More Transit for the Same Cost? Auckland Plan Shows How

In a new post on his Human Transit blog, Walker discusses the simple geometries behind the ambitious redesign of Auckland's public transit network that he's authored with planners from Auckland Transport and his colleagues at MRCagney.

For the same operating costs as the city's existing network, Walker's proposed plan, "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." Images of the existing network and the proposed plan demonstrate the dramatic expansion of access.  

"What's the catch?", asks Walker. "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." 

"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."