Wayne Brown should stop redesigning bus routes, and here’s why – Simon Wilson

Wayne Brown objects to the bus routes near the CRL's Maungawhau (Mt Eden) railway station. Photo / Alex Burton

THE FACTS

• The City Rail Link (CRL) is expected to open in the middle of 2026.
• Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown is unhappy with planning for the Maungawhau (Mt Eden) station.
• He has proposed his own design for road connections to the station.

He’s a construction engineer, our mayor. He’s built roads. He knows a lot more than most of us about infrastructure. And last week the Herald reported he had come up with a way to “fix” what he believed was a ridiculous plan for traffic flow into and around the big new Maungawhau Railway Station soon to open in Mt Eden.

Auckland Transport (AT) and Eke Panuku, both council-controlled organisations he’s determined to have mayoral control over, were responsible for the original plan.

He didn’t like it. Buses wouldn’t connect directly with the station, so passengers wanting to transfer would have to walk 250 metres. This was true.

Brown’s solution is to reroute buses on Mt Eden Rd, so they dogleg through the Maungawhau site before exiting on to New North Rd and proceeding into or out of the city. And to do the same, in reverse, for buses on New North Rd.

The route they would do this dogleg on is called Ruru St at the west end and Ruru Lane to the east.

At the council meeting on June 5 where Brown voiced his objections, he also said emergency services and taxis and rideshares like Uber would not be able to get right to the station. But this was not true, as AT officials confirmed to the meeting.

Since then, as the Herald reported on Monday, AT has further explained that Fire and Emergency New Zealand, police and Hato Hone St John were involved in both the design and operational planning for the station.

As with the entire City Rail Link (CRL), emergency services are closely involved in creating plans for evacuations and other emergencies, and testing them.

This is one of the most common complaints people make about transport planning they don’t like: they haven’t thought about emergency services! But it’s simply not true.

Brown doesn’t have to take AT’s word for it that things are in hand. He’s visited the site. He must have seen that an access lane, leading all the way to the station building, has already been built.

Maungawhau station, showing the new Ruru Lane leading to it. Photo / Sylvie Whinray

Let’s think about the people using Maungawhau station for a moment.

In 2019, prior to its closure for the big CRL dig, AT says an average 622 people got off the train there during each day’s morning peak, 7am-10am.

In the same period, an average 375 got on the train. That’s 1000 people a day, at morning peak time.

An average 238 transferred from the train to a bus, mostly students and staff going to the universities on Symonds St. An average 98 transferred from a bus to the train. A total of 336 transfers.

The CRL is expected to double rail usage, so these numbers should rise. But even if there are 500 or 750 transfers, or more, it will still be a small proportion of the bus passengers on New North Rd and Mt Eden Rd every day.

Matt Lowrie at Greater Auckland has reported that the buses on those two arterials carried 7.3 million trips in the year to the end of March. That’s something like 25,000 passengers per weekday, and 11% of all the bus trips in Auckland.

It’s easy to think of Maungawhau as a massively important station, because it was a massively important feat of engineering to get all the tunnels and tracks built beneath it, and right now it’s sitting on the edge of a massively big wasteland. The digging has finished but no one has done any landscaping.

There are six tracks running under that site. At Maungawhau, the Western Line will deliver some trains into the city centre and through to the Eastern Line, while others are routed to Newmarket and down to Manukau.

Maungawhau is also where the Southern Line from Pukekohe will begin its loop around the city centre before continuing back out to Ōtāhuhu.

But despite its size and the remarkable engineering, from a passenger point of view Maungawhau is not a big location.

For students and staff arriving by train from the west, Kingsland will be an easier interchange. It’s one stop earlier and streams of buses heading for Symonds St go right by the station on both New North Rd and Sandringham Rd.

Or, those passengers may prefer simply to stay on the train until they reach Waihorotiu (formerly Aotea), two stops past Maungawhau and the closest station to the universities. Train passengers from the east and south are also expected to use Waihorotiu.

Maungawhau won’t be a big stop for other train passengers, either. Kingsland and Morningside are the Eden Park stops. Grafton, one stop further on towards Newmarket, is the hospital stop. Karanga-a-hape, Waihorotiu, Waitematā (formerly Britomart) and Newmarket are the stops for shopping, hospitality and nightlife. Waitematā is the big interchange for ferries and buses to the north.

Most of these stations are likely to have far more passengers coming and going than Maungawhau.

Empty land in front of the Maungawhau station. Photo / Sylvie Whinray

It’s true this will change. The Maungawhau wasteland will disappear and within a few decades thousands more people are likely to be living and working in the area. One day, Maungawhau may also become an interchange for passengers on the proposed Northwest Rapid Busway.

The station itself has been built large enough to cope with all this: that’s good forward planning. But the bus routes on New North Rd and Mt Eden Rd don’t need to be changed now. That will be easy to do if the need arises later on.

So let’s look at those bus routes.

During the three-hour morning peak, 139 buses on the 22, 24, 25 and 27 routes from the west converge at the tops of New North Rd and Mt Eden Rd, on the routes where Brown wants some or all of them to dogleg into Maungawhau station. Most of these buses have to return, to do the run again.

That’s probably 250 buses in 180 minutes, or one every 45 seconds. Many of them are double-deckers.

If those buses take Brown’s dogleg, perhaps one or two passengers per bus will have a shorter walk to or from the train. But most of those passengers, remember, could transfer at Kingsland or stay on until Waihorotiu anyway.

The dogleg will make everyone else’s trip longer.

With all those buses, Ruru Lane will need to be wider, which will encourage rat running: vehicles using the road as a shortcut. That’s exactly what should not be happening around pedestrian-friendly areas like railway stations.

This precinct has the potential to become a real model of urban development: pedestrian-friendly, with medium and perhaps some high-rise buildings for residential, commercial, shops and restaurants, along with kids’ play areas and open parkland.

Why put a busy road through it, if it’s not needed?

Next problem: Brown’s plan will require the start and end of his dogleg to become big new intersections. Traffic-light phasing that allows the buses to rejoin the arterials will also mean banked-up traffic down New North Rd and Mt Eden Rd.

Is 250m a long way to walk from one transit station to another? You walk about that length if you’re connecting from the downtown ferry to the Waitematā railway station. The walk from the end of a Waitematā platform just to Te Komititanga Square takes a couple of minutes.

What about when it rains at Maungawhau? That’s a good argument for building a covered walkway.

Wayne Brown, bus supremo. A cartoon from last year by Rod Emmerson.

There are a couple of bigger questions at stake here.

One is that no one has yet produced a decent plan for the site itself. Brown wants to call for expressions of interest as soon as possible, and choose a developer who can get cracking. That does strike me as a good option.

But if it isn’t going to happen quickly, the council itself has to step in with an interim plan. Grass the whole site, plant trees, put in play areas, a pump track, a half court, maybe even playing fields. They can all be temporary, kept in place until developers produce plans that show urban density and great open-space recreational facilities to go with the density.

The other big issue is this. What the hell is the mayor doing trying to redesign bus routes?

Today, the Government is releasing the draft 30-year Infrastructure Plan, drawn up by Te Waihanga: the Infrastructure Commission. That is, it’s big-picture, heavyweight thinking. A long-overdue attempt, among other things, to wrest our infrastructure obsessions away from the small stuff. There’s a lesson in that for Wayne Brown, if you ask me.