Airport SkyBus dumping stops
Firm says focus on Mt Eden Rd will be more efficient
SkyBus services to Auckland Airport will drop stops along one of the city’s busiest arterial routes for buses because it doesn’t stack up financially.
The bus company, which had been offering services between the CBD and the airport along parallel routes via Mt Eden and Dominion Rds, will quit stops along Dominion Rd, meaning some passengers will have to travel further to find a bus.
SkyBus says confining its service to Mt Eden Rd will make it more efficient and allow it to increase frequency, reducing time between buses from 20 minutes to 12 minutes.
It is also dropping fares on the route from $19 to $17 as it faces slowing growth of passenger numbers and increased competition from Uber and shuttle services.
“It just comes back to the cost and the number of passengers we’re serving down the Dominion Rd side,” said the SkyBus general manager for New Zealand, Dave Butler.
“We’ve done some analysis and there’s just not enough passengers [but] this allows us to speed up the service,”
The round-the-clock service started four years ago and
SkyBus was now talking to the airport about how to optimise it, Butler said.
“We want to work more with the airport about understanding where the staff live and whether there’s more productive routes our buses can take because we want to reduce the amount of traffic that comes to the airport.”
Comment has been sought from the airport company.
The bus had stopped at three places down Dominion Rd and there had been “a little bit” of feedback, he said.
“The comment from one person is that it was going to take them three different buses to get there now instead of our service. I think they’re disappointed and it predominantly seems to be the regular workers at the airport.”
The company also runs services from Albany to the airport for $25 one-way and throughout its Auckland network carries just under one million passengers a year.
While there has been steep growth on the North Shore service, the city to airport service growth has been flat.
Butler said the company would prefer to run an express service between the airport and the city but the numbers didn’t make it viable at the moment.
SkyBus started in Australia nearly 40 years ago and Butler said it was a purely commercial venture with no public funding support.
The Government has longstalled plans to build light rail down Dominion Rd.
But Butler said he didn’t think the difficulty SkyBus had in making the bus service viable was relevant to any light rail — when it gets built.
“It’s a different type of service that we’re running at the moment — we don’t pick up and drop off down the length of Dominion Rd.
“If you were running a light rail service down there you’d be picking up people coming into the city.”
SkyBus services on Dominion Rd will end on November 17.