars. While there's a time penalty to service bus stops, there are already bus lanes on a significant part of the route. With bus priority pockets at key signalised intersections and emergency shoulder running on the rest of SH20, you could probably keep closer than not to 45 minutes for the full route.
For someone going from Avondale to Puhinui, that would mean ~35 minutes on a bus vs 57 minutes on a train, which would represent a 38% time savings!
The Stops
Being an express bus, with speed as a goal, there are some hard choices to make about where to service, hence the following X stops:
New Lynn - A natural choice as the transport hub for West Auckland.
Avondale - While heading from the motorway along Wolverton St is mildly more direct, heading to Avondale lets us use the bus lanes on Great North Rd for more consistent rush hour runs and picks up another big catchment.
Maioro St/New Windsor - Allows direct interchange with the very popular 24 buses.
Onehunga - This stop is marginal, due to the complexity of getting on and off the motorway, especially west-bound, but due to the huge stop spacing otherwise, I think it’s worth it (just).
Mangere - Another major bus interchange, and another challenge to efficiently serve, this time when south-bound, due to the bus interchange being on the south side of Bader Drive only.
Puhinui - an obvious candidate, connecting to the Southern and Eastern lines, the AirportLink bus and Te Huia. This is where travellers heading further south, to Manurewa and beyond, will disembark.
Manukau - a short hop away from Puhinui that does not impact travel times for the core demographic of West<-> South travellers, but enables far easier connection points to areas like Flat Bush and Otara.
I'm also limiting myself to something that could feasibly launch within just a couple of months, which means no stop at Mt Roskill (even if the Dominion Rd bridge is a great candidate for a WX1-style interchange with the 25)
But What About the Airport?
An alternate route to the airport, with stops in yellow, bus lanes in green and T3 lanes in purple
An enticing alternative to this route is to take SH20A after Mangere and service the airport directly. This makes a lot of sense, as the airport is a major trip generator and a not-insignificant number of workers and holidayers heading to Puhinui would hop right back onto an AirportLink bus anyway.
I’m not a huge fan of this option, as it compromises the core thesis of the route (efficiently connecting the west to the south.) It’s a detour that could cost anywhere from 10-20 minutes and yet only saves travellers taking the AirportLink bus 15 minutes.
The main difficulty is choosing the stops: the AirportLink takes a notoriously circuitous route to get to the employment hubs, domestic terminal and international terminal and mirroring that takes 10 minutes alone. All of these are useful locations, and it’s difficult to justify skipping any if you’re serving the others.
Yet simplifying to one stop for the whole area isn’t great either, as that stop has to be very far from anywhere, with zero walkable catchment, as the AirportLink travels around the airport precinct in a one-way, counter-clockwise loop.
Still, the draw of the Airport Precinct for employment and travel is strong (just ask the former Auckland Light Rail Ltd) and I would not be mad if this was the chosen route for a future service. A valid compromise may also be to split the route into a SX1 and SX2, serving one each of Mangere and the airport, though that may be stretching service hours/frequency too thin.
This is the only motorway corridor in Auckland (other than SH18) that doesn't have a parallel-ish train/busway, and it serves as a major pain point for cross-city travel. Do you think a cheap, quick-rollout, express-running, frequent service would have enough ridership to justify itself? Is there an obvious alternative I missed?
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