Auckland : the north shore busway evaluation

Abstract

Paper presented at the 21st Annual South African Transport Conference 15 - 18 July 2002 "Towards building capacity and accelerating delivery", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.

This study is one of the few, if not the only, projects in New Zealand where a major public transport facility has been proposed that relied on the provision of road infrastructure. Clearly, had the Busway been proposed as a dedicated public transport facility, it would never have met the funding criteria of Transfund. However, the introduction of HOV vehicles brought the carriageway component into Transfund’s arena, and the Busway component ‘piggy backed’ on that, but used improvements to existing and future bus passengers, coupled with ‘decongestion’ benefits to justify the additional expenditure on station linkages and facilities. As a consequence, the analysis was much more complicated than a standard project evaluation, different objectives of the stake-holders also added to the complexity, and the division of work between two consultants did not make the analysis any easier, although it probably gave confidence in the results because of the need for consistency. The analysis technique, although not the study team’s first choice, proved adequate for this project, but by its nature, it is difficult to use in areas which are rapidly expanding. Forecasting of public transport trips relies on growth factor techniques which do not adequately deal with new public transport corridors or developing areas where there are no present day services. Following the presentation of the results to Infrastructure Auckland in November 2001 over NZ$50 million (R245 million) funds have been approved towards implementation for this BRT project.