Another state highway project and another pretty animation, this time it is the turn of Puhoi to Warkworth.
Some of the earthworks in this project are going to be absolutely massive although in this video doesn’t really show them as well as the previous video due to it being zoomed out a bit more. Also I find it interesting how the NZTA is very reluctant to say anything about what the time savings of this road actually are, for pretty much every other project they tout how much faster it will make journeys e.g. they say Waterview will take 15 minutes off the journey from the Airport to the CBD. I suspect this is because the time savings aren’t actually that great. It’s also interesting how they show the the existing road all the way to Whangarei, I wonder if this is their attempt to tie Northland into a project that exists solely with the borders of the Auckland Region or if they are indicating that they want to eventually extend the motorway all of the way to Whangarei?
Here is a similar video they releases last year when the indicative route was announced, you can see a bit more clearly some of the huge earthworks and viaducts that are being planned.
The NZTA has announced its preferred route to build a motorway from Puhoi to Warkworth which is part of the Puhoi to Wellsford Road of National significance. The route makes a few changes to what was announced about a year ago and said to be due to them having refined the engineering and environmental issues along feedback from locals from consultation. Hidden in the information is news that they plan to start building the motorway in 2014 with a completion date for this section of 2019. Reading through the announcement and various bits of information it raised a lot of questions but first, here is the new alignment aldong with the key changes:
We have already seen that the previous alignment would require some absolutely massive earth works along with multiple viaducts and I don’t think that this has changed much. The first question I have comes from the yellow box at the bottom of the image where they quote that Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga generate 36% of the countries GDP. The problem with that is Auckland alone currently generates 37% of the countries GDP so getting basic facts like that wrong is not a good start. Here is the key part of the media release:
As the main road link for the freight industry, the new route will better connect Northland to the markets of Auckland and the central North Island to stimulate economic growth in Northland and the Upper North Island.
NZTA State Highways Manager for Auckland and Northland, Tommy Parker,says the agency’s traffic modelling shows that the average number of vehicles travelling between Puhoi and Warkworth each day is expected to increase from an average of 19,700 in 2012 to Puhoi and Warkworth to 31,300 per day in 2026.
“Drivers will make significant time savings on an Auckland-Whangarei journey in 2026 when the Puhoi to Warkworth section of the RoNS is operating, and these time savings are expected to be greater for heavy vehicles carrying freight.
“A divided motorway with a central median barrier will also greatly improve safety, eliminating the kind of head-on collisions which have claimed four lives on this stretch of highway since 2006.”
It seems that with this project you really need to read between the lines because what they aren’t saying is often just as important as what they do say. They claim that 31k vehicles will use the route by 2026 but the key thing here is that it is across both routes, not just the motorway. I also wonder if that increase in vehicles is based on the same growth projections used in other projects and still get used despite traffic volumes being static or even reducing over the last 7 years.
They claim that there will be significant time savings for vehicles but the key thing here is that the benefit is only for drivers coming from further north, that is because the only connection to Warkworth will be on the northern side of town. That time saving benefit was estimated in the past to only be about 5 minutes and those that live in the town will have to drive North to get to the motorway before heading South again which means for many that there will be little to no time saving benefits over what they have now.
There are quite a few other things that could have a big impact on this road. The NZTA have said that they haven’t made a decision yet on whether it should be tolled. Their experience with the existing motorway from Orewa to Puhoi is that even though that piece of road has greater time savings than this new section is expected to deliver, about 30% of traffic still uses the old free route. Using that ratio as an example it would mean that we would still see about 10,000 vehicles per day using the existing route and the motorway would carry about the same amount of traffic as the existing road does today. I believe that would mean it is carrying less traffic than any other motorway in Auckland and less than most arterials.
They have also said that at this stage they won’t be building an interchange at Puhoi which would have interesting outcomes.
The residents on Puhoi and Mahurangi West would no longer have direct access to the motorway. They would instead be forced to use the free road which takes longer and is more dangerous. I wonder if that has been taken into account in the BCR.
As there is a big impact on vehicle numbers if the road is tolled, no interchange at Puhoi means that the NZTA either have to toll the whole motorway from Orewa to Warkworth or remove the existing toll. If they take the latter option they should include the remaining debt that the toll is currently paying into account as that would still need to be paid and so it should be added to the costs for the project.
The NZTA is going to get this consented via a board of inquiry like they did with Waterview, and you can be sure that the locals of Puhoi and Mahurangi West will want ramps built. Given the mitigation that was required for that Waterview with things like vent stack locations, I suspect the locals will have a good chance of winning but that raises another question. Part of me thinks that the reason for not including ramps at that location is that the NZTA know their time savings estimates are bogus so are going to try and force as many people as possible to use the motorway as that would make the old route much longer once again.
So what about the financial and economic aspects of the project, this is what the NZTA has to say:
Estimated costs for the Puhoi-Wellsford project are $760m for Puhoi-Warkworth and in the order of $1b for the Warkworth-Wellsford section
The Puhoi-Warkworth section has a BCR of 1.5 and the overall Puhoi-Wellsford project has a BCR of 1.0
From memory $760m is a little cheaper than when the route was announced last year but still bloody expensive for how many people will use it daily. The total cost of the project has increased though from $1.65b to 1.76B. The more interesting thing is the Benefit Cost Ratio (BCR), it isn’t clear if this includes things like wider economic benefits or what discount rates have been used, one thing we can be sure of is that they will be the best case scenario. Taking these numbers at face value they suggest the section to Warkworth is marginally ok but that the section from Warkworth to Wellsford has a BCR of only 0.6. This once again highlights one of the biggest problems with the RoNS, to get some of the bad and uneconomic parts built, they are lumping them in with other projects to bring their scores up. The NZTA hasn’t actually released that much information so I think an OIA request will probably be in order to get a copy of the latest business case.
Other than the costs, there also has been no new information the section from Warkworth to Wellsford. The indications are that they still can’t find a workable route through what is one of the most geologically unstable regions in the country. Perhaps the people working on it also know how stupid the project is and are trying to delay it as much as possible because if spending $760m on a road that currently carries only ~20,000 vehicles per day is bad, spending $1b on a road that carries less than 9,000 vehicles per day is just madness.
The NZTA have released a new video about the Waterview Connection (they actually released it about a month ago but I have only just seen it now). It is definitely a very pretty video but I get the feeling from the ending that it is partly to help push their case for moving the vent stack from the one mandated by the Board of Inquiry. This is something they were pushing back in Feb but I thought they had now dropped the issue.
Of course one does have to ask just how much was spent on this video, I bet it wasn’t cheap.
The other day I took a trip out to Manukau to have a look at the station and made a stop at Ellerslie to see how things had progressed but I also made on other transport related stop (it was actually between the two mentioned). Auckland Transport held an open day in Pakuranga to update the community on what was happening with with AMETI. The key information was that AT have now confirmed where the South Eastern Urban Busway would go once it got to the Eastern side of the Tamaki River. They had confirmed in December that the busway would be build on the northern side of Lagoon Dr and that a new bridge would be built over the river exclusively for the busway as well as pedestrians and cycles.
The new Panmure bridge, complete with 80's style American buses
Once across the bridge AT have now confirmed that the busway will run along the Northern side of Pakuranga Rd until it gets to Ti Rakau Dr where it will then turn south. At the Pakuranga town centre and in the current carpark for the mall will be a major busway station. From there the busway will head down Ti Rakau Dr where it will run down the middle of the road. There will also be bus lanes that carry on along Pakuranga Rd up towards Highland Park.
Note: The Yellow dots are signalised intersections and the blue boxes are bus stops/stations
And some images of the busway and stops along Pakuranga Rd
And the central busway on Ti Rakau Dr
I do like the busway plans and they are a big improvement on what has been suggested in the past and I also overheard locals saying how much they liked it. There is downside to all of this though, the biggest and what I think will be most opposed part of the project is a plan to build a flyover down Reeves Rd. The intention is to divert all through traffic around the back of Pakuranga, over the flyover and directly on to Pakuranga Highway thereby avoiding the Ti Rakau Dr intersection and also avoiding the busway. The problem though is that flyovers tend to be extremely ugly things that dominate their location and cities around the world are removing them where ever possible. AT claim it will enhance the pedestrian realm but I can’t see it.
And here is an image of the flyover from one of the information boards they had.
AT are starting to put quite a bit of information up on their website which is great to see and they have now put up the information boards that they showed. They have also posted a couple of videos of how the busway would look. The first one is a bit lower quality but flies through the project while the second one shows how some of the stops would work in a bit more detail
Also pleasing is that the busway stops at the Panmure station appear to be right outside the station now rather than a few hundred metres down the road
Fantastic aerials of the the biggest urban motorway junction in Australasia under construction. From the Whites Aviation collection at the National Library:
1968, Dominion Rd flyover in the foreground
Auckland City used to just flow into its surrounding inner suburbs. Weirdly, as seen above they started with arguably the daftest part of the whole plan: The massively over engineered Dominion Rd/New North Rd flyover. Some engineer was allowed to get more that a little carried away that day. Ah: Brave New World.
1966. Newton. George Courts on K'd on the Left
Site clearance already beginning; anticipating SH1 being shoved right through town. You can see why K’Rd was such a successful shopping precinct; direct connection with its community. Plus of course being at the heart of the well used tram network.
1967. Domion Rd flyovers, looking west
Unusual view. Western Line on the left. Easy to see how out of scale the Dom Rd flyover is, and needlessly complicated. The scar of the pointless destruction of community that is to become dumb little mini-me motorway of Ian McKinnion Drive on the right.
1969. Symonds St in centre. work starting on SH1 through the city
Work begins. Check out the on-street parking. They’ve got to go somewhere if this is the mode you invest in. A big additional but uncalculated cost of the auto-dependent choice.
Not sure of the date 1970s. The full CMJ sandpit.
Fantastic print. Whites clearly invested in some better kit by this stage. A Hasselblad maybe; looks like it could be the great 40mm Distagon, or possibly the 38mm Biogon on the SWC, developed by Zeiss and Hasselblad as an aerial reconnaissance camera for the Luftwaffe in the 1940s! [A fact you don't see in their advertising]. And still great. Happy to be corrected, if anyone knows. Forgive me for indulging my inner camera nerd.
CMJ, with gardening
Severance at its best; no way across to K’rd now, hey guess what?, it’s never recovered commercially.
CMJ_lost street pattern
1950s "Master Transport Focal Point"
And how they sold it. Doesn’t look like much does it? A few little lines, nothing that’ll totally cut the CBD from its inner suburbs and nearly kill it for example. The text talks of tunnels. Yeah well that would have been much better, human life could have continued so much better if the surface hadn’t been reduced to a few car dominated bridges.
A fine monument to central planning. South Seas Soviet style. This whole effort was planned and built by government apparatchiks in Wellington immune to any input from the locals, including the local elected officials.
Well there you go: How modern Auckland was made by a city engineer with the phrase: “It’s a technical matter”. Never let the pricks get away with that one again.
Edit: Just added the accreditation for the photos
Auckland motorways, Dominion Road interchange. Whites Aviation Ltd : Photographs. Ref: WA-67442-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23121284
Newton, Auckland with motorway construction on right of Grafton Bridge. Whites Aviation Ltd : Photographs. Ref: WA-66170-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23119567
Auckland City, including Southern Motorway and Eden Crescent. Whites Aviation Ltd : Photographs. Ref: WA-67026-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22595451
Motorway junction, Symonds Street, Auckland. Whites Aviation Ltd : Photographs. Ref: WA-68574-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22792353
Auckland motorway construction, Newton, with ‘spaghetti junction’ roads. Whites Aviation Ltd : Photographs. Ref: WA-74702-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22722332
The Auckland Council’s business advisory group has decided, based on what wisdom I don’t know, that the best way to raise the supposedly necessary additional funding to build Auckland super-expensive motorways like an Additional Harbour Crossing and the East-West Link, is through tolling people who travel on the motorway network. It sounds a lot like an idea that was proposed by the NZ Council for Infrastructure Development last year. With the briefest of analysis, the tolling idea seems like it might have some merit because of the large amount of money that could be raised – with (NZCID estimate) 915,000 vehicles joining the motorway network each day, even a fairly low toll for each vehicle would raise a lot of money that could be spent on transport projects. Compared to other revenue raising systems, the idea is also relatively simple: just toll gate every motorway onramp.
Here’s how it was described in a NZ Herald article earlier this week:
The council’s business advisory panel believes a toll of about $2 a day would be fairer and more effective than 12 other options raised by Auckland Mayor Len Brown to fill an $11.7 billion transport funding gap.
Councillor Cameron Brewer, who chairs the forum, said yesterday that there could be some variation in the toll according to time of day and location but an average of $2 would raise about $700 million a year.
“That would go a long way to servicing and making inroads into the $11.7 billion funding shortfall,” he told the Herald.
However, the idea has a number of significant flaws – one of which really kills the whole concept. Firstly, the ‘non-fatal’ flaws:
The system is likely to disproportionately impact upon lower income Aucklanders by pricing them off the motorways (at least at peak times). While the system seems like it’s designed to raise money as its primary purpose, rather than to reduce congestion, clearly adding a charge to driving on the motorway will dissuade some from doing so, who by definition will be priced off the road (the big question is ‘where do they go). Set against that argument is the reality that this is how markets work, and we live in a market economy for most things – why not roadspace? We can, arguably, achieve social equity in other ways such as a progressive tax system and through the social welfare system.
The next flaw, as pointed out by Brian Rudman’s column yesterday, relates to the efficiency of these tolling systems at raising money. As a way of raising money, tolling is far less efficient than – for example – simply whacking up fuel taxes. You need to build a whole pile of infrastructure to capture people getting onto the motorway, you need to set up a very large and complex computer system to process it all, you need to send out a lot of letters reminding people to pay their bills, you need to take a few people to court to ensure they pay their bills. It’s just complicated and costly, particularly when compared to fuel tax which is just done through sending the petrol companies a bill once in a while. Set against this argument is that perhaps, even despite the massive collection costs, the system could raise enough money to still be worthwhile.
These issues aren’t necessarily fatal to the concept as a whole. If Auckland’s population can be convinced that we need to waste billions more on additional motorways, to the extent that we’re willing to pay $2 each and every time we get on the motorway, perhaps with different pricing schemes to reward those travelling outside the peak for shift-work, maybe we can get past the social equity issue. And perhaps, if the operating costs for this system could be minimised – in comparison to the amount of money raised, then the efficiency argument becomes a bit less critical.
However, there remains a flaw that I don’t think has a solution – and that is a little thing called diverted traffic. If motorways are tolled but not adjacent arterial roads (and the system’s complexity would be increased hugely if we included non-motorway roads), then surely a fairly significant chunk of traffic is going to shift away from the tolled routes and onto the free routes. This has a number of rather perverse results:
The big, wide and fancy new motorways that we’ve spent billions on will be largely empty, except for rich businessmen to drive along (maybe that’s why they like the idea?)
The arterial roads which people actually live in, where we run our buses, where we have pedestrians, cyclists, driveways, where we want to improve the balance between movement and place functions, will become horrendously busier and more congested as people use these roads to avoid having to pay the motorway tolls.
In short, we shift traffic away from where we want it (on the motorways) and into places where we don’t really want much through-traffic (the streets and roads where we live, work and play).
The only way to get around this flaw is to also start charging for travel along local roads. In which case we’re really shifting to a GPS-based congestion pricing scheme which, although probably more sensible in terms of avoiding problems like the above, is likely to be much much more complicated and expensive to implement and may well face significantly greater political opposition.
In short, tolling motorways to raise money (in isolation) may sound like a good idea in theory, but when you look at it in reality, it’s pretty damn stupid.
Tuesday’s Herald had a lot of good coverage of transport issues. No fewer than four good reports by Mathew Dearnaley. Rudman on the Remuera buslane rebellion, covered here on this site. And even a piece on the transformation of LA back towards being a transit town.
There was also really good coverage of this site’s founder, Josh Arbury, in his new role as Transport Strategist at the Council on value for money in Auckland’s PT; here. A piece on design of the new trains, here. And coverage of ways to raise infrastructure investment funds via proposed road pricing here. This issue deserves its own post and will get future coverage on this site. All this follows earlier an report on fewer road deaths here, and a really encouraging report on Shared Spaces with not only Alex Swney of Heart Of The City saying really good things about the improvements they bring but even the AA’s Simon Lambourne managing to not see the world ending at the removal of parking spaces; here, although still demanding more parking buildings.
But the one I want to look at in detail is about a seemingly insignificant little road with a boring name; who was/is Ian Mckinnon? Dearnaley’s article is here.
I have always hated this road. I hate driving on it. I certainly hate cycling on it. I hate the detail of its design. I hate its programme of speeding vehicles up briefly in the middle of the city. I hate the way it turns its back on its surrounding sites. I hate the way it cuts off Eden Terrace. I hate the way it spreads the quality of a motorway a little further into the surrounding area. And now it turns out to be so bad that it kills its users too….. In short the whole thing is a disaster. Why? Well first let’s look at its reported problems.
Although the road was built almost to motorway standard for the 30,000 vehicles that use it daily, and includes long downhill sections in both directions, it lacks a median barrier and has become notorious for crashes on its main bend.
So the idea of building a road ‘almost to motorway standard’ to link ordinary streets in the middle of the city has led to bad outcomes. Surprise me. And despite a road design that encourages speed it is now expected that declaring a lower speed limit will fix the situation, although police concede that this is unlikely.
But although the police intend monitoring the new limit, they are expected to “exercise discretion” until drivers get used to it, with prompting from electronic message signs over the next two weeks.
Hopeless really, it should have the physical characteristics of a city road; in particular it would be best to reduce it to one lane each way to help slow drivers. This would also provide the opportunity to add a real cycle lane here on the resultant spare tarmac. Something urgently needed because the NorthWestern cycleway stops at the Newton Road overbridge and this annoying little road could provide a way to link the cycleway up to K and Queen, to Symonds Street and therefore the Universities and the hospital, through to the Domain and so forth. A low cost way to get a great deal of cycling connection and some traffic calming thrown in for free! Like this:
Ian McKinnon Drive as a way to extend the NW cycleway to Upper Queen St and beyond
Now let’s go back a bit further and look at what else is so bad about this road. Here’s a wider view from above:
Dom Rd/New North Rd flyovers bottom. Ian McKinnon Dr top.
Ian McKinnon Drive is a relatively new road [anyone got a date?] inserted through a much older street pattern and a sorry consequence of the terribly over-engineered and land gobbling monument to post-war planning that is the Dominion Road/New North rd interchange. Originally designed to be part of the Dominion Rd Motorway, yes!, this interchange clearly needed somewhere to head to once the motorway was thankfully abandoned, so Ian Makinnon was rammed through. Here is how it was:
Dominion Rd + New North Rd with rail line pre interchange
Ok you can see the problem; both Dominion Rd and New North Rd converging into one road city bound. You can also see what’s good about this intricate and interwoven neighbourhood street pattern; housing and employment mixed together, walkable and interconected streets; a modern urbanist’s dream. But to allow [or force] a car based transport model on a city like this can only mean getting out the wreckers ball. It also means, of course, choosing to prioritise those living further out and wanting/needing to drive in over the value of the land and buildings and the community already existing in this inner area. New outer suburbs over older inner ones. Spirit of the times. Here is work by Kent Lundberg showing what value was directly destroyed by putting this road in [Twitter: @kentslundberg]:
Interesting to see just how much of old inner Auckland has been lost to expanding the roadspace to accommodate our imbalanced car focussed system, especially in the light of how valuable this kind of inner city property has become. What great rating income if nothing else has been abandoned by choosing this kind of city. Lost wealth. But that isn’t all, this demolishing and severance, as well as the presence of more and more vehicles rushing past has kept the remaining odd parcels of property low value, underdeveloped, and underperforming. Auto-dependency waving yet again its magic wand of anti-agglomeration. In the top left you can see a stretch of Newton Gully which has also, of course, been sacrificed to auto infrastructure. Making complete the separation of the remaining housing of Eden Terrace into a strangely stranded island. And one that few walk to and from as Ian McKinnon and motorway form such barriers to pedestrians.
You can also see there is a rail line running through these pictures. Had the earlier versions of the City Rail Link been built and a real Auckland passenger service been invested in so many of the commuters that these interventions were designed for could have still got to the CBD efficiently. Then could the costly destruction of so much of this neighbourhood have been avoided? It would have had to have been considered valuable for that to happen or at least there would have had to have been the ability for local view to have been heard and considered instead of distant decisions being forced down from City Hall and Wellington. We could still do much to improve this area, undo a lot of the damage, but we’ll never get the old street pattern back. The good news is that reducing the road space will become more and more viable as we build effective alternatives car commuting and as it would release a fair of land for productive use such rehab work might pay for itself. Here is an earlier post about this by Josh Arbury.
Let’s also remember the wider lesson from this story, we must balance place value and movement benefit more sensibly than was done here. Motorways and other invasive insertions are always more likely to happen in areas of low value but are those values permanent? How much have we already lost? Grafton Gully, for example, is a terrible loss to the city and clumsy separation of the city and the Domain, and put through in an age when we valued wild places a little less. Is it any surprise that the road lobby are now proposing to complete the total separation of Onehunga from its harbour by motorway; a lot easier to get its payday among the poorer and less connected of South Auckland after getting a bloody nose in the eastern suburbs.
So we can see in this one example how the auto-dependent model is considered the least productive and most wasteful system of movement for a city; it is a costly destroyer of place value. But we’ve always known that:
Stuart’s twoposts on traffic volumes in the last couple of weeks have highlighted the indisputable fact that we’re driving less, that we’ve been driving less for quite some time now and perhaps most interestingly, that us driving less is actually not a bad thing for the economy. The best data available is for state highway traffic volumes, where we can see three distinct phases of traffic growth/decline since 2008:
The data is from NZTA, and I have just overlaid the red lines and text separating out the phases. The key coloured line is the pink one, which shows the three month rolling average for all vehicles compared to the previous year. It tracks the green line, which is for light-vehicles, quite closely.
Phase 1 is pretty much 2008, and starts with a dramatic decline in volumes in the earlier part of the year – with the rolling average for all vehicles in July bottoming out at around an 8% decline from the same months in 2007. In the later months of 2008 the decline reversed, but it took until 2009 before we saw ‘month on month’ positive growth rates re-emerge.
Phase 2 is 2009 and is pretty much the only time when we actually saw higher traffic volumes compared to the same month the year before. However, a key reason for this is obviously because it was recovering from the massive declines in 2008. And in actual fact, many of the 2009 increases weren’t big enough to offset the 2008 declines. For example, traffic growth in June 2009 was 2.5%, but the decline in June 2008 had been 6.6%, meaning the 2009 numbers were still 4.3% below 2007 levels. Overall, only January and December 2009 had higher traffic volumes than the same months in 2007 – the rest were lower.
Phase 3, which I think we’re still in, covers all of the last two years and is actually pretty boring really, showing pretty much no increase in volumes, although the decreases are not as dramatic as in 2008. After the huge fluctuations in 2008 and 2009 it has been a calmer period, but certainly has not reverted to the long-running trend of pretty constant growth in volumes that had occurred up until 2008.
Before I get onto the cause of these trends, I think it’s worth noting the differences between heavy vehicle trends and the general trend. Heavy vehicle volumes held up a bit better in 2008 (although the trend was downwards) than for general vehicles, but didn’t recover until much much later in 2009. In phase 3, heavy vehicle volumes have increased significantly more than general vehicles, although even they have tailed off in the last few months.
There are likely to be multiple causes for these trends. Stuart’s posts highlight changing demographics, changing cultural attitudes towards cars, technological change, transport saturation, ongoing urbanisation and rising transport prices as all contributing to this fundamental shift – which on a per capita basis has actually been quite a significant decline in the amount we’re driving. It’s hard to get good data on most of those contributing factors, except for one that I think has had perhaps the most immediate impact over the past few years: fuel prices. Using the handy AA Petrolwatch information, we can see how the price of 91 Octane fuel has fluctuated over the past four years (not adjusted for inflation by the way – something I probably should do for future posts): We all know the story: in the first half of 2008 oil prices spiked, sending petrol in New Zealand over $2 a litre for the first time. Then in September 2008 the global economy tanked and oil prices crashed – with petrol hitting a low of $1.33 a litre in December 2008. Prices held relatively steady (though generally increasing) throughout much of 2009 and 2010, before increasing in early 2011 (Libyan crisis?) and have stayed above $2 a litre ever since – most recently propped up by concerns over Iran and a slowly recovering global economy.
So what happens if we overlay the graphs on each other? Well, to further iron out some fluctuations in traffic volumes I have taken a 6 month rolling average, then overlaid that onto the graph above (though the horizontal lines relate to the volumes to make it clear where zero is): What seems to correspond best, just glancing at the graph above, is the relationship between petrol prices and the slope of the traffic volumes graph. I guess that’s natural when you use rolling averages, because it takes some time for the impact to really show through.
I’m not much of a statistical whizz, but overall there does seem to be quite a clear link between the two – showing that higher fuel prices really are a significant contributor (in my opinion) to declines in traffic volumes. With the likelihood of fuel prices increasing in the future seeming higher than the likelihood of them decreasing, it seems a fairly safe assumption that the stagnation in traffic volumes isn’t going to end any time soon: terrible news for NZTA and the Ministry of Transport who are trying to justify the spending of billions on new motorways, but great news for the rest of us as chances are congestion isn’t going to increase much in the future.
The Department of Transport published last January, with no publicity, its latest National Road Traffic Forecasts. This is an output of the National Transport Model. Although traffic levels have levelled off in recent years, the projection is for a 44% increase by 2035, even though population growth is assumed to be only 18%.
Car traffic in London is projected to grow by 36% by 2035, even though the number of car trips (driver and passenger) has held constant at about 10m a day since 1993, according to data from Transport for London. This finding suggests that road capacity is limiting car use, taking account of the impact of parking restrictions, bus lanes, traffic signals and the congestion charging zone. So it is hard to see how the DfT projected traffic growth could be fitted in.
My view is that DfT, having built a national transport model at considerable effort, are reluctant to question the behavioural assumptions underlying the inputs and the face validity of the outputs. Doubtless it suites the Department to project substantial traffic growth when bidding for funding from the Treasury.
The last sentence is critical. I’m yet to work out whether this whole denial of stalled traffic volumes in both the UK and New Zealand is simply institutional inertia or whether it’s something far more sinister.
It has been really refreshing to see transport discussed so much in parliament this week – with the results of the exchanges spilling into the media, as evidenced by the interviews on Breakfast TV a couple of days back.
What seems to have really kicked this off are numbers coming out of the Ministry of Transport, and in a series of answers to written questions, highlighting the ever-increasing dominance of our transport budget by projects that have very low cost-benefit ratios. This was first highlighted in the Ministry of Transport’s briefing to the incoming minister – which included this graph: A series of written questions from Phil Twyford to Gerry Brownlee has dug up some further detail on the numbers that sit behind the graph above (at least for the last couple of years) and also updated it with 2010/2011 data. I’ve put together the answers to a series of written questions into the table below – first by dollar amount and then by percentage: Finally, a couple of questions asked by Mr Twyford look at the proportion of the state highway spend on projects with low cost-benefit ratios that are related to Roads of National Significance projects. The answers highlight that in 2009/2010, $527 million of the $587 million spent on projects with low cost-benefit ratios related to RoNS project (just under 90%). In 2010/2011, $468 million of the $583 million spent on projects with low BCRs related to RoNS projects (just over 80%).
Now let’s put them all together into a graph showing what’s happened since 2005/2006 – effectively adding the 2010/2011 data to the earlier graph in this post:
Geez what happened from 2008/2009 onwards that triggered such a dramatic lowering in the cost-effectiveness of our state highway spending? Oh that’s right, the current government came to power and introduced the RoNS projects.
A series of written questions from Phil Twyford to Gerry Brownlee has dug up some further detail on the numbers that sit behind the graph above (at least for the last couple of years) and also updated it with 2010/2011 data. I’ve put together the answers to a series of written questions into the table below – first by dollar amount and then by percentage:
Recent Comments