Last Wednesday’s work saw me travelling to Dannemora, one of those mega-suburbs out in south-east Auckland where the houses go on for miles and miles.
Dannemora is east of Botany Downs.
It’s typical of recent developments in the area where, looking at a map of it, it looks like it was assumed that everybody drives. It’s that spread out with a lot of distance between spine routes.
It’s nowhere near anything remotely resembling “rapid transit”, however I felt like a challenge so I thought I’d try to get there without a vehicle anyway.
Step one was to get to Penrose to pick up some parts from PB Technologies, one of my suppliers.
From there the next stop was Dannemora.
When looking up how to do that, I was surprised to find there is a more-or-less direct bus from Middlemore Station to where I was trying to go – except it was set up a little weird.
From Middlemore there’s a route 575 to Botany. From Botany there’s the Botany Loop (rotues 660 and 661) going around some of the suburbs north and east of Botany – Meadowlands, Howick, Half Moon Bay – with Meadowlands close to where I was heading.
Interestingly, the same buses serve both – they start as a 575 at Middlemore Station, and become a 661 at Botany. In the other direction, the 660 becomes a 575 continuing to Middlemore.
The bus trip took over half an hour but I made use of the time by writing the first half of this blog entry. As I type the bus is turning into the interchange at Botany Town Centre. I’m the only passenger on board, and the driver seemed a little surprised that I wasn’t getting off at Botany.
At this client’s home, we started discussing transport and I got to show them the Free Parking video as well as Josh Arbury’s overlay of land use for Botany Town Centre down the road.
He told me that even with all that parking, it gets full and very difficult to find a park there, and that the bus may well be an option. So we had a look at the timetable.
Sadly weekend services are only hourly so they will continue to drive in to do their weekend shopping.
This seems a little dumb – weekday frequencies are half-hourly and one would think that in a case of the terminus of the route being a shopping centre, potential weekend demand would be higher.
How many other routes’ usefulness is stymied by their low frequencies, I wonder?
jarbury · January 30, 2010 at 11:30 pm
I get so frustrated with the completely unproven belief that people aren’t expected to use public transport at the weekends. I thought the success of Sylvia Park train station had killed that off? Clearly not.
Just like the other unexplained rule of public transport – that Sunday service levels must be worse than Saturdays. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?
Admin comment by andrew · February 1, 2010 at 9:51 am
I believe talk on your blog post points to a good answer, that it’s historical – it harks from back in the day when there was nothing to do on a Sunday and drivers needed to be paid double-time. And church ministers were very disapproving that there were Sunday services at all.
Which brings us to the conclusion that this practice needs reviewing – are the original reasons for separate Saturday and Sunday timetables still relevant and should they be merged?
I’m also a fan of having the same frequencies for weekday offpeak and Saturdays. It would make the Connector route mentioned above workable for people, like my customer mentioned above, who currently drive because it is the only currently practical option.
(Note too the 575 mentioned above doesn’t run on weekends at all!)