Auckland Transport Blog » Policy

The Council Agrees to the LTP

Matt L — Wed, 23 May 2012 08:03:05 +0000

After what I imagine has been a huge day at the council offices the governing body has agreed to the LTP and that includes funding for the CRL. This is great news as we move forward to getting this absolutely crucial project built. Here is what Len had to say tonight:

Today we can celebrate clear and unequivocal steps towards transforming Auckland. After an all-day council meeting thrashing out multiple changes to the draft Long-term Plan (LTP), councillors agreed this evening to adopt my proposals for the 10-year budget. This is a thrilling time to step up and transform this city. The hopes and dreams of our young people depend on it.

And this from Twitter

I will update this if more info comes up but this is a great day for Auckland. Now we just need to convince the government.

Playing Politics with the CRL

Patrick Reynolds — Mon, 21 May 2012 10:23:39 +0000

Councillor Brewer continues to play politics with the CRL as reported in this morning’s Herald; here. I guess this isn’t a surprise as he wants the mayor’s job and Brown’s mayoralty is identified with the CRL. Brewer has in the past made the now common National Party claims of ‘supporting’ public transport while going out of his way to attack any real steps towards meaningful change in this direction. Here is the wonderfully vague waffle on his website:

Promoting transport solutions

Gridlock traffic has long been the number one complaint about Auckland. With the roads only set to get busier, the Auckland Council will need to find sustainable transport solutions, while making sure our neighbourhoods are protected.

Cameron has worked effectively with the New Zealand Transport Authority, the Automobile Association, rail authorities, public transport providers and advocates. He is committed to leading the charge on addressing local transport issues.

This is after the article congratulating himself and other retrogrades like Ken Baguley for getting the bus lanes on Remuera Rd downgraded to uselessness.

But enough on political game playing; there really is nothing duller, the interesting point is not that Brewer is going to spend the next year painting the CRL as black as he can but rather that his current complaint exactly expresses the reverse of what I believe the Council ought to be doing with the CRL. Here is his big idea:

Orakei councillor Cameron Brewer yesterday said it was crazy to spend $112 million in the coming financial year on land purchases for the rail loop when it had no funding certainty.

Well of course buying property is a really exchanging one asset for another, so not really ‘crazy’ unless a particularly poor deal is made. And here’s the thing, transit stations transform land use and value positively, so the Council is in a strong position to make good deals through the purchases around the CRL. Two of the financially most successful transit systems in world, in Hong Kong and Tokyo achieve this success through the very act of investing in and developing property around subway stations. A recent article at Atlantic Cities on the Tokyo system begins with this observation:

Twice during my recent trip to Tokyo, once at Shibuya and again in a suburb to the west of the city, I exited a subway platform only to find myself swaddled in a massive department store. This was the Tokyu store.

Really innovative councillors, especially from the supposedly business savvy right, should be pointing out the investment opportunities for the Council Property CCO especially around Aotea station and at the Downtown Centre that the CRL offers. The article continues:

…the Tokyu Corporation. Established in 1922 as a regional development company, Tokyu today is a massive “rail-based conglomerate” of nearly 400 companies that employs 30,000 people, only a tenth of which work directly for the railway. Beginning in the 1930s Tokyu surrounded its hubs with commercial and retail buildings and sold land near its intermediate stations to universities at good prices, to create reliable residential (and thus passenger) corridors.

My compliant with the Council is not that it shouldn’t buy property where it intends to change that property’s value through transport initiatives but rather that the Property CCO seems rather lacklustre and lacking in sufficient energy to maximise these opportunities. I guess it doesn’t get any such lead from the Council itself.

No surprise as we certainly don’t seem to be blessed with much quality from the C&R ticket. I am most disappointed with Councillor Fletcher, to whom all Aucklanders owe a debt of gratitude for the construction of Britomart, as she is reported as observing:

C&R leader Christine Fletcher said the time was not right for a big budget and a big spend-up.

Well Sydney built much of its metro in the Great Depression, and in many ways it is the perfect time, interest rates are low, especially for local authorities, the construction industry is largely idle, the city and country needs investment in game changing infrastructure, and property can be easily bought. And we are only talking about getting ready to start the real work later which gives a few years for things to change in Wellington.

Instead these local politicians seem to all be taking the lead from the visionaries currently in charge in Wellington; the big idea is to invest in nothing, construct nothing, change nothing, and hope that somehow through all this inaction that there’s a brighter day around the corner.

So my question to Mr Brewer, the man ‘committed to leading the charge on addressing local transport issues’ other than not investing in Auckland’s future, where is your charge heading? Gridlock I guess.

What value life?

Stu Donovan — Sun, 20 May 2012 19:00:40 +0000

What is the value of human life? This seemingly academic question is more important than most people appreciate, especially in the context of transport funding decisions.

But before we discuss how the value of human life influences transport funding decisions, let’s first justify the economic concept itself. I’m aware that for many people the phrase “value of life” just sounds wrong, usually because they think that life has, well, infinite value.

On the other hand, it’s easy to point out that people accept certain “risks” all the time; we are if you like “risk-takers.” That’s not to suggest that people are inherently foolhardy, but it is to suggest that people seem to accept the risk of death when the probabilities are low and/or the rewards are high. Every time you cross a road, for example, you are effectively trading-off a small risk of death versus the benefit of being on the other side of the road.

Perhaps even stronger evidence that the value of life concept has some merit can be found in situations where people pay for things that reduce their likelihood of death. When deciding which car to buy, for example, most people will trade-off safety features versus the additional costs. In this case, people are actually revealing, through how much they pay, how “safe” they prefer to be. To put it bluntly, some people will willingly accept increased risk of death when the price of safety is too high.

At this point I should acknowledge that people are not necessarily fully informed of the relative risks associated with their actions. I may also agree that in situations where people do not have full information it may be worthwhile for governments to “nudge” people towards certain choices that have outcomes that are more desirable. Such arguments lie behind government involvement in, for example, advertising campaigns that encourage children to adopt more healthy eating habits. Ultimately, however, the issue of imperfect information suggests people err when evaluating relative risks; it does not suggest the VOL concept has no merit.

The suggestion that life has infinite value also seems absurd when you consider its full implications: If life were infinitely valuable then we would reasonably expect individuals to use all of their resources to eliminate risks to life, and where risks were unable to be eliminated then we would cease to undertake those activities altogether. My personal view is that while many people feel uncomfortable talking openly about the value of life, it is a conversation that every advanced society that is concerned for the welfare of its citizens (both in terms of their safety and their freedom) needs to have.

Putting philosophical issues to one side, government agencies estimate VOL because it’s actually rather practical. Indeed, VOL helps government agencies determine appropriate levels of funding for health and safety initiatives. And outside of the health system, perhaps no other government agency needs to value life so much as the transport sector. This brings us to the ‘nuts and bolts’ of this post. That is, the methodology that it typically used to estimate VOL.

To estimate VOL you actually just need to follow these three simple steps:

Get a representative sample of NZers;
Ask them questions about how much they would be prepared to pay (both in terms of direct and indirect costs) to drive on a “safe” road, compared to a goat track; and
Collate their responses and use some freaky econometrics (preferably non-parametric logit models) to estimate how much people are prepared to pay for reduced change of death.

From these types of “stated preference” experiments NZTA have estimated the value of life for the average New Zealander to be approximately NZD $4 million.

A normal benefit-cost analysis of a transport safety initiative then proceeds by multiplying this VOL by the reduction in transport related deaths attributed to the project. E.g. Project A saves 5 deaths therefore benefits = $4million x 5 lives saved =$20 million in benefits. Voila, with this methodology NZTA is able to estimate the economic benefits of transport safety improvements in comparison to their economic costs. This in turn can inform relative levels of investment in transport safety initiatives compared to, say, public transport and walking/cycling.

But is this a reasonable methodology? I think not. The primary issue I have with the current process for estimating VOL is that it considers VOL from an individual perspective, rather than in terms of one’s societal value. To put it another way, the current methodology asks people how much they value their own life, but it does not ask about the value of that person to other people. Just ask yourself: How much your own mother, father, and partner would collectively be prepared to pay to avoid your death? Quite a lot one would imagine! That is quite a lot “on top” of your own value of life, i.e. what I call “societal VOL” is additive to “individual VOL” – where current methodologies estimate only the latter.

Am I alone in suggesting that NZTA maybe under-estimating the value of life? It seems not. In May 2011 the State Services Commission commented (in a formal review of NZTA):

NZTA may need to check that the costs in its Economic Evaluation Manual (which are based on a social value of life and willingness to pay surveys) appropriately measure the current economic cost of serious injury. For example the cost to ACC of a paraplegic 20 year old is around $10-15 million life time cost.

In this case, the State Services Commission has picked up the fact that the value of avoiding injuries used by the NZTA is at least four times lower than the actual fiscal costs. Either this suggests that ACC is spending too much on paraplegics, or alternatively that the NZTA is underestimating how much society is prepared to pay to mitigate the costs of serious injury (NB: Injuries are a complex kettle of fish because there are arguments to suggest that being seriously injured is worse than dying).

There is another intuitive reason to think that something is fishy is going on with how we currently value life. This fishy smell arises when you look carefully at responses to stated preference experiments. In doing so you will typically find an interesting anomaly: Young people have a lower value on life than old people, even though the former have longer left to live. Now some of this can obviously be put down to differences in risk profiles. But some of it is also, I believe, due to the fact that individual value is not equivalent with social values, especially when age differences come into play. Stated differently, society places a high value on the life of young people, even if young people themselves do not value their own existence so highly.

If you asked people on the street whether (given the horrendous) choice they would choose to save the life of a young person over that of an old person then most would reply “yes.” This suggests that society values life quite differently from how individuals value their own lives. Again, in my mind the anomaly of young people having a lower VOL confirms that the current method of estimating VOL is incomplete.

As someone whose own father suffered a horrendous vehicle accident at the hands of a drunk driver, I can tell you from first-hand experience that serious injuries impact not only on the individual’s quality of life, but also the quality of life of those that are close to them. There is, if you like, collateral damage to society when people are seriously hurt or killed.

To sum up: I believe that current methodologies are systematically under-estimating the value of avoiding transport related deaths and injuries. They do so because they focus exclusively on the individual value of life, rather than the wider social value.

So while the value of life may not be infinite, I think it’s certainly more valuable than we currently think.

People travelling less in the UK too

Peter M — Mon, 14 May 2012 04:09:45 +0000

The slowdown in traffic growth seen both in New Zealand and the USA is also occurring in the UK, as detailed in a recent Economist article.

Car and van mileage has fallen over the past four years, mainly because of the economic slump. Yet this comes atop a longer-run trend: for around 15 years, Britons have been making fewer journeys. According to the Department for Transport, the average person now goes on only slightly more trips than he did in the early 1970s, mostly by car. Between the mid-1990s and 2010 individuals made 19% fewer shopping outings. Jaunts to see friends dropped by fully 22%, thanks to a fall in visits to private homes.

The article is accompanied by a couple of really useful charts which start to break down the difference between trip numbers and distance travelled, and then looks at which types of trips are increasing and decreasing the most: The decline in trip numbers is discussed at length in the article, which looks at long term cultural changes such as people grouping together shopping trips much more, a general reduction in “Couch and kitchen socialising”, the rise of the internet and higher petrol prices making think twice about ‘discretionary’ trips. Yet the article also argues this does not mean Britain is turning into a country of hermits:

A rise in hours spent staring at computer screens and televisions—and a concurrent decline in journeys to see friends at home—does not necessarily mean that Britain is becoming a nation of hermits. Mr Gershuny argues that those who engage with friends online also tend to see them more in person, even controlling for age. The internet may make socialising more “efficient” and diverse—people can research and plan where they are going, or what they want to buy, eat or do when they are out. In fact, many trips to visit friends at home are being replaced by jaunts out with friends, reckons Oriel Sullivan of Oxford University.

The ONS’s national well-being survey suggests that socialising with friends is still one of the most popular pastimes. People spend more time chatting on the phone too. Yet the travel data may obscure such engagement because socialising is increasingly combined with another activity. The number of trips to meet friends outside their homes has held steady. Other types of outing have become more popular, such as what the ONS describes as “entertainment or public activity” and “day trips”, all of which are likely to include friends or family. For many people, work is also a social encounter.

Retail travel also follows this trend. Despite the decline of the high street, there are more grocery shops at transport hubs such as railway stations, which makes buying fresh food possible without a special outing. “Multitasking” has become a popular shorthand for the predicament of modern workers. It may increasingly apply to their leisure time too.

There is an interesting debate to be had, I think, around the extent to which we might expect trends like these to continue into the future. I do wonder whether there’s a risk of us over-building transport infrastructure – particularly new roads where volumes are very much static (unlike booming PT patronage) – because our future projects are based on past assumptions which simply no longer hold true.

I feel the real test will be what happens to travel patterns and traffic volumes once economic growth properly returns (assuming it will do so).

US Traffic Volumes – something weird is happening

Peter M — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:46:57 +0000

We’ve spoken a lot about traffic volumes over the past few weeks on this blog – and for good reason too: there are some strange things going on with traffic volumes on state highways now static for around seven years and vehicle kilometres travelled on both state highways and local roads in the Auckland area increasing at a much slower rate than population growth over the past five years. Needless to say, these trends are pretty much unheard of previously – in that for close to a century traffic volumes have just gone up, up and up (world wars excluded, I imagine).

The trend is not just limited to New Zealand though, here’s a graph showing the 12 month rolling total of vehicle miles travelled in the USA since 1970:
Showing a comparison with times of recession is useful because often when you point out to people that traffic volumes aren’t increasing, the first response is “but that’s just due to the recession”. Looking at the above graph you can see that in a recession it’s normal for volumes to flat-line or even decrease. Yet outside recessionary times there’s almost always an increase in volumes – aside from what looks like a time period which coincided the 1979 energy crisis.

That is until recently. While obviously the world’s recovery from the 2008 global financial crisis has been slow, having VMT flat-line and then quite sharply decline in very recent times, outside a recessionary period, is quite unprecedented. Something very different is happening here, a big reduction in traffic volumes even when the economy is growing. It would be interesting to run a comparison for New Zealand – something that the Ministry of Transport should be doing but I suspect aren’t because their heads are stuck in the sand just as much as the Minister’s.

Govt: We don’t care as long as the roads are built

Matt L — Wed, 09 May 2012 19:30:30 +0000

Julie Anne Genter was been back in action in parliament yesterday asking questions of the government, this time around what it plans to do about future shortfalls to transport funds that are being predicted by the Ministry of Transport. The answers are quite frankly shocking and reveal that the government really care about the future impact the current expenditure as long as they get the roads built. In essence it is a pretty clear case of doing what they feel like, with no evidence to themselves up and leaving it for future generations to have to sort out.

And a transcript is here:

Snapper ruining integrated ticketing – surprise, surprise

Peter M — Mon, 07 May 2012 19:44:46 +0000

Wow another surprise, surprise this morning – Snapper are ruining integrated ticketing by being too useless to get their machines up to spec. Here’s the NZ Herald story:

A $98 million integrated ticketing system for Auckland is ready to go, but is being held up by Snapper and NZ Bus not installing the technology on more than 650 buses.

This has left Aucklanders – who have paid $42 million towards the system – waiting until November at the earliest to use a single card on buses, trains and ferries.

French technology giant Thales has completed a contract to install the new ticketing system and its New Zealand country director, Peter Beggs, has taken a swipe at Snapper, a sister company to NZ Bus, for delays.

On May 3, Mr Beggs told staff in an email – obtained by the Herald – that the “failure of Snapper to deliver a functional bus system that meets the ratified standard has caused delays to project go-live”.

The Thales contract was signed in late 2009 while the HOP card was officially launched more than a year ago now. If Snapper haven’t been able to get their act together in that time I have little hope that they’re doing anything more than running interference on the whole process and it seems unlikely they’ll be able to sort themselves out by November.

Auckland Transport are also running out of patience:

Within Auckland Transport, patience is running out with Snapper, NZ Bus and its investment company owners, Infratil, who together have been delaying Auckland’s integrated ticketing project from day one.

In March last year, the Snapper card was launched under the guise of being Auckland Transport’s Hop integrated ticket, but Snapper has failed to integrate its system to the Thales system on its 650 buses – and already missed one deadline to prove its system could link into the Thales system.

Last night, Auckland Transport chief executive David Warburton said that after sitting down with Snapper and making changes to the transition, he had no reason to doubt the Wellington company would be ready to go live with the integrated ticketing system on November 30.

“We have no intention of having multiple systems. There will be one system that will be the NZTA New Zealand standard,” Mr Warburton said.

So what happens if Snapper can’t meet the deadline? It would be pretty amusing – although annoying in a sense as it would delay the project – if all the Snapper machines had to be ripped out of NZ Bus buses and replaced with machines that can actually do the job properly.

Why Compare with Vancouver?

Peter M — Sun, 06 May 2012 00:13:48 +0000

There have been a few posts recently that make comparisons between Auckland and Vancouver – and I’m planning to really focus on this comparison over the coming weeks, which begs the question of “why compare with Vancouver?” At a broad level, I think making comparisons with Vancouver is useful because it’s a relatively similar city to Auckland (in terms of population density, geographic constraints, ethnic diversity and to an extent, size).

But more particularly, I think Vancouver is a really useful comparison because, if we do a lot of things right over the next 20-30 years (and learn from a few of Vancouver’s mistakes) then Vancouver is a pretty good model for where we might want Auckland to be. Even population wise, with around 2.3 million people in Greater Vancouver – there’s a great comparison with what Auckland’s population is likely to be in around 20-30 years.

Importantly – in terms of the desire to make Auckland the ‘world’s most liveable city’ – Vancouver is generally a city that Auckland competes with regularly in the various liveable city survey results that get bandied around every year. In 2011 Auckland did rank higher than Vancouver (3^rd compared to equal 5^th) in the Mercer survey, but we were below Vancouver in the Economist survey (10^th compared to 3^rd). Most relevantly, Auckland’s excellent results in some parts of the survey (political environment, schools and education, health and sanitation, natural environment and recreation) are let down by our performance in that key issue of most interest to this blog: transportation.

Vancouver has a really interesting transport history – making a decision in the 1960s to not allow motorway construction within the City of Vancouver. Even today, there are remarkably few motorway/freeway type roads within the boundaries of Metro Vancouver:

Instead of spending vast amounts of money on road-building, Vancouver has developed an incredibly effective public transport system over the past 30 years – particularly since the opening of the first Skytrain Line in late 1985. From zero passenger rail trips prior to Skytrain opening, there were 25 million trips four years later and then big increases right through to the present day, with over 122 million rail trips (3 million on the West Coast Express, the remainder on the Skytrain system including the new Canada Line). The graph below shows patronage growth over that time, compared to population growth (in 2001 there was a very lengthy strike which caused the dip): Data from here: http://www.metrovancouver.org/about/statistics/Pages/KeyFacts.aspx

To get a better idea about how well Vancouver has done over the past 20-odd years in growing ridership, it’s worth making the inevitable comparison with Auckland:Interestingly, while Vancouver’s PT patronage is so much higher than Auckland’s and while Vancouver has been far more successful than Auckland at integrating land-use and transport policies (most notably through places like Metrotown, as discussed in my previous post), overall Auckland actually has a higher average population density than Vancouver – when you look at the population and size of their respective urban areas (rather than arbitrary administrative boundaries). Data from here: http://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf

Of course average population density is misleading in a number of ways (after all, it suggests that Los Angeles is higher density than New York City), but it gives us the general picture that Vancouver’s vastly better PT patronage it not due to it being a vastly higher density place.

Vancouver is also interesting to compare Auckland with because they have somewhat similar urban development aspirations. Let’s compare the development strategy from the Auckland Plan with Vancouver’s regional growth strategy:
Both cities want to contain sprawl. Both cities want to focus intensification centres and around the PT network. Both cities need to protect industrial land that’s becoming a scarce resource. Both cities are concerned about their effect on polluting the natural environment. Both cities continue to grow quickly and face significant housing affordability issues.

While Vancouver’s no absolute urban utopia for us to copy mindlessly, I think it’s a city that Auckland can learn a huge amount from. Over the next few weeks I’m going to really try to look at Vancouver in a bit more detail to be able to tell the story about how it’s turned into the kind of city that can be a model for Auckland (to an extent), and apply the learnings from Vancouver to see what might be key decisions the city needs to make over the next 30 years – particularly in relation to transport.

Surprise surprise, MoT policy advice quality criticised

Peter M — Fri, 04 May 2012 20:55:27 +0000

I can’t say I was too surprised to read this Radio NZ article yesterday:

A Ministry-commissioned report last year by consulting firm The Institute of Economic Research found 21 of 60 pieces of advice to the transport minister and the Cabinet were communicated in a borderline or poor way.

While it noted the Ministry’s comprehensive technical knowledge, it said there had been lapses of judgement.

The Ministry is required to save almost $1 million a year and since the 2010/11 financial year the number of policy staff has dropped from 107 full time equivalent employees to 90.

Ministry spokesperson Gareth Chaplin says despite this they can improve their policy advice by working together.

The report cited one paper that seemed intent on embarrassing the transport minister by reminding him of officials’ advice from the distant past and his comments from two years ago. The report said this type of telling off makes officials look churlish.

Other reviewed papers were deemed pointless.

The Ministry’s ignorance of the impact of higher oil prices, their willful disregard for a seven year trend of near flat traffic volumes and the hatchet job they did on the City Rail Link business case make me very unsurprised to hear that there are concerns about the quality of MoT’s work.

You can listen to the accompanying radio piece here.

How Effective Transport Planning Has Transformed London

Patrick Reynolds — Wed, 02 May 2012 01:00:22 +0000

There’s that word again, the thing Auckland needs: Transformation. How altering our transport investment habits is the way to achieve it; lessons from London, should be interesting:

AK Conversation 29 May 2012