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Another awesome time-lapse video – this time of Tokyo, Japan (worth watching in full screen). I find the huge volume of pedestrians particularly fascinating to watch when sped up – a simply massive wave of humanity. Tokyo is an interesting case study about just how big a city can get while still functioning pretty effectively. Venice is a truly amazing urban creation – captured incredibly in this video: Hat Tip to the excellent Price Tags blog. Those promoting a transport and urban outcome based around smart growth, a compact city, a more balanced transport policy and more investment in public transport, walking and cycling – instead of on road capacity – have long based their arguments on the need for change. This had some logic to it as the general trend the world was heading seemed to be towards more urban sprawl and more car dependency – which has some serious negative consequences for the economy, society and the environment. The paradigm could be summarised as follows:
Pretty much everything is couched on this world-view: from both sides of the argument actually. On the side of smart growth and a balanced transport policy we still hear much about the need to “change behaviour”, the need to “curb urban sprawl”, the need to “get people out of their cars” and so on. On the ‘other side’ of the argument, we hear a lot of criticism about planners engaging in “social engineering”, about public transport advocates wanting to “force people” out of their cars. Essentially both sides of the debate are making the same assumption: that the market (being the aggregated wants and needs of the population) wants to deliver car-based urban sprawl. They only differ in whether this outcome should be allowed or discouraged. One of the key things that various posts on this site over the past month or two have tried to emphasise is that this paradigm has changed. Increasingly, the evidence is pointing towards the market making a pretty radical departure from its general trends of most of the last century, with a new and thoroughly different paradigm emerging – the market actually wants less sprawl and less car dependency. People actually want to catch public transport because it makes sense for them. People want to live in central parts of the city, not on the urban periphery. People are smart enough to realise that what Auckland needs is not a whole pile more roads, but a world-class public transport system to complement our existing roading network. In short, those promoting this new paradigm no longer need to couch their arguments in terms of the need for change or the need for intervention, increasingly they can simply focus on allowing and enabling this shift to happen. There are two key pieces of evidence in relation to this paradigm shift: traffic volumes compared to public transport patronage growth being the first and the location of housing demand (highlighted most clearly through house prices) being the other. Let’s start with traffic volumes compared to PT patronage. Stu’s two posts a few weeks back really highlighted that the current ‘flat-lining’ of traffic growth is not only a pretty dramatic shift from constant increases over much of the last century, but also that this flat-lining has been going on now for quite a long time: seven whole years. Furthermore, a ‘de-coupling’ of traffic growth and economic growth has been going on for around 14 years now, meaning that for the first time we’re able to grow the economy without a similar level of growth in traffic volumes. And in more recent years we’ve been growing the population quite significantly but once again without a commensurate increase in traffic volumes:
The idea that traffic volumes won’t continue to increase, or at least that they might increase at a slower rate than population growth (as each person travels less) is a complete anathema to the “old paradigm”. Under that old paradigm volumes always increase by around 3-4% a year and always would. With most roading projects justified by forecasts of increasing traffic in the future (and the horrors if a road is not widened or added to cope with that increase), the huge dip in per capita travel over the past five years is utterly devastating to the business case for pretty much every new roading project. If our system for assessing such projects actually recognised this fundamental shift, which it doesn’t. In contrast, public transport patronage in Auckland most particularly has grown in leaps and bounds over this same period – up by around a third since 2006: The second paradigm shift relates to that vexed issue of “how should Auckland grow?” The common assumption is that “the market” wants to grow through urban expansion or sprawl, and that planning intervention is required to encourage/force people to live more intensively and ‘save’ the rural hinterland. Yet again, both sides of the debate accept the paradigm that everyone wants to live on the urban edge, in a “quarter acre paradise”. However, a series of posts – this time mainly by Patrick – have highlighted that the reality these days is actually quite different. Patrick has noted a series of articles in the NZ Herald and other overseas publications over the past few months which consistently say the same thing: house prices in the inner suburbs are soaring while (especially in the USA) they are still falling on the urban periphery. There are a wide variety of reasons given for this phenomenon, things like higher fuel prices, changing demographics, smaller household sizes, cultural shifts and so forth – all of which are interestingly similar to many of the causes that might be behind the stagnation in traffic volumes over the past seven years. So the paradigm of “allowing sprawl or forcing/encouraging intensification” really may not be valid anymore, just like the “providing for vehicle growth or encouraging/forcing people onto public transport” is now outdated. People are changing their habits already. The trick now is to ensure that policy decisions, especially when it comes to decisions over where transport money is spent, reflect this new reality. We plan for the future, both in land-use decisions (whether to expand urban boundaries or make intensification easier) and in transport decisions (whether to spend money on holiday highways or city rail links) – let’s ensure that our decisions reflect the new reality of what people actually are doing and what people want. Not an outdated, old paradigm, version of that. We don’t have to force change anymore, let’s allow it to happen. Many regular readers will know that I catch the train to work on an almost daily basis and I was thinking the other day about what kinds of transport my colleagues use to get to work so I decided to do a little survey. I work in the CBD which obviously has much better PT connections compared to other parts the city but even so the results are interesting. There are 10 people in my immediate team and we get the following breakdown:
That’s quite an even split between transport modes and it is surprising to see walking feature quite highly (and the team’s is one of those that walks to work). Also both of those that do drive live out west near SH16 and both would happily use buses if there was a Busway built alongside it, they also either start early or start late to avoid the worst of the traffic. It is obviously only a small sample size so I decided to cast the net a bit wider and think people in my wider department which gives these results
Again far more people are using PT to get to work than those who drive and in this case the General Manager of the department is one of those PT users which helps to reinforce that PT isn’t just for poor people. Transport seems to be a pretty common ‘water cooler’ topic at most work places so my question to readers is, how do you and your colleagues get to work? For a couple of years we have been able to see traffic info and even webcams for Aucklands motorways care of the NZTA. The system is also tied into the message boards at motorway onramps to give indications as to travel times to certain destinations, the main routes to/from the airport were also added last year just before the RWC. Now Google has gone a step further and launched their traffic layer a few weeks ago which overlays live traffic data on to the map and as you can see it has a lot more coverage. I’m not sure exactly where all of the information is coming from but I suspect it is from a variety of sources but regardless it is incredibly useful. It even lets you change the day and time of the data to an idea of what things look like at a certain times which is based off historical data, their aren’t as many routes shown you do select that but it is probably just a case of building up more data.
It would be great to if could publicly get real time information for our PT network the same way, even better would be to be able to compare the two bits of information when people want directions and to show people the fastest way of getting from A to B. Perhaps something for the smartphone app developers out there to do and also something I think routes like the Busway would do very well on:  Northern Motorway at 8am on a weekday We often are looking at what is coming up or what we could do differently so with March now over I thought it might be interesting to take a look back in history and see what we were talking about in the same month a year or two ago. Here are the themes or posts that caught my attention in the brief scroll back through time. 2010 The month started out with a big change to the rail network in the form of the first part of the New Lynn trench opening, it was still only a single track at that time and the station building along with the bus interchange were still under construction but it was a pretty big moment. New Lynn is one of my favourite stations in Auckland and aside from Britomart and Newmarket is the busiest on the Western line. It is also likely to get much busier in the future with all of the development in the area.
We also learned the preferred alignment for the CRL. This came out before the business case was completed and while the government hasn’t yet agreed with the need for the project, the council and Auckland Transport are now working to get route designated.
This post on the tender document for our electric new trains had a timeline which caught my eye. Things slipped a bit last year when Kiwirail extended the tender to include a number of companies not originally short listed. Most were from China leading to a number of people suggesting political interference but the eventual winner was one of the companies on the original list. The contract will finally signed in October last year with delivery expected in mid-late 2013. (I am also hoping to get some updated pictures of what they will look like but am still waiting for AT to get back to me).
Lastly the theme at this time was looking at the upcoming Super City reforms and what that would mean for transport. There was a lot of concern about the implications of having council organisations that would operate largely independently. Personally I think that things have worked our fairly well although there is still a lot of stuff that happens behind closed doors. 2011 March 2011 was a pretty big month, the first draft of the Auckland plan was released and definitely led to some interesting discussions about how the city should evolve over the next 30 years. The final version of the plan was just signed off a few days ago and while there are some things I’m not entirely happy about, on the whole I think the plan is ok and hopefully we can now get down to implementing it (well the good bits at least). This video was also released of the vision for rail network, sadly the North Shore line seems like faint hope at this stage and Airport line is not to much better.
Also released in March in was the latest study into another harbour crossing. Both bridge and tunnel options were looked at and both had appalling BCRs but even so in the final version of the Auckland plan it has managed to be listed as the third most important transport project for the region. The plan picks the tunnel as the best option and based on the estimates would cost obscene amounts of money, especially when we consider that the number of vehicles crossing the bridge isn’t growing and hasn’t been for some time. It also doesn’t look the option of building a PT only crossing initially which is something I think should be considered.
Part of the reason for traffic not growing has been the enomous success of the Northern Busway which at peak times is estimated to be carrying 30-40% of all people crossing the bridge. Last year we saw huge problems with ‘March Madness’ with long queues forming to get onto buses. Luckily we haven’t seen things that bad this year which is most likely to increased frequency of services.
The last thing that caught my eye was that March was when we first heard about changes to the link and a few other bus services. After some tweaks they were eventually introduced in August and no coincidence that since then we have seen patronage on Isthmus bus services start sky rocketing.
I found it quite interesting to see what was important back then as we often forget what was happening and if people like this then I might try to make it into a regular feature. This morning my wife and I needed to drive to work so I thought I would do a little experiment and time the trip. Those who regularly read the blog will probably know that I catch the train from the Sturges Rd station our west. 7:14 – We cross the Sturges Road bridge and we were actually driving across the over bridge at the same time as the train we catch passes under it so it turned out to be a pretty fair comparison. If we are driving to the motorway, even off peak, we will avoid Lincoln Rd for as long as possible due to the amount of traffic and lights along there, going via Rathgar Rd it usually takes about 5 minutes to get to the intersection of Universal Dr and Lincoln Rd and this is where the problem starts. 7:42 – Green Marker- After sitting in bumper to bumper traffic we finally get to the intersection of Triangle Rd, Central Park Dr and Lincoln Rd. Moving on to the interchange it self, as we had two people in the car we are allowed to use the T2 lane which saves us a few minutes waiting at the onramp lights. One extra thing I will point out is I noticed a cyclist who stood out from some others due to what he was wearing, his bike and they type of helmet he was wearing, he crossed the intersection and was heading down Central Park Dr towards the city just before we crossed the intersection but more on this later. 7:42 - If we had of been catching the train and it was on time then it would have been at about Kingsland so would have travelled much more in the same time frame. Back on the motorway we had just travelled past the Te Atatu interchange when I noticed the rider mentioned earlier about to cross the bridge over the Whau River however he disappeared again as we had to slow down in traffic. This was pretty good considering he had to negotiate a few back roads and get across Te Atatu Rd. 7:55 – Light Blue Marker – We were travelling along the causeway just past the works going on, traffic is still heavy but is moving. 7:55 - If the train is still running on time it would probably be somewhere between Newmarket and Parnell, this is after already completely passing the CBD and allowing for a 3 minute stop at Newmarket for the driver to change ends. 8:00 – Yellow Marker – After the Waterview interchange the motorway started to speed up quite a bit and we were making up for lost time, we were just passing Western Springs. At the Waterview interchange was where we finally passed the cyclist mentioned earlier, quite some distance from when we first saw him. 8:00 - By now the train is due to be arriving at Britomart with a probably about 300 hundred people on board having already dropped of a similar number of people at Grafton and Newmarket (the train is usually 5 or 6 carriages long and gets often gets completely jam packed). 8:07 – Red Marker – We finally arrive in the city and park the car, my work is abut the same distance walk from either the train station or the car park so it didn’t even have that benefit. All up the trip via the road trip comes in at 18.3km while the train is 23.2km. The other thing is that things are much more stressful when driving, you constantly have to be on alert to what vehicles around you are doing and there is nothing more frustrating that sitting in traffic not going anywhere. On the train use my phone to surf the web, play games or listen to music or podcasts, much more relaxing.
Of course the trains that we use today are pulled by 40 year old freight locomotives that were never designed for the type of use they currently have, once we get brand new purpose build EMUs we can expect the rail trip to be at least 5-10 minutes faster than it is today. A little bit further in the future the CRL would drop this time by a similar margin meaning a trip to the middle of the CBD from Sturges Rd would be only 30-35 minutes, just imagine how popular that would be. On my home tonight I noticed these new signs around the posts at Britomart, can you spot the new addition? I do like the use of the pillars to display these maps and combined with the recent improvements to how destinations are shown it should hopefully make things much easier for people unfamiliar with the system. (sorry for the quality, it was taken with my phone while on the way to my train).
This is the first of what I hope will be a series of short posts on good/bad transport behaviour. The idea is that by “naming” people/companies that deliver good transport outcomes, and “shaming” those that perform poorly, we can create a semblance of public pressure for businesses to pull up their transport socks. From the outset I should say that these posts are necessarily subjective and somewhat banal: They revolve around me and my mixed experiences in Auckland. But if you have a particularly good/bad transport experience of your own then please email me at stu.donovan-at-gmail.com and I’ll consider your experience for inclusion in future award ceremonies. Without further ado, my prize for best transport experience of the week goes to: Big Brands Online – this website sells home appliances and provides free delivery with all purchases. No need to leave home, just click your way to a new fridge and sit back as their delivery trucks bring home the bacon within 1-2 days. Big Brands Online wins the Auckland transport blog prize for recognizing home delivery as an opportunity to cut huge costs (retail space, car-parking etc) from their business model – savings which are passed onto consumers in the form of lower prices and free delivery. May the capitalist planets align to ensure the success of their business.
But at the other end of the spectrum my award for worst transport experience of the week goes to … The Localist – 2-3 weeks ago I was crossing the intersection of Symonds/Alten Street and I was almost nailed by a red light runner. As the car flashed past in front of me I saw “The Localist” sign emblazoned on the door. I promptly lodged a complaint via the Localist website; three weeks later I have not yet received a response (let alone an explanation) from the company. Upon perusing their website I noted that The Localist is a subsidiary of NZ Post. In their “corporate sustainability” strategy NZ Post state the following mission (which they suggest applies to all their subsidiaries):
I’d suggest that by failing to follow up on my complaint about their driver’s dangerous red light running ”The Localist” has in turn failed to meet their self-proclaimed corporate responsibility. It is for this reason that they win my award for worst transport experience of the week. P.s. Don’t forget to email me with your own transport experiences, good or bad! This the second of two guest posts is from commenter Icebird looking at PRT, see the first one here A short history of PRT For an idea with such obvious (to me anyway!) potential, PRT has had an enormously difficult time going from the drawing board to reality. The first major flurry of activity on the concept occurred in the 1970’s, with companies like the Aerospace Corporation and Cabintaxi working on the concept. Governments changed, funding was directed elsewhere, and development stopped. The one survivor from this era of work was the PRT system in Morgantown, West Virginia. The system doesn’t really match the model of a “modern” PRT system – it uses large vehicles, carrying up to a dozen people instead of small vehicles. That had a flow-off effect on the size of the infrastructure. The system still operates reliably in both scheduled and “on demand” configurations, and it works well for the particular transit challenges that Morgantown faced, but the high cost deterred others from copying their model. In the 1990s and 2000s, Dr Ed Anderson of the University of Minnesota devoted decades of his life to working on the concept, and a PRT system was almost built in Rosedale, Illinois (near O’Hare Airport). Unfortunately Raytheon, the engineering company tasked with turning the system into reality underestimated the crucial importance of keeping costs as low as possible. They built a test system over-engineered to within an inch of its life. The cost ballooned, the city got cold feet, and a major opportunity was lost. The company that Dr Anderson founded to develop his PRT system is now largely dormant. This period was marked by feasibility studies in various cities: Tacoma, Washington; Cincinnati, Ohio; New Jersey. If the consultants had a significant interest in building urban rail systems, they tended to conclude that PRT wouldn’t work, while the more open minded studies usually concluded that the technology had potential, but please would someone else go first? Advanced Transport Systems aka Ultra in the UK has had the most success in getting its system into the real world. It received government funding to build a test track in Cardiff, and for a while it looked like Cardiff would be the first city in the world to have a modern PRT system. The project was delayed to allow for competitive tendering, the government changed, funding vanished again. In the mean time BAA invested in Ultra, and decided to build a PRT system to link Heathrow’s new Terminal 5 with a distant carpark. Construction was completed in 2009, but an extensive testing programme delayed the official opening of the system until last year. In the meantime Dutch company 2getthere started their PRT system at the Masdar “eco-city” in Abu Dhabi. The Masdar approach was to build the entire city on top of a basement level where the PRT vehicles would operate. This model doesn’t really lend itself to duplication, and the scope of the PRT network has been steadily scaled back as Abu Dhabi’s ambitions for the Masdar project diminish. The first application of PRT in an existing urban setting will occur in Amritsar, India, where a 3.3km 7-station system with 200 vehicles will link the city’s train and bus stations with the Golden Temple, a major destination for tourists and pilgrims. This system is due for completion in 2014.
Hands-on with the Heathrow pod system I visited the UK in January, and like any good transit nerd I took a half hour detour to try out the PRT system at Heathrow airport. The PRT system is located at the shiny new Terminal 5. It took a little bit of hunting around to find the system. It’s located on level 2 of the parking building adjoining the terminal. If you follow the signs to “Business Parking”, you’ll end up in the right place. (Please excuse the iPhone photography).
The station at the Terminal has three vehicle bays, all of them stocked with empty vehicles when I arrived. The bays are arranged in a diagonal configuration (think angled parking spaces), and the vehicles back out, so you can leave from any bay without being blocked in by vehicles stopped ahead of you. A helpful speaker invites you to touch the screen to begin – all of the bays had their own touch screen terminals. You select your destination (either Car Park A, or Car Park B), confirm the destination, then the station and pod doors open. The pod has two bench seats facing each other. The pod could accommodate 4 people sitting, plus lots of luggage. You could fit a wheelchair or bike in the pod as well. There are button panels on either side of each bench seat. To your left: Close, Open and Start. To your right: Information and Alarm. You press the Close button to shut the doors, then Start to get the vehicle underway. There are three video screens in the pod to show information on your progress, or potentially anything else the operators could think of.
The Ultra system uses rubber tires on either concrete or flat steel, so the journey isn’t as smooth as a pure steel-on-steel rail system. The Heathrow system has fences running on either side of the guideway, which presumably improves safety at the expense of aesthetics. I suspect they aren’t completely necessary, but Ultra have erred on the side of safety until the system’s track record has been proven. The station at Car Park A was at ground level with 2 vehicle bays. I stepped out, snapped some pictures, then returned to the terminal. Entering and exiting the Terminal 5 station you catch glimpses of empty pods waiting out of site, ready to shift into vacant bays.
Applications in New Zealand One of the fun parts about transport blogging is planning the transit systems you wish would be built. So where would I start? I actually thing the best place to start wouldn’t be in Auckland at all, but in Wellington. The Regional Council is in the middle of a long-running planning process to determine options for the “spine” linking Ngauranga Gorge with the airport, via the inner city and hospital. Your initial system might be a loop that starts at Westpac Stadium, passed the railway station, heads down Lambton Quay, Manners mall and Courtenay place, then loops back along one of the waterfront roads (passing by Te Papa and ASB Stadium). You could then add up a loop to head up Kent Terrace, past the Basin Reserve to the hospital. To connect with Kilbirnie and the airport, you’ve got two options : use the existing Pirie Street bus tunnel, or the Constable Road pass (you could probably use both). The system would probably work out cheaper than Ceila Wade-Brown’s light rail system, and reduce the need for a very expensive expansion of the Mt Victoria tunnel. In Christchurch, PRT could take the place of the proposed City-to-University light rail system, a pet project of Bob Parker’s that seems to be an idea in search of a purpose. For Auckland, I’d begin with a basic loop that went up Queen St to K Road, then returned to the waterfront via Symonds Street. Think of it as a basic “proof of concept” system that would link the downtown’s major shopping areas and the university. You could add a second “downhill” leg along Hobson Street to serve Sky City and the hotels and apartment blocks along that road. Once the initial system is proven, you could expand it to area served by the Inner Link bus: Ponsonby, Parnell, Newmarket. Stage three? Let’s get really ambitious, and tack guideways on to the Auckland Harbour Bridge, connecting our inner city loop with the north shore. Hey, we just added three highway lanes of capacity to the harbour bridge in each direction, and we spent maybe $50 million on the harbour crossing instead of $5 billion. In looking at the question of “where do send the PRT network after it crosses the bridge?”, I’m going to avoid the busway completely (we’ll leave that for future rail systems), and instead I’m going to head west, putting in a loop that heads through Northcote Point and Birkenhead, and returns via Onewa Road. The loop could connect with the busway at Akoranga (giving residents of Northcote and Birkenhead an easy way to head north to Albany), and perhaps continue on to Takapuna. Conclusion Being a fan of PRT requires a lot of patience. For a system that can be built quite quickly, seeing it get to a position where it can start realising some of its potential seems to have taken longer than you would believe. But I’m getting increasingly confident that the proverbial “tipping point” is near. For years, critics of PRT were able to say “well, there isn’t a PRT system operating anywhere in the world”. Now there is, and both Heathrow and Masdar seem to work pretty well. In two or three years, we’ll be able to evaluate the Amritsar system. If it proves successful, I suspect there will be a stampede of cities looking to build systems – when it comes to innovation in public transport, everyone wants to be the second city in the world to implement an idea. In a comment discussion on this blog last year, Nick R doubted that a PRT system would be built in Auckland in our lifetimes. I’m not quite so pessimistic. I think by the time that the City Rail Link is completed, there will be multiple PRT systems in operation around the world providing real world data to assess its suitability for Auckland. If PRT can prove itself in high-capacity operation, I see it as a real game-changer. It’s flexible enough to apply to even difficult transit situations, it could act as a feeder for the rail system, it could reduce the need for allocating so much space to parking in the suburban commercial areas, it facilitates those suburb-to-suburb journeys that bypass the CBD completely. The recent discussion document about paying for Auckland’s transport wishlist illustrates the astronomical costs of current solutions to Auckland’s transport issues. Maybe its time to look at more left-field alternaitves? Until such time as the concept is proven to be completely unworkable, I’m going to remain a cheerleader and advocate for PRT |
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