Dialogue: Lamb cyclists don't stand chance among lion buses

By BRIAN RUDMAN

You get the odd strange letter or two in this business - scrawled messages across a newspaper clipping, hand-printed notes with capital letters heavily underlined in red ink. But the scariest one came in response to the tale of my snail-pace journey from Newmarket to Ponsonby the other day.

"I was interested to read that you took an hour and a half to get from Newmarket using public transport," began my Birkdale correspondent. "I note also that you can walk uphill for more than one kilometre. Therefore I offer you this solution - a mountain bike with 24 gears."

This, she assured me, would have got me to my destination "within half an hour easily, even if you dismounted to avoid a few motorists on the way."

I can only think she has me confused with some suicidal lookalike. Because the only place I reckon I'd end up within half an hour riding a bike among Auckland's manic rush-hour drivers is in the back of an ambulance.

No one's going to convince me that pushbikes and rush-hour buses go together, despite all the optimistic signs on the urban clearways encouraging cyclists to mingle with the leviathans. Talk about lambs and lions sporting together.

Russell Turnbull, Stagecoach New Zealand marketing manager, was in touch too. He hopes an electronic tracking device will speed his flagship inner-city Link bus service. From early next year the Link buses will be hooked up to a GPS (global positioning system), using a distant satellite to pinpoint their positions in downtown streets.

It is the first stage of a three-year project masterminded by Auckland City and Auckland Regional Council which will eventually link all the city's buses.

To begin there will be electronic signs at 30 popular Link stops, predicting how much longer we will have to wait for a bus. Whether I really want to know that is a moot point. At least when you don't know, there's always hope.

Meanwhile, for those on board there will be recorded messages announcing the next stop.

Best of all, for those of us just wanting to get home quicker, the buses will be able to sweet-talk traffic lights into staying green longer than normal when they approach.

Auckland City principal traffic planner Denis Mander says that when two buses from different directions simultaneously try to chat the lights up, the system can be programmed to give precedence to, for example, the bus with more passengers, or the one running more behind in its schedule.

The GPS system will also enable drivers to maintain a gap between each Link bus, avoiding the feast and famine supply that currently occurs.

Hopefully it will beam down television and internet services as well to help to fill in the long journey.

For some on-the-road expertise about inner-city travel, I listened to an old bus-driving mate. His common-sense solution to speeding up the buses is to eliminate the bottlenecks.

One he pinpoints is narrow Bowen St, which runs along the northern side of Albert Park, carrying buses heading for Sandringham and New North Rds out of the city. He wants the existing parking lane removed, providing room for a bus lane out of town.

Another bugbear is the Mt Eden Village clearway, which operates only between 4.30 pm and 5.30 pm, unlike other clearways, which run from 4 pm to 6 pm.

Mr Mander says the Bowen St bottleneck is under review, though with parkland on either side and the existing car-parking lane narrower than a normal bus lane, he can see problems in changing it.

As for Mt Eden, he agrees extending the bus-lane hours would speed the traffic flow. Lengthening the village parking ban, however, would have a deleterious effect on the shopping centre and, after a review, the shop keepers have won this one.

Across on Dominion Rd though, my bus-driver mate has had a victory. His proposal to extend the bus lane near Ewington Rd has been endorsed.

And what about my getting a bike?

My friend guffawed and started to regale me with the tale of the guy who threw his bike at his bus. One of those unlit-bike, pedalling-between-traffic, near-miss incidents.

He needn't have bothered telling me. I'd already decided Lycra was not my look.

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