Auckland Transport Blog

A press release by Statistics New Zealand today indicates that Auckland’s population will be pretty close to 2 million by 2031 – only 21 years away. Here’s the press release in full:

Auckland home to 38 percent of population in 2031

The Auckland region is projected to account for 60 percent of New Zealand’s population growth between 2006 and 2031, with an increase of 570,000 from 1.37 million to 1.94 million, Statistics New Zealand said today. “The Auckland region would be home to 38 percent of New Zealand’s population in 2031, compared with 33 percent in 2006,” Population Statistics manager Denise McGregor said. Natural increase (births minus deaths) is projected to account for almost two-thirds of the population growth, with the remainder due to net migration gains.

Of New Zealand’s 73 territorial authority areas, 44 are projected to have more people in 2031 than in 2006. However, population growth will generally slow over the projection period because of the narrowing gap between births and deaths. The highest growth rates between 2006 and 2031 are expected in Queenstown-Lakes district (an average of 2.2 percent a year) and Selwyn district (2.0 percent). Manukau city and Rodney district (1.7 percent), Waimakariri district (1.6 percent), Tauranga city (1.5 percent) and Franklin district (1.4 percent), are also projected to experience relatively high population growth.

All territorial authority areas will have more older people in the future. In 2031, 34 areas will have more than double the number of people aged 65 years and over, than in 2006. Selwyn district is projected to be home to almost four times the number of people aged 65 years and over in 2031, than in 2006, while Queenstown-Lakes will be home to over three times. Nationally, the number of older people (those aged 65 years and over) is projected to double between 2006 and 2031. “The increase in older people is due to higher life expectancy, accentuated by the baby boomers born during the 1950s and 1960s entering these ages,” Mrs McGregor said.

Somewhat hilariously, the New Zealand Herald website is reporting that by 2031 60% of all New Zealanders will be living in Auckland. Ummm…. no, that’s 60% of the country’s population growth between now and 2031 will be in Auckland.

Now one could suggest that as 60% of the country’s population growth will be in Auckland over the next 21 years, perhaps 60% of the transport spending in the country on new infrastructure should also be in Auckland. After all, one doesn’t really need to widen roads or build new railway lines in places whose population isn’t getting any larger you would think. Generally Auckland has struggled to keep up with its population growth in terms of providing infrastructure – particularly during the 1980s and 1990s when it seems like not much at all was built (maybe our political thinking at the time was hoping “the market” would come along and build it for us?)

One would think that by 2031 we would need to have built the CBD Rail Tunnel, Rail to the Airport, some sort of Howick/Botany Line, perhaps rail to the North Shore and a whole pile of other important transport projects.  I tend to think that if Auckland’s population can grow to 2 million well, then a city of that size is perhaps a bit more useful than where we are now. I can’t help but feel that Auckland is a slightly annoying size at the moment: big enough to suffer many of the problems of a larger city such as congestion, but too small to be able to fund projects necessary to do something about it.

This may well be the shortest blog post of all times, but it is to raise a question that I have never had properly explained:

Why is is that Sunday’s public transport service levels have to be worse than Saturday’s?

In all my catching of public transport over the years I’ve seen no real evidence that patronage is much less on a Sunday than a Saturday, except for in the evening. So why can’t we just have a “weekend timetable”, rather than separate, complex and confusing timetables that separate the two days? If we were really smart we’d match up the off-peak weekday timetable with the weekend one, so that people travelling off-peak would know the timetable was the same seven days a week.

Is this difference between Saturdays and Sundays perhaps a hangover from the days when everyone was paid more on Sundays, and companies tried to reduce their wage bill by cutting back on services?

Here are a couple of good ideas that add to urban livability and sustainability that I saw during my recent travels that I haven’t seen in Auckland and cannot see why we don’t have them.

Firstly Bicycle Cops:

Come on, even the yanks have these. The downtown station in Auckland is a beat only station while Newmarket has some but only constables, get em on bikes!

Secondly, public recycling bins:

To Landfill or Recycling Centre - simple you'd think

These ones are in Christchurch at the International Antarctic Centre but everywhere I went in Wellington and Christchurch you could find these but they are nowhere to be seen in Auckland, they were great, my recycling went up hugely while I was there because I had a choice wherever I was rather than the choice not to recycle or carry my rubbish around with me all day.

I think it’s pretty obvious that a better job could be done to market public transport in Auckland. How many people are even aware that it only takes the Northern Express bus 22 minutes to get from Britomart to Constellation Drive off-peak, and 30 minutes during the evening peak? Or that it only takes trains on the Eastern Line 14 minutes to get from Glen Innes to Britomart , no matter what time of day it is?

The idea I had would be for ARTA to somehow get radio stations which give traffic updates on how congested the motorways are each morning and evening, to also mention how the trains are running and how the buses are running along the Rapid Transit Network. I guess occasionally there might be hold ups on the rail network, but a simple message saying “the Northern Motorway is congested from Greville Road to the Bridge, about a 45 minute drive, or 25 minutes on the Northern Express” would raise awareness of public transport at exactly the right time – when people are stuck in traffic.

As we’re getting pretty close to the end of the year, we have the opportunity to look back at 2009 in a holistic manner. I suppose that overall it has been a topsy-turvy year for transport – with some particular highs and particular lows. I’m curious about analysing what people think was the biggest (or perhaps the series of biggest) transport stories for 2009.

Here are some ideas I have (going somewhat chronologically):

1. The opening of the Orewa-Puhoi Motorway. Massive traffic jams and Steven Joyce’s announcement that he wanted to extend the motorway to Wellsford.
2. The cancellation of the Regional Petrol Tax, throwing into doubt rail electrification, integrated ticketing and a variety of other projects.
3. Changes to the Government Policy Statement, shifting masses of money into state highway building and away from other transport areas.
4. The Super City announcements (partly related to transport!)
5. The changes to the Waterview Connection route (which have subsequently largely been reversed).
6. The Harbour Bridge Crossing. My word that was an enormous amount of fun – for one morning we stuck it to NZTA and took back the Harbour Bridge.
7. The announcement of changes to the Public Transport Management Act. This will most likely be a bigger story during 2010, and didn’t get much press, but could certainly have some significant repercussions for Auckland transport.
8. Integrated ticketing contract awarded to Thales. Although there was certainly a lot of drama surrounding this initial announcement in June – before things were finalised just a few weeks back.
9. The bigger trucks debate. We still haven’t had it confirmed whether these larger trucks will be allowed on New Zealand’s roads yet.
10. Announcement of a study into the CBD Rail Tunnel. Perhaps this could win the award for the most under-recognised transport story of the year.
11. The Puhoi-Wellsford Motorway debate. Mike Lee’s “holiday highway” term has spread like wildfire.
12. The establishment of the Auckland Transport Agency as the transport branch of the future Super City. Originally I thought this was a good step, now I’m very much not so sure.
13. Possible cutbacks to electrification. Fortunately these didn’t happen quite so harshly in the end.
14. Slow progress on the Onehunga Line. A source of much frustration for public transport campaigners, it finally looks like progress is being made on building the stations for this line.
15. The $860 million widening of the Northwest Motorway. This one came rather out of the blue, and I think is an enormous waste of money due to induced traffic.
16. The debate over prioritising projects. Otherwise known as the ARC versus the government.
17. The release of the draft Regional Land Transport Strategy. Most probably Auckland’s best transport strategy in 60 years.
18. The debate over whether Auckland’s next harbour crossing should be a bridge or a tunnel. Personally I vote for a rail tunnel and that’s it.
19. The bus lock-out. I wonder if the NZ Bus public relations person has lost their job yet? What a botch-up that was on their behalf.
20. The announcement of funding for Auckland’s rail electrification. Yay!
21. The end of the Helensville train service. Many say it was doomed from the start and I would have to agree – Helensville is probably just not big enough to justify a rail service.
22. Another change to the Waterview Connection route! We’re almost back to where we were pre-May, which I guess is a good thing for the local community.
23. Transmission Gully gets the go ahead (not Auckland I know). This is despite it having an incredibly low cost-benefit ratio of around 0.3-0.5.
24. The Snapper/Thales battle over integrated ticketing. I think in the end Thales have won – although that will depend on the extent to which the PTMA is gutted next year.

A pretty busy year all up actually. The two issues which drove the most traffic to this site were, interestingly enough, the May Waterview Connection announcement and the October bus lockout.

Your thoughts? Top story? Top 5? Anything I’ve missed?

I suppose I was asking for it, hoping to take public transport from Herne Bay to Sylvia Park on a Sunday and expecting it to not be complete and utter rubbish. Although, on the other hand past experiences haven’t been too bad. Although the bus route from here into town, and train from Britomart to Sylvia Park only run at half-hour intervals on Sundays (does anyone actually know why Sunday timetables have to be different to Saturdays, the patronage never seems hugely different?) usually in the past they have aligned reasonably. Well today proved everything wrong, and to me really showed in perfect clarity everything that is wrong with public transport in Auckland.

For a start, after leaving house (at a random time, I know, I probably should live my life to a timetable) my daughter Amalia and I reached the top of our street to see a damn 017 bus sitting at the bus stop. We ran like crazy towards it, and it didn’t move – until we reached it and discovered that it wasn’t our bus, but rather a broken down bus waiting for assistance. It would have been nice for the driver to change his sign to read “Not in Service” rather than leaving it showing the route and its destination. As the next bus was around 20 minutes away (and possibly not guaranteed to arrive in any case) we decided to walk to Ponsonby (only about 5-10 minutes away) so that we could catch the Link Bus, which runs every 15 minutes on a Sunday.

While waiting for the Link Bus, not one but two 017 buses decided to come along, but of course since we were at the bus stop for the Link Bus and not the 017, they didn’t stop for us – even with much vigorous arm-waving to try to encourage a driver to take pity on a guy with his 5 year old daughter – but to no avail. Eventually, our Link Bus did come along – and I think it had been quite a long gap since the last one as the people we were waiting at the bus stop with had got the point of making pointed loud comments wondering whether the bus would ever show up. Then the trip on the Link Bus into town seemed to take an age – perhaps we were just unlucky with the lights but I’m sure that my usual 005 bus trip doesn’t take as long as this Link trip did – even though they basically follow the same route.

Eventually we made it to Britomart, and were reasonably in luck to find out that our train was “only” 8 minutes away. I bought tickets (bloody annoying that my bus pass can’t be used on trains, perhaps that can be the first part of integrated ticketing to be sorted out) and we went down to the platforms to wait for the train. Oddly enough, even though the train we were due to catch was the next one departing from Britomart, platform 2 (the platform for our train) was the only one without a train at it. As the time our train meant to depart came and went, there was a platform announcement that it was running 5 minutes late. Goodness knows how you can stuff up running trains on-time on a Sunday, but I’m amazed at the depths Auckland’s system can plumb so I wasn’t surprised. Eventually the train did show up in the Britomart tunnel (around 5 minutes after scheduled departure time) – but then bizarrely sat there for a couple of minute doing nothing. I imagined at first it was waiting for a train within the station to leave, but as none was due to leave until after us, I really don’t know what was going on – I can perhaps imagine something along the lines of the following conversation between the train driver and whoever runs the signalling/trackwork:

Driver: Ah yeah, I’m in the tunnel, can I proceed to platform 2.
Britomart station person: Sorry, the guy who’s meant to be doing the points is just finishing his lunch, can you hold on for a couple of minutes.
Driver: Yeah sure, no worries.
Britomart station person: OK he’s back, now let’s go through a 14,894 step procedure to do this.

Perhaps I am being a bit uncharitable, but it does seem as though the whole organisation of getting trains in and out of Britomart is run on 19th century pen-and-paper technology, and there is an enormous lack of urgency about everything. Yes sure, it’s a Sunday, but still if your train is getting towards 10 minutes late a little bit of effort to get the train into the platform, and then out again ASAP wouldn’t go amiss. Eventually we were on our way again – and the trip between Britomart and Sylvia Park passed by fairly quickly. Somewhat annoyingly, even though we were on a four-car ADK set two of the carriages were closed off so everyone had to crowd together into two carriages rather than being able to spread ourselves out throughout the whole train. Hopefully that becomes a thing of the past once we have automated ticketing on our trains! Below is a photo of our train as we got off it at Sylvia Park:

By this stage it had probably been well over an hour since we originally left home. But anyway, we did our shopping – which was reasonably successful now as I am about halfway through all my Xmas shopping – and then left the mall to catch a train at around 2.15pm. Unfortunately that meant we had just missed the previous train, but I figured the wait wouldn’t be too long, as we reached the station at around 2.20pm – meaning around a 20 minute wait until the next train was due to come along. By this time I was starting to get a bit tired, as was Amalia – although she’d done pretty well so far to walk all the way to the bus stop, then walk around the shopping centre for a couple of hours. At around 2.44pm, when the next train was supposed to arrive a train did come along but it just barrelled straight through the station at around 100kph – a bit freaky when you’re expecting it to stop. I figured that perhaps it was just running as something of a support train to provide greater frequencies out of the city, and that our one would come along fairly shortly. But no, it took until 3.10pm – almost 50 minutes since first arriving at the station – until our train finally came along and whisked us back to the city. Certainly spent a long time staring at this view:

Fortunately from there it didn’t take too long for the 017 bus to come along, and although that bus took forever to get us home (thanks to the million sets of traffic lights on Queen Street that give no prioritisation to buses) we eventually made it – only around two hours after first leaving the mall. Overall, it was quite depressing to realise the incredibly sorry state of Auckland’s public transport on a Sunday. The terribly frequencies, the train that just decided it didn’t feel like stopping for us at Sylvia Park, the general lack of urgency from all involved in trying to keep things to the timetable – and the general amateurish feeling I got. I heard at least four of five people throughout the day commenting on how terrible Auckland’s public transport system is, and those were only the ones within earshot.

I must say I thought we’d got beyond the point of Auckland’s public transport being a complete embarrassment. Perhaps today was just a bit of a bad day, or are all Sundays like this?

There are a number of little things about Auckland that makes you realise how wrong we have our priorities when it comes to transport. Little things that we just get wrong, or things that show how generally public transport is looked at with disdain, or how pedestrians are seen as second-rate citizens, even in supposedly pedestrian-oriented areas such as the CBD. This post is intended to create a list of little things that Auckland just get wrong, which it shouldn’t, and which could be fixed quite easily (and cheaply) if only someone gave a damn.

1. Why can’t bus drivers on the Link Bus at Victoria Park tell you exactly how long it will be until their timetable says they’ll be leaving again?
2. Why is the pedestrian traffic light near the intersection of Durham Street and Queen Street so pathetic in taking so long to give pedestrians a turn that everyone jay-walks across the road anyway?
3. Why is the right-turn arrow phase from Queen Street into Karangahape Road (heading up Queen Street) so short? A lot of buses need to make that turn, so it’s stupid to give them such a short phase.
4. Why are pedestrians crossing Jervois Road at the intersection with Redmond Street and Dedwood Terrace held in such disdain that they have to wait two phases to cross the road?
5. Why is graffiti around the motorway system cleaned up almost immediately while that along the railway corridors stays in place for months, if not years?
6. How on earth can Manukau City Council justify giving Great South Road a speed limit of 70kph as it passes through their town centre? Do they want to kill off pedestrians?
7. Why does there have to be a difference between the 004 and 005 bus routes? I mean seriously, what does that do other than confuse people and put passengers off using the service?
8. Why is our main street a four-lane highway? (OK that can’t be particularly easily fixed, but it’s annoying all the same!)
9. Why is the 224 bus always 15 minutes late?
10. Why are we able to roll out real-time information signs for buses (seemingly quite a complicated task), but not for trains (seemingly a relatively simple task)?

Please feel free to add in your “pet peeves” about Auckland and its transport system. Perhaps I will be able to gather them all together and email them to a whole bunch of people at Councils, ARTA, NZTA, KiwiRail or whoever else is responsible and we can get some action on the simple stuff we should be getting right, but just aren’t.

Well I’ve spend a couple of hours digging through information on oil prices, petrol prices, state highway traffic levels and public transport patronage, to hopefully come up with some interesting information on the relationship between petrol prices and transport.

Logic tells us that as petrol prices increase we would expect fewer people to drive and more people to catch public transport. When we look at what has happened to petrol prices, traffic levels of state highways and public transport patronage since January 2007, we do see that trend to some extent, although there are enough exceptions (especially in terms of public transport patronage, which varies a lot month to month) that the relationship seems a bit more complicated than I had potentially thought. For a start, here’s the table I put together: The trend seems most obvious throughout 2008, where between March and September we saw petrol prices above $1.80 a litre, significant decreases in road use, and significant increases in public transport use. If we look back at 2007 we can see for most of the early part of that year petrol prices were significantly lower than they had been throughout 2006, and as a result traffic volumes were also up on the year before. Public transport use throughout 2007 was pretty poor when compared to 2006 levels, in that while patronage did still increase it was not what might have been expected. So I guess the trend held there too: lower petrol prices, more people driving, less people (comparatively to what might have been expected) catching public transport.

That trend seems to have disappeared in 2009 though. Ever since November last year we’ve seen significant reductions in petrol prices – with prices being up to 30-40c a litre cheaper than they were in the same month of the previous year. However, with the exceptions of a few months (most notably July 2009) we haven’t really seen state highway use recover the ground that it “lost” during 2008. I guess quite a lot of that might be due to the recession, but the public transport trends also show us something quite interesting. Put simply, it really does appear as though people who first tried public transport in 2008 due to the higher petrol prices – have decided to stick with it this year, even though price of petrol has come down a lot.

The graph below shows the clear trend between petrol prices and traffic levels, although as can be seen the relationship with public transport use is a bit less obvious: Months where the yellow line is above the pink line shows that public transport patronage growth is higher than state highway traffic growth. No surprises that it mostly happened when petrol prices were highest.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the next few months. Perhaps the lower prices will finally kick through into more traffic growth compared to public transport growth?

I had quite a few interesting suggestions in the comments section of a post I made a couple of days ago asking for a bit of feedback into what readers thought of this blog, and in particular what they wanted me to blog more about. One particularly good suggestion was that I do a series of posts on other cities around the world and what they’re doing in terms of public transport investment. So, the first city I’m going to look at is Vancouver.

Vancouver is a particularly useful city for Auckland to model itself on I think. Sure, its population is about 50% more than Auckland’s – 2.3 million versus 1.4 million. However, both cities were developed around the same time (over the last 150 years) and both are quite constrained in terms of the characteristics of the area around them – by water in Auckland’s case, and by water and mountains in Vancouver’s case. It also helps that I’ve visited Vancouver, back in 2005, so I can speak from some experience on the city. For a start, here’s a map of the city:

What seems immediately obvious to me is the comparatively low number of freeways/motorways the city has. There are a few in the southern area, but apart from that it seems there’s a single main freeway that runs through the city. That’s not very much for a city of 2.3 million. I remember when visiting Vancouver in 2005 doing an interesting comparison between it and Seattle. Seattle had masses and masses of freeways – yet suffered terribly from traffic congestion. Meanwhile, Vancouver had only built one freeway (excluding those ones in the south that don’t go anywhere near the CBD) yet I never noticed any congestion at all in Vancouver. It’s almost like they’ve achieved more for less, certainly worth exploring further.

The wikipedia article on Vancouver has an interesting extract on transport as well:

Successive city councils in the 1970s and 1980s prohibited the construction of freeways as part of a long term plan. As a result, the only major freeway within city limits is Highway 1, which passes through the north-eastern corner of the city. While the number of cars in Vancouver proper has been steadily rising with population growth, the rate of car ownership and the average distance driven by daily commuters have fallen since the early 1990s. Vancouver is the only major Canadian city with these trends. Despite the fact that the journey time per vehicle has increased by one third and growing traffic mass, there are 7% fewer cars making trips into the downtown core. Residents have been more inclined to live in areas closer to their interests, or use more energy-efficient means of travel, such as mass transit and cycling. This is, in part, the result of a push by city planners for a solution to traffic problems and pro-environment campaigns. Transportation demand management policies have imposed restrictions on drivers making it more difficult and expensive to commute while introducing more benefits for non-drivers.

So it seems clearly possible to avoid the increasing auto-dependence that Auckland has experienced over the past few decades. By focusing development around the public transport network, there has actually been a reduced need for travel, especially into the CBD. Vancouver is an excellent example of why integrating land-use planning and transportation planning is so critical. You can get it right.

One of the most interesting things about Vancouver’s transport system is that the rail system isn’t huge. It’s not like we’re comparing ourselves with London or Tokyo here – as can be seen on the map below in fact the rail system in Vancouver is not that much more extensive than what we have in Auckland:

However, what is key is that Vancouver have invested in their rail system over the past few years – and in fact the whole of the SkyTrain system (which makes up almost all the above map) has been constructed over the past 20 years. The SkyTrain is quite fantastic actually, with driverless trains coming at 90 second frequencies throughout the day. The newest line in the SkyTrain system, the Canada Line, will open next Monday in fact. This line provides a high-quality public transport link between the city’s airport and the downtown.  The photo below provides an insight into what the Canada Line looks like (although much of it is underground at its city end):

Vancouver is often rated as one of the best, if not the best, city in the world to live in. They’ve managed this without spending squillions of dollars on a motorway system (or possibly, because they haven’t spent that money). Vancouver continues to invest in expanding their public transport system – with future plans for another SkyTrain line being rapidly developed. The city also has excellent bus services – no doubt helped by its grid layout. We can certainly learn a lot from what’s happening there – which is not a lot of road building, that’s for sure!

There was a Dad and his three or four year old daughter on the bus with me today, and it got me thinking about how rarely we see this kind of situation – a parent taking their child with them on the bus to work. I assume he would have been dropping her off at some inner-city daycare centre or kindergarten before heading off to work himself. She was having a great time, pointing out all the other buses she saw, pointing out the Sky Tower when we went past it and so on.

There are a couple of reasons why I think it’s sad that parents don’t take their children on public transport more often. I have tried to take a few opportunities to take my five year old daughter on the bus and train over the past year or so – and she’s really loved it too. It makes the journey to wherever you’re going part of the whole experience and adventure for them, and she particularly enjoyed riding the train as it went through the tunnel near Glen Innes on the Eastern Line. But anyway, I digress, the first reason why I think it’s great to take kids on public transport is that it makes them aware of it. I know that throughout my childhood the only times I ever really went on the bus was for school trips, and it certainly gave me a very car-centric view of the world by the time I was a teenager. I remember once looking at the railway line next to the Southern Motorway, seeing the rail signals and thinking it was unfair how the railway system got ‘traffic lights’ whenever it wanted them, but a couple of nasty intersections near where I lived didn’t. The cities that I drew as a teenager were full of motorways and rarely had any rail lines, I thought that all congestion could be solved by simply widening motorways or building more of them and so on.

It wasn’t really until I visited Sydney in 2000 and 2001, and used their train system regularly to get around, that I realised how useful public transport could be. By that stage I was also catching buses into university each day, so I was certainly aware of it – but Auckland’s public transport system was pretty rubbish back then (it arguably still is) so Sydney was a real eye-opener for me. I think a lot of the ‘car-centric’ viewpoints we see from politicians and the general public simply exist because people just don’t use public transport and didn’t grow up with it being a ‘normal’ way to get around the place. Making public transport seem, to children in particular, like a normal way to get around is a pretty key step in moving away from our auto-dependence in the longer-term.

The second reason why I think it’s sad parents don’t take their kids on public transport more often is that it stifles their independence in the longer term. I didn’t have a clue about how Auckland’s bus system worked until just before I started university. Throughout high school I only very occasionally caught a bus – usually when travelling with friends into town and out again. I didn’t know how the stages worked, I didn’t know what it cost, I usually just mumbled to the bus driver “same for me” when getting on – it was pretty embarrassing actually. I remember one day I ended up having to catch a bus home from town but didn’t have a clue which one to get or where to get it from. I ended up catching a Richmond Road bus, just because it was the bus that I had caught with my friends, and walked quite a long way from the end of Richmond Road to home.

All of this lack of understanding made me very reliant on my parents to get me around, although I did use my bike quite a bit. It also reduced my understanding of how Auckland worked and made it seem much more difficult for me to do something as simple as head into town to meet my friends, than it should have been. It is difficult to calculate what the actual costs of this ‘lack of independence’ were, but I know many international books that I’ve read put down the lack of independence children have due to our auto-dependence as a huge negative effect of the way in which our cities and transport networks have developed over the past few decades.

So I do think it’s important for parents to take their children on the bus or train with them. It is important to teach your child how to use the bus system, to teach them where the routes go and what route they would need to catch to get to a certain place. It will provide them with a greater sense of independence, it will give them a much more rounded viewpoint on transport policy in the future and they’ll probably have a lot more fun than strapped into the back seat of a car.