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By admin, on January 26th, 2010 Last night I came across an interesting post on HumanTransit.org which discusses the question of “how green (environmentally friendly) is public transport?” The post responds to the claims that empty buses that operate during off-peak times are likely to counter-balance any environmental benefits that public transport provides over cars during peak hour. It quotes an article in Canada’s National Post:
“Subsidized transit is not sustainable by definition,” says Wendell Cox, a transport policy consultant in St. Louis, and former L.A. County Transportation commissioner. “The potential of public transit has been so overblown it’s almost scandalous.”
It’s not that environmentally minded transit promoters are being dishonest when they argue that city buses are more efficient than private cars: It’s that they’re talking about a fictional world where far more people ride buses. Mass transit vehicles use up roughly the same energy whether they are full or empty, and for much of the time, they’re more empty than full.
For the bulk of the day, and on quieter routes, the average city bus usually undoes whatever efficiencies are gained during the few hours a day, on the few routes, where transit is at its peak.
Jarret Walker, who runs Humantransit.org, has a variety of responses to this claim.
In 19 years as a transit planning consultant, I’ve studied the operations of at least 100 bus and bus+rail systems on three continents, and I have never encountered one whose overriding goal was to maximize its ridership. All transit agencies would like more people to ride, but they are required to run many empty buses for reasons unrelated to ridership or environmental goals. To describe the resulting empty buses as a failure of transit, as Cox does, is simply a false description of transit’s real, and conflicted, objectives.
If public transit agencies were charged exclusively with maximizing their ridership, and all the green benefits that follow from that, they could move their empty buses to run in places where they’d be full. Every competent transit planner knows how to do this. Just abandon all service in low-density areas, typically outer suburbs, and shift all these resources to run even more frequent and attractive service where densities are high, such as inner cities. In lower-density areas, you’d run only narrowly tailored services for brief surges of demand, such as trips to schools at bell-times and commuter express runs from suburban Park-and-Rides to downtown. If you do such a massive shift of resources, I promise your productivity (ridership per unit of cost) will soar, and you won’t have as many empty buses.
Why do we know that’s the answer? Because if you rank a transit agency’s lines by productivity (riders per unit of cost), the top ranking services are almost all in one of these categories: either (a) all-day high-frequency service to areas of high density or (b) peak-only commuter express from suburban centers to downtown, or (c) services to suburban schools at bell-times.
So if we were talking about Seattle’s King County Metro area, for example, a ridership-maximizing service plan would probably offer no all-day transit service outside the City of Seattle except for links to the densest suburban centers such as downtown Bellevue and perhaps some older, denser inner-ring suburbs such as Renton and Burien. Beyond that, the suburbs would have nothing but school services and express buses to Seattle at rush-hour. In the dense urban fabric of Seattle, on the other hand, you’d have buses or streetcars every three minutes on every major street, with lots of rapid-bus overlays, etc, etc.
The outcry would be tremendous, the politics toxic, the prospects for implementation zero. I would never propose it. But there’s no question that such a service change would dramatically increase ridership, dramatically reduce the number of empty buses, and thus improve how transit scores on the kind of tally that Cox and his allies propose.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, transit agencies have to balance contradictory demands to (a) maximize ridership and (b) provide a little bit of service everywhere regardless of ridership, both to meet demands for ‘equity’ and to serve the needs of transit-dependent persons.
One analysis that I’ve done for several transit agencies is to sort the services according to whether they serve a “ridership” related purpose or a “coverage” related purpose. Ridership services are justified by how many people ride them. Coverage services are justified by how badly people need them, or because certain suburbs feel they deserve them, but not based on how many people ride. I encourage transit agencies to identify which are which. Once a transit agency can identify which of its services are trying to maximize ridership, you can fairly judge how well those services are doing in meeting that objective, including all the environmental benefits that follow. Until then, the Cox argument is smoke and mirrors.
Overall, I think the point Jarrett is making is that public transport could be far more green than driving, if that was all it needed to be concerned about. Of course that is not possible, as off-peak services are necessary in low-patronage areas so that everyone has accessibility to at least a basic level of service. It’s a good question as to whether we really need a 50 seat bus to provide that sort of service, when it’s likely the bus will be operating mostly empty for its run, but unless we want to abandon any sort of public transport for big chunks of the city it’s rather inevitable that there will be very low patronage routes.
But does that mean public transport isn’t green? I think the answer is potentially, and I’m not sure whether Jarrett’s response really does answer that question – instead somewhat bypassing it. At a fundamental level it seems as though public transport should be more environmentally friendly than driving – as one engine shifting a number of people just has to be more efficient than a pile of engines each shifting one person (and a tonne or so of metal too). Once you throw electrified public transport into the mix the benefits become extremely obvious – but even if we’re talking about diesel buses (which provides the bulk of Auckland’s public transport) it would appear as though public transport is more environmentally friendly than driving. But what about all the empty runs during the middle of the day? What about the fact that peak time buses often travel empty into the city or out of it, only picking up passengers along half the distance that they actually travel? What about the distance buses have to travel from their route to their depot? All of those add up to suggest that each actual bus service probably needs a reasonable number of passengers (an average of 7 I have heard) to make it more environmentally friendly than driving.
So perhaps we shouldn’t simply “bypass” this question about how green public transport is, but actually think about ways in which to improve the environmental friendliness of the system. Do we really need full-size buses to operate inter-peak or late-night routes is an obvious question, while another is finding ways of actually increasing average patronage per service, while not losing ‘coverage’ – which probably includes my pet project of improving cross-town routes so that the efficiency of the system can be increased. Electrifying the rail system will create some significant environmental benefits, as would running electric trams where appropriate – like I proposed for the Dominion Road corridor. Investment in hybrid buses (which I believe is happening) could also improve the environmental friendliness of public transport – and as a guess I think the uptake of hybrid/electric buses will be a lot quicker than the uptake of hybrid/electric vehicles. So there’s certainly a lot that could be done to improve things – perhaps more easily than reducing the environmental impact of individual cars I might suspect.
Another matter which I think is important to analyse is how each additional user of either public transport or a private vehicle has an impact on the environment. Each extra person driving adds additional environmental impact – through more CO2 emissions, other air pollutants, noise pollution and so forth. On the other hand, if we’re providing public transport for reasons other than their environmental benefit, each additional user just results in the existing capacity being used more efficiently, while the environmental effect of the additional car user is avoided. I suppose that if we attract enough additional public transport users we might need to increase service provision levels (leading to a greater environmental effect) but by then our buses are very full so that issue isn’t relevant. If that explanation seems complex, think about whether you’re going to catch the bus or drive tomorrow – if you drive you will pump out more pollution into the world from your car than if you didn’t, while the bus is still going to run regardless of whether you choose to use it. If you catch the bus, you don’t create that pollution from your car, and you ensure that the pollution from your bus is split across more people – thereby being less ‘per capita’.
Therefore, even if public transport isn’t particularly environmentally friendly, the only way to make that situation better is to improve the service (preferably through better quality/higher speed services rather than more of them) so more people use public transport. If you reduce investment in public transport, and instead focus your money on building more roads, the environmental outcome is inevitably going to be worse – because you still need to provide the PT, it’s now used even less and you have a whole pile more cars on the road.
There are a couple of excellent comments on the Humantransit.org post, which sum things up quite nicely. First, by someone called “Allan”:
This is crap. The point should be… there’s a seat for you, and if you take it there is no extra emissions for you riding (virtually), however if you drive you’re polluting a ton. So ride the bus if you care about the environment. You should be looking at your personal carbon footprint not the system’s.
And another by “Russell in Cincinnati”:
But maybe the easiest way to see past the “transit isn’t green” line is with an occasional whiff of reality. 800 gallons of gasoline are consumed by the average resident of Atlanta, in one way or another, cars/trucks/whatever, every year. In Barcelona that number is about 50 gallons. What will the long term consequences be to the lives of Atlantans when gas reaches 10 dollars a gallon, compared to the impact on daily life and housing patterns in Barcelona? Those simple numbers make the gasoline deniers’ handwaving sound like a very small voice, at the bottom of a quite deep beer mug.
Yes, quite. Of course this means that “land-use planning” matters too, which just proves once again that you can’t separate land-use planning from transportation planning (which of course is what the reforms of Auckland’s local government are exactly going to do…. sigh).
By admin, on January 25th, 2010 A great article by Brian Rudman on the Waterview Connection in the NZ Herald today:
Long, twisted road to tunnel backflip
Think of a figure, double it, add your age and subtract the number of eels in Oakley Creek: that, it seems, is as good a guess as any for the price of completing the Waterview Connection.
I’m not surprised Transport Minister Steven Joyce and the NZ Transport Agency waited until the eve of the Christmas exodus to sneak out the highly embarrassing news that a tunnel was, after all, the most cost-effective and environmentally sensitive way to join State Highway 20 up to the Northwestern Motorway at Waterview.
Mr Joyce called this backflip, a “fine-tuning of the alignment”, while Transport Agency chairman Brian Roche’s press release was even more buttoned-up, referring to “design improvements”. The only reference to cost was by Mr Roche, who said the new tunnel “can be completed within the original project budget and is the most cost-effective option for constructing this section while also responding well to community concerns”.
In other words, at Christmas 2009, a three-by-three-lane tunnel could be built for around $1.15 billion. Yet just 10 months before, Mr Joyce signed the death warrant for the defeated Labour Government’s similar tunnel project, saying costs had blown out from $1.89 billion to “in excess of $3 billion”. On closer examination, his bloated $3 billion included all sorts of add-ons the Labour-backed plan did not.
[rest of article here]
I particularly like that first paragraph, and it is oh so true. NZTA have a fair amount of explaining to do as to how this latest option can be built for half the price of the “previous to previous” option, when it’s fairly similar (and actually wider at 6 lanes instead of 4).
By admin, on January 25th, 2010 Just caught a rather long-winded bus home, as it got a bit caught up in the gridlock that seems to have descended upon Herne Bay in the past couple of weeks. This is generally related to the roadworks that are currently going on along Curran Street in Ponsonby/Herne Bay. These roadworks are, strangely enough, part of the Victoria Park Tunnel project – as they involve re-routing a watermain to go via a different route between the city and the harbour bridge.
Anyway, basically since the beginning of the year Curran Street has been closed to ‘downhill’ traffic heading towards the Harbour Bridge – and vehicles have had to travel via Shelly Beach Road or Hamilton Road. I must say that I found it odd that if Curran Street was narrowed to one way only, that you’d make that one direction being “uphill” rather than downhill. This is because Curran Street acts as basically an extension of an onramp onto the Harbour Bridge, and I would say about 95% of the vehicles that use Curran Street are heading ‘downhill’, just as probably 95% of the vehicles that use Shelly Beach Road are heading uphill. For the last few weeks we’ve ended up having the arrangement shown in the diagram below: While our street (Hamilton Road) has certainly been a bit busier than usual, this seems to have worked out OK. I think most of the traffic has used Shelly Beach Road as the preferred way to access the motorway – which makes sense as the intersection at the top of it has traffic lights, and it’s already a fairly busy road. However, yesterday I noticed that there had been a subtle, but significant, change to the area of road closed, with access from Sarsfield Street onto the motorway no longer possible. This meant that to get from Hamilton Road to the motorway I had to head up to Jervois Road, along it, down Shelly Beach road, along Sarsfield Street and then onto the motorway. No real big hassle, although the signage was certainly confusing with circle and diamond shaped detour signs located seemingly at random all over the place.
This morning, as I wandered up to the bus stop on Jervois Road I noticed that there were a heck of a lot of vehicles heading up Hamilton Road – which certainly seemed strange as most of the additional traffic we’ve had is heading down the street. I haven’t confirmed it, but I am guessing that these were vehicles intending to head north on the motorway from Sarsfield Street, but had to make a last minute detour because of the road closure – something like the journey shown in the diagram below: This evening clearly the same problem was happening, with cars the length of Hamilton Road, cars backed up along Jervois road everywhere, cars all over Shelly Beach Road and so forth. The obvious problem to me (aside from closing the wrong side of Curran Street) is poor communication. The detour signage is, to be frank, pretty pathetic and confusing. If the connection between Sarsfield Street and the Harbour Bridge simply had to be shut, then there should have been good signage on Jervois Road very early on telling everyone to not use Sarsfield Street.
Here are a couple of photos showing the gridlock along normally quiet Hamilton Road:  Hopefully some lessons will be learned from today’s mess and things might be a bit better tomorrow. On a personal level, I’m glad to bypass the whole mess by catching the bus into town.
Edit: this gridlock might have been exacerbated, but didn’t seem to be caused by, today’s power cuts, as traffic lights in the immediate area seemed to be on when I went through there. Lights further back towards Ponsonby were out, but that was quite separate!
By admin, on January 24th, 2010 The Dominion Road corridor is probably the most well-served bus corridor in Auckland (except for ones like Great South Road where you have a tonne of disparate routes converging) with over 30 buses along that route reaching the CBD between 8am and 9am during the week. That’s over a bus every 2 minutes, which means that at peak times the existing bus lanes are getting pretty close to capacity. Auckland City Council have plans to widen Dominion Road so that improved bus lanes can be constructed, but not until 2016. The project generally involves the following aspects:
Widening parts of Dominion Road
Sections of Dominion Road, between View Road and Lowery Avenue, will be widened by around one to two metres. This will accommodate four metre wide bus lanes, and more and better bus stopping facilities. The width of the new lanes is sufficient to allow cyclists to share the lane with buses.
Bus route deviations at Valley Road and Balmoral shops
Two features of the original Dominion Road passenger transport improvements were the proposed route deviations off Dominion Road near the Valley Road and Balmoral Road intersections and shopping centres. These were developed to avoid demolishing character buildings in the two shopping centres, and will each offer improved bus trip times and reliability if they are introduced.
Since the original scheme was developed 2003-2004 the need for better urban design features around the shopping centres and along the length of Dominion Road has been recognised. Consultation undertaken in 2005 also revealed that many people were also keen to see an improvement in the design of the paving, planting and seating facilities for example. To incorporate many of these urban design features, the original scheme for the deviations behind the shopping centres is currently under review. The review will enable Council to consider other ways of using the space behind the shopping areas and take international best practice into account while still delivering a sound solution for improving passenger transport along Dominion Road.
The table below shows the timing of the various parts of this project: While this is certainly a good project, it does make me wonder whether simply widening the bus lanes and threading them behind the shops at Valley Road and Balmoral Road is going to achieve what we need out of this corridor – and in particular whether it will interact with the land-use plans for the Dominion Road corridor and provide for the significantly higher capacity that is likely to be needed in the future.
The diagram to the left shows the Dominion Road corridor, broadly outlined. Dominion Road does stretch further south than this, all the way to Hillsborough Road actually, but I think the main focus is on the area north of Mt Albert Road, as that’s where the current squeeze on the road is most acutely felt.
The three red crosses indicate that three shopping centres along Dominion Road – Valley Road shops, Balmoral shops and Mt Roskill shops (heading north to south). Although there are these three distinct centres, I tend to think of the Dominion Road corridor as quite a continuous stretch of fairly intensive development. In particular, north of Balmoral Road there are shops which line Dominion Road for most of the distance from there to its northern end. This is no surprise as development stretched out along this route when it was a tram route.
There are three options I suppose when it comes to improving public transport along this route – the improved bus lanes as proposed, a light-rail/tram line and a (underground) heavy rail route. These options are detailed below:
1) The current bus-based proposal, as shown above, includes wider bus lanes and dedicated bus lanes behind the two shopping centres. Its cost is about $50-60 million I think. The wider bus lanes and especially the bypassed shopping centres would offer some improvements in capacity of the road, but I suspect that if we had significant intensification along this route we might eventually see it becoming fairly overcrowded. An advantage of a “bus based” system is that the buses can run with varying ‘stopping patterns’, some being express services, some only stopping in a couple of locations and others starting their run fairly close to the city but stopping everywhere.
2) A tram route would possibly run along the same route as the bus lanes, or alternatively down the middle of the road. I know that internationally there is a preference to run trams down the centre of roads, and perhaps that might be prefered. I would suspect that this option would be much more expensive – perhaps twice the price for infrastructure works as well as a decent amount of money to purchase trams/light-rail vehicles. In terms of capacity though, generally light-rail can carry around double the number of people per hour as a bus based system – as modern trams are often triple-articulated making each vehicle able to carry a couple of hundred people at capacity. I suspect that constructing a tram line along this route would also stimulate quite a lot of intensive redevelopment – which once again is something that Council’s plans seem to want.
3) The third option is a fully underground railway line, probably with stations at Valley Road, Balmoral Road and Mt Roskill, before linking up with a future Avondale-Southdown railway line next to the Mt Roskill Motorway. This line would obviously be incredibly expensive – perhaps in the region of a few billion dollars – but would offer a massive capacity increase compared to both bus-based and light-rail systems. One problem with it though is that having only three stations means that there would be a lot of people living between stations who wouldn’t be particularly close to the line – and we would probably have to provide a bus service along the route still – potentially not the most efficient outcome. If this option was ever chosen I imagine that massive intensification around the three stations would be needed to provide the number of required people within walking distance of the stations .
I probably lean towards option 2 as my preferred choice. The linear type of development that exists along Dominion Road makes on-street light-rail more suitable than heavy rail in my opinion. In terms of comparing a tram and bus-based system, I do think that a tram line is more likely to encourage intensification along the corridor than simply improving the current bus lanes. The additional capacity offered by light-rail also suggests that this might be a smarter option in the long term.
I’m keen to hear what others think though. This project is likely to be one of the next major public transport projects in Auckland (excluding rail improvements), so it’ll be interesting to see what happens there. The changes in local government arrangements in Auckland will make it possible to readdress whether the current option is the best one.
By admin, on January 23rd, 2010 A rather strange lead story on One News tonight about ‘roading jobs around the country being under threat’. Here’s the video for the story, and TVNZ’s full story is included below:
There is more grim employment news with roading jobs around the country under threat because of a lack of local government funding for planned projects.
This comes after images of thousands of south Aucklanders queuing for a handful of jobs has reminded New Zealand that unemployment is still rife.
Roading New Zealand says regional bodies are pulling money out of planned roading projects, despite central government plans to boost infrastructure funding.
In February last year, the government announced a $500 million dollar stimulus package, with $142 million of that for roads alone.
Meanwhile around the country councils were shutting their wallets.
Transport Minister Steven Joyce says it is a concern.
“We are putting a huge amount of additional expenditure in all adding several hundred jobs, so obviously it would be a concern if we were losing jobs out the other end,” says Joyce.
The government-funded New Zealand Transport Agency matches local government spending on local roads dollar for dollar.
So the agency set aside over $350 million to match what councils planned to spend on roads for the year. But the transport agency spent $40 million less because local government spending came short by $40 million.
That means a total of $80 million that should have been spent on local roads was not.
Chris Olsen from Roading New Zealand says it is quite a significant impact.
“If you think that the government’s stimulus package was $142 million over three years then $80 million in one year is quite substantial,” says Olsen.
And that means job losses.
The thousands in south Auckland queuing for only 160 supermarket jobs have already illustrated the dire employment situation right now.
At least 100 roading workers in Auckland lost their jobs last year and Robert Reid from the National Distribution Union says this could increase.
“We are facing considerable more redundancies in the future and we’ve already been told that by the major road construction companies,” he says.
But local government says roading projects are prone to delays and it is trying to create jobs.
Geoff Swainson from Local Government New Zealand says local government are involved in a broad range of infrastructures and projects.
“One only has to look at the investment that’s occurring around the country in terms of, for example at the moment, building new stadiums,” he says.
Roading New Zealand says more local government money needs to be committed to roading projects to keep people fully employed.
Joyce told ONE News he has met with the interested parties and he is aware local government has under spent on its roading budget for years now. He says while it is too early to tell how this financial year will turn out he will keep his eye on it and if one region under spends then that money will be relocated to another region to use on their roads.
For a start, I did think that the main idea of investing in transport infrastructure was to improve the state of the country’s infrastructure so that we can get around more easily and more sustainably, rather than it being a giant “make-work” programme, but I guess that’s a useful secondary benefit.
But the main question that came into my head was “why the heck’s this a story now?” An excellent table put together by Cam Pitches of the Campaign for Better Transport clearly shows that the May 2009 Government Policy Statement cut a lot of money out of local road funding compared to what had been expected under the August 2008 Government Policy Statement – $225 million less over three years in actual fact. Quite close to the $80 million a year that’s mentioned in the new story above. Over the past few years councils have struggled to fund their share of the cost of improving and maintaining local roads as they’ve been doing everything they can to keep rates down – so it seems a little unfair to criticise councils for not spending enough on building more roads when at the same time they’re being criticised for increasing rates by too much.
Before the Government Policy Statement was changed in May 2009, the previous iteration had realised that local governments were struggling to fulfil their half of the funding share when it came to necessary local road improvements, and that NZTA funding (from petrol taxes etc.) would be necessary to make up the short-fall. Unfortunately that ‘making up the shortfall’ money is now being ploughed in to the roads of national significance – and therefore we have ended up in the current situation. It’s hardly a surprise, and certainly not the fault of local government in my opinion (I hardly think Local Government Minister Rodney Hide would be particularly happy about Transport Minister Steven Joyce telling local councils to raise their rates to spend more money on local roads).
By admin, on January 23rd, 2010 After writing a fair few blog posts on Newmarket station over the past week (and not all of them particularly complementary) I thought I should go check it out for myself. Arriving from Broadway, I do think something needs to be done to improve the connectivity of “station square” with the main street. Even a few signs saying “Newmarket Station this way” would be useful! Although quiet, station square is certainly quite a nice public space (although a bit of greenery wouldn’t go amiss). As I have said previously, one the best parts of the station is the “map wall”, which shows a historic map of the area. Apparently at night time the map wall is lit up and looks spectacular. As a bit of a fan of old maps, I find it fantastic. Maybe I just got lucky with my timing, but there was a train due (heading to Britomart) within just a few minutes of us arriving. It was also arriving from the west, which would give me a good opportunity to assess the time it takes for drivers to change ends. Our train was due at 11.49 and arrived bang on time, to the minute
 Now I assume the driver changed ends, but actually I didn’t notice. The train didn’t seem to wait too long at the station before we were off on our way. So either there was a second driver or the driver managed to change ends really quick. Either way, on this particular situation the ‘end-change’ didn’t seem to be an issue. There were also no issues about having to wait for other trains to clear the junction – and we were at Britomart within 7 minutes of leaving Newmarket.
Britomart station was pretty busy for a Saturday. The SA Train (four carriages) that we were on heading into town wasn’t jam packed, but it was certainly fairly full.
 I did a bit of shopping in town, and had some lunch there, before catching the train back to Newmarket. Once again we got lucky with the train timing and only had to wait about four minutes before our train left – once again a Western Line train. This trip didn’t seem to work quite so well – as we had to wait for quite a few minutes just before we reached Newmarket before the signals changed in our favour. I strongly suspect that our delay here may have been avoided if Newmarket’s “missing link” had been constructed, as our train wouldn’t have conflicted with anything coming towards Britomart, could have used platform four and then hooked through to the west from there.
Getting off the train, I noticed the gap between the train (an ADL on this occasion for all the train nerds out there) and the platforms seemed particularly large. I tried to take a photo that would illustrate this gap: The train also seemed to take longer to get going. We were well up the escalators and the train was still there, and I don’t think I heard it pulling away until we were almost out of the station altogether. One last thing I think worth mentioning is the lack of a pedestrian crossing over Remuera Road immediately outside the train station. This seems a pretty unacceptable omission – and it was amusing at the station opening to watch Steven Joyce and the rest of the transport dignitaries having to take a three-legged journey around the intersection. Hopefully Council will fix this problem very soon.
Overall, I think I was pretty impressed with things. I still think the missing link between platform 4 and the west is necessary to increase the capacity of the Newmarket junction. It also seems as though the wait time at Newmarket station is a bit all over the place. Hopefully the end-change issue can be sorted out soon, and hopefully KiwiRail get around to building that missing rail link. That way we’ll be able to get the most out of Newmarket station.
By admin, on January 22nd, 2010 Apparently recently petrol prices in New Zealand were at their highest levels in about 14 months, until a 3c a litre cut in the price. However, prices are still about 50 cents a litre short of their mid 2008 peak. As I have outlined in the past, in my opinion (which is backed up by a reasonable amount of research) the price spike that we saw in 2008 was largely the result of oil supply hitting a peak in around 2005/2006, but demand continuing to grow between then and 2008. Once we had demand reach the maximum level of supply, we saw prices go up dramatically as there was no way for supply to be increased to a level that could bring them down. Of course, this process was exaggerated by the crazy oil investor situation we saw during 2008, and a weakening US dollar.
And then the recession hit. There’s a fairly good argument that the extremely high oil prices of mid 2008 had a big role in causing the recession, but that’s not really my focus here. Basically the global worldwide recession led to a massive amount of “demand destruction”, where reduced economic activity led to much lower demand for oil – which jumped back to below the level that could be supplied. Therefore prices plummeted, which once again was exaggerated by the very same investors who had gone nuts in the opposite direction just a few months earlier. So we saw the huge drop shown clearly in the graph below: Since a low of around $US 35 a barrel in early 2009 we have seen prices slowly increase – I think to around $US 70-odd a barrel at the moment. This is largely a reflection of the global economy’s recovery over the past few months.
I was thinking a couple of weeks or so ago how I was surprised that prices hadn’t increased by more. Prices were back at around $US70 a barrel in the middle of last year, and certainly the global economic outlook had improved a lot since then, so it seemed strange that we hadn’t seen things skyrocket back more. Perhaps I had been a bit premature in thinking that peak oil has already been reached? However, when looking closer into the data of demand and supply, some interesting information emerges that explains exactly why prices haven’t increased dramatically yet, but also shows that potentially we’re heading back towards that crunch point that was reached in the early part of 2008.
If we look at supply levels first, we can see that there have been some fairly significant fluctuations over the past few years, but in general it would appear as though the production of “liquids”, particularly crude oil, has not really had a general trend of increasing throughout the 2004-2009 period. So it wouldn’t appear that prices are lower than they were in mid 2008 because we’ve found more oil. In fact, it would seem the opposite is true – that the world is producing less oil now than it was 18 months ago. It’s also fairly interesting to note that the production of crude oil between 2005 and 2008 didn’t increase very much EVEN THOUGH prices skyrocketed during that period. You would think that if there was any potential for the oil-producing nations to “pump more”, then being able to sell it for $100+ a barrel would have been a great incentive to do so. But production didn’t increase during that period. Perhaps because it couldn’t?
So if supply graphs don’t tell us much about what’s happened over the past year or two, how about demand rates? Will they provide more useful data? Well I think that it does. The graphs below show oil demand across the OECD, for North America and for the European Union. The red lines I have added in to show September/October 2008 when the global financial crisis really began. The first thing to notice from these graphs is pretty obvious – that demand decreased fairly dramatically as a result of the global recession. This led to a reduction in prices, as more supply and less demand inevitably does. However, perhaps the most interesting thing to note is that even though it’s not pretty obvious the world is emerging from its recession, demand for oil has not really picked up particularly much – and is certainly still well below its 2005-2008 levels – particularly in North America. I think this lack of recovery in demand has a big role to play in prices remaining at fairly sane levels.
So the next question that comes to mind for me at least is “how long is this going to last?” To be honest I wouldn’t have a clue about how long it might take the economies of USA and Europe to ‘properly’ recover, and I think it’s unlikely that demand from those parts of the world will increase back to 2005-2008 levels until such a time as their economies have recovered the lost ground of the past year or so. However, there is another graph that makes for very interesting reading, and is certainly a big insight into the future for oil prices: In particular the rate of increase of oil consumption in China over the past few months is quite staggering. I’m sure some of that is seasonal variation, and November 2009 tailed off a bit, but it would certainly seem as though China has shrugged off the recession and is demanding as much oil as ever to run its factories and fuel its cars. Given that oil consumption in China is now nearly 50% of that in the USA – and rising rapidly – it might not be that long before China pushes worldwide oil demand back up to a level that can’t easily be matched by supply. It is then, and probably not before then, that we will see oil prices skyrocket once more.
It is only a matter of time though. How well prepared is Auckland for $3 a litre petrol I wonder?
By admin, on January 22nd, 2010 One the biggest hassles about the old Newmarket Station (the old old one, not the Newmarket West or South stations) was the “shunt” movement that has to be used to get trains from Britomart out to the west. In 2006 I used the train service between Britomart and Avondale for a couple of weeks after writing off my car, so experienced the “Newmarket shunt” first hand. Coming from Britomart, we would go straight into Newmarket station, then wait a couple of minutes for the driver to change ends, then reverse back the same way we came, wait another couple of minutes for the driver to change ends again, before heading on our way out west.
The mess of the Newmarket junction became a notorious symbol of the pathetic state that our railway network was in at the time. Over the last couple of years that situation has been completely avoided, as Western Line trains avoided the junction by using the Newmarket West station. Of course that had many disadvantages of pretty much making it impossible to transfer between the west and south lines, but it certainly sped the process up for people using the Western Line quite considerably. Obviously we all knew that situation wouldn’t last, and in many ways that was a good thing (so that we could have west to south transfers and a ‘proper’ station at Newmarket), and with the opening of the very flash Newmarket Station earlier this week we have seen the return of the ‘end-change’ at Newmarket for Western Line trains.
I haven’t caught a Western Line train through Newmarket yet, so I am talking a bit second-hand here, but my understanding is that while we no longer have to suffer through the “three point turn” process that I experienced in 2006, obviously trains going out west via Newmarket will have to change direction at that station. Which means that the driver will have to pack up their gear, make sure everything’s switched off that needs to be, walk the length of the train, get into the other end, switch on everything that needs to be switched on and so forth before the train can proceed. Compared to a normal stop time at a station of around 30 seconds, it would appear as though this is causing trains to wait at Newmarket for anywhere between 2 and 5 minutes. An article in the NZ Herald today highlights this problem:
Extra train drivers may have to be used to reduce turnaround times at Newmarket’s new $35 million station, the Auckland Regional Transport Authority has acknowledged.
The authority disclosed last night that it was considering asking its rail operator, Veolia, to post drivers at each end of western line trains at peak times to reduce delays which have become apparent since the station was added to its network on Monday.
Drivers now have to walk or even run from the front to the rear of their trains at Newmarket, before reversing direction through the adjacent junction of the western and southern lines.
That meant four trains observed by the Herald yesterday spent anything from one minute and 45 seconds to three and a half minutes at Newmarket, depending on how many carriages they were pulling.
The longest wait at the station was for passengers on a locomotive-hauled SA train, as they watched the driver walk 96 metres from one end to the other before pulling out of the station.
The train took five minutes, 10 seconds to get through Newmarket junction, which is just to the north.
Transport authority communications manager Sharon Hunter said her organisation had recorded times of between 60 and 94 seconds for drivers to change ends for western line trains but was considering measures to cut the delays.
“The option of employing relay drivers is already being considered for introduction when 10-minute peak frequencies are introduced across all lines,” she said.
“If requirement dictates, then this introduction date will be reviewed.”
There are a couple of interesting matters here. The first is that ARTA should not be in any way surprised about the problems and delays associated with the drivers changing ends. After all, we had years of this very same problem before the old Newmarket station was closed for refurbishment. Furthermore, last Thursday when I attended the opening of the Newmarket Station I raised that very issue with both ARTA and Veolia representatives. When discussing the delays that would be caused by drivers changing ends of their trains, I was informed that this would not be a problem at all as the drivers would not need to change ends. Instead, there would be a ‘pilot’ used, who I assume is someone at the other end of the train who gives directions to the ‘blind’ driver while they drive the train. I’m kind of curious what happened to this plan, or indeed whether it was really a plan to start off with.
Having lengthy delays at Newmarket station isn’t acceptable at all, and hopefully whatever plan ARTA and Veolia put together to sort it out happens quickly. A lot of money has been spent on the upgrade of Newmarket station and the trackwork surrounding it, and we have a really fantastic piece of rail infrastructure there now. It would be a shame for minor details (that tend to make a huge difference when it comes to train operations) to undermine the marvellous addition to our rail network that is the new station.
I do not agree with others who say that we should have kept the Newmarket West station, as I do think it’s important for there to be a single Newmarket station – both as a feature point for the area and as a way of making it easier for people to transfer between the lines (once the timetables are better aligned of course). However, we need to ensure that the delays that will inevitably be caused by the slight detour Western Line trains have to make, is minimised to the greatest extent possible. And that does not involve forcing drivers to wander nearly 100m to change ends of the train they’re driving.
Oh, and I think KiwiRail were very wrong indeed when they claimed the “missing link” from the Newmarket Junction was not necessary - see for yourself the impacts of that poor decision.
By admin, on January 21st, 2010 Most regular readers of this blog would know I’m a huge fan of Melbourne based transport academic Paul Mees and what he has to say about transport policy. In particular, the work that he has done on finding ways to improve public transport in dispersed cities like Melbourne and Auckland, is fascinating and utterly essential reading in this field. Unfortunately, the one book he has published previously is out of print, otherwise I would own it in a flash (when I got it out of the Auckland University Library it inspired a rather large number of blog posts!)
Fortunately, Dr Mees has another book out very soon! Called Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age, it promises some further fascinating insights – this time focusing on finding effective and viable alternatives to the automobile over the next few decades as environmental and resource scarcity concerns make it impossible for the auto age to continue. Here’s a full description:
 The need for effective public transport is greater than ever in the 21st century. With countries like China and India moving towards mass-automobility, we face the prospects of an environmental and urban health disaster unless alternatives are found–it is time to move beyond the automobile age. But while public transport has worked well in the dense cores of some big cities, the problem is that most residents of developed countries now live in dispersed suburbs and smaller cities and towns. These places usually have little or no public transport, and most transport commentators have given up on the task of changing this: it all seems too hard.
This book argues that the secret of European-style public transport lies in a generalizable model of network planning that has worked in places as diverse as rural Switzerland, the Brazilian city of Curitiba and the Canadian cities of Toronto and Vancouver. It shows how this model can be adapted to suburban, exurban and even rural areas to provide a genuine alternative to the car, and outlines the governance, funding and service planning policies that underpin the success of the world’s best public transport systems.
I must admit that I have pre-ordered this book and greatly anticipate it arriving some time in the next couple of months.
By admin, on January 21st, 2010 I was just thinking about various developments that have happened recently around the Waterview Connection route – in particular the new alignment announced in December, and the use of the ‘call-in’ process announced a couple of days ago, and a few questions came to mind.
- How can basically what was said to cost $2.77 billion now cost $1.4 billion?
- What will happen if the board of inquiry/environment court turns down the application? Or will we see special measures to ensure such a thing doesn’t happen (remembering that Auckland City Council effectively declined NZTA’s designation application for its part of the Mangere Bridge duplication project, so these things happen).
- What really made NZTA switch away from the alignment they announced in May, and back towards what is effectively the previous option? Was it because mitigation costs were getting out of control?
- Will the latest alignment be constructed with a “tunnel boring machine” or a “road-header“? The original alignment was to use the TBM, the May 2009 alignment a roadheader (because they cost around $10 million rather than $150 million to purchase). Roadheaders aren’t particularly viable on long tunnels because they’re very very slow.
- Why isn’t there a connection between State Highway 20 and Great North Road?
- Will there be any significant reductions in traffic along Great North Road once the motorway is built?
- If NZTA spent six years working out that a bored tunnel was the best option, how can it really be believed that the latest route change was because they had learned more about the area’s geology recently? I mean how many geological studies of the area can there be?
- Why didn’t NZTA and the government hold fire with the May 2009 announcement of a route change when they hadn’t completed all the necessary geological work (which seems to have only recently been finished)?
The first question’s the big one though. The numbers just don’t make sense.
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