KEY POINTS:
Bus passengers will be offered the run of North Shore City - and beyond - on single, time-based tickets when the bulk of Auckland's $300 million Northern Busway begins full operations on Sunday.
The two-lane busway, first envisaged in the 1980s and to be opened tomorrow by Prime Minister Helen Clark, is being promoted as the spine of a complex network of services encompassing North Shore and the Hibiscus Coast.
To that end, the Auckland Regional Transport Authority is introducing a seamless ticket new to the region but considered essential to coaxing commuters out of their cars by making it easier and cheaper for them to use public transport.
The concept, already used in Waikato and Christchurch and many overseas cities, will be extended throughout the Auckland region in 2010 with an electronic smart card.
But the transport authority has hastened North Shore's three main bus operators towards an "integrated" paper ticket to make the most of the hefty public investment in the busway - most of it from the Government via Transit NZ - by encouraging more people to join the system by feeder services running close to their homes.
That should reduce pressure on the heavily used "park and ride" facilities at the established Albany and Constellation bus stations, and ease disappointment over an absence of parking spaces at three new stations to be opened tomorrow - at Sunnynook, Westlake (Smales Farm) and Takapuna (Akoranga).
The transport authority yesterday announced a new time-based ticket called the Northern Pass, on which passengers will be able to travel in two-hour, day-long, or weekly allowances.
There will be two ticket zones - separated by an east-west boundary north of Constellation Drive - although no fares will be higher than the existing cost of travel between the two established bus stations and Britomart.
Passengers buying a two-hour pass for $4.30 in the lower zone or $5.40 in the upper zone will be entitled to unlimited bus travel in that time for the same cost of existing single trips to or from central Auckland.
Day passes of $8.60 and $10.80 respectively will cost the same as existing return trips, but with feeder services thrown in.
The passes will also entitle bus passengers to transfer to trains at Britomart at no extra cost for rail trips to Newmarket, Glen Innes, Ellerslie or Kingsland.
"The Northern Pass is a new kind a ticket, not a ticket for a specific journey," transport authority customer services chief Mark Lambert said yesterday. "You pay once and don't have to buy a new ticket when you board a different bus, even if the vehicle belongs to a different bus company."
An overhaul of North Shore services means some local bus routes will be diverted to feed into the busway, without requiring passenger transfers, although others will terminate at the various bus stations.
The Northern Express service, which will remain confined to running up and down the 6.24km busway and across the Harbour Bridge to Britomart, will be boosted by 50 per cent to a bus departure every five minutes during morning and afternoon travel peaks and every 10 minutes between times.
Tomorrow's busway opening will be a highlight in the career of Transit's transport planning general manager, Wayne McDonald, who headed transport operations at the Auckland Regional Council when it still ran the region's largest bus operation.
He recalled yesterday how the council persuaded Transit in the 1980s to allow buses priority use of motorway shoulder lanes, an idea which proved so successful that it led to plans for the country's first dedicated busway.
"This is the first time in New Zealand where a new-world transport system has been put together," he said.
"This is a transport system, not just another piece of pavement."
North Shore mayor Andrew Williams said the busway would serve not just as a more efficient corridor between his city and Auckland but as a conduit for easier travel within and across North Shore.
ON THE WEB
For new North Shore bus timetable information www.maxx.co.nz
