|
|
By Matt L, on May 8th, 2012 Sometimes the comments in posts take an interesting turn and yesterdays post was one such occasion with a discussion about what to do with Britomart when we build the CRL so I thought it might be worth a separate post to look at the issues. When we build the CRL the plan has always been to ‘plug’ it into the back Britomart connecting to tracks 1 and 5 but thing I am really concerned about is the impact that would have on the rest of the station. Those two platforms would be very heavily used while the remaining platforms would be largely empty except for perhaps the occasional future regional service or trains like the Northern Explorer. I think there needs to more thought put into the impacts of this so I have put together a few of the options mentioned.
Option 1 – Connect to Platform 1 and 5 but leave the rest of the station as is
This would probably be the cheapest and easiest option but I think there is one big drawback to this option and that is simply the capacity of the platforms. Even today we see that when a full train turns up the platforms become quickly overwhelmed, this is made worse if there are a lot of people also waiting to get onto that same train which is something that frequently happens. We will soon be getting larger capacity trains which will mean even more people getting out on to these same platforms. The platforms also take a long time to clear so with the CRL running at high frequencies we could really start running into problems.
Option 2 – Build new platforms ‘behind the walls’
One thing many people don’t know is that there is actually space behind the coloured walls, this was originally intended to be used by light rail vehicles to get to the surface from where they would then run on the surface at street level. This is something that simply can’t happen any more due to the number of trains that we need to get into and out of Britomart meaning that there just isn’t the capacity to allow this to happen. We might be able to modify the space to allow for an additional platform for boarding or disembarking. If we did this I would still be concerned about the numbers on each platform as areas like the stairs and escalators already get easily overloaded so having more people in a smaller space isn’t going to help.
Option 3 – Widen the existing platforms
Another option could be to widen the existing platforms by removing one of the existing tracks, this would provide much more space for people to move about within the station while still having a few places for regional trains to terminate. It would require some modification to the existing layout but hopefully shouldn’t be anything too difficult. Personally I think that this might end up being the best option as it also allows us better reflect how our priorities have changed since the station was originally built. It also still allows us space to potentially develop regional services in the future where perhaps 4-6 services an hour could terminate.
Option 4 – A new dedicated CRL station
This is Nick Rs preferred solution and it could provide quite a bit of additional capacity to the rail network but one of my major concerns is that without a major investment to develop a quite a number of regional services that the existing station would be largely empty for most of the day. This would likely hurt any future development of rail such as extensions to the airport or to the North Shore as opponents would use it as an example of a wasted resource.
I suspect we will just end up with option one as it is the cheapest to do but I do hope that the project team look what will be the best solution long term although I guess that options two or three could be developed in the future if needed.
By Peter M, on May 7th, 2012 As part of their efforts to supposedly make inter-city rail between Auckland and Wellington more cost-effective, KiwiRail have significantly changed the way the current Overlander service operates, and have now announced it will be renamed as the “Northern Explorer”. Here are the details:
KiwiRail’s new North Island train service, which will begin service in the middle of this year, has been given a new name – Northern Explorer.
The name was announced this morning at the TRENZ conference, where New Zealand’s key tourism providers meet to showcase their products to international travel and tourism buyers.
“The new name signals a fundamentally different train service for the North Island and the transformation of the service into an internationally recognised tourism product,” says KiwiRail’s Scenic Manager Tom Evers-Swindell.
“This is a journey through the heart of New Zealand’s scenic North Island and the name Northern Explorer evokes a sense of discovery on a trip with a real New Zealand experience.”
Mr Evers-Swindell says that KiwiRail has and will continue to work with tourism operators to develop tourism packages and help showcase what is great about the North Island – both inside and outside the train.
“Feedback that KiwiRail received from Overlander passengers about the service is that while the scenery is beautiful and the staff are fantastic, the carriages are very old and the journey time is too long. The introduction of the Northern Explorer service with its new scenic carriages and shorter journey time will be a big shift in the experience that will be offered to our international and domestic passengers,” Mr Evers-Swindell says.
In addition to the new carriages, changes include a new café carriage, an open-air viewing carriage, a multi-lingual commentary system, in-carriage display maps and a new menu, showcasing New Zealand food and wine.
The new train will run three weekly services from Auckland and three weekly services from Wellington, with a lay-over day on Wednesday for vehicle maintenance. In addition to reducing the number of weekly services from 14 to six, a shorter journey time with fewer stops is also being introduced. Intermediate stops will be limited to Hamilton, National Park, Ohakune and Palmerston North.
“The new timetable will be operating year-round – 6 days a week every week of the year, making it easier for customers to plan their journeys,” says Mr Evers-Swindell.
“The future for long distance passenger train travel in New Zealand is now about creating a world-class travel experience rather than simply getting people from one place to another. We want to make the new Northern Explorer service – and the North Island – a must-do tourism experience for people travelling in and around New Zealand,” Mr Evers-Swindell says.
The new way of running the service obviously means that only one train will be needed to operate it – rather than the current two trains – as the service will depart Auckland and Wellington on alternate days. Maybe it’s good that the service is one that can (hopefully) be financially sustainable, but overall the changes feel quite disappointing – effectively a cutback, especially from the current summer timetable when trains run from both Auckland and Wellington every day.
By Matt L, on May 7th, 2012 One of the big complaints about the CRL is the cost and at over $2b it is understandable that people balk at it. The project is actually likely to come down in price as a result of the refinement that is going on behind the scenes and things like staging some of the stations as has been mentioned will also help and may even get the cost down below $2b which should help its image enormously. But how does a project like the CRL compare to something like the Western Ring Route (WRR) that is being built. There have been numerous parts completed for it over the last few years but one thing that has happened is that the costs have been spread out over various projects and so the general public doesn’t really seem to have had as much objection to it. Here is a map of the entire WRR:
Thinking about it a bit further I decided to add up all of the costs for the WRR to see just how much had been spent and how much is predicted to be spent in the next few years. After a bit of searching I managed to find the costs for all the projects bar the Royal Rd interchange which is the NZTA haven’t listed yet.
So all up just over $3b will have been spent on the route over a period of roughly 10 years. That is a huge amount of money and I can only imagine what would have been said if the NZTA or its predecessor had tried to build the whole thing in one go. At $2b over the next 10 or so years, the CRL starts to actually sound a bit more reasonable but then of course is the issue of how much each of these projects would be used. Its pretty hard to directly compare the two as there are so many different variables so I decided just to do a really rough calculation. The best numbers I have for the CRL come from an OIA request our former admin did over a year ago.
That shows that in about 30 years that with the CRL the rail network would have 47.6m trips per year or about 130k per day, this is compared 22.2m per year without the CRL or just under 61k per day. From that we can say that the CRL provides for an additional 69k trips per day. A few quick calculations show that for us to be getting the same number of additional trips, the improvements to the WRR would need to generate roughly an extra 80,000 vehicle movements per day on top of what was using SH16 and SH20 before these improvements were started (accounting for an occupancy of 1.3 people). To put that in perspective, that is only just a little less than the number of vehicles that cross the causeway today.
I guess the one big thing with the CRL is that with the exception of perhaps a few of the stations, there is not much chance to stage things and everything else will have to be be built in one go.
By Matt L, on May 4th, 2012 Yesterday I posed the question of which piece of transport infrastructure carried the most people during the morning peak. The answer is that at the moment they both carry about the same number of people, the difference of course is that the Britomart tunnel has the ability in the future to carry many many more people in the same amount of space as I intend to show you shortly. I have mentioned before how hard it seems to be to show just how much benefit the CRL brings to the city and this post is another intended to try and show some of this information in a different way to make it easier to understand.
The data for this post came from a couple of sources, the current PT information came from the Screenline Study which counted the number of people on buses and trains that entered the CBD last year. The vehicle traffic numbers come from Auckland Transport’s vehicle counts from which there are AM peak hour counts for the roads the cross enter the CBD. I have then mixed this information together along with information we already know about the capacity of the CRL and the EMUs to put these maps together.
A quick explanation about the maps:
- The lines represent places where people enter the CBD from, Red lines are access points from the motorways, Blue from local streets, Yellow from the ferries and Green is the rail network. The size of the line represent the number of people (not vehicles) coming via that route.
- For the streets the bus and vehicle counts are merged into one arrow, bus patronage is worked out at approx 30 people per bus for the current map, 40 per bus for the 2017 map and 50 people per bus for the 2022 map. In reality we probably won’t see utilisation that high but I thought it would be useful to show the difference.
- For the rail network the current count only includes people entering Britomart so other heavily used stations like Grafton and Newmarket are not included which take up much of the reserve capacity. The final map only shows the network at 60% capacity with the assumption that people would still get off at stations like Newmarket. Also before getting accused of accused of having a CBD only focus, the lines represent capacity to the Aotea station for visual purposes only.
First up here is what we have currently. The rail network is small but it is actually the 4th largest source of arrivals into the CBD when compared against each individual streets. You can also see the massive impact that buses from the North Shore and from the Isthmus and down Symonds St make, over 70% of people coming along these two corridors do so on a bus.
Next we see the what things might look like in 2017. By this time we should have all of our new EMUs running which will boost capacity as well as attractiveness of rail network. There are likely to also be significant increases in the bus network following the implementation of the planned improvements to it. In here I have assumed that only about half of the capacity of the EMUs arriving into Britomart is being used yet that line is already the single biggest on the map.
Lastly we see the impact once the CRL is opened, as mentioned the lines only represent about 60% of the available capacity as not everyone will want to head to the CBD. The capacity of the CRL absolutely dwarfs every other entry point to the CBD and it does so without impact to the surrounding streets once it has been built. It is also worth pointing out that the usage of the bus network has been greatly increased, probably more that we can expect in this time as combined it is around 65% higher than the bus patronage is now.
Going back to yesterdays post, to get the same amount of extra capacity we would need probably another 15 general traffic lanes into the CBD, around an extra 400 buses per hour or some combination of the two.
By Matt L, on May 3rd, 2012 I’m currently working on some information for a post in the next few days but as a result of that work I thought I would pose a quick question for readers and to make it easy I will make it multiple choice quiz. Which of these two bits of transport infrastructure do you think currently carries more people into town during the morning peak?
A) The Nelson St traffic sewer. This 5 lane beast of an inner city road is fed directly from two motorways which means it is always busy.
B) The Britomart tunnel. Two tracks wide this tunnel currently handles the arrival of about 18 trains per hour in the peak
 Image care of Jon C of the former AKT
By Peter M, on May 1st, 2012 The City Rail Link project undoubtedly provides benefits throughout Auckland, particularly through increasing the capacity of the city’s rail network. However, there are places where the project’s benefits will be felt most keenly. The CBD is obviously one of those places, but so is the inner part of the Western Line: say from Kingsland out to New Lynn. The part of Auckland shown in the map below: Trip times from this part of Auckland to the city centre will decline by the greatest amount – percentage wise – as a result of the CRL. Taking trips to Aotea Station as an example, you can see that it’s Western Line stations that see the biggest time savings: Going by international examples, the massive time savings on the inner part of the Western Line means that those areas are effectively ‘transported’ much closer to the CBD in the way that they function. In short, they could become ideal places for intensification.
A really great example of this is what’s happened around the Metrotown Skytrain station in Vancouver – which enjoys around 6.7 million boardings a year (around two-thirds of the entire rail patronage of Auckland’s system). The station opened in December 1985 on the oldest section of Vancouver’s Skytrain system and since then the transformation of the area is pretty dramatic. Here’s what the area looks like now: You’ve got one of Vancouver’s largest shopping malls right on the doorstep of the station, and you also see many fairly high-rise residential buildings within relatively close proximity of the Skytrain Line (which runs between Beresford Street and Central Boulevard).
Here’s a view of the immediate station area – including pedestrian link into the giant shopping mall on the right (with bus interchange) and high-rise apartment buildings nearby: It certainly isn’t perfect – most planners would prefer to see a cutesy town centre with shops that have street frontage. But it is an excellent example of locating high-intensity uses right next to a high-quality public transport stop. It’s not just the shopping centre though as here’s the skyline just around the corner: And just to remind ourselves that Metrotown is not located in the inner-inner suburbs the “1″ in the image below shows its location in relation to Greater Vancouver (about 11km southeast of downtown – by comparison New Lynn is 9km southwest of Auckland’s CBD): I feel that the City Rail Link will open up the potential for key points along the inner Western Line to become model transit-oriented developments, like Metrotown and so many other places along Vancouver’s Skytrain system are. It’s clearly an attractive lifestyle to live in an apartment around Metrotown Station – a quick journey on the Skytrain system to most parts of the city, a large shopping centre on your doorstep, decent amounts of open space. If our planning rules were to allow it, the CRL may well lead to similar types of development occurring in places like Morningside, Mt Albert, Avondale and New Lynn. I think some well-placed clusters of suburban high-rise buildings could really help in achieving levels of intensification envisaged by the Auckland spatial plan while allowing areas with valuable existing character to retain that character.
Metrotown, like so many things about Vancouver, highlights something that could be a model for Auckland’s urban future – not ‘pie-in-the-sky’ pretty pictures of European town centres but an actual North American suburban centre that has integrated transport and urban planning (at least at the high level) really well.
By Matt L, on April 30th, 2012 Thinking of buying a new smart phone, it might be a good idea to get one with an NFC chip in it because AT and Thales are trialling using NFC with the final (real) hop. That would mean you wouldn’t need a separate Hop card and would just need to swipe your mobile phone to pay for your PT trip. It’s also a world first for Thales meaning we could actually be leading the world on something PT related. Here is the press release:
Auckland Transport, Telecom and Westpac to trial Mobile Wallet
Paying for services through your mobile phone is closer to reality after Telecom, Auckland Transport and Westpac have announced plans to start trialling a mobile wallet system from May in collaboration with Gemalto, Thales and Paymark.
In a major milestone for the development of mobile payments technology, the trial will involve some 30 staff from the six organisations. Trial participants will be able to use a mobile phone to make “tap and go” payments to access public transport inAucklandand make purchases at a small selection of retailers.
In a world first, Thales will be using its near-field communication (NFC) application throughout Auckland Transport’s final smart card ticketing system, HOP, before deploying it globally across all networks and banks. The trial, which utilises Telecom’s XT network, is expected to enable participants to pay forAuckland’s buses, trains and ferries through their mobile phones. The phone will communicate with the HOP terminal to complete the transaction without having to swipe or insert a card.
Auckland Transport’s Chief Executive, Dr David Warburton said:
“Mobile phone technology makes the option of paying for transport services using a device the majority of New Zealanders carry with them every day, a natural choice reducing the number of cards customers have to carry. We look forward to working with our technology and service partners in this trial.”
And in aNew Zealandfirst, the trial will also use a Westpac credit card to top up a Telecom XT Prepaid account, using Paymark’s infrastructure. This will make it easier for customers to add credit to a prepaid card without having to go online or pay in a store.
Telecom CEO, Paul Reynolds, said that the days of people having to use multiple plastic cards to pay for goods and services were quickly becoming numbered.
“As we have seen with developments in mobile phone technology, people quite rightly expect their phones to offer more versatility and functionality and simplify their lifestyles. And we’re absolutely committed to developing the mobile wallet through our investment in building a common trusted services manager forNew Zealand.
“The information gained from this trial will be invaluable for developing a mobile wallet with the kinds of innovative products and services that our customers can expect on the XT network.”
Westpac General Manager Customer Technology and Services, Jim Stabback, said the trial is a step toward Kiwis joining the growing global trend of banking via mobile phone.
“This is an important part of Westpac’s innovation pipeline and it’s an excellent opportunity to build further capability in this area as theNew Zealandbanking industry moves toward a mobile future,” Mr Stabback said.
For the trial, Gemalto will provide the essential network infrastructure required for near-field communications including its Trusted Service Management platform (TSM).
“Gemalto is excited to be the technology partner in this strategic trial. Our goal is to provide an open, interoperable and neutral NFC ecosystem for operators, banks, service providers and merchants. This allows them to provide not just secure mobile contactless payments, but also a variety of new services such as loyalty and e-couponing in a fast, secure and convenient manner,” said Tan Teck Lee, Chief Innovation and Technology Officer & Asia President.
“Having been involved in over 50 NFC projects, we look forward to sharing our knowledge and experience withNew Zealandas it transforms its payment environment.”
Earlier this month Telecom, Vodafone, 2Degrees and Paymark announced a joint venture to launch a TSM which will provide a common solution for theNew Zealandmarket to encourage consumer uptake and avoid confusion. The technology and solutions prototyped in this trial will ultimately be available to all New Zealanders, across all mobile operators, via the TSM.
I’m very please with this announcement, well done AT and Thales and if we could just get the real hop rolled out we can start living in the future. I guess it also means I will have to start working on a business case to convince the wife that I need a new phone soon.
By Peter M, on April 30th, 2012 Matt’s post a couple of weeks ago noted an incredibly rare event for Auckland: a month where rail patronage was actually lower than the same month the year before. In March 2012 there were 1,047,347 journeys on the rail network – a decline of around 70,000 from March 2011. There were a number of mitigating factors for this drop – such as one less work day, fewer special events and an additional weekend when parts of the network were closed. However, it was still disappointing to see a decline as (outside December and January network closures) it is many many years since rail patronage actually went backwards when compared to the same month a year before. Here are the detailed numbers for March 2012:
 While the Onehunga Line saw a small increase in ridership, the Western and Southern/Eastern lines saw a similar level of decline – just under 7%. I must say this was particularly surprised for the Western, which has otherwise seen a pretty steady increase in ridership over the past year (somewhat boosted by the Rugby World Cup in September and October): In comparison, the Southern/Eastern line has seen much lower growth in more recent times, meaning that the decline was perhaps a bit more expected: By including Onehunga Line riders, the graph above hides what the more detailed tables have shown to be very low rates of growth on the southern and eastern lines for most of the last year.
There are a couple of things changing on the rail network over the next couple of months which will make future rail patronage totals interesting to observe.
- With Manukau Station open, I will be looking forward to seeing whether that has much impact on the numbers. I suspect the low current level of service, combined with not many buses yet being integrated with the station, will mean that Manukau won’t have much effect for now.
- The fairly sharp increase in rail fares as of today and whether they impact on ridership. Rail no longer has a cost advantage over buses for single journeys so it will be insightful to see the extent to which people chose to catch the train based on cost, rather than the other advantages it may offer over the bus (or disadvantages, as the case may be).
To do a little bit of rough predicting myself, I’m guessing that we’ll see low levels of patronage increase on the rail network over the next few months unless petrol prices rocket up further from their current levels. The timetable improvements which coincided with Manukau Station opening were incredibly disappointing: we’re still waiting for 10 minute peak frequencies on the western line, still waiting for 15 minute inter-peak frequencies on the main lines, still waiting for something better than hourly weekend services on the western line and still waiting for trains to travel beyond Henderson on Sundays on the western line. Pretty much all of this was meant to have happened by now, and until it does I struggle to see why patronage would improve much.
In the longer run though, I certainly doubt we’ve reached saturation level in terms of demand for rail travel. This is for a number of reasons:
- It seems as though Auckland Transport is doing some good work on redesigning Auckland’s bus network to have services feed into rail, rather than wastefully compete with it. In places like Perth, Vancouver and Toronto, close to half of passengers using rail arrive at their stations on the bus, showing huge potential for growth from this area.
- The service improvements outlined above should actually happen at some point in the relatively near future.
- The rollout of integrated ticketing should boost rail use, even in advance of a redesigned bus network, as people are able to use the same ticket for the bus as they do for the train.
- The arrival of our electric trains will make rail travel much faster and more pleasant.
- The likelihood of petrol prices continuing to increase means that driving will become increasingly less affordable and attractive from a pricing point of view.
I suppose the really interesting question is how long will a short-term lull in patronage growth last, before these longer term improvements really kick in. It may turn out that March was just a “one-off” event and we’ll return to double-digit growth rates in rail patronage from April onwards. We may see the promised service improvements actually happening in the next few months – which should boost off-peak patronage in particular. We may actually see integrated ticketing finally happening (which does remind me, what is happening with that?).
Clearly are a lot of unanswered questions and a lot of guesswork on this issue. However, one thing is for certain: the longer it takes for rail patronage growth to return to 10%+ year-on-year, the harder Auckland’s task will be in convincing central government that the City Rail Link is a worthwhile project. And that is worrying.
By Matt L, on April 29th, 2012 Peter’s post the other day highlighting the capacity of the rail network and why we need the CRL got me thinking that about how this critical piece of information is not only missing from Auckland transports marketing of the project but just how hard it is to get that message across to the general public. Part of the problem I find is that people don’t understand how the rail network can be at capacity given how many people it could potentially move so to explain the capacity issue to people you either need to talk to people about it in person or get people to read a few paragraphs about it. Both of those are difficult to do when there are so many people that need to be communicated to for a project like this and the waters also get muddied by electrification and the extra capacity that will deliver.
So how do we solve this, one thing I have been thinking about is a graph to show the capacity constraint that exists today and how it would be affected in the future by the various projects. These numbers won’t be 100% right but do give an indication as to the kind of capacity constraints we will have. The blue line is the rough capacity of the rail network at peak times in the peak direction while the red line is the number of trips using the network in the AM peak, the future AM peak numbers come from some of the work done for the CRL business case.
The first step in the blue line represents the change in capacity with electrification while the second step is the capacity of the network once the CRL is built, in reality that wouldn’t all come on stream straight away as it would depend on how many trains we had. It is also worth pointing out that some of those shown in the red line will be in the counter peak direction. While some of the numbers in here might need tweaking, the real general trend of the graph is what we are expecting to see and the point of this post is to show a different and perhaps easier way of explaining the capacity problem.
Are there other ways that people can think of that would be useful for AT to use to help to easily explain why the CRL is needed?
By Peter M, on April 27th, 2012 One assumes this is a temporary arrangement! Photo credit to Geoff from here.
|
Recent Comments