An article in yesterday’s Herald highlighted a few of the worst spots across Auckland when it comes to congestion:
The section of the Southern Motorway which merges with the Ellerslie Panmure Highway is the most likely to suffer traffic delays, according to a traffic monitoring company.
The SUNA Traffic Channel analysis of major metropolitan roads also revealed the top six worst areas in New Zealand were in Auckland.
The company took speed and vehicle data from thousands of probe vehicles earlier this year to make the assessment.
The Southern Motorway’s South Eastern Highway exit was the country’s second most problematic.
The Great North Rd and Rosebank Rd exits on the Northwestern Motorway and the Tristram Ave and Constellation Drive exits on the Northern Motorway also suffered delays.
I’m not surprised that this section of the Southern Motorway comes up as the worst spot on the network. It’s not just the severity of congestion at this point which is a problem, but also the extent of the congestion timewise. It’s often stuffed on a Saturday, quite early in the afternoon, well after/before peak hours and so on.
The congestion, particularly northbound, seems to be caused by too many vehicles entering the Southern Motorway within a pretty short distance. Northbound merging onramps from the Southeast Highway (around 18,000 vehicles per day) and the Ellerslie-Panmure Highway (around 12,000 vehicles per day) really just dump too many vehicles onto the motorway within a short period of time for it to cope.
Interestingly though, the number of vehicles per day on this section of motorway has been steadily decreasing since 2007:
Data from here.
Despite the falling traffic volumes, NZTA still has a project in place to widen the section of northbound motorway between Ellerslie-Panmure and Greenlane, as noted in the article:
The NZ Transport Authority’s regional traffic manager, Kathryn Musgrave, said the agency had introduced a number of significant changes to ease congestion.
These included plans for an additional fourth northbound lane on the Southern Motorway from the Ellerslie Panmure onramp through to Greenlane.
I can probably live with such a project, as it seems there’s still a big problem even if volumes aren’t growing anymore. The real question is whether small, seemingly desperately required, state highway projects such as this one can still get funded when most of the budget is going on the Roads of National Significance along stretches of road with less than 10% of this section of motorway.
Widening, widening, widening, yes just what the city needs.
Isn’t that stretch of motorway one with an underutlilised rail line running right next to it? Spend the money on that. Widening will just move the congestion somewhere else. We’ve been here before, surely?
Would be really nice if they actually added a southbound on ramp from the South Eastern at the same time.
In terms of the railway line if they actually opened up access to the Syliva Park station from Carbine road and also had a park and ride I think you’d see a dramatic rise in patronage.
Like the above commenters, I too am concerned with the question “If we widen this piece of motorway, where will we shift the chokepoint to?” – would this project immediately kick off a “need” to widen past Market Rd? Then the northbound Viaduct, which has only just been rebuilt? Then the southern end of the CMJ, again? Then there’s induced demand.
Speaking for myself, I have suppliers in that area and make sure I time trips there mid-morning or get things couriered out so I can avoid that traffic. Or, if it suited and the supplies needed are small, I have caught a bus in there from home and a train onward. If they widened the motorway, I’d be less inclined to plan those mitigating measures and would be more likely to go in anytime – that’s induced demand right there. The present congestion has me manage my own demand for going into the area.
I hope all they do is complete the slip lane, and then leave it well alone.
Oh and the SE arterial to Southern Motorway onramp truck and transit lane seriously needs enforcement. I sometimes find myself in the ramp signal queue and watching a steady stream of single-occupant cars and vans using the T2/truck lane. It can be infuriating.
I’ve seen a large truck trailer on the motorway from further south cut across the triangle median/island and the on-ramp to get onto the end of the T2, jump in front of 10 or so cars in rush hour before merging back in. Professional.
I’ve driven a few times on motorways recently and seen plenty of other antics besides the usual tail-gating:
A Building Worx van overtake a number of cars queued in the on-ramp down the shoulder lane
A car driver overtake cars at about 70 or so in heavy traffic on the motorway shoulder
A plumber go more than 1km down shoulder to overtake cars and take off-ramp
This is completely impatient and reckless use of the roads. What has happened to NZ drivers – this is third world behaviour. And as always, where are the cops when you need them?
That piece of road has been like that since I was working there 10 years ago. The added lane, which will allow people to merge more easily, should work well.
Yes in a simple cost/benefit sense, especially if that benefit is measured as number of vehicles carried and because it is relatively inexpensive, the addition of a lane here will be clearly ahead of Joyce’s dream schemes. And perhaps it may take some traffic from Great South Road between Penrose and Greenlane, but I doubt it.
What these constant increases in motorway width do though is move the traffic to each pinch point more efficiently, while reinforcing driving as the only movement option, building a ‘dash and stop’ rhythm to SH1, a very poor dynamic to any flowing system. This encourages multiple entering and exiting the network in attempts to find that clever way through. A sort of Auckland driving knowledge game that some take to a high level of sophistication. In short; more driving. This is literally attempting to deal with obesity by buying bigger pants.
Along with being a hopeless way to address the whole system’s problems [the patient still suffers the disease] and yet another indication of how stupid it is that NZTA are only allowed to build roadspace to reach its outcomes [cannot, under current rules, fund rail infrastructure], it is also a very high stakes game with regard to the CMJ.
The CMJ, especially northbound SH1 is at capacity, so is it really clever to ease the ‘belt’ on the SHs suppling this singularity in Auckland’s movement design? Too many eggs in this basket.
The completion of the Western Ring Road will see more traffic there, but will it relieve the CMJ as NZTA are banking on, or also deliver tides of vehicles more suddenly down SH16?
Regardless of whether total numbers of journeys are increasing [they aren't] these widening programmes still are likely to make congestion events more extreme by concentrating them. So unless the plan is to widen every motorway for ever [neither physically possible nor desirable] it can only increase the experience of congestion and frustration of drivers.
Or, of course, we could focus our resources on an already existing but incomplete complementary network, join it up and make it efficient and appealing, as the best way to relieve pressure on the existing and vital motorway system…..
The motorway is already 4 lanes immediately north of the proposed widening so it doesn’t really add capacity, instead just removing a pinch point and eliminating a merge.
Well this one is not bad in it self but the whole approach is, and the cumulative effect on the CMJ is shortsighted. NZTA admit it, their claims for success are very short term.
This is an excellent plan that will provide good value for money. The north-bound slip lane already starts, stops, then starts again so only about 600-700m is required to complete it. The NAL has already been moved over (during the Easter block I think it was) so there are no physical constraints.
The existing slip lane from Greenlane to Market Rd works well, and the newer one from St Marks Rd south to Greenlane is brilliant. One thing that Kiwi drivers are particular poor at is merging, so anything that eases this is a bonus.
This has to be one of the worst examples of Motorway design in Auckland, and the site of numerous crashes. Just last week my car (and three others) was written off in a crash which was caused by a car trying to merge too quickly from the South Eastern Highway – the driver then did a runner!. Since then I have seen 3 other crashes at the same spot. Half the problem is driver mentality, and whilst I’m a public transport advocate, I do think something could be done to improve the Motorway in that area. I am also in favour of finally widening the Mt Wellington bridge to 3 lanes both ways, which is the cause of hold up in rush our too.
This is classic Auckland transport design isn’t it, the problem around Ellerslie/Panmure comes from the huge volume of traffic being funnelled into 1 motorway from the gigantic hinterland of Panmure/Botany/Howick which has no rapid transit alternative. Imagine if they build the rail line mooted on this forum connecting Glen Innes/Botany/Manukau allowing people to jump on a train instead and provided capacity probably equal to the existing roading network
Sigh
Absolutely. It should have started yesterday. And in the meantime, much better bus priority measures for the entirety of East Auckland (the forgotten suburbs). A rush hour bus takes 60 people. A car takes 1.3.
While I don’ know the area well it is very frustrating that these projects can just happen, with no fight or anything just becasue they are on the State Highway network. It may be a good project if it is localised pinch point, or has safety issues, however in general continual widening will not get us anywhere. We can generally add one lane easily, as it mostly in existing designation. But beyond this it gets very expensive so only really a short term fix. I wonder how many extra bus services we could get added the 15min all day network with this money?
What these constant increases in motorway width do though is move the traffic to each pinch point more efficiently, while reinforcing driving as the only movement option, building a ‘dash and stop’ rhythm to SH1, a very poor dynamic to any flowing system. This encourages multiple entering and exiting the network in attempts to find that clever way through. A sort of Auckland driving knowledge game that some take to a high level of sophistication. In short; more driving. This is literally attempting to deal with obesity by buying bigger pants.
As a lot of people have noted, there are very serious problems with Aucklander’s ability to negotiate motorway traffic. That’s kind of fair enough – it’s a technical skill involving spatial and social awareness, and the ability to operate a machine. It doesn’t come naturally. It is however improved with education, and by controlling the environment in which it is engaged in. I wonder if projects that enforced better merging techniques, socialisation/education – the “merge like a zip” signs we used to see on roads, and policing of poor and dangerous merging would have a similar or better effect.
Traffic lights on onramps have done a great job in restricting flow onto the road and reducing the kinds of competitive or ignorant driving that jam flows. A similar measure is slowing the entire flow of traffic. For human-driven vehicles in traffic 40km/h is the speed which sees the most vehicles pass a given point in a given minute. When road demand exceeds or approximates supply, that’s the speed at which the network should travel – if drivers try to go faster, they will exceed capacity and end up causing jams. If they travel much faster, they will cause jams and risk very serious accidents. This is what happens everywhere on the network, every day, and it’s tragically obvious to me what the problem is, and what the solutions are.
The purchase of a network of variable speed-limit signs would cost much much less than building new roads across the network, yet it does not seem to have been implemented anywhere. I wonder why this is.
It’s interesting that traffic volumes in this stretch have been declining, because there’s no evidence thereof in how consistently and badly it gets congested. It’s congested most of the working day and into the evening between Penrose and Greenlane, it’s frequently congested on Saturdays and Sundays. It depresses me that the knee-jerk reaction in here to a road project that is objectively supported by a need to increase capacity based on all-day usage is “It’s more roads. Roads are bad” rather than “The evidence says that this project is necessary.” We keep on going on about National ignoring evidence with the Roads of Dubious Significance, but it seems that a lot of people in here don’t want to know about the evidence in favour of this particular project because the entire project doesn’t conform to their biases.
The BCR of this project will be phenomenal. It’s short, there’s no land acquisition, it’s flat, it’s already a designated transport corridor, etc, so it’ll be cheap, and it will address a serious congestion problem that I am not aware exists anywhere else in the country. I’ve certainly not encountered any other stretch of motorway in Auckland that is consistently congested well into the weekday mid-morning, or frequently congested at weekends.
There’s a problem. That’s not being denied here. Is the solution being presented objectively supported by the evidence? On the face of it, yes. It’s the poster’s argument, and the comments have generally acknowledged that this will relieve congestion in the section being upgraded.
But how does it compare with other solutions? Do other solutions work better, achieve different outcomes, or achieve similar results at lower costs? Those are legitimate questions to be asked of any project. In any kind of endeavour, it’s worth going back to first principles and asking – what do we really want? Because of an ‘inevitability’ of roading in Auckland we’ve generated a range of outcomes, not all of which are good. I’m happy to ask those questions again here, and ask whether simpler or indirect tools which have not been implemented might actually deliver what we want.
(And if it’s a bias to think that poor merging behaviour causes much congestion, or that a single lane of motorway carries 1/10th that of a line of rail, then so be it.)
Even when 4 lanes it will suffer from merging which slows everything down considerably. I’d like to see a highway-within-a-highway by dedicating 1 or 2 of the inner lanes into “express” lanes where they have a barrier to keep the lanes “merge free”.
As peter says “seems to be caused by too many vehicles entering the Southern Motorway within a pretty short distance” so this would be a way to solve that. So vehicles traveling through can continue at speed without having on/off ramp users merging and slowing them down.
This is where the proposed Waterview tunnel will be awesome – probably be the longest stretch of suburban motorway in nz with no on/off ramps so it may actually keep uncongested!