There was an article in the NZ Herald today about where the different parts of the new Super City will be located. Here’s what the article says:
Details about the location of council services are contained in a memorandum from the agency designing the Super City, obtained by the Herald.It says the Auckland Council head office will be located in the central business district, with the Mayor and Auckland councillors.
No decision has been made about the location of the mega-transport council-controlled organisation (CCO). One option is the new Waitakere City Council headquarters in Henderson.
The water CCO, Watercare Services, will have its headquarters in Newmarket.
The full service centres, delivering all council services, will be located in Central Auckland, Takapuna, Henderson and Manukau.
Local service centres will be located at Orewa, Waiheke Island, Papakura and Pukekohe.
Neighbourhood service centres will be located at Warkworth, Huapai, Helensville, Great Barrier Island and Waiuku.
So it would certainly seem as though the Auckland Council itself will be based in the city centre. That probably means the existing buildings used by Auckland City Council and the Auckland Regional Council (who share a building with ARTA).
In terms of where Auckland Transport will end up, I guess the choice is either somewhere in the CBD, or in one of the three other city council buildings. I am guessing that perhaps Waitakere City Council’s building has been suggested in this article because it’s the newest and flashest out of it, Manukau and North Shore City. It also happens to be the only one of the three that’s currently located near a railway station – which is probably a fairly good look for a transport agency.
But I actually think there’s a third option here, which nobody has thought of yet. I think it could be a good idea to build a big new building out in the middle of Flat Bush for Auckland Transport! Now I know that sounds stupid, but if we did that and then didn’t provide much parking at all, everyone working for Auckland Transport would finally realise how utterly terrible public transport is for suburb-to-suburb travel. That would also give Auckland Transport huge motivation to construct the Howick/Botany Railway Line, who the ARC have written off as supposedly “not popular enough“. It would also be a classic lesson for those involved in planning transport and land-use in Auckland over the years that allowing so much development out in that part of Auckland, without providing anywhere near the necessary transport infrastructure, is probably the biggest planning mistake ever made in Auckland.
Jeremy made a good point a few days back when he blogged about us transport advocates being a bit too negative at times. I think we have to be critical when things really are going wrong, but at the same time that needs to be balanced by some good news stories. One particularly excellent development in recent times in Auckland City Council’s “Shared Space” concept. The latest area where this concept, which revolves around the idea of taking away the distinction between the roadway and the footpath, is Darby Street. The council is currently seeking feedback on its proposal to turn Darby Street into a Shared Space.
The map below shows where Darby Street is located in Auckland’s CBD: pretty much as central as it gets. Despite its very central location, Darby Street is currently in a fairly poor state. There’s parking along it, which takes up a lot of space and creates footpaths that really are far too narrow for an area like that. It’s also used as a shortcut by people trying to get from Queen Street through to Victoria Street – so they can bypass the traffic lights at that major intersection (which do take forever to change).
Below is a photo of what Darby Street currently looks like: This is not the only street that Auckland City Council have identified for upgrading to a “shared space”. We also have the fairly well advanced Elliott Street and Fort Street proposals. The Darby Street proposal is likely to look something like this: Interestingly, when all these shared space ideas emerged last year, Darby Street was originally proposed as a link to be fully pedestrianised. For some reason Council stepped back from this, and have gone with the share space idea instead.
As I said above, while I am a huge fan of shared spaces, in some ways they are a more politically viable and pragmatic alternative to full pedestrianisation, in cases where full pedestrianisation would be very difficult (such as requiring irregular access to buildings, for example). However, in the case of Darby Street it would seem as though there isn’t really a need at all for vehicular access, so we could have got away with full pedestrianisation here if council had had a bit more guts. The other issue with having this road as a shared space, rather than a pedestrian mall, is that cars are still likely to use it as a short-cut between Queen Street and Victoria Street – whereas in actual fact you probably want as few vehicles as possible travelling along the space. Perhaps a solution there might be to reverse the direction that vehicles travel along Darby Street, so that it’s pretty useless as any short cut?
Speaking more generally again, here’s an excellent video by Auckland City Council on the shared space idea:
And a two-part video on shared spaces from England:
I think there’s an interesting debate to be had about where shared spaces are more appropriate and where full pedestrianisation is more appropriate.
…there is nothing inherently convenient about cars, or about any vehicle. It is the system that makes them convenient, and that system includes both the vehicle and the infrastructure. Provide unlimited, subsidized “free” car infrastructure, and cars will be convenient. Run buses often, everywhere, all the time, and buses will be convenient. Put everything in a giant skyscraper with computer-controlled elevators, and elevators will be convenient. Trains, walking, bayou boats, swinging from vines, conveyor belts, scuba diving: whatever it is, if you throw enough money at the infrastructure you can make it convenient.
So true.
It’s like asking why Aucklanders drive so much….. maybe it has something to do with the fact that we spent almost nothing at all on public transport between the end of World War II and 2000?
The excellent Humantransit blog has an interesting post on whether your city’s bus stops are located too close together. While it specifically focuses on San Francisco, the post says this generally:
Are your city’s stops too close together? If so, does your city have activists saying this? San Francisco’s standard is that stops should be around 800-1000 feet (250-300m), but 14% are still closer than this. Most North American cities have much closer spacing, sometimes as little as 300 feet (100m). Now and then there’s a good reason: transfer points and senior-disabled facilities have to have stops. But in most places I’ve worked stop spacing is cultural, a matter of agency or industry habit. There’s much to critique about bus service here in Sydney, but they are merciless about stop spacing on their major routes. It’s rarely less than 300m / 1000 ft.
Of course, there’s one nagging virtue to excessively close stops. They make it easy to walk down the bus route, so that you get somewhere even if the bus doesn’t come, but can still catch it if it does come. Sydney’s the first city I’ve lived in where that’s really hard; the bus catches me between stops that are too far apart to run to when I see the bus. But then: Do we want a policy to be predicated on making it easy to mistrust the service? Or do we want one that will help make the service more trustworthy?
There’s an interesting balance to be found here. The more widely spaced stops are, the less frequently the bus has to stop and (theoretically at least) the quicker it can make its journey. On the other hand, the further apart stops are the more difficult it can be to walk to them.
As a bit of an experiment, I took a look at the inner part New North Road and counted the number of bus stops. This is shown in the image below: This stretch of New North Road goes from Morningside to Eden Terrace, just under three kilometres, and is fairly intensively served – particularly to the east of the intersection with Sandringham Road. Along this section of road there are 10 bus stops – meaning an average distance between stops of just under 300m. Yet the stops are hardly evenly spaced – with a couple of clear bunches. I have put yellow circles around two stops that I think could be eliminated without much problem.
In general, I think that fewer stops is probably a good idea. However, perhaps what is more important than reducing the number of stops is quickening up the procedure of boarding the bus. It took nearly 10 minutes for my bus to load up this evening. My word I cannot wait for contactless smart-cards!
The latest edition of the excellent Going Solar transport newsletter outlines a new piece of legislation that the Victorian State Government in Australia has passed to ensure a better and more integrated approach to transport. The Transport Integration Bill is briefly outlined in the Going Solar Newsletter – as shown below:
There are a number of very very important steps that Victoria is taking to ensure it gets the best transport and land-use outcomes. For a start, this legislation clearly links the two together – stating that you can’t talk about land-use without transport, and vice-versa. It also looks at all aspects of the transport system as a whole – whether they’re roads, rail, busways, trams, cycleways or whatever.
It’s also useful to have a look at the legislation itself. The policy framework detailed below gives a good summary of what the Transport Integration Bill seeks to achieve:
It’s pretty depressing to contrast the steps forward being taken in Victoria with the giant leaps backwards occurring here. Instead of integrating land-use and transport in Auckland, we’re splitting them into two separate agencies; instead of integrating the central government approach to funding different types of transport, we continue to have a situation where state highways are funded one way, regional arterials another, public transport improvements a third and rail infrastructure improvements a fourth.
Last week Jon over at Auckland Trains wrote a post entitled Cheer Up! prompted by a post at Silver Machine about how the negativity of the public transport forums is driving people away and causing politicians to say, “stuff the PT advocates, they are never happy”.
I agree and and admit I have been one of the worst at this.
So I’ve decided to focus on the long term and fighting to ensure as much “good stuff” is included in the long term plans for our city, I believe we will win eventually whether through good arguments or world events. A good first step to positivity is to focus on all the gains we have made since the really dark, dark days of the early 90s:
- The rail system wasn’t removed, it seems crazy to me now to believe people were seriously talking about this.
- The Link bus service.
- Expansion of bus lanes, mainly in Central Auckland.
- Creation of ARTA.
- Public Transport Management Act amendments.
- Construction of Britomart.
- General railway station improvements and continued maintenance of bus stops, new suburban stations and stops.
- Relatively modern bus fleet.
- Train service on Sundays.
- Better bus frequencies.
- Introduction of electronic bus displays.
- New downtown ferry terminal.
- New ferry terminals at Birkenhead and Bayswater.
- New ferry routes to Half Moon Bay and Westaprk.
- The Northern Busway.
- The Central Connector.
- Newmarket station.
- Duplication of the Western Line (almost completed).
I think looking at this list we have a lot be thankful for and hopeful that the ball is rolling enough now, that the call for further improvements will become overwhelming and the entrenched majority position. I believe the above is the reason we’ve seen patronage staying proportional with population growth and hopeful with the upcoming improvements that will continue till a pro-PT administration is back in the mix.
The document does have some very helpful information on what we can expect from our new electric trains, as well as outlining a timeline over the next few years for when we can expect various milestones of the project to happen. A description of the project is detailed below:Some good and bad news here. In terms of the good news, it seems as though the electric locomotives that are required to haul our SA trains in the future will be included as part of this purchase – rather than having to be cannibalised from the North Island Main Trunk line. The bad news is that, while some trains will be delivered in 2013, we won’t be getting all of them until 2014. That seems like a long time away.
Now for some technical requirements: I am liking the frequent mentioning of the CBD rail tunnel. I’m not quite sure why a max speed of 110 kph has been specified on this occasion, whereas ARTA’s previous tender specified a maximum speed of 130 kph.
And now for the timeline of where to next: I’m not exactly how far along this timeline ARTA had got before the government stuffed things up last year, but I am pretty sure that we’d at least got to the point of them issuing the EOI. Which means that we’re running at least a year behind where we could have been.
On the bright side though, this outcome is a million times better than the outcome that seemed likely back in August last year.
I have tried to take a bit of a breather over the last week from blogging too much about the establishment of the Auckland Transport “council-controlled organisation” as part of the local government reorganisation happening in Auckland. The issue has remained fairly high-profile in the media, with Rod Oram in the Sunday Star-Times writing a particularly good article on the issue, and another article in the Herald today pointing out a complete lack of transport staff in the future Auckland Council.
I have written quite a few posts outlining the viewpoints of others, obviously with my own comments thrown in as well, about Auckland Transport, but I think it would be useful for me to go over the main problems I can see with the proposed structure, as well as what steps I think are necessary to fix the issues.
Problem 1 – the structure of the board of Auckland Transport
Section 45 of the Local Government (Auckland Law Reform) Bill sets out the structure of the governing body of Auckland Transport – its board. Essentially, it will have eight voting directors (of which two can be councillors on the Auckland Council) and one non-voting director appointed by NZTA. There are no non-voting directors from KiwiRail. Schedule 2 of that Act outlines in further detail the process by which the board is appointed. Perhaps the most controversial aspects revolve around the fact that it will be Steven Joyce and Rodney Hide appointing the initial board of Auckland Transport, and that the people they appoint will be around for up to three years, as detailed in Section 35I of the Bill. It’s also of some concern to various politicians that it will be the board itself, rather than Auckland Council, who will choose the chairperson of Auckland Transport. As it is the chair who often becomes the public voice of the agency, who that person is can be quite important.
So all up, I probably have three main issues with the structure of Auckland transport’s board:
That the initial board will be chosen by the Minister of Transport, rather than by current regional and local politicians.
That KiwiRail doesn’t have a non-voting director on the board, even though NZTA for some reason does.
That the board itself chooses its chair, rather than Auckland Council (less significant).
Solutions:
Being realistic, and assuming that an Auckland Transport CCO is going to happen, it would still be possible to fix these issues. Firstly, the initial board of Auckland Transport should be chosen by some sort of forum, the is comprised of representative of the various existing councils throughout Auckland. If that’s not possible, then it should be spelled out more clearly in the legislation that Auckland Council can replace part of, or all of, the transitional board at any time it wants. Alternatives, all the transitional directors could end their term 6 months into the Super City, to be replaced by a new board appointed by the Council.
In terms of the other two matters, they’re fairly easily fixed. KiwiRail must have a non-voting representative on the board to ensure integration between transport decisions made by Auckland Transport and the rail system operated by KiwiRail. Similarly, spelling out that Auckland Council should choose the chair of Auckland Transport is a pretty easy change to make.
Problem 2 – the Auckland Council’s oversight of Auckland Transport:
When I first started analysing the establishment of Auckland Transport I was surprised by the great lengths to which it seemed the legislation goes to ensure minimal oversight of this CCO by the Auckland Council. For some reason, Auckland Transport is exempt from a variety of sections of the Local Government Act (sections 59, 60, 64 and 74 to be exact), meaning that it only “may” act in accordance with its statement of intent or “may” act in accordance with the wishes of its shareholder, the Auckland Council. Surely the words “must” are required here?
Solutions:
Practically, the fixes required here are fairly complex, as they involve a detailed web of how different pieces of legislation apply. In general though, it is my strong opinion that Auckland Council must be provided with the legislative backing to properly control what Auckland Transport does. Auckland Transport must be required to act in accordance with its statement of intent, the wishes of its shareholder, it must be subject to the same openness of information that Councils are – no meetings behind closed doors, agendas and minutes (along with appendices detailing the different papers presented) should have to be published so that people can scrutinise what this agency is actually doing, and the decisions they are making.
In other words, section 59 (which requires CCOs to achieve the objective of their shareholder and act sustainably), section 60 (which requires CCOs to act in accordance with their statements of intent), section 64 (which further requires the CCO to act in accordance with its SOI) and section 74 (which requires CCOs to operate in an open manner as if they were councils) of the Local Government Act 2002 must apply to Auckland Transport.
Problem 3 – whether the Mayor and Council can achieve their transport goals:
It is highly likely that transport will be a huge election issue later this year. In terms of local and regional politics, transport is pretty well up there as the number one problem faced by Auckland. While I have confidence that most, if not all, local and regional politicians understand the need for Auckland to change its thinking on transport – away from building more motorways and towards improving public transport – there will be arguments over prioritising projects, whether a railway to the North Shore should happen before a railway to Howick and Botany; whether rail to the airport is more important than improving bus lanes… and so forth. There will also be debate about projects like PenLink, further bridges across the Whau River in west Auckland and so on.
With so much focus likely to be on transport, it would seem utterly crazy for those elected to have little power to actually implement their transport policies. While my suggested changes to the legislation outlined above would certainly help give the Council stronger control over Auckland Transport, I do wonder whether anything else could be done to ensure the future Mayor and Council are able to do transport.
Solutions:
This one is a tricky one. Short of canning Auckland Transport CCO altogether (which I’m not necessarily opposed to!), perhaps options such as giving the Mayor a dedicated seat on the board of Auckland Transport may help, or requiring in legislation more clear lines of control from the Mayor and Council, through to Auckland Transport.
Problem 4 – the sadly ignored Local boards
The local boards barely get a mention in terms of how they will influence what Auckland Transport does. In fact, from my reading, the term “Local Board” is not mentioned once in the section of the Auckland Law Reform Bill which relates to Auckland Transport. This just further confirms the suspicion I have that the Local Boards are nothing but glorified lobby groups and will be effectively powerless in the new Super City structure.
Solutions:
There would seem to be to be two paths that one could go down here to give the Local boards much more of a say in what Auckland Transport does. The first option would be to require Auckland Transport to develop a “Local Transport Plan” in conjunction with each and every local board throughout Auckland. Each Local Transport Plan would highlight important objectives, policies, projects, timeframes and so forth for transport improvements in that particular part of the city. While you would end up with 20 odd transport plans, and there would be a need for them to be consistent with overall region-wide transport strategies, getting local input into transport would allow much better integration with land-use planning than I suspect will happen otherwise.
The other option would be a tad more radical, and effectively require joint control of local roads between Auckland Transport and the relevant Local Board. The Royal Commission into reorganising local government in Auckland actually proposed that local roads should be in the hands of local councils, rather than the “Regional Transport Agency” they came up with.
Problem 5 – integrating land-use planning and transport planning
In some ways I find this problem the most difficult to solve without doing away with the Auckland Transport CCO altogether. As I’ve explained previously, I strongly believe that separately land-use planning (which will be done by Auckland Council) from transportation planning (done by Auckland Transport) is a really really bad idea. I don’t actually think it’s possible to do land-use planning without strongly focusing on transport, and at the same time I think it’s utterly stupid to try and do transport planning without having an eye to the land-use outcomes that exist, and the land-use outcomes you want to promote. Many of Auckland’s problems have occurred because of not enough integration between these two issues – and the proposed structure is only going to make things worse.
Solutions:
As I have said before, it is really difficult to see how this could be solved without doing away with Auckland Transport altogether. I think that the “Spatial Plan” section of the Auckland Law Reform Bill is supposed to help address this issue – but it has some significant flaws. To start with, the Spatial Plan is very high-level and strategic, whereas integration between land-use planning and transport is also needed “at the coalface” when making operational decisions (such as “should this resource consent be granted? Are its effects on traffic OK?”) or when making day-to-day policy decisions. Secondly, the Spatial Plan sits in isolation at the moment, with no other plans required to “give effect to it”. This is likely to change in the longer term, but for now it sits in isolation. Finally, the Spatial Plan doesn’t exist at the moment, and may yet take a very long time to exist.
Possibly one way of solving this problem is by ensuring that there remains a reasonably decent presence of transport within Auckland Council. There should be a fair number of strategic transport policy makers within Auckland Council, there should be some operational staff to give advice on consenting, planning and other matters, and there should be an expectation that Council still does transport stuff – just less than it did before. I’m not quite sure how this should be spelled out in the legislation, but I suggest that the clause which states that Council can only do transport if Auckland Transport lets them would need adjusting.
Conclusions:
Overall it would seem as though perhaps Auckland Transport CCO can be rescued from being rubbish, without doing away with it altogether. I wonder if any/many of these changes will end up happening.
How should we roll out Auckland’s rail expansion? How can we do it as cheaply as possible but ensure we get good quality and also maximum ridership?
Here is my proposal for expanding Auckland’s rail system, I’ve included diagrams of the lines that differ from the current plan, the expansion is in two phases, Phase 1:
The CBD tunnel, it is absolutely crucial for any further expansion, the reasons for it have been covered extensively on this site as well as others.
Cost: $1.5 billion
Construction: 2013 – 2020
Triple tracking of the Eastern Line and Southern Line (from Wiri to Onehunga).
Cost: $400 million
Construction: 2015 – 2020
Airport rail, I propose double tracking and extending the Onehunga Branch to the Airport with a depot near the airport.
Cost: $900 million
Construction: 2015 – 2020
South-Eastern Line, a new line from Glen Innes to Botany following the Te Irirangi Drive corridor toward Manukau (following the Saljen route) ending at a depot in Flat Bush, saving on an expensive tunnel under SH1 to Manukau.
Cost: $1.5 billion
Construction: 2020 – 2025
The Avondale-Southdown Line, built on it’s current alignment to save on an expensive tunnel next to SH20.
Cost: $700 million
Construction: 2020 – 2025
All up the cost of Phase 1 is $5 billion dollars, this is roughly what we are spending on motorways till 2015. Costs do not include the expenditure on EMUs, maintenance or the ongoing running of the system.
Spread over 15 years, the rollout also protects the skills being developed by the staff currently working on Project DART by ensuring projects are paired and a consistent level of work is available. At some point some serious work is going to be needed at Quay Park Junction and Onehunga Junction.
The second phase after 2025 is very expensive and involves a second CBD tunnel and rail over the shore, I will cover this in a later post. By 2025 the system will look like this:
You may be thinking there are some silly things I’ve done here, such not connecting the Airport to Manukau and South-Eastern line to Manukau but when I explain how the system will operate it should make more sense.
Basically I propose we shamelessly copy how the RER system operates in Paris, which I believe is the most efficient commuter railway on the planet, using mainly an only double tracked system. The RER uses a few simple principals to maximise its effectiveness. Almost all services are through routed, the main station in Paris has 500,000 commuters disembark an hour in peak hour on 6 platforms, they can manage this as most services continue on through, as a contrast Penn Station in New York is a terminal station and uses 21 platforms for 300,000 passengers. Secondly the RER pairs tracks. Thirdly all lines pass through the CBD (although Paris doesn’t have a CBD per se the lines all pass through key employment areas). I propose we do the same and operate the tracks in the following sets:
Airport Line with South Eastern
Eastern Line with Western Line (Eastern Terminating at Manukau)
Southern with Southern (around loop till future completion of North Shore Line)
Circle Line
Each line should have it’s own branding and operate independently of the others (with the exception of signalling of course). The system will look like this:
It’s goal is to be thrifty while ensuring freight routes as passenger train use increases and as high ridership potential as possible with the motto, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”.
I have been meaning to post this table for ages, because it shows us some quite interesting information on Auckland’s rail network. I’m not sure whether this is an average, or whether it’s just on one particular day, but it does provide us with some useful information. There are around 32,000 rail trips a day on the Auckland network (a 13% jump from 2008 to 2009). Assuming most people make two trips a day, this is around 16,000 people who catch trains on an average weekday in Auckland (not a lot I know, but it is increasing very quickly). Of those people, around 10,000 board or alight from the train at Britomart, around 60% of people using the rail network. A further 10% board or alight at Newmarket. While quite a few trips are between Britomart and Newmarket, these figures tend to suggest that around 30% of trips involve neither Britomart nor Newmarket – perhaps mainly school kids, those working in places like Henderson & New Lynn, or those going shopping?
Britomart is clearly the busiest station, followed by Newmarket, Papakura, Manurewa, New Lynn, Papatoetoe, Henderson and Middlemore (all stations with over 2,000 boardings/alightings per day). At the other end of the scale (excluding the closed Helensville service and Mangere which is only used by a couple of trains a day) the quietest stations are Waitakere, Te Mahia, Remuera, Westfield, Swanson, Penrose and Morningside (all stations with under 500 boardings/alightings per day).
I wonder how this table will look in a couple of years time, with the ProjectDART upgrades completed. I would suspect that Newmarket will increase fairly dramatically over the next while, same with New Lynn and Avondale. It’ll be interesting to see how the future stations in Manukau City and Onehunga fare. There’s an expectation that Manukau could be nearly as busy as Newmarket, but I think that’s hugely over-optimistic. I think Onehunga could be a bit of a surprise (if only ARTA gave it half-hourly off-peak frequencies!) and out-perform many expectations. It’ll also be interesting to see if the new Grafton Station is much more popular than the current Boston Road station.
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