Auckland has 154 kms of SVLs out of those 44.7 kms are transit lanes (T2 & T3). All the transit lanes on arterial roads in Auckland operate only in peak hours in the peak direction from Monday to Friday, which means the intent of these lanes is primarily to facilitate ‘travel to work’ trips in the peak direction of traffic. By prioritising vehicles with multiple occupants, transit lanes are a mechanism to encourage more people movement with fewer vehicles on our roads, but are we getting the best value for those lanes?

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The higher occupancy in social and recreational trips is because they generally involve more than one family member, for example going to the kid's game or the movies or for a barbeque involves more than one family member. It is a fair assumption that social, recreational, and other trips generally occur on weekends or after work hours.

Congestion in Auckland is a lack vehicle occupancy during peak periods. Despite most vehicles having five seats in Auckland most vehicles only have one occupant. Congestion is inefficient it reduces vehicle speeds and flow while doubling fuel use and emission for every vehicle congested. In vehicle Technology would enable occupancy charging digitally at a low beauracratic cost while enabling vehicle users to met the true cost of congestion in peak periods or choose to eliminate congestion through high vehicle occupancy delivery.

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Put another way, are the transit lanes operational when the vehicle occupancies are generally higher? To answer that, we must assess periods and days when private vehicles have higher occupancy.

Vehicle occupancy data for a full seven-day week is not readily available for Auckland as most of the traffic counts including occupancy surveys are taken on weekdays. However, we can derive occupancy data from trip purpose data.

Interesting thought. Longer operating hours for exclusive transit lanes makes sense. However, having worked on a couple of transit lane corridors in Auckland, I felt allowing cabs reduces their efficiency. If cars must be allowed, it must be for cars with 3 or more passengers.

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Transit Lanes are a type of special vehicle lane (SVL) that can be used by vehicles with more than one person. A transit lane can only be used by buses, passenger vehicles, motorcycles, mopeds, cycles, and motor vehicles carrying a specified minimum number of persons. Transit lanes in New Zealand are generally either T2 or T3 lanes, these being for vehicles with two or more people (T2) or three or more people (T3), where ‘T’ stands for transit.

Although there are other factors to investigate such as traffic congestions on weekends and benefits for buses with a higher number of vehicles using transit lanes. This is something to ponder Auckland Transport

We are missing out on travel time savings for most people by not providing transit lanes when they are needed the most, i.e. on weekends.

The data from the Ministry of Transport[1] shows that private vehicles have the lowest passenger hours in ‘work’ purpose trips and have much higher passenger hours in social, recreational, and other travel-purpose trips. The graph from MOT shows that for recreational trips, 28% out of 31% of trips have a passenger i.e. more than one occupancy, similarly, vehicles have more than one occupancy for 37% out of 47% of social trips.