Auckland Transport Blog

Earlier this week the Auckland Regional Council released their “State of the Environment Report”  The whole report makes for quite interesting reading, analysing the pressures faced by Auckland, what steps have been taken to protect the environment from the pressures, and what further steps probably need to be taken. It is an incredibly comprehensive and necessary report, and once again reinforces what a loss to Auckland it will be when the ARC is wound-up into a single Auckland Council. The environmental oversight that they provide is absolutely precious, and I worry tremendously about who, if anyone, is going to replace that role.

Anyway, in terms of transport, the report makes a number of interesting findings. These key findings are outlined below:

• Nationally, vehicle ownership increased from 641 vehicles per 1000 people in 2001 to 698 vehicles per 1000 people in 2007. The Auckland region is likely to have experienced the same or a similar trend.
• Congestion in Auckland shows considerable variability. Travel times in the evening peak have declined for the past three years, however it is too early to tell if this is a longterm trend.
• Between 2004 and 2008, the amount of Vehicle Kilometres Travelled (VKT) in the Auckland region is estimated to have increased by about one billion (nine per cent).
• Nationally, there was steady growth in the engine size of vehicles between 2001 and 2007. However, this rate of growth declined for both New Zealand-new and used imports in 2006 and 2007.

Looking at congestion, there have been some really interesting statistics over the past few years, and many of the fluctuations – particularly between 2007 and 2009 – can tell us a lot about what causes congestion and what is may help ease it.

First, the data:

If we look at the averages for motorways, state highways and arterials, it is quite revealing to note the fluctuations between 2007, 2008 and 2009. On the motorways we’ve seen a continued decline in congestion – which may be the result of a number of factors such as the completion of the CMJ improvements at the end of 2006, an increased use of public transport for longer-distance trips (particularly on the Northern Motorway when the busway become operational) or other reasons – which become a bit more obvious when you look at the stats for state highways and arterials.

The statistics for state highways (the ones which aren’t motorways) show a dramatic decrease in congestion between 2007 and 2008, but about half of that improvement being lost again between 2008 and 2009. For regional arterials, we see a small decrease in congestion between 2007 and 2008, but a large increase between 2008 and 2009 (particularly in the morning peak and interpeak). In short, 2008 was clearly the least congested year on Auckland’s roads.

To try to explain this phenomenon I think it’s worthwhile to see what petrol prices were in these various years. The data referred to above was collected in March 2007, March 2008 and March 2009 so we have a good opportunity to try to see if there appears to be any relationship between congestion and petrol prices. The AA “Petrolwatch” provides the following archive information on petrol prices (recorded at the end of each month):

March 2007: $1.56 per litre for 91 octane
March 2008: $1.78 per litre for 91 octane
March 2009: $1.59 per litre for 91 octane

It would seem as though the level of congestion somewhat mirrors the petrol price. This is not surprising, as petrol prices get higher people will want to drive less, and will consider alternatives such as walking, cycling and using public transport more.

While this is hardly earth-shattering news, it is very interesting to see just how clearly congestion is affected by petrol price. To me, this information shows that if we really want to reduce congestion in Auckland there is only one way to go about it – and that is to get people off the roads, and that one of the most effective ways of doing this is by making driving more expensive.

I suppose that one could argue that congestion has continued to decline on motorways between 2008 and 2009 “on average”, even though petrol prices reduced. However, if you look at the data closely, the time when the motorway is most congested (ie. the morning peak) actually worsened between 2008 and 2009. Considering the amount of money that has been thrown at building motorways in the past three years (and continues to be thrown at this task) it must surely be a disappointment for NZTA that the morning peak times on the motorway continue to become more and more congested – no matter how much money seems to be spent.

Of course there were many disadvantages of having high petrol prices in 2008, and I think that internationally the high oil prices certainly contributed to the economic meltdown later that year. However, it’s worthwhile noting that high petrol prices really do seem to reduce congestion – arguably more effectively than anything else.

A couple of great posts are doing the rounds of transport blogs at the moment, and I think they’re essential for me to comment on. Ultimately, they focus on the question of whether our transport patterns result from some sort of ‘culture’, or whether they simply respond to what the logical decision to make is.

Firstly, there is this post on the Psystenance blog, talking about what is known as the Fundamental Attribution Error, which in social psychology means the over-emphasis “…on the behaviour of others to personality or disposition and to neglect substantial contributions of environmental or situational factors”. In terms of transport matters, this is very applicable – as the post goes on to state:

Thus, the fundamental attribution error in transportation choice: You choose driving over transit because transit serves your needs poorly, but Joe Straphanger takes transit because he’s the kind of person who takes transit. This is the sort of trap we find ourselves in when considering how to fund transportation, be it transit, cycling, walking, or driving.

Let’s say you live in a suburban subdivision. You can afford to drive, and it’s the only way you can quickly and easily get to your suburban office and to the store, and pick up your child from daycare. How do you interpret the decision of other people to take transit? Is it something about the quality of transit where they are? More likely you are going to attribute it to something about those people themselves — they’re poor, or they’re students, or they’re some kind of environmentalists. It’s difficult for people to realize the effect of the situation, e.g. one with frequent transit service to many destinations along a straight street that is easy to walk to. (I’d also point out that students, the poor, and even environmentalists do drive as well.)

Why do Europeans walk more, cycle more, and take transit more? Surely it is something about their culture? But this is an excessively dispositional attribution. I won’t deny that culture plays some role in transit use, especially in the decisions that lead to the creation of transportation infrastructure. But that infrastructure itself and the services provided on it are a strong influence on the transportation choices people make. The European infrastructure situation facilitates those other modes of travel much more so than does typical North American transportation infrastructure.

Where our infrastructure gets closer to the European model, so does the transportation mode choice, and conversely, where Europe is more like the North American model, Europeans turn out to drive more. If culture were really the driving force, you wouldn’t expect to see much fluctuation in transportation choice. But just as North America suburbanized and fell in love with the private automobile, so did Europe, albeit to a lesser extent. Only recently has Europe started again building new tram lines and clawing back space from the car. Copenhagen, now viewed as an urban cycling mecca, wasn’t always one. The rise of the car drastically lowered cycling there in the 1960s. Copenhagen owes its recent fame to restrictions on parking and to its dedicated cycling infrastructure, which have led to a cycling renaissance.

The excellent Humantransit blog picked up on this post, and added some further comments that I find particularly noteworthy. These sections of the post I find particularly relevant to the situation in Auckland:

We’ve all heard the term “car culture” about places like Los Angeles. I’ve always hated the term, but now I understand why: it’s an expression of the attribution error. When we say that Americans drive because they’re a car culture, we imply that that the choice of most Americans to drive isn’t a rational one, in light of each person’s situation, and therefore requires a cultural explanation. Situation includes origin, destination, available infrastructure, available vehicles, special needs (wheelchairs, traveling with children, etc) and the time/cost tradeoff (the urgency of the trip vs the desire to save money).

But in the places most Americans live, given the current economics of driving, and transit options being as they are, the decision to drive is rational for most of the people making it. If most Americans are in situations where driving is the rational choice, we don’t need the “car culture” to explain their behavior, and we can see a clearer path to changing it, by helping to change people’s situations.

Conversely, car advocates who cite current car use as evidence that people want to drive cars are also making the attribution error; they’re implying that everyone who rationally chooses to drive is culturally committed to driving. That’s wrong; some of the people driving cars would like to be in a situation where they didn’t have to.

If I think about my transport situation rationally, I take the bus because parking in the CBD is very expensive and it makes more financial sense to simply catch the bus to work. Being able to check the internet on my phone while being on the bus is also quite nice. For most people who don’t work in the CBD (and many who do whose parking is subsidised), the same economic process doesn’t work, and as a result they logically choose to drive – generally unless they’re too poor, young or old to afford to buy and run a car. This isn’t because Aucklanders are lovingly attached to their vehicles (although that might be the case for a small proportion of the population) but rather because it’s the most logical thing to do. Taking the bus or train when travelling on a suburb to suburb trip is probably going to take you three times as long, cost your more and not even work half the time.

And why is this the case? Well most probably because we’ve spent most of the past 60 years building masses of roads and completely ignoring public transport investment. We’ve also put in place planning regulations (particularly in the case of minimum parking requirements) that are huge subsidies for those that drive. It’s not that we want to have to drive everywhere, or want families to own four cars, it’s that the way we have built our city or even more importantly the way we have built our city’s transport network, that effectively forces us all to act as though we have a car culture.

Where public transport improvements have been made that make catching the bus or train the logical choice for people, the results have been outstanding. The huge patronage growth on the Northern Busway over the past couple of years is probably the best example of this – a service with excellent frequencies, one that is pretty damn fast (faster than driving critically) and one that is super comfortable to ride. Proving the point that where you offer a superior option to driving, people will act logically and make the change.

Last week at Auckand City Council’s Transport Committee meeting, representatives from ARTA and KiwiRail gave an interesting presentation on the CBD rail tunnel. The whole presentation is available on the city council website. It doesn’t have that much actual information that we don’t know about already, but does include a number of interesting and useful diagrams.

One diagram that I find particularly noteworthy is a cross-section of the tunnel. This is included below: As shown in the diagram above, both the Karangahape and the Newton stations will be well below ground level – around 20m down I think, which should make for an interesting construction process. The Karangahape station itself is proposed to have the tracks at a 1% grade, which is a bit unusual as stations are often completely flat (or on a vertical curve to aid with braking and accelerating). Hopefully that won’t make it difficult for trains to pull away from the stations when they’re fully loaded.

There’s also some information on the three station locations, although it doesn’t seem that we’re at the point of working out possible entry points. I like the fact that particular emphasis is being given to tying in the stations with land development that will happen around them. It is this link between improving rail access to the CBD and the urban renewal that will bring, which provide the greatest benefits from this project.

So where to next? Well this is outlined below. It seems as though we won’t see a final costing, business case and other documentation until December. Seven years from now it would be great to have this built and operational.

ARTA has released the performance statistics for trains in February, and the result is predictably pathetic. Things have improved slightly in some areas compared to the January statistics, when punctuality on the Western Line was a mere 36%. However, in other respects the February results are even worse than January, as the system operated throughout the whole of February (as opposed to the last couple of weeks of January only). Furthermore, Eastern Line punctuality in February was below that in January.

The above poster says that “Veolia Transport, KiwiRail and ARTA are working together to deliver solutions to these issues”. Well quite frankly I see absolutely no evidence of that. Anecdotally it would seem that so far in March the trains on the Western Line in particular have continued to operate late, there continue to be breakdowns, regular signal failures, regular points failures and the like. Come on ARTA, please tell us exactly what you, KiwiRail and Veolia are working on to solve these problems. I would really love to know.

As an interesting point, a while back someone mentioned to me that in many overseas countries rail contracts are cancelled if punctuality falls below 90%. Crikey if we ever reach 90% in Auckland it’d be a miracle!

Last night I went to an interesting workshop, run by Auckland City Council, to help discuss important matters that should be included in a future District Plan for the Mt Albert area. This is all part of the Future Planning Framework that was supposed to inform the next generation District Plan for the isthmus area of Auckland City – until the whole Super City thing killed off that idea. Nevertheless, Auckland City Council continue to plough forwards with their work on this, I suppose hoping that the new council will pick up on the work that has been done and carry it forward into the new District Plan for the whole region that will need to be prepared eventually.

Anyway, the workshop was quite interesting, broken into three tables: transport, housing and main street. I tended to flit between the transport group and the housing group, as I was there for work reasons so couldn’t solely focus on my transport interests – although it was tempting given the number of ARTA staff there! Focusing on transport matters (as, after all, this is a transport blog) I tried to point out to a number of people that Mt Albert actually has a heck of a lot going for it: there’s a railway station in the middle of the town centre, there’s a strong CBD-focused bus route along New North Road and there’s also a pretty strong cross-town route – in the form of Carrington Road and Mt Albert Road. Sure, the bus frequencies on the cross-town route aren’t particularly flash,  but hopefully over time that will be improved as ARTA (and their undemocratic successor) get around to putting bus lanes along Mt Albert Road and Carrington Road and creating a property “Quality Transit Network” along that route.

As shown in the map below, in terms of transport accessibility, you can’t do much better than Mt Albert: Yet something doesn’t work here. The Mt Albert shops are a place one tends to avoid, rather than be particularly drawn to. The general quality of the shops seems surprisingly low when you consider that the residential areas surrounding them are quite highly gentrified, particularly to the east. The train station is reasonably well used, with around 1,500 passengers a day boarding and alighting (making it the fourth busiest Western Line station after New Lynn, Henderson and Newmarket), but considering Unitec is located fairly nearby, I would think that the patronage is slightly disappointing.

In the future, as our cross-town routes (hopefully) get better supported, and as integrated ticketing encourages people to make multi-leg journeys a bit more, Mt Albert could become a critically important transfer point in the Auckland transport network. However, I don’t think that’s going to happen unless significant improvements are made to the finer details of how this transport interchange will work, and also vast improvements to the Mt Albert train station and its site surrounds are made. Unfortunately I don’t have a photo of the station, but trust me it’s pretty dire – possibly the ugliest station left in Auckland at the moment. ARTA have some plans for a quick-fix upgrade, but really in the longer term I think that Mt Albert’s strategic location means that something extra is needed. If we get the train station upgrade right then hopefully it will have significant wider benefits for the whole town centre too.

An idea that I had, along with a number of other people at the workshop, was that we really need something that will help link the railway station with New North Road better, will help stitch together the two-sides of Mt Albert (split by the railway line) and will help “open up” the rear of the shops along New North Road to the train station. Another matter to consider was the need for the Woodward Ave level crossing (to the southwest of the map above) to be grade separated for safety reasons at some point in the future. This is likely to mean that the railway track will be lowered. If the tracks are to be lowered, then there’s the potential to do something similar to what is happening at New Lynn at the moment, with the line being put into a trench. On top of the trench, at least as it passes through what would be Mt Albert station, you could could a big public square – which would act as the heart of Mt Albert and have shops opening out onto it. There would be plenty of links between the square and the surrounding street network (so that it doesn’t end up hidden like the Newmarket Station Square). Possibly something like this: An upgrade like this would clearly link together the two sides of Mt Albert to a far greater extent. The new roading link would provide better access to the shopping area for those who live on the northwestern side of the tracks, and would probably make that area more suitable to the kind of intensification Auckland City Council envisages for the area (up to 3-4 level townhouses and apartments). Opening up the back of the shops that are squeezed between the railway line and New North Road would also improve their economic viability and performance, while the public square itself would provide a great focal point for the community – and would be reasonably safe and secure because of the proximity of the new road link, Carrington Road and the various other access points.

Of course this is all just a bit of a dream, but what it shows me is that it’s stupid trying to plan transport upgrades (like the Mt Albert station) without co-ordinating them with other land-use improvements or townscape upgrades. As I have said many times before, we need closer co-operation and integration between land-use and transport planning. It seems pretty crazy that instead we will be splitting them into two completely separate agencies.

After my post the other day, complaining about the lack of progress on building the train station at Onehunga as well as some concerning signs on the ProjectDART website, it seems as though some of my concerns have been alleviated. The ProjectDART website says this:

Work is now well underway on the rehabilitation of the Onehunga Branch Line, which is scheduled to open for passenger rail services in 2010.

Furthermore,  I was forwarded an email discussion between ARTA and a concerned local resident, which goes along the following lines:

Resident: will the the Onehunga line be operational by July 2010? I have seen no recent activity on this site for the new station.

ARTA: it is amazing how quickly a station can be built. You will see activity at the other end of the line which is where the project is starting.

Hopefully these are good signs that we will have an operational Onehunga Line by the end of July this year. As the line was originally meant to be open by the end of last year, it would be enormously frustrating if the opening date was pushed back even further.

The term “Greenwash” is quite well known, meaning situations where companies disingenuously promote their products as environmentally friendly when they aren’t, or over-sell what are really quite modest environmental benefits. Wikipedia defines the term as follows:

Greenwashing (green whitewash) is the practice of companies disingenuously spinning their products and policies as environmentally friendly, such as by presenting cost cuts as reductions in use of resources. It is a deceptive use of green PR or green marketing. The term green sheen has similarly been used to describe organizations that attempt to show that they are adopting practices beneficial to the environment.

An interesting phenomenon that I have seen in transport circles, particularly in Auckland, is what could be called “public transport-wash”, or “PT-wash” for short. It is when road projects have tiny or pointless little supposed public transport improvements tacked onto them in order to help “sell” them to the general public. Road engineers and other people who generally promote big roading projects realise that what people really want is better public transport, so that’s why they add on these supposed public transport benefits that most of the time don’t really exist, or at best are extremely minor compared to the project as a whole.

A classic example of “PT-wash” is the proposed widening of State Highway 16. As noted in the NZ Herald last year, around $860 million is going to be spent on widening SH16 between St Lukes and Westgate over the next decade. In that original article you see the following paragraph:

Bus shoulder lanes would also be extended over the full distance, boosting an existing “patchwork” of peak-hour priority sections.

At the Waterview Connection Expo I attended on Saturday, there was a bit more information on the extent of these bus shoulder lanes. Somewhat unsurprisingly they will continue to abruptly end at each on-ramp, off-ramp or over-bridge, and in general seemed to be a continuation of the “patchwork” of priority lanes that exists at the moment. In reality, we’re probably going to merely end up with slightly wider shoulder lanes that are a bit smoother – and that’s it. Yet the project is being sold to the public as helping to improve public transport. AMETI is another classic example of “PT-wash” in my opinion. A whole pile of massive road upgrades that justifies itself on the basis of adding a few bus-lanes, when really what’s needed is a whole new rail corridor.

I may seem to be overly grumpy and exasperated here, but I really do think that we need to keep an eye out for “PT-washing”, to ensure that we’re not being taken for a ride here. If a project does nothing significant to help public transport then we shouldn’t be tricked into thinking that it does.

An interesting agenda item in the recent Auckland City Council City Development Committee meeting provides an interesting insight into how the supply of parking can impact upon the need to build expensive roading projects. While the whole report is an interesting read, basically in short there is going to be a lot of redevelopment around the Wynyard Quarter/Tank Farm area of Auckland’s CBD over the next 20-30 years which raises some potentially difficult traffic problems. One way to solve those problems is to restrict the supply of parking that is constructed in the area quite severely, so that on average only 30% of people travelling to the area will use their private vehicles. The other option considered was to build a $100 million grade separation of the Halsey Street/Fanshawe Street intersection.

This is detailed below:So basically, through restricting parking supply, we’ve managed to save $100 million and have avoided having to build a pretty damn ugly grade separated intersection. Hopefully this is a bit of a lesson for Council, that in areas of the city with the potential to be well served by public transport, restricting the supply of off-street parking means that other transport modes will be encouraged and they won’t have to build super expensive roading upgrades.

Imagine if we put that $100 million into the tram-line that the ARC envisages for the Tank Farm area? Heck, for that price we could almost extend it along Tamaki Drive out to Kelly Tarltons or Mission Bay.

There are three interesting articles published in the NZ Herald yesterday and today, including two editorials, raising further concern about the power that will be wielded by the “Council Controlled (controlling?) Organisations” that are being established as part of the Super City.

First, here are some good extracts from yesterday’s editorial:

[last week]…the Herald said the current proposal could not stand. This week’s articles on the extent of the work to be undertaken by the CCOs and the powers at their disposal have served only to reinforce that verdict.

In several ways, they will bring an undemocratic element to the Super City. First, they will operate out of the public eye and be virtually unanswerable to Aucklanders. They can meet behind closed doors, and do not have to issue agendas and minutes, apparently to lighten the administrative burden.

Such a paltry attempt at an explanation can only underpin the view that the directors of the CCOs are deliberately being cushioned from local pressure and political influence. In no way can this be healthy.

The “secrecy” of how Auckland Transport and the other CCOs are proposed to operate is to me the most unpalatable part of the proposal and it is relatively easy to fix. Somewhat surprisingly, neither Rodney Hide nor Steven Joyce have shown any inkling to make changes to this aspect of the CCOs.

There are more fundamental issues here though, as the editorial explains further:

There is also no guarantee that Super City mayors will be able to deliver the platforms on which they were elected. The Auckland Council will also find its hands tied.

Under the third and final Super City bill, the transport CCO can, for example, prohibit the council from exercising any transport functions unless it delegates them. The directors wielding this power will, in the first instance, be largely appointed by Mr Hide and Mr Joyce. Thereafter, the council will appoint but not directly control them.

In essence, the CCO boards will run more than 75 per cent of services in the Super City at arm’s length from its elected representatives. The councillors will be restricted to writing spatial plans and statements of intents with the CCOs. Even the most worthy of these will be a pallid expression of democracy when every level of the decision-making is in the hands of unelected directors. Local-body politicians of every hue, including the leading mayoral aspirants, John Banks and Len Brown, have voiced their concern over this flight from democracy. They sense, correctly, that this is the recipe for a frustrated and disappointed citizenry.

In response, the Government has hinted at minor changes to make the CCOs more accountable to the council and ratepayers. But there has been no sign that it might, say, shelve the transport CCO or limit the waterfront agency to development issues. It seems resolved to impose this model on Auckland.

Better sense must prevail. If not, Aucklanders will, indeed, feel locked out of the major decisions on their city’s future. It is hard to think of the Super City starting life under a more serious handicap.

There has been quite a lot of debate about whether you want to only have the high order strategic parts of transport politicised and debated, or whether the more operational and delivery elements should also be under the control of the council. While certainly there are poor decisions made by politicians when it comes to transport matters, such as the Helensville rail service and cutbacks to bus lanes along Tamaki Drive, this has to be balanced against what is lost when these operational matters are put behind closed doors. Will unelected officials give as much of a damn about how unreliable Auckland’s train services are as an elected politician would? Experience so far this year suggests not.

Nevertheless, on balance I think that ARTA has been good for Auckland, having an agency that is dedicated to improving transport has had its benefits. But then it’s fairly strongly (though arguably not strongly enough) under the control of the ARC. So having some level of structural separation can be a good thing, but I guess the question is where you draw the line between what should be “in” council and what shouldn’t be. That is a difficult question, and surely one should err on the side of more political accountability rather than less. The current proposal errs enormously the other way.

The reason to do this is perfectly illustrated by the concerns of mayoral candidates Len Brown and John Banks. Clearly, in Auckland transport is going to either be election issue number one or very damn close to it. While both candidates seem sensible in their approach to the need for a balanced transport system (rather than the roadsfest central government seems keen on), there will undoubtedly be debates about which project should get priority, which candidate’s going to be best at getting the CBD rail tunnel built, which candidate’s going to ensure the reliability of trains in Auckland’s improved, which candidate’s going to promote more bus lanes and so forth. The same will be true of all the councillor candidates – who will actually be pretty powerful politicians given how few of them there are. And yet, while we could end up electing a hugely pro public transport council (or anti-public transport I suppose, although that seems unlikely in my opinion) they may be powerless to actually implement the policies on which they were elected. That just seems wrong.

Another article in yesterday’s paper, by John Roughan, explained in a very well thought out manner, why having CCOs for debatable issues like transport and the development of the waterfront is a bad idea:

Non-elected boards have worked well for government departments that can charge for their services, and for the chargeable services of local government. They can be given a measurable financial objective and left to decide how to organise and price the service to meet it.

The system works when the public doesn’t care how the service is organised so long as it remains reliable. The boards that will manage the Auckland Council’s property, water supply, stadiums, events and the like, should be fine.

But the system is problematic when the public cares about the means to an end. It is the means, not the ends, of solving traffic congestion or developing a public waterfront that are likely to arouse public interest and political disagreement. The ends are readily agreed.

While I disagree with other parts of Roughan’s article, I think he’s hit the nail on the head here in distinguishing between situations where CCOs make sense and situations where they don’t. It we compare water to transport, the difference becomes most clear. With water (wastewater and water supply) we don’t really care exactly how we get clean water, or how our wastewater is disposed of, as long as the water is good quality, the wastewater doesn’t end up in our harbours and it’s all done as cheaply as possible. Transport is hugely different to this, as while we are likely to all agree that the “ends” of less congestion, greater choice and so forth are what we’re aiming for, we really do care how we get there.

Whether we try to build our way out of congestion through massive motorway investment, or whether we build new railway lines, or whether we focus on improving bus lanes or whatever, are all matters of great public interest and debate. There is no clear right and wrong answer, the problem is not one that some engineer can simply work out with a computer programme and the different paths we take to getting the outcome we’re all aiming for will have tremendous impacts on people’s lives. It’s not a matter of debating whether this water pipe is plastic or concrete, transport is about debating issues that affect lives in a huge number of different ways. It’s complicated, it’s ugly, it’s debatable – and that’s why it needs to be accountable, transparent and democratic.

Today’s Herald on Sunday has an editorial that again looks at the CCOs. While it’s largely similar to previous articles, it does involve some interesting parts:

But an unelected mega-board looking after transport is even more chilling: if one thing unites Aucklanders it is the lament about how hard it is to get around the place, whether by public or private transport. Neither area is one that any sane Aucklander would want under the control of someone beyond the reach of electoral accountability. Ditto water, council investments, economic development, regional facilities and the city’s property holdings.

There is nothing yet in the proposed organisational set-up that says the council – and by extension the voter – will not be able to exercise control over these boards. But there is nothing explicitly to say that they will, either. Hide and his Cabinet colleague, Transport Minister Steven Joyce, have been quick to make placatory noises: in a jointly written op-ed piece in the Herald, they said that “transparency and accountability is [sic] a key feature” of the plan. But if the lines of accountability are not plainly laid down, that is so much cant. These boards are called “council-controlled organisations” (or CCOs), but there is no provision for the “council” to exercise any “control” over the “organisations”. The ministers seek to respond by saying “Trust us: we know what we’re doing”. We say “yeah right”.

It will certainly be interesting to see what changes, if any, come out of the select committee analysing the legislation that is setting all of this up. They report back to parliament on May 4th.

Well I went along to a fairly significant chunk of NZTA’s Waterview Connection expo today. While I criticised the wisdom of running something for seven hours in a previous post, I must say that having all that time available meant that issues could be delved into in far greater detail than I’ve ever seen at any previous consultation. This was certainly a good thing.

While it’s obvious that NZTA are going to fairly significant lengths to mitigate the adverse effects of the project, there are still a number of unresolved matters in my opinion, a number of areas where I think there could be relatively minor design tweak that could lead to significant benefits, as well as some fundamental problems I have with aspects of the proposal that unfortunately probably won’t be changed, but at least I can reserve “I told you so” rights in future years. This post will focus on the more fundamental matters – in particular the works to state highway 16 – while future posts will talk about other matters.

The biggest problem I have with the upgrade is not actually the Waterview Connection, but rather the upgrades to State Highway 16 that are occurring in conjunction with the SH20 actual Waterview Connection. I’m not exactly sure why these two projects have been bundled together, although the thinking is that because the Waterview Connection will feed extra traffic onto SH16, it needs to be widened (the causeway between Pt Chev and Rosebank also needs to be raised up a bit). And not widened by just a little bit either, widened by three lanes as shown in the diagram below: The end result will be a nine lane wide motorway between Pt Chevalier and Te Atatu: five lanes westbound and four lanes eastbound. Inevitably, within a few years this super-wide motorway will become congested just as every other motorway widening project around Auckland has never eliminated congestion – just pushed it back a little bit until induced demand kicked in.

I pointed this out to many of the NZTA staff at the expo, and how silly it seemed to effectively flush $800 million down the toilet on widening a motorway that will become congested again within a few years. They pointed out that some of the work is necessary anyway, such as raising the causeway, and probably one additional westbound lane will be necessary to soak up vehicles from SH20. They also pointed out that bus “shoulder lanes” would be provided. However, the problem with bus shoulder lanes is that whenever they come up to a road overbridge or an on-ramp or an off-ramp they end abruptly, the bus needs to pull out into traffic again and much of the benefit is lost. Furthermore, bus drivers (understandably) wanting to avoid having to pull out into motorway traffic often simply avoid the shoulder lanes. In short, shoulder lanes are of limited benefit to buses and generally are just sop to shut public transport advocates up (kinda the same process as “future proofed for light rail”).

As I have detailed previously, it seems quite unbelievable that we’re spending around $800 million on upgrading state highway 16 yet not build a busway. The Northwestern Motorway is perfect for a busway, as there are station opportunities at St Lukes, Pt Chevalier, Te Atatu, Lincoln Road, Massey and Westgate just sitting there as I explained last year. Furthermore, it seems as though the problem isn’t that NZTA don’t want to build a busway, but that ARTA/ARC have only ever designated state highway 16 as a “Quality Transit Network (QTN)” rather than a “Rapid Transit Network (RTN)”. In terms of busways/lanes, apparently QTN means shoulder lanes and RTN means full busway (like the Northern Busway). Therefore, if state highway 16 were to be designated as an RTN then NZTA would be somewhat forced into at least strongly considering putting a busway along there.

Most of the arguments put up against SH16 being an RTN are along the lines of “but the train line is the RTN out west” or that “the busway would cannibalise patronage on the train system.” What this misses is the completely different alignments of the two. How many people living in Pt Chevalier take the train to work? How many in Te Atatu? How many in Massey? How many in Westgate? The answer all up is probably a big fat zero. They either drive or they use the incredibly messy, slow and complex system of buses that serves those parts of West Auckland at the moment.

This is clearly shown in the map below, with the Western Line shown in green and the route of a possible northwest busway shown in red. West of Pt Chevalier, the two are never less than three kilometres apart (the yellow stars indicate possible busway station sites):

Now I wouldn’t argue that the northwest busway is one of the most pressing public transport projects in Auckland, and perhaps that is why it has been ignored by just about everyone as a possibility, but the fact remains that NZTA is going to be spending $800 million here. Shouldn’t we at least ensure that money is spent on something that will have long-term benefits of giving people more transport choices (like the rampantly successful Northern Busway) rather than on simply widening SH16 and watching all that extra capacity being eaten up by induced demand?

The response I got today from most NZTA staff about this situation was that a busway should be considered as “another project”. The problem with that approach is that the money for the future busway is being spent on pointlessly widening SH16. I don’t think it’s that likely we’ll spend $800 million here on widening the motorway and then in 10 years spend another $600 million on putting a busway next to our superwide (but of course now super-congested) motorway. If we want the busway we need to do it now.

Why aren’t we doing that? Why are we flushing $800 million down the toilet widening SH16 instead?