@Dave - Christchurch buses aren't deregulated. They have a contracting model, but Environment Canterbury (regional Govt) actively schedules the bus services that the contracted operators will deliver. When I first worked there in the 90s, I thought they were deregulated too - they had simultaneous departures scheduled on busy routes. When the 5.10 bus filled up, they scheduled another bus at 5.10 on the same route. They called them "assists" and they resulted in the unusual situation of one bus corridor having 8 buses departing each hour, but 4 of them all left together at 5.10 and the next 4 at 5.40. My first recommendation was to stop doing that and run a regular frequent headway down the corridor!

Bjorn, there were of course the usual teething problems immediately after opening as drivers got used to the new interchange. The article you quote, with the union rep's rhetorical flourishes, was three weeks after opening. About three weeks later the same newspaper was concluding "Accidents ease at Christchurch Bus Interchange" and "there had been no incidents since issues at the interchange were publicised in mid-June". http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/70031190/accidents-ease-at-christchurch-bus-interchange Yes, reversing is trickier and there is a potential for crashes, but planned, designed and managed properly, reversing operations can work well and allow real customer benefits.

I think they can, but a lot of attention needs to be paid to pedestrian safety. In a dedicated facility, with *effective* modal separation, reversing can unlock some substantial benefits. However, given pedestrians' willingness to put themselves at risk of death or serious injury to make tiny perceived time or distance savings, we need to think hard about how to avoid pedestrian-vehicle conflicts in planning, design and operations. I think there will be an increasing need for active management of bus stations and interchanges to maximise efficiency and safety.

A quick PS - drivers are trained for the bus station using virtual reality. One of the guys at my previous employer (where I worked on this project) made a detailed 3D simulation of the bus station, surrounding streets, and its bus control systems. It's like a computer game. The drivers wear a VR headset and sit at a PC steering wheel and pedals and drive through the bus station in a virtual environment. In this way they can experience the reversing and the operating rules before they do a live drive. Was reported quite a bit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p030q209 Brian

I was closely involved in the design of this bus station and its predecessor. I'm a transit hub specialist based in Sydney Australia and I've got a bus operations background. I can shed some light on a few things: Reversing buses - agree than in general driving buses forward is preferred, but we had a specific and challenging brief to create a people-focused, compact off-street bus station that was primarily a part of the city's fabric as a 'place' in a prominent main street. It was the first anchor project in the city's rebuild. Reversing operation allowed a very compact bus station for passengers and fitted in a form that created an l-shaped active retail frontage to two key streets. The design has some key features that help to make it safe - pedestrians are fully segregated from bus movements by the locking glass doors that line up with the bus doors and the bus roadways are wide as JW pointed out - these were extensively field tested to make sure they worked. The circulating lane is a generous 5 metres because it curves and the reversing lane is 7 metres wide. The sawtooth bays are a particular innovation I'm proud of. The relaxed angle and left-in operation (bus doors on the left in NZ) allow the passenger lounge walls/doors to be brought very close to the bus bay. This means that passengers step straight from bus to lounge and vice versa. You don't load or unload from an open air 'outside' finger like in most bus stations with sawtooths and/or reversing operation; and consequently there's less potential for people to be walking on bus roadways. I'm surprised this approach isn't used more widely (there are many reversing bus stations in the UK and the Hamilton NZ bus station has operated this way since the 1990s). The risk of minor damage to the structure or bus is far outweighed by the passenger safety and amenity benefits. Yes it is fairly rare for reversing bus stations in urban bus operations, in NZ and Australia but we have found it adds no appreciable time to operations. As stated, we tested the design in the field, using the range of bus types that would use the bus station and drivers from the operators' depots. We had a mix of highly skilled and inexperienced/low skill drivers. These latter are the ones that teach you most about the resilience of the design. None had regularly reversed buses but within an hour they were operating like old hands through a range of challenging scenarios. Operations are controlled by positioning lights, cameras and screens that display rear views for reversing drivers and allow them to check the way is clear. A management system controls the bus movements to and from the bays. Dynamic stand allocation - actually its semi-dynamic. Routes are grouped geographically into 4 groups of 4 stops. Individual stops are dynamically allocated within the groups of stops (so passengers know their bus will always go from the same area but the actual stop used may vary). This is needed because as the city's road network is rebuilt after the quake, bus services can be highly variable. The system needed to be able to cope with seriously out of order buses. Christchurch has had effective real time bus tracking since around 2000. The system tracks buses on approach to the bus station, monitors bay use, stages of loading etc in the bus station and assigns stops to approaching buses based on route number, direction (all the routes are through routes so you can have buses with the same route number operating in opposite directions) etc. The driver gets the info at a screen at one of the entrance driveways and the same info goes to waiting passengers via the real-time info system. The system is particularly clever because it can 'borrow' spaces from adjacent stands so the normal stand of 4 stops can be 5 or 6 if needed (as I said they get terrible late running and bunching because of the post-quake roadworks and bus routes having to be changed in response to roads being opened or closed). The bus station's operating at about 50-60% of its bus capacity, so it has room to grow. The previous bus exchange was shoe-horned into a small site donated by a developer, but handled twice the bus flows in less than half the spaces of the on-street terminal it replaced, because of off-site layover, stop sharing and semi-dynamic stop allocation. But because of improvements in bus services and infrastructure like the bus exchange, patronage growth significantly outstripped the forecasts the bus exchange had been based on. Customers demanded the new bus station have the same high quality waiting space they had in the original year 2000 bus exchange. Christchurch's current strategy will see double-deckers brought into service on core routes, to get greater capacity from the same headway, with no change required in the bus station footprint. Overall the customers were key to the design. They got a a high quality, safe, comfortable and active space, right in the heart of the CBD, which is all part of promoting bus as a serious, modern mobility option. The city got a bus station that is part of the city's main street and is a building that contributes to getting the city working again as a destination, workplace etc. Bus operators got a facility that they knew they could operate safely in with the supporting smarts to make sure it functioned efficiently. Brian Smith