Te Rapa road bus stop patronage
A previous post on looked at how storm water is treated along Te Rapa (basically, storm water is hidden out of sight as fast as it arrives). This post looks at bus stop patronage; here we see a lot of patronage on the east side and less on the west side of Te Rapa Rd.
It is not hard to understand why the patronage is so lopsided. There are no safe road crossings for 1.5km north of Home Straight (Bunnings) to Pukete Rd. There is a similar 1 km distance between the Te Rapa shops (Vardon Rd) and the Beerescourt Shops (Forest Lake Rd) and it is then another 1.4 km along Ulster St to find another safe crossing point. There is a suggestion that people are catching a bus in the opposite direction to where they want to go, then getting off at safe location where they can cross the road to catch a bus going in their desired direction. Of course people who choose to do so can take the most direct route to their destination by crossing anywhere, but for some pedestrians this is not possible because they can’t move fast enough, or have hearing or vision issues that impair their safety when crossing busy roads.
The Ulster St – Te Rapa Rd bus route has huge potential for giving people choice in how they travel, but the greatest barrier is actually getting to a location to board the bus.
For more on the potential of the Te Rapa bus route, Hamilton’s Infrastructure Operations Committee 7 Dec 2021 (page 136); reports on infrastructure issues and opportunities along this route.