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By admin, on July 26th, 2010 Today the Green Party launched a campaign to fast-track the CBD rail tunnel – a project which I consider to be Auckland’s most critical transport project in the next decade (now that electrification is happening). The CBD rail tunnel will achieve so much for Auckland, by doubling the capacity of Britomart, improving rail access to southern parts of the CBD, by making further expansion of the rail system possible and by providing a kick-start for the revitalisation of the central Auckland.
So I certainly 100% support this project being completed as soon as possible. Furthermore, while it seems that every local and regional politician in Auckland fully supports the project, the question of how it would be funded – and in particular the various transport policies that mean NZTA funds can’t be used – remains huge, and unanswered by central government. It is pretty obvious that Auckland, headed by whoever ends up being the new Mayor of the Super City, will need to mount one of the biggest campaigns yet seen to get the government to stump up with at least a reasonable amount of the necessary cash for the project (if the government is wondering where to find the money, I can suggest a low-performing project that if cancelled would free up all the money required).
It would seem as though the Green Party’s campaign launch today to “fast-track” this project is the first step in this wider campaign that will be necessary. And in that respect, I absolutely support it. However, I do have a lingering thought in my mind about whether this is necessarily the absolute best moment to run such a campaign, particularly in terms of aiming to get central government to view the project more favourably. The reason why I question the timing is because we are just a couple of months away from the current business case analysis into the CBD tunnel providing us with some preliminary results. This study will articulate, in great detail, what the cost of the project will be, what its benefits will be, and provide (hopefully) a sound justification for proceeding with the CBD tunnel. Then in December this year the business case study will be completed and we will have all the details, plus enough detailed documentation to actually start proceeding with securing the route for the project.
There seems to be a pretty good argument for holding off on the big push for the project until we know a lot more about it, as our arguments would be much stronger with a solid business case to back up what we’re saying. In particular, it would be useful to be able to compare the two business cases of the CBD rail tunnel and the holiday highway and have a debate over which of the two projects represents the best way to spend the $1.5 billion that both of them approximately cost. I suppose that my main worry is that when we have all this additional information and really want to push for the project there might be a bit of fatigue over the issue and it won’t be as effective as it need to be.
Alternatively I suppose that it’s possible for this launch to be just the start of things, and for a big push for the project to continue throughout the next few months, which would include the time where we know the results of the business case. I also recognise that it’s important for the project to be an issue in the Super City elections – so we have some idea of which politicians support the project (seemingly everyone) but perhaps more importantly which politicians are prepared to sacrifice something else in order to prioritise this project (a decidedly smaller group).
I suppose that all up I just wonder whether this well-meaning campaign is slightly jumping the gun in terms of its timing.
By admin, on July 26th, 2010 I remember someone once telling me that a significant problem with the “transport field” is that many of the experts start out their academic studies as civil engineers, and the first thing they study is stormwater. Now I have a great appreciation for stormwater engineers, as they make sure our cities don’t flood when it rains, but ultimately it’s fairly logical stuff: x amount of rain falls and you need to get rid of it without flooding the place and without polluting the environment. There are some reasonably simple calculations to make: what will the demand on the stormwater system be (ie. how much rain will fall) and what will the supply of the system be (how wide do the pipes need to be to get rid of all the water).
Inevitably, when engineers move on from studying stormwater to studying traffic, they often seem to end up thinking of vehicles passing along roads in exactly the same way that they think of stormwater rushing through pipes. There’s a certain level of demand (the number of vehicles passing through the system) and a level of supply (the number of lanes, whether it’s grade separated, intersection capacities and so forth). If you’re a road engineer then life is all about trying to ensure the level of road supply is greater than the level of road demand, as otherwise you end up with congestion.
Reading through the documentation behind a proposed upgrade to the intersection of East Tamaki Road, Preston Road and Ormiston Road in Manukau City, I found a perfect example of how road engineers continue to think of people like we are mindless stormwater. The project to simplify the currently complex intersection probably makes quite a lot of sense, as the current intersection is a damn mess and the proposal would simplify that significantly.
Current situation: Proposal:
However, in analysing the scheme assessment report I found myself getting a little bit suspicious of the level of anticipated benefit when I saw that the cost-benefit ratio of the project was supposedly 8.0!
Delving into the way that this cost-benefit analysis was undertaken provides some quite useful information that perhaps goes a long way towards explaining why roading projects always seem to promise huge time savings benefits that never seem to materialise (or only materialise for a very short period of time before induced demand eats them up).
What time savings benefit analyses for roading projects tend to do is not actually compare the situation as it is now with the situation that will exist in 20 or so years, but instead compare an expected do nothing outcome with an expected do the project outcome in 20 or so years. Now obviously that makes sense in a general sense, as you may well be justifying your project in terms of how it answers the question “what difference will this project make in 20 years time?”, but what it does mean – to put it a tad crudely – is that you’re actually comparing one guess with another guess. And it is actually the “expected do nothing outcome” that I think we’re probably measuring very poorly at the moment, leading to an over-estimation of the time savings benefits that roading projects are expected to bring.
This issue is highlighted in the do nothing analyses for this East Tamaki/Ormiston/Preston project, which I have included a table of the “expected situations” in future years if the project doesn’t happen:
Looking at this data, one’s first response is likely to be “well crikey if we don’t do the project look how terribly congested and slow this intersection will be by 2031!” And, taking the modelled results without question, yes that certainly appears to be the case. Passing through the East Tamaki Road/Preston intersection in 2031 will apparently take you nearly six minutes during the morning peak, compared to just over one minute now. Similarly for the Ormiston Road/Preston intersection, it will supposedly take you just over two and a half minutes to pass through this intersection in 2031 during the AM peak, compared to 70 seconds now. Average speeds will supposedly decline from around 30 kph to around 6 kph.
The next step in working out the benefits of the project is to model what will happen in 2031 with the upgrade, and then compare the two. Here’s similar data for the new intersection: While congestion still goes up, it is not nearly as bad as in the “do nothing” situation. The difference between the two situations is aggregated, a cost allocated to every saved minute, and voila, we have a significant amount of “time savings benefits” that are used to justify the project. Here’s the table showing the outcome of the assessment:
As the project only costs around $6 million, its cost-effectiveness is pretty whopping according to this assessment, and therefore it is seen as a priority to fund.
However, getting back to where I started this post, does anyone else see a problem here? The question I am interested in answering is whether, once the existing situation started getting worse than it is now, people would continue to pile into using that particular intersection, or whether they would start seeking alternatives – like going another way, catching the bus (if there was one that wasn’t affected by this congestion) cycling, walking or simply not taking that trip. Now obviously there would be some level of economic disbenefit from people not being able to make these trips, or having to go a more non-direct way in order to avoid the congestion of this intersection – but shouldn’t that actually be what we’re measuring to determine the cost-effectiveness of the project, rather than some mythical “congestion armageddon” that will clearly not happen.
This is where we get back to road engineers thinking that people are like stormwater. If this intersection were just a low capacity pipe, and it started to rain, then of course the water would continue to keep piling up. But people are not stormwater. People will be put off taking trips, people will choose alternative routes, people will choose alternative modes (if they exist and have a speed/convenience advantage) and so forth.
I actually think that the “20 minute savings” promise that NZTA’s CEO went on about at yesterday’s opening of the duplicated Mangere Bridge makes this same mistake. It expects that people will continue to keep piling onto the bridge no matter how badly it is congested. It is this misunderstanding, or ignorance, of the fact that congestion will put people off using that stretch of road, that I think significantly contributes to the over-estimation of time-savings benefits for our roading projects. This inevitably ends up being made worse by politicians who pick up on the mentioning of a “time saving” and assume it’s the difference between the road as it operates now and how it will operate when the project finishes. In actual fact, it’s a comparison between a ‘congestion armageddon” in 20 years time that will clearly not happen, and how the road will (supposedly) operate once completed – a calculation which inevitably ignores induced demand.
In other words, it’s usually total rubbish – because people are not stormwater. We’re people.
By admin, on July 25th, 2010 An NZ Herald article notes that the Mangere Bridge was formally opened earlier today, by the Minister of Transport. Here’s an extract:
Motorists in Auckland are set to benefit from reduced journey times to and from the airport after the new duplicate Mangere Bridge across Manukau Harbour was officially opened today.
The New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) and the Manukau Harbour Crossing Alliance completed construction of the 650 metre-long bridge seven months ahead of schedule.
People were given the chance to walk and cycle the new bridge today before it opens to motorway traffic.
The $230 million project, together with the existing bridge which opened in 1983, increases capacity on the Southwestern Motorway (State Highway 20) to 10 lanes across the Manukau Harbour – with eight lanes for general traffic on the bridges and two shoulder lanes for buses.
Ah well at least the bus lanes mean there might be some benefit for public transport users.
The benefits of the project were trumpeted by NZTA Chief Executive Geoff Dangerfield:
The duplicate bridge is on one of the country’s most important routes, NZTA chief executive Geoff Dangerfield said.
“The additional traffic and bus lanes will reduce congestion, and shorten travel times for commuters, visitors and exporters who depend on travel reliability to get to the airport.
“Time savings of up to 20 minutes are expected for journeys between the CBD and the airport at peak,” he said.
The duplicate bridge has a fourth southbound lane dedicated to local traffic between the communities of Onehunga and Mangere Bridge. The existing bridge beside it will be refurbished to carry four northbound lanes.
I’ve underlined what I think is the most important bit here. NZTA reckon there will be a 20 minute benefit for people travelling between the CBD and the Airport at peak times just because the motorway has been widened by a few lanes? Crikey, if the benefits are that great then one wonders why we’re even bothering with the Waterview Connection. That project is being justified on the basis that it’ll save people 15 minutes off a trip between the Airport and the CBD. Any more motorway projects to speed up this trip and driving sounds like it’ll be about as fast as teleporting from the city out to the airport.
But being serious here, this “20 minute savings claim” make me think very much of a post I did a few weeks back questioning the veracity of these “time savings benefits”. I’ll re-post my concluding paragraph:
What I think we need to measure is the ability of a project to “increase the number of people within “x” minutes of “y” location” (ie. measure the number of people whose accessibility has been enhanced), rather than hope that a particular project will save a certain number of minutes off travel time, and then measure those minutes. We must take into account induced demand: both in terms of triple-convergence, but also in terms of longer-term changes such as whether the project is inducing people to travel further, or whether it’s encouraging land-use patterns that will eat away at the project’s benefits over time. I think it is only then that we’ll be able to truly measure the benefits of our transport investment accurately, and I think such a change could throw up some interesting results.
There may well be an advantage of having a greater number of people within a 30 minute drive of the airport, for example, as a result of this project. But if that’s the case then that’s what we should and must measure. It won’t sound quite as “sexy” as a claim that “this project will save you 20 minutes off a peak time trip”, but it will actually be true.
I fully expect that within a few years the Mangere Bridge will become just as congested as it is now with four lanes. Mark my words, motorway widening has never fixed congestion before so I don’t see any reason why it would start fixing congestion now.
By admin, on July 25th, 2010 The Roads of National Significance (RoNS) have somehow managed to force their way into being the forefront of transport investment in New Zealand over the next decade, with a huge amount of the $10.7 billion anticipated to be spent on state highways over that period going into these seven roads. It’s a pretty incredible concentration of transport spending, so you would hope that the economic justification for concentrating the spend would be pretty sound. As I have explained in the past, for at least one of these roads (the Puhoi-Wellsford holiday highway) the justification is decidedly dodgy.
To put the economic justification of the roads of national significance to some level of “test”, NZTA have commissioned some further research into looking at the projects as a whole, and seeing whether it makes sense to be spending such a huge amount of money on them. The result is this study by Australian company SAHA. The entire study is a pretty hefty 166 pages long, but there is some useful information in there if you have a good dig. Here’s what it sets out to do: It’s useful to note that the report doesn’t actually reassess the cost-benefit analyses undertaken by NZTA for the various RoNS, but just packages them all together to see whether the concept, as a whole, makes economic sense. This means that all the problems with the business case for the holiday highway that I have highlighted previously are carried through into this study – but I’ll get back to that point later.
One matter that I’m quite curious about is the issue of “wider economic benefits”, which I think could be a significant justification for transport projects if they’re measured accurately, but around which there seems to be quite a bit of debate at the moment. The study doesn’t exactly settle that debate either in terms of what it says about the “WEBs”. In my opinion it’s certainly useful to consider the wider economic benefits of projects, but I’ll actually take the results with a grain of salt for now, as for example with the Puhoi-Wellsford road – SKM in a 2008 report were saying that the wider benefits would be pretty insignificant, but by 2009 they were saying that the wider benefits of the road were huge. Until we actually get some consistency it would seem as though WEBs may just be a tool to get around a business case that doesn’t quite stack up the way one would hope it did.
Overall the SAHA report states that the RoNS project – in its entirety – represents an investment that will generate around $1.80 in returns for every dollars spent, so therefore could be justified (at least to the extent that it won’t lose money). Here are the conclusions: Now before road-fans start jumping around saying “aha, I told you the RoNS were worth doing!” There are two matters that need to be considered. The first is the question of whether all the cost-benefit analyses for the RoNS are as dodgy as the Puhoi-Wellsford one, which honestly I don’t know the answer to because I haven’t gone through them with a fine tooth comb. The second issue is the question of whether under-performing parts of the “RoNS project” are having their lack of cost-effectiveness hidden by other projects that do perform particularly well. Or in other words, is the poor cost-effectiveness of projects such as the holiday highway and transmission gully being hidden by the good cost-effectiveness of projects like the Victoria Park Tunnel and the Christchurch motorways.
It is on this second issue where the SAHA report provides some useful answers, in the form of a series of graphs that have been terribly reproduced in the report (deliberate?), but can still be vaguely read and understood. In the graph above (it’s a particular pity that the dollar figures on the left hand side were chopped off in the final version of the report) green shows the conventional transport benefits, blue shows the wider economic benefits that include employment benefits and purple shows the wider economic benefits excluding employment benefits. Perhaps the most interesting thing though is the comparison of the different projects with each other – and the particular lack of benefit that the Puhoi-Wellsford road has compared to the others.
This clear low level of benefit is quite surprising when you consider that the cost of the Puhoi-Wellsford project (around $1.6 billion) is four times the amount of the Victoria Park tunnel, but its amount of transport benefit appears to be around a quarter of the VPT’s. I may not be an economist, but that seems to show that the Vic Park Tunnel is around 16 times more cost-effective than the holiday highway. In fact, no other road of national significance has benefits as minuscule as the Puhoi-Wellsford road.
In fact, even in the super-ultra optimistic analysis of all the projects’ wider economic benefits, the holiday highway still shows up as the clear loser from all the different projects in terms of its sheer lack of benefits: What this clearly shows is that some of the RoNS have significant traditional benefits, particularly the Western Ring Route and the Victoria Park Tunnel. The amount of wider economic benefits for each project appears highly variable, depending upon the model used to formulate them, and therefore should be taken with a significantly large grain of salt – but that probably these two projects make economic sense (whether or not the State Highway 16 part of the Western Ring Route project’s cost-benefit analysis makes economic sense is a completely different story though). Other projects may well also make sense, but honestly I don’t know enough about them to say that either way.
But perhaps the clearest thing that the report tells us is that the Puhoi-Wellsford road will not bring significant benefits – either in terms of traditional transport benefits or in terms of wider economic benefits (even if we take the super optimistic estimate of its wider economic benefits). In fact, its total amount of benefit appears pretty tiny, even against the Victoria Park Tunnel project: which is around one quarter of the holiday’s highway’s price tag. There’s just absolutely no possible way that the holiday highway makes good economic sense – even a report that supports the RoNS as a whole seems to agree on this matter!
By admin, on July 24th, 2010 Jarrett at Humantransit.org has an interesting post about how public transport has developed in Los Angeles, and continues to develop, over the past decade or so. His post is based on a Los Angeles Times article which claims that it would have been smarter to invest money in making buses cheaper and getting more of them on the road, than it would have been to construct the rail improvements in LA over the past decade or two.
What the argument appears to come down to is whether a rail system will attract riders who simply wouldn’t use the bus – a perception issue that people only catch the bus because they have to (generally because they don’t own a car), while people will choose to take the train over driving. This argument is perhaps most usefully put forward in one of the comments to Jarrett’s post:
I’ll take this opportunity to repeat a statistic I heard: 75% of bus riders don’t have a driver’s license, while only 40% of rail riders can’t drive. Basically, there are two groups of transit riders here: those who take the bus because they have no choice, and those who have weighed the options and prefer transit to driving. The problem with a massive bus network is that buses are slow (generally 2.5 times slower than driving), and even dedicated bus lanes on surface have a hard time competing with freeways, while a subway has fast enough average speed that it’s actually faster than driving on local streets, and reasonably competitive with freeways. Bus ridership in Central LA is not limited by the fact that buses aren’t frequent enough, or not cheap enough, but by the fact that they’re just not fast enough. Rail gives you both speed and capacity, which frees up more money for buses, and the combination of rail and bus is often much more effective than bus alone.
Who knows whether these statistics are the same in Auckland, but there’s a chance that there would be some similarities. However, I think a good question needs to be asked about whether this is actually a debate between buses and trains or is it a debate between public transport on one side with “priority measures” such as being completely off-road (trains and the busway) or having priority in the form of bus lanes; and public transport on the other side that runs in traffic without any priority and therefore by definition cannot be faster than driving the same distance (and in fact will always be slower because it has to pick up passengers, usually takes a long-winded and indirect route and often has low frequencies meaning you have to wait for ages).
Jarrett reckons it is the latter – that what’s important here is not necessarily whether it’s a bus or a train, but how fast it goes, how frequent it is and how comfortable the ride is:
Implicit in that argument, subtly but inescapably, is the suggestion that there is a large category of “rail riders” who are only using the rail system to the extent that they can complete their trip on rail. That’s a difficult assertion to test. But the crush-loads on the Orange Line — a Bus Rapid Transit line presented as part of the mostly-rail rapid transit network — suggest that a clear and interconnected rapid transit system will attract plenty of riders regardless of whether it’s on rails or tires. Local bus system ridership is still very heavy all across central Los Angeles. Would it be higher with more service, quite possibly. But if you really want a transformative boost in transit ridership, the single most effective thing you could do can be done entirely with paint and signs: converting traffic lanes to bus lanes.
During the 1980s, rail-boosters often said things like: “Los Angeles is a great world-class city, every bit the peer of Paris or New York. Those cities have rail transit networks, so we need one too.” Well, if you’re going to admire and imitate Paris and New York, then you should know that Paris now has bus lanes on practically every boulevard, all created, at the expense of general traffic lanes, in the last two decades, and that New York is doing them too, not just across outer boroughs but on two of the busiest avenues in Manhattan.
Similarly to what appears to have happened with the Orange Line in LA, the Northern Busway here in Auckland has shown that the distinction between a bus or a train is far less relevant in attracting riders than issues like speed, frequency, convenience and comfort. Of course in many situations to achieve that outcome will require a train – particularly because of capacity issues (and because I can’t see people complaining about not being allowed to drive more than 50 metres down a railway track), but if we really want public transport patronage to increase through attracting riders who would otherwise be driving (and the economic benefits of doing this are huge) then following the lead of cities like New York and Paris by focusing on priority measures, can probably give us the biggest results for a fairly low cost.
So I don’t actually agree with the claims that simply “putting more buses on the road” is the answer to improving public transport ridership. I had this argument once with a board member of one of our public transport operators once – debating whether the money being put into integrated ticketing would have been better off invested in simply more buses (which was his argument). My counter-argument was that having more empty buses on the road was utterly pointless, and what we needed to do instead was improve the quality of the public transport available: through integrated ticketing, through more bus lanes and through a better route structure.
Let’s hope the new Transport CCO can do a better job at selling the benefits of bus lanes than the half-hearted efforts of Auckland City Council – including making sure people know exactly when they can and cannot be driving in those lanes.
By admin, on July 23rd, 2010 I’ve got hold of an interesting Ministry of Transport paper on the CBD rail tunnel and also the future Airport railway link. It provides a useful over view of what progress has been made on the CBD rail tunnel project in particular over the past few years – and also what has actually brought the project “onto the radar” in an official sense. While the project has been on the books since the 1920s (or perhaps even earlier), in its current form the idea seems to appear in the late 1990s: I hadn’t quite appreciated the sheer number of studies into the CBD rail tunnel that have occurred within the last few years. It’s also interesting to see that a very preliminary business case analysis showed a benefit to cost ratio of greater than 1, even without wider economic benefits included. I look forward to seeing how the current business case study compares to this previous one.
The paper also looks at the question of who has prioritised the project, and where it fits within Auckland’s official long-term transport plans: The importance of the RLTS prioritising the CBD rail tunnel is particularly interesting when you consider that it was a number of relatively last minute changes to that strategy which led to it becoming such a key part of Auckland’s transport future.
Funding options for the CBD tunnel were also considered: The fact that NZTA are unable, due to policy decisions, to fund at least part of the capital cost of this project is a huge barrier to it ever being constructed. That is because NZTA is the only agency out there with anywhere near the amount of available funds to make this happen. The problem is that they’re too busy spending that money on loss-making highway projects.
There’s also quite a lot of further information on the Airport Line, but I’ll leave that to a future post.
By admin, on July 23rd, 2010 I knew I could trust Herald columnist Brian Rudman to insert a bit of sanity back into the bus lanes issue that has been all over the newspaper this week. Here’s part of his article in today’s paper.
Auckland City councillor Greg Moyle’s grumpiness at being ticketed $150 for trespassing on a Symonds St bus lane is understandable. But he should be kicking himself for breaking the law, not denouncing his own organisation for “revenue gathering”. After all, he is part of the council that highlighted the $43 million central bus corridor between Britomart and Newmarket as a key part of its transport policy…
…Mr Moyle misses the point in saying he was driving safely. That’s not the issue. Creating a dedicated bus lane is about providing an uncongested, car-free busway, that allows mass transit vehicles to zap large numbers of citizens about the city according to a set timetable…
…The reason for the burgeoning passenger numbers on Auckland rail is the increased regularity and speed of the service. With electrification and new rolling stock, this explosion in patronage will continue. Bus lanes are road-based public transport’s answer to double-tracking and electrification in one. But to match rail’s new popularity, they need to be car-free, so buses can keep to their timetables, and provide regular, reliable and swift service around the city.
If motorists are so envious of the unclogged bus lane they keep straying into, there’s a simple solution. Catch a bus. I promise it won’t cost $150 a trip. From Mr Moyle’s place it’s just $1.70.
Rudman nails the point about how critical bus lanes are to shifting people more efficiently and effectively around the city, and how while it seems that the lane is empty and under-used, if everyone could flood into it then all the benefits of the bus priority would disappear. I used to catch buses up Symonds Street before the lanes went in, and it could take half an hour for the bus to get from the city to the top of the road – an absolutely outrageous length of time.
I think what has become clear is that there are actually two issue here: the first being about whether bus lanes are a good idea in general and the second being whether something can be done to improve the signage over where you can and cannot enter a bus lane.
Personally, I think that the signage issue is overblown, and that if you’re uncertain you should just err on the side of caution and cut in at 20 metres. Rudman agrees that 50 metres is being pretty generous, as it’s a bus lane, not a turning lane. But if those are the rules then we should at least make it easier for people to understand them – and some sort of marking 50 metres back from intersections at problematic points of the road would achieve that. Furthermore, if you make the signage as clear as anything then you actually take away the opportunity for people to moan about it. Of course, clearer signage means fewer people breaking the rules, which means less revenue for council – so perhaps that’s what holds them back. But I’d ideally like to see no revenue for council from bus lanes because I’d like to see nobody breaking the rules.
By admin, on July 22nd, 2010 NZTA reports that as part of the Victoria Park Tunnel works, they will need to close the Wellington Street onramp between Monday 23 August and the end of November. Here’s the press-release:
On-ramp closure as Vic Park tunnel construction accelerates
21 Jul 2010 | Auckland Regional Office
Construction of the Victoria Park motorway tunnel in central Auckland is reaching a critical stage, and the NZ Transport Agency is advising motorists that the Wellington Street on-ramp will be closed for approximately three months so that supporting walls for the southern approach to the tunnel can be built.
The on-ramp – which provides access from the Auckland CBD and Ponsonby to State Highway 1 for traffic heading north across the Auckland Harbour Bridge – will close on Monday, 23 August. The NZTA says it plans to have it re-opened at the end of November.
“We plan to get in there, get the work done, and be gone as quickly as possible to avoid potential impacts on the transport network over the Christmas rush,” says the NZTA’s State Highways Manager for Auckland, Tommy Parker.
Mr Parker adds that the temporary closure – which will be backed by an extensive communications campaign to keep drivers informed – is the best and safest option for drivers and project workers.
“The only viable alternative is to do the work at weekends only, which would require closing the on-ramp for 40 consecutive weekends,” he adds. “The three month closure is the least fuss, most gain option.”
The proximity of the work to live motorway lanes means the walls can be built safely only with the on-ramp closed, and Mr Parker says the decision to temporarily close Wellington Street follows six months of planning and consultation,
“Construction of the tunnel reached a milestone earlier this week with the completion of the tunnel walls within Victoria Park, and it is now critical to progress tunnel construction outside the park to avoid impacts on the traffic network at the time of the Rugby World Cup,” he adds.
The Victoria Park Tunnel project is one of the seven roads of national significance and construction of the 450 metre-long tunnel will eliminate the last serious traffic bottleneck on the central motorway junction between the Auckland Harbour Bridge and the Newmarket Viaduct.
The motorway between the Wellington Street overbridge and Victoria Park is being widened from four to seven lanes. The tunnel will take three northbound traffic lanes, and the existing Victoria Park viaduct will be reconfigured to carry four southbound lanes. SH1 through St Marys Bay is being widened by one lane in each direction to 10 lanes in total.
Mr Parker says drivers most affected by the Wellington Street closure are people from the North Shore who work in the CBD and drive home between 4pm and 6pm. The NZTA will start its communications campaign on 1 August to ensure they have alternative choices to get home.
“Once on the motorway commuters will get an improved run because there will be no traffic merging from Wellington Street.”
The NZTA will promote commuting options through advertising, billboards, posters and a website being established for the three-month closure.
“Building a new section of motorway through the centre of a city is a challenging project,” says Mr Parker. “We will be doing everything we can to minimise disruption and delay.”
Interestingly enough, when the Wellington Street onramp was built (around 35 years ago I think) it was supposed to be a temporary onramp while other works to the central motorways were completed. While the onramp is reasonably well used, I wonder whether there’s actually a case to monitor what this does to traffic flows in general, and think about keeping it closed for good.
The reason why I think closing the ramp for good might make some sense is that it currently encourages a lot of traffic to pass through Union Street, which is an absolutely nightmare area with intersections with many onramps, off-ramps and so forth. While I understand that closing the ramp would mean more traffic on Fanshawe Street, the fact that the mess in the “upper” part of the CBD has been removed might well make that worth it. As Mr Parker says, it’s certainly likely to improve traffic flows on the motorway.
One possible negative is that more people could be encouraged to drive along Ponsonby Road to access the Curran Street onramp, and it’s already a problem that Ponsonby Road is so busy with cars when it really should be more of a pedestrian area.
I just wonder whether NZTA has ever looked at solving both these problems (all the traffic encouraged to Union Street and to Ponsonby Road), by linking up Newton Road with a north-facing ramp. I always thought it would be impossible, but looking at the aerial it might actually be quite simple to link in with the current SH16-SH1 northbound ramp, as shown in the map below: Such a ramp would actually be damn useful in reducing the amount of traffic in that upper CBD area: places like K Road, Pitt Street, Union Street and so forth – and also would probably reduce traffic travelling along Ponsonby Road to get to the Curran Street onramp I think.
By admin, on July 22nd, 2010 As I noted in yesterday’s post, NZTA has been undertaking a significant amount of work into finding out ways to get “better value” out of public transport investment. As I also noted yesterday, NZTA currently gets around $4.40 worth of road user benefits for each dollar they spend on subsidising public transport in Auckland, so they’re actually doing pretty well at the moment. But if there are other ways to efficiently improve the delivery of public transport, obviously they should be looked at – and it’s interesting to see what ideas have come out of this project.
They’re summarised in the diagram below:
There’s some good stuff being said here, like the need for simplified fares and ticketing, and the need for a zone based fare system (as an aside, ARTA had better be wording on a zone based fare system that will be rolled out with integrated ticketing). References to the need to focus on a more integrated approach to public transport network planning is also good, while the idea of a “demonstration project” in each city sounds quite exciting. Other things, like improved customer service, probably have some value (I have noticed that bus drivers seem a lot friendlier these days) but in the future we’re likely to be interacting with drivers less frequently, so that might not be as important as other things.
Let’s have a look at some of the details of what’s in these boxes. Starting with improved customer experience, some of the statistics in the section below are quite fascinating – particularly the potential economic benefits of increasing public transport use: So 10% more people using public transport in Auckland would next to an (annual?) benefit to Auckland of over $80 million. That’s a useful number to store in the memory bank. It’s also further confirmation of the significant economic benefits that are brought about by getting people out of their cars and onto public transport. I’d be curious to know what percentage of that $85 million would be benefits to road users.
What is said about integrated networks is perhaps the most interesting thing of the lot, and links in a lot with what I have said previously about “The Network Effect“, which was also the subject of a fairly recent NZTA research report – which public transport academic Paul Mees contributed significantly to. It also has some very interesting statistics regarding the effectiveness of the Northern Busway:
 If NZTA are really thinking about how the network effect could be applied in New Zealand, and most particularly in Auckland, then that’s very very good news. While the cost-effectiveness of subsidising public transport in general remains excellent (as outlined in yesterday’s post), over the past 10 years there has been a lot of “adding services” without necessary too much thought going in to the structure of our services – with the result being the incredibly messy route structures that we have. The “network effect” seeks to clean all that up, create a grid public transport network and to base the system around transfers rather than around avoiding transfers. International evidence shows that this works spectacularly well.
Another interesting key issue identified by this effectiveness project is what NZTA has termed the need to strengthen leadership, but what I would probably call the need for everyone to bloody work together for once. The last sentence here is the key one, that what we really need is for the different operators to start focusing on growing the public transport market, rather than just focusing on protecting their little bit of that market. Now this was the point of the public transport management act, to give ARTA a lot more powers to make this happen. I’m not sure whether NZTA has been informed of the Minister’s intentions to ruin that legislation.
There’s quite a lot of further information that I will probably get around to blogging on in the future, but it is quite good to see that some of the thinking going on behind the scenes actually makes sense, and is focused on the very issues that I often talk about on here – the need to simplify and integrate, and also the tremendous economic benefits that can arise from increasing the number of people using public transport.
By admin, on July 21st, 2010 One of the common excuses for why public transport supposedly “won’t work in Auckland” and why we need to continue to plow money into motorways, is that Auckland is supposedly “too low density” for public transport. In fact, aspiring Auckland Super City Mayor John Banks went so far as to say that Auckland was the “second most spread out city in the world” (after Los Angeles) in a Guest Post on Aucklandtrains. He used this “fact” to justify why Auckland needs to “compete its motorway network” as quickly as possible.
But is this true? How does Auckland’s population density compare with other cities around the world? How does its land area compare with cities in Australia and the USA – for example? Is Auckland anywhere near the second most spread out city in the world? What about Los Angeles?
Fortunately, Demographia (who I am often quite sceptical about when it comes to planning matters, but who seem to have a reasonably good grasp of this issue) have undertaken an enormously in depth study into city sizes, city population and population densities. Perhaps what is most interesting about their work is how they calculate where each urban area begins and ends – which actually fits together quite nicely with how I tend to think of the issue: I like the idea that we’re not measuring “bits of cities”, such as simply the inner part of the New York urban area – which of course has very high densities but isn’t just what New York is made up of.
For a start, I suppose that it makes sense to look at what the biggest cities in the world are by population – here are the top 20: Auckland doesn’t even make it into the top 200, which roughly corresponds with the number of cities in the world with more than 2 million people.
The next thing that’s very interesting to look at is the physical size of cities in the world – which of these urban areas covers the most space. I remember as a kid hearing that Auckland was physically the same size as London, but is that true?
 Well according to the table above, the Auckland urban area was 531 square kilometres in size, making it about a third the size of London. Also interesting to note that Auckland’s about half the size of Perth, and less than a third of the size of the Brisbane metropolitan area. At the top of the list, we see that the New York metropolitan area is the biggest built-up urban area in the world, by size, followed by Tokyo. The New York metropolitan area is about 22 times the physical size of Auckland. By size, Auckland is actually the 181st largest city in the world.
Turning to population density, it is really interesting to see how Auckland compares with other cities in Australia and the USA. Most of the really high density cities in the world are in developing nations, which shows why Auckland and many other large and well known cities end up ranked so low. Yet we still see that Auckland’s population density is a bit higher than Sydney’s and significantly higher than all the other major cities in Australia. Interestingly enough though, one city that has a higher population density than Auckland is Los Angeles. In fact, Los Angeles has the highest density of any city in the USA – not because it has a really dense core like New York does, but because throughout Los Angeles the lot sizes are generally pretty small, a similar situation to what we have in Auckland.
So what does all of this mean? Well for one it shows that any time someone says “Auckland’s population density is too low for public transport to work” you can absolutely say that they’re talking rubbish. It also probably means that simple population density isn’t necessarily the ultimate defining issue about whether a city’s urban form is suitable for public transport or not. The way in which that population density is structured (small lots evenly spread throughout the city or higher and lower density nodes) might matter more, the concentration of jobs in certain areas might also make more of a difference (although remember that Vancouver has a lower percentage of jobs in its CBD than Auckland).
Ultimately, what this all probably means is that the popularity of public transport is likely to be based more on the quality of the system than it is on the urban form of the city. Sure, there are many things we can and must do to structure our city more efficiently and sustainably, but let’s stop making the excuse that Auckland is too spread out for public transport to work. Because, as the above tables show, that’s complete rubbish.
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