Bus lane being blocked by cars
Auckland bus drivers are finding it too difficult to use a Northwest Motorway bus lane at rush hour.
Scores of vehicles from the city queue at peak time along a new bus lane in order to exit at Te Atatu off ramp, blocking it for buses.
Te Atatu resident and regular bus commuter Pshem Kowalczyk posted video to Twitter on October 10 of the problem – as his bus drove past in a traffic lane.
‘‘While the cars pile up to get off the motorway ... people join the car in front and are completely unaware that this is actually a bus lane. And then before you know it they are all the way back to Patiki,’’ Kowalczyk says.
Brett Gliddon is the highway manager for the New Zealand Transport Agency in Auckland.
He says the bus lane was opened in May, and the agency is aware that motorists are blocking it.
‘‘While we understand that motorists are doing this to shorten their wait in the queue to exit we don’t encourage the use of bus lanes in this way,’’ he says.
‘‘We are currently looking at remarking the lanes to provide two clear exit lanes and a separate bus shoulder. The proposal would mean the dedicated bus shoulder would be extended further up the off ramp as well as providing two vehicle exit lanes. A decision on this option is likely in the next week.’’
Kowalczyk says he has commuted to work in the city by bus most work days for the past
‘‘We understand that motorists are doing this to shorten their wait in the queue to exit’’
Brett Gliddon
few years. He is a member of Generation Zero and says his morning bus to town is also taking on average about 15 minutes longer since the recent opening of a forth traffic lane across the causeway from Te Atatu.
It is being caught in ‘‘a huge backlog’’ as the fourth lane is exit only at Pt Chevalier, and all the city-bound traffic merges into three lanes, he says. Kowalczyk would prefer that the recently opened fourth traffic lane was a shoulder bus lane – like it was before the causeway improvement work started.
Ideally though, a gradeseparated busway into town ‘‘is the only reasonable option’’ so that buses are not slowed by broken-down cars or by merging traffic at motorway exits, he says.
The reopening of the bus lanes is due by the time the Waterview Tunnel opens in early 2017.