The NZ Herald today has reported on the laying of the first tracks around Wynyard Quarter and while those who keep an eye on transport related sites like this one will have known about it there were some interesting aspects in the article that I think are worth mentioning but first, here is a photo of the current works, more can be found on the CBT forum or on AKT
As well as securing a lease of two heritage trams from a museum in Bendigo, Victoria, the Auckland Waterfront Development Agency also hopes to borrow an electric light-railcar for demonstration purposes during the Rugby World Cup.
But development agency chief executive John Dalzell said yesterday that the council-controlled organisation also wanted to use the circuit as a demonstration pilot for a possible light-rail extension across Viaduct Harbour to the Downtown ferry terminal, Queens Wharf, or even further along the waterfront.
“We want to gauge the public’s appetite for this form of transport.”
He said a $3.5 million pedestrian and cycling drawbridge reaching across the mouth of the harbour to Te Wero Island would have strong enough foundations to carry light-railcars.
Off-site prefabrication work had already begun and pile-driving was likely to start by the end of this month.
Its great to see that they are thinking ahead about this and have at least made the piles, if not the temporary bridge deck strong enough to support trams in the future allowing the loop to be extended to hopefully Britomart and then further on. Also it is pleasing to hear that they are also thinking about extending this further and having a modern tram (light-railcar) would be great to see in Auckland and really help to show the public what we could have in the future.
Perhaps we could have some trams like one of these:
Also Admin has done some posts in the past looking at possible routes that we could extend trams on initially which I agree with, the first two lines we should consider extending one along Tamaki Dr to St Heliers in one direction and through Ponsonby to Motat and the Zoo in the other, this would link in together much of Aucklands main tourist attractions. The other line is one down Dominion Rd which I is one of the busiest bus routes in the city and could also help to improve the amenity of the town centres along the way, something I have posted about in the past.
When Auckland Transport released details of the latest concepts for a southeast busway: along Ti Rakau Drive between Botany and Pakuranga and eventually extending all the way into Panmure, I hesitated and had a pretty good think about whether this was a step in the right direction. On the negative side, if this busway is built to an RTN standard then I think the chances of us ever getting what I’ve called the “Howick/Botany Line” become pretty remote – at least any time in the next 30 years.
It’s a pretty darn awesome railway line in my opinion – improving access to the whole southeast part of Auckland, providing a Botany to Britomart connection in about 25 minutes, avoiding the “what to do at Panmure question”, the lot. Here’s a map of my preferred route:But if I’m realistic, I realise that there was no real hope in hell that this railway line would happen any time soon. To avoid massive environmental effects, most of the section between Glen Innes and Highland Park would probably need to be in a tunnel, while most of the section between Clover Park and Manukau City would also have to be in a tunnel. All up, a project like this would probably have a pricetag of around $3 billion. While I think it’s probably a better spend on $3 billion than a North Shore Line (and certainly a better spend than another road-based harbour crossing), it’s damn clear that we’re unlikely to have such amounts of money rolling around any time soon to embark on something like this.
If southeast Auckland currently had at least half-decent public transport, the lack of funding for a rail project like the one above might not be such a problem. We could just squeeze out small improvements to the current service while going about the task of designating, designing and eventually funding a rail project such as this. A pretty similar process to what might happen on the North Shore. But the problem is that public transport in southeast is nowhere near half-decent; in fact it is utterly terrible. It needs an improvement that is significant, relatively affordable and – perhaps most of all – can be done quickly. In terms of those matters, I think the AMETI busway idea makes a lot of sense.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t debate what the best solution is, taking an overall assessment of our options for the southeast – including both short-term and longer-term considerations. Engineer and public transport supporter Barry Palmer raised some interesting points in an email discussion and at Wednesday night’s Campaign for Better Transport meeting that I think are worth noting and discussing.
He says (with a bit of paraphrasing):
I was dismayed to read the Herald that there is to be provision for a busway in the AMETI development but not a word about any ultimate plan to convert this to light rail in due course.
I note particularly a recent EU report of research carried out in France, Austria and Switzerland on health hazards of traffic exhaust fumes found that: -
*Traffic induced Pollution costs the health system and therefore us about $700 per year per capita, (for NZ about $3 billion per year)
*Social and benefit costs for dependents of those killed or crippled by exhaust fumes is about $470 per year per capita, (for NZ about $2 billion per year).
These colossal amounts will merely be exacerbated along the corridors of the busways. Every new project that increases our exhaust fumes (diesel is 17 times more deadly than petrol which is bad enough) is another cost on our overloaded health budget increasing our rates of lung cancer, other cancers, bronchial and heart diseases.
I have often heard figures mentioning that air pollution in Auckland causes more deaths per year than the entire road toll across New Zealand. One only needs to walk up Victoria Street at around 5pm to smell the horrific fumes the are being emitted by the diesel buses. So I definitely agree with Barry that we should be concerns about emissions from diesel buses. He continues:
My second point is that apart from the above, light rail, although expensive in the beginning, will over time prove to be the less costly option. From the ATPA figures that I am consistently receive; light rail running and maintenance costs are regularly 20% and often 40% below that of a diesel bus operation. These cost comparisons are not immediately apparent either and ignorance of them amongst those who make critical decisions confer on us another substantial cost we could have saved. An LRV has two to three times the life of a bus, has less down time for maintenance and carries two to three times the number of passengers. When coupled a train of them can replace 10 buses (and 10 drivers).
This is an interesting point, and one that I’m interested in learning a bit more about. Undoubtedly light-rail is much more expensive to build than a busway, but if it’s cheaper to run (less staff per passenger, lower fuel costs, lower maintenance costs) at what point do the capital savings from the cheaper construction start to be a false economy? In the end, this may prove to be the telling matter which decides the point at which it is logical to turn the Northern Busway into a railway line: simply because continuing to operate it as a busway may become prohibitively expensive and inefficient.
I have a third point. Light Rail will always do a journey in 20 to 30% less time than a diesel bus. Because it doesn’t carry fuel and with electric motors with initial starting torques far superior to diesel engines and three independent braking systems (disc, regenerative and magnetic brakes on rails), it can accelerate and stop more than twice the rate of diesels and therefore maintain top speed for longer. In addition because of rail guidance its length can be as long as a street block so that its consequential multiple doors allow embarking and disembarking of passengers to be at least double that of a bus. It provides a smoother, quieter, fume-free ride.
Vehicle speed seems to be most dependent on issues like the level of priority given to the buses or trams, the speed they are boarded and the geometry of the route itself. Busways can theoretically offer many of the same measures – but for some reason they tend not to. You tend to need to validate your ticket in front of the driver, the lanes tend to be of a lower quality geometry and (at least until the median busway route was proposed) on-street bus lanes (as opposed to the Northern Busway) tend to be quite stop-start and are therefore greatly influenced by other traffic.
And now a fourth point. Light rail is independent of fossil fuels and would ensure that the eastern suburbs are protected in the inevitable event of an oil shortage. There are 18 main reasons I can supply that this will occur and electrification of public transport to that area is a must. Trolley bus would be a good interim measure and has a lot of the attributes of LRT including its less cost to run over its lifetime, but it does not equal LRT.
Peak oil really in the “elephant in the room” when it comes to future transport issues – something that I think will have a huge effect and will not be able to be mitigated through “lots of electric cars” as this government seems to think. That said, I’m not sure whether I would support trolley buses – as I think they can end up being the worst of both worlds in a tram/bus debate: they don’t offer the improved ride quality and enhanced capacity of a tram yet at the same time they don’t have the route flexibility and low capital costs of an independently powered bus.
Barry’s final point throws an interesting curve-ball into the whole debate: whether or not we should consider light-rail because of the ability to run ‘tram-trains’.
Now my final point is what I would describe as the king hit. Because of the development and outstanding success of a new vehicle now known as the tram-train we have a mode that can run on street-based tracks taking advantage of congestion-free narrow corridors wherever they are available and then access a rail corridor onto rail tracks (e.g. at Panmure through to Britomart and return) providing an unbroken congestion-free journey to the CBD.
I’m not sure how technically feasible these tram-trains (most famous in Karlsruhe) would be for our southeast RTN. I worry that the more “tram-like” they are, the more they would mess with regular trains on the Eastern Line between Panmure and Britomart; or the more ‘train like’ they are, the greater difficulties we would have actually running them on the street between Panmure and Botany.
Overall, I do think Barry makes some excellent points. But I wonder whether this is simply the wrong transport corridor to be focusing on for light-rail. As I’ve mentioned before, I think Dominion Road is probably the most suitable corridor for light-rail in Auckland: because of its existing high demand, because of its existing intensified corridor land-use patters, because of its enormous potential to further develop as a development corridor and so forth. Ti Rakau Drive really doesn’t have many of these qualities. Most of the passengers catching buses along Ti Rakau Drive would probably be coming from areas further south and further east than Botany, on a bunch of routes that would converge and then travel along the busway. Unless we could get the tram-trains to work, we would be forcing a bus-to-tram transfer at Botany and then a tram-to-train transfer at Panmure. While I’m all in favour of building a system around transfers I think that takes things one step too far! Furthermore, in terms of the pollution issues, most of the buses along this busway wouldn’t continue into the city, where pollution caused by diesel buses is probably worst. Once again, if we want to make an improvement to bus pollution and reduce its health effects, we would be better off focusing on a route like Dominion Road which does run into the heart of the city.
So while Barry does make good points and what he says does make sense, I still lean towards still supporting the busway model over light-rail: because of the particular characteristics of this transport corridor. At some point in the future we may wish to upgrade it (if fuel became exceedingly expensive perhaps), although if we reached that point we may actually be wanting to reconsider constructed the Howick/Botany Line after all. A busway can provide a lot of benefit quickly at a relatively low cost – so I think it’s my preferred option for now. As long as we put it down the middle, not to the side!
The streetfilms videos that I’ve posted recently seem fairly popular, so here’s another one – on Seattle’s new (as in it opened last year) light-rail system:
Sometimes I wonder whether this kind of “technical solution” could be a reasonable way to upgrade the Northern Busway. It would be much much cheaper than heavy rail – as it might be able to go over the Harbour Bridge and could be constructed without significantly regrading the busway. But at the same time it wouldn’t offer the massive speed and capacity gains that you’d get from heavy rail – so the price of the upgrade might not actually gain you much benefit over and above a busway.
It is interesting how US cities are really keen on their light-rail though.
I like to play around with ideas for dream future rail systems for Auckland, and oddly enough sometimes my rail visions are embraced by those with some opportunity to make them into a reality. But aside from making for interesting discussion points, having a bit of a think about what we might want our public transport system to look like 20, 30 or even 40 years into the future is important for one simple reason.
Future proofing.
At the moment, or over the next few months, a lot of thought will be put into the detailed design of Auckland’s CBD rail tunnel. We might also have analysis undertaken for rail options to Auckland Airport and rail to the North Shore. The consenting process for the Waterview Connection may also raise questions over whether we should have a long-term vision for rapid transit to northwest Auckland, while questions are also likely to be asked over whether AMETI really provides for the southeast rapid transit line that is so desperately needed. As each of these projects are designed, planned or even studied in a highly preliminary way I think it’s important that we think about how future improvements to the system might tie into what we’re focusing on in the here and now.
For example, when the detailed design of the Midtown railway station is being undertaken, I sincerely hope that thought goes into how a future North Shore line might link in with the system. Would it bypass the tunnel completely – instead running as an east-west tunnel across the city (much like this option), or would it somehow link into the CBD tunnel? If it links in with the tunnel, should that link be at Britomart or up near Midtown? These are decisions that will need to be made incredibly soon (if not made already) and they will have a huge impact on how that future North Shore Line functions – when it eventually is constructed (which is likely to be decades away).
Furthermore, we must keep in mind that Auckland’s population is projected to keep growing at a pretty quick pace over the next 40 years. One of the most interesting graphs that I plucked from a recent ARTA presentation related to Auckland’s future population growth and how that stacks up against New Zealand’s growth as a whole:
These graphs show what is a quite staggering observation: that between 2006 and 2051 Auckland’s population will grow by three times as much as the rest of New Zealand put together. In numbers terms, around 1 million extra people will live in Auckland, while the whole of the rest of the country will only experience population growth of around 330,000. If there was ever a good argument for Auckland getting a significantly larger slice of the “new infrastructure pie” than we get at the moment, then this data is that argument.
Added to the simple fact that Auckland’s population will grow hugely over the next 40 years are other long-term trends like dramatically higher petrol prices and the need to reduce CO2 emissions (both from transport and generally from our cities by making them more energy efficient). All of this points towards Auckland in 2050 needing a significantly more comprehensive public transport system than it has today.
So what might that system look like? Well I’ve had a bit of a crack at it – with the map below showing the heavy rail (coloured lines) and light-rail/busway (black lines) that could make up the backbone of Auckland’s public transport system in 2050 (obviously along with a lots of buses and ferries):
There are four main railway lines, seven light-rail lines and one busway. The major addition from past maps is the Westgate branch of what I’ve called the “Westgate-Botany Line”, the red one. This line could effectively run down one side of State Highway 16 fairly easily, and offer a very high speed commuting option for those living in parts of west and northwest Auckland that currently aren’t served by the western line. In the shorter term, it could be a busway.
Many of the light-rail lines follow routes that at the moment have high-frequency buses. It’s possible that other light-rail lines could be introduced – such as along Sandringham Road – but I would think these are the main ones to start with. They would often act as feeders to the core heavy rail routes, but could in other areas provide the capacity necessary to shift a big chunk of the 2.3 million Aucklanders that will inhabit the city by then.
Of course a system like this is just a dream for now. But if we do need these lines in the future then we need to start thinking about making sure we don’t stuff up alignments by not future-proofing in projects we complete in the nearer future. Plus, it’s always good to have a system with many parts that need ‘completing’. The motorway network has had billions spent on it in recent years in order to ‘complete it’. Why not think long term about rail too?
Updated: Map updated with some of the suggestions made incorporated. Still far from a finished product.
According to a recent publication from the Auckland City Council, In the next 20 years they expect there to be an additional 54,000 jobs in the Auckland CBD and a further 17,000 residents. Straight away we can tell this is going to result in a lot of pressure on the transport system!
I though I’d try and figure out if those sorts of growth projections are even possible, and what we would need in the way of infrastructure to support them. So let’s start by estimating the number of trips this sort of growth would result in. Of course the number of jobs isn’t directly related to the number of trips, but I think we can get a ballpark figure.
For a start let’s take those extra residents and assume half of them will end up working in the CBD, while the rest would be students or work elsewhere. If we take that half off the number of extra jobs we are still left with 45,500 extra people coming into the city to work each day. Now not every worker in the city comes in each weekday and of course many people come to the CBD for all sorts of reasons beyond work, but I think we can say roughly 45,000 extra commuters a day is the sort of numbers we’ll need to accommodate by 2031 to meet those growth projections.
So how will all these people get there? For a start let’s assume that ongoing walking and cycling improvements have a good effect, and the current 4% walking and cycling mode share gets up to 10%. Knocking 10% off our total still leaves us 40,500 commuters to accommodate on motorised transport. If we assume they all come into the city in the two hour morning peak, what we are really taking about is capacity for an extra 20,000 people per hour. So therefore if we don’t want our transport congestion to get any worse, we’ll need to construct new infrastructure capable of bringing twenty-thousand more people an hour into the CBD over the next twenty years.
So looking at how this might be achieved, the first port of call is the road system. Could we meet our growth needs with new roads for the private car? I don’t think so!
Consider this: A standard motorway lane carries about 2,000 vehicles an hour at maximum. At Auckland’s low occupancy rate of 1.2 people per vehicle this equates to about 2,400 people per hour. Now putting aside the potential for carpooling and the like to improve occupancy, this means we would need an additional eight inbound motorway or arterial road lanes (and another eight back out again) to meet those growth demands with private car travel alone.
In other words we’d need two or three brand new motorways feeding into the CBD, or to double the width of four major arterials.
Could we even consider adding more motorways to the CBD?!
Of course once that traffic had reached the CBD it would need to go somewhere, so we also need another eight to ten lanes of arterial roadway to circulate within the city, and then of course there would be the parking problems. At 1.2 people per vehicle our 40,500 commuters would need about 34,000 new long stay car parks to store their cars in while they were at work. To put that in relative terms we would need to build 27 new carparking buildings of the scale of the new one going in near Britomart!
So what are the chances of all this happening? Absolutely none. Three brand new motorways is simply ludicrous, as is doubling the width of major arterials. The cost in land alone would run into the tens of billions. And widening the streets within the city would be worse (as most of them are now lined with skyscrapers) as would finding places to build dozens of new carparking buildings.
Based on this ‘quick and dirty’ analysis it is plain to see that it is simply impossible to meet anything like these growth targets with private vehicle transport alone. In fact I think it is safe to assume that the level of private vehicle access to the CBD we have today is more or less the most we will ever have, unless we start to tunnel road lanes under the existing streets or build them in the air. Basically if the Auckland CBD is to grow at all, that growth must come on the back of public transport. But luckily public transport is a hell of a lot more efficient that cars on the road.
So what would take to shift the same 20,000 commuters an hour by public transport?
Well to begin with let’s look at ferries. The ‘Kea’ run by Fullers has a capacity for 400 people. Using that as a baseline we would need about 50 new ferry trips an hour to meet the whole increase, or about five times as many as in the busiest hour today. That is feasible, if a little unlikely. For one it would mean the purchase of at least 20 new boats to shuttle back and forth and they would certainly need to extend or duplicate the ferry terminal to handle almost one ferry per minute. But the biggest constraint would be the other end. There is really only a moderate amount of growth to be had out of the Waitemata’s seaside suburbs, so a massive ferry system would involve a huge level of bus feeders, park and ride or transit oriented housing development. Ferries have good capacity, but are probably limited in their potential to expand significantly.
So let’s look at buses. A typical bus can carry about 50 people before things start to get too much like a sardine tin, so to meet our future CBD growth by buses alone we are looking at an extra 400 buses an hour. Now this is a lot of buses, but they can run from all over the region and access the CBD at about a dozen points so this is probably more feasible than the ferries.
Is this central Auckland in a few years time?
The problem of course comes with road congestion. To actually get 400 buses an hour through the CBD is going to require a lot of high capacity bus lanes and some serious bus stops. At one bus a minute per lane we are taking about seven or so new sets of bus lanes leading into the city. Effectively to go with a bus only system would require full bus lanes and bus priority signals on all the motorways and every major arterial leading into the CBD, plus maybe two or three bus-only streets through the city (an a new bus interchange or two for good measure).
Is that actually so unrealistic? I don’t think so, if it is politically acceptable to convert general traffic lanes to bus-only lanes then it would be a relatively cheap proposition in terms of capital expenditure. The real problem I think comes with operational efficiency. Four hundred new buses wouldn’t come cheap, nor would 400 drivers to operate them. Furthermore we would need to find sites fairly close to the CBD in which to stable those 400 buses during the middle of the day.
One option with greater efficiency would be to develop trams (aka “light-rail”). Modern articulated trams of the kind they use in Melbourne and Europe can carry about two hundred people per vehicle. So this drops our requirement down to 100 new trams and 100 new drivers. At one tram a minute we would need to convert only two or three arterials to having dedicated tram lanes, and could probably get away with just one tram spine through the CBD. There are two problems with meeting all our growth with tramways however. Firstly it would be a brand new system that would cost a lot to install, certainly a lot more than painting bus lanes. Secondly trams don’t have the same ‘reach’ as buses. This is fine for travel on busy arterials but for trams to service the whole region there would again need to be a big system of feeder buses linking into the tram network in the suburbs.
So the final option to explore is heavy rail.
The best way to shift tons of extra people into the CBD?
Auckland’s new six-car electric trains will be able to hold about a thousand people at maximum, this means we would need an extra 20 trains an hour into the city to meet our projected growth by heavy rail alone. Twenty trains and drivers sounds a lot more efficient than 400 buses or 100 trams. In fact 20 trains an hour is merely the one way capacity of a single rail line.
Now there is well more that twenty trains an hour’s worth of capacity left in our three main suburban lines, so no problems there: assuming we order another 20 or so trains the lines can handle that growth. The main issue is the capacity at the city end, as we know Britomart is almost at capacity and a CBD tunnel is proposed to alleviate that. Luckily for us the tunnel project would add about 20 trains an hour capacity in the CBD, almost exactly what we need! Now again the rail lines don’t go everywhere, so some bus feeders will be needed. But effectively we just need to build the CBD tunnel project and order a second batch of trains and a bunch more buses to meet all the projected growth in the central city for the next twenty years.
So lets recap, to support an extra 45,000 jobs in the CBD we would need a big increase in walking and cycling plus one of the following options:
Three brand new motorways across the region plus eight to ten new arterial road lanes and twenty-seven new parking buildings in the CBD.
Twenty or so new ferry boats, a hugely expanded ferry terminal plus a massive system of bus feeders and parking to wharves.
Four hundred new buses and drivers, plus bus lanes on every arterial leading into and through the city and a new city bus interchange.
One hundred tram vehicles and drivers, plus two or three new tram lines leading into the city and a central tram interchange, with bus feeders in the suburbs.
The proposed CBD rail tunnel, with about twenty additional trains and and a series of bus feeders to suburban railway stations.
This has really just been an exercise in comparing the people carrying capacity of various modes and in reality the true answer is going to involve a mix of these options. We will need to look at greatly expanding bus priority and new ferries, get more people living next to transit stops and investigate light rail on our busiest bus corridors. Whatever the option bus feeders and integrated tickets are probably essential.
However one clear point stands out, that the CBD rail tunnel and the existing rail lines could single-handedly accommodate twenty years of projected growth in central city commuting.
Mike Lee’s latest blog post talks alot about Auckland’s past and how times have changed since the 50s. Here is the snippet of the post about transport. It is very likely Mike Lee will be the Councillor for the CBD (Waitemata and Gulf) so he could have a big roll to play in the future of the CBD tunnel. It is interesting to see how well understands Transport and obviously has a keen interest, unlike two certain candidates “applying” for the rung up the ladder.
One of the most wonderful features of 1950s Auckland was the electric tram network. Due to New Zealand’s huge national effort in World War ll, there had been little money to improve civic infrastructure so the tram fleet of the time was rather run down – though still very popular with the travelling public. In the early 1950s the city fathers instead of comprehensively renewing the tram fleet were persuaded that electric trams were ‘old-fashioned’ and needed to be replaced with diesel buses. As a mark of how popular and effective trams were, up until that time when Auckland’s population was less than 400,000 people Auckland had over 100 million passenger trips per year – and 80 million trips of those were by electric tram. Nowadays with 1.4 million people we have only 60 million public transport trips per year, mainly by diesel bus and at a huge cost in ratepayer/taxpayer subsidies. Sadly the popular electric trams were removed from the city streets in 1956 along with 72km of tracks – a terrible mistake in my opinion but because this was New Zealand of the 1950s there was little questioning of authority.
It was a mistake that Auckland has never recovered from.
This was not the only mistake. The decision to abandon a long planned electrified metro rail system, and the decision to build a four lane – cars-only Harbour bridge was compounded by redirecting SH 1 right though the inner city, with enormous disruption to inner city suburbs. SH1 was originally planned to run along the alignment of where the unfinished SH20 is intended to go now – in other words to loop around the city rather than slice through the centre of it. Of all these decisions though, the removal of electric trams and the tramway was clearly the most destructive. Auckland public transport patronage collapsed virtually overnight and Auckland went from being one of the best public transport cities in the world to one of the worst – a city famous for its traffic congestion.
History, as someone once said, is never over and in one of the last major decisions of the Auckland Regional Council we have decided to build a heritage tramway in the Wynyard Quarter by the waterfront and extend it to Britomart Transport Centre on Queen Street. A small and modest step to be sure. But after this the tramway could go anywhere. The tramway project is being managed by Sea + City, an ARC subsidiary as part of the Wynyard quarter redevelopment. Once it is built as well as heritage trams we can start looking at modern Light Rail Transit vehicles which can carry more than 100 people at a time.
New Zealand’s foremost expert on the 1950s and the history of trams is author Graham Stewart. Graham was the key note speaker at the opening of the MOTAT ‘I Am The Last Tram’ exhibition along with MOTAT CEO Jeremy Hubbard and chair of MOTAT electoral college Cr Vanessa Neeson. Graham was a photographer for the NZ Herald during the 1950s and covered all the major news events of that remarkable decade.
As Graham has kept the memory of Auckland’s wonderful electric trams alive for nearly 60 years, it would be wonderful if we can have him come and open our waterfront tramway next year. Congratulations to Jeremy Hubbard and the MOTAT staff for organizing such a brilliant exhibition.
The 1950s has a special resonance with today I feel - the wheel of history has turned and once again just like the 1950s, sixty years on Auckland finds itself at an historical cross-road. For a number of reasons to long to go into here, Auckland now has the opportunity to make huge advances in our transport infrastructure, projects like completion of the SH20 loop road around the city, electrification of rail, which are under way and new initiatives like the CBD rail loop tunnel, rail to Auckland international airport, and returning trams to our inner city streets. This time we have an opportunity to at last correct the short-sighted decisions made in the 1950s.
I recommend everyone to see the MOTAT, ‘I Am The Last Tram’ which will gives revealing and sometimes insights into the almost forgotten history of Auckland – and reminds us that history is for us to make.
I like the positivity. The whole post is well worth a read.
There’s some good news and some not-so-good news in a NZ Herald article on the Dominion Road bus/T2 debacle that I have written a number of blog posts about in the last few months.
It seems as though the proposed changes to the road – including the removal of on-street parking, the creation of lengthy cycle lanes down both sides of the road and the bus versus T2 issue has created a lot of controversy and anger in the area. The article outlines this:
Auckland City leaders, including Mayor John Banks, are backing away from radical changes to Dominion Rd which have had the local community in an uproar.
Mr Banks has confirmed that he will today accept a Save Dominion Rd petition – which organisers say has been signed by more than 5000 people – and that he intends supporting the petitioners.
The petition calls for the city council to abandon plans to remove all street parking along 4.5km of Dominion Rd outside peak hours. Neither do the petitioners want the road widened for cycle-only lanes, nor the introduction of restrictions against right turns.
The changes have been listed in an $83 million package of proposals on which the council has received 1250 submissions in a consultation round due to close on Sunday.
While I don’t agree with many of the things the petitioners are asking for, I think it’s positive to see so many people getting involved in the issue. It would have been interesting to see if the opposition had been quite so overwhelming if the council had stuck with the initial idea of making the lanes for buses only, rather than T2 lanes. The idea of a four-lane highway with no on-street parking to slow vehicles down is pretty scary and I’m not surprised the community has risen up against that.
The article continues, with the organiser of the petition confirming that the biggest fear is that Dominion Road would be turned into a soulless highway:
Petition organiser Penny Hickey said yesterday that the community would be happy with some simple changes, such as a possible minor extension of hours for existing bus lanes, and running these through intersections where general traffic is allowed to occupy two lanes each way.
But she said local residents and business owners had been horrified by a council proposal to turn them into 24-hour lanes, and to open them to any vehicle with two or more occupants, while banning all parking.
“This road has been blighted for 20 years by designation and held back from investment,” said Ms Hickey, a resident of a side street off Dominion Rd who teaches English to migrants.
I think that Ms Hickey’s suggestion of extending (perhaps to 7-11am and 3-7pm?) the hours of bus lane operation would be a useful first step – encouraging more people to use the excellent bus service that is provided along Dominion Road. Extending bus lanes through intersections is also a great idea, as it is intersections where buses often experience the most significant delays.
But I also think it’s worth recognising that these measures are a bit of a “stop-gap” and delay – rather than resolve – finding a longer term public transport solution for Dominion Road. Personally, I think that solution should be the placement of a modern light-rail tram line down the middle of the street – providing a significant boost in capacity and also benefitting the local businesses and residents in the same ways that light-rail systems around the world have proven to be fantastic tools in encouraging intensification, redevelopment and greater economic activity along their routes. I think it must be recognised that removing street parking from Dominion Road will always be difficult – and rightly so in many respects as local shops depend on it (or at the very least think they depend on it). In order for the parking removal to be accepted I think there will need to be something pretty significant given in return that will help these people out.
Land-based public transport in Auckland is currently provided in two ways, through buses and trains (don’t let anyone tell you that taxis are public transport, they’re for-hire private transport that don’t offer any of the efficiency gains of real PT). Over the past 10-15 years there have been on-off arguments in Auckland about whether there’s a place for something to sit between trains and buses: in the form of light-rail. Initially, light-rail was probably seen as a potential replacement for the heavy rail system, and it seems for this reason that whenever someone suggests a tram/light-rail line Auckland City Council (who did most of the debating about light-rail) start talking about the CBD Rail Tunnel and that it means we won’t need light-rail.
The legacy of the light-rail debates that Auckland has had in the past have left us with some interesting results, like a Northern Busway that is supposedly “future proofed for light-rail”, and a wide median of Te Irirangi Drive that is similarly “future-proofed”. Not that I have anything against future-proofing (in fact I think we don’t do nearly enough of it in Auckland), but it seems as though the term “future proofed for light-rail” is a bit of a joke in Auckland, and generally means that it’s an alignment we’re going to need full heavy rail trains to run along at some point in the future. Rather than as a substitute for heavy rail, I do think that light-rail/modern trams have a place in Auckland’s transport future – as the best part of the Quality Transit Network.
First things first though, I do think it’s important to restate that the debate over whether buses, trams or trains provide the best solution is a stupid debate. Each different transport option has its strengths and weaknesses, and therefore works best in certain circumstances. We need buses, we need trains and we also potentially need trams to sit between the two, where the situation is right. The second thing I probably need to state is what I actually mean by tram/light-rail – and why I use the terms interchangeably. What I mean is something that runs on the existing road, but generally with its own lane to operate in. In some cases it might end up with a street to itself, but generally there would be other vehicles on the same street. Something like this: While it is true that there’s something of a convergence between the technologies emerging, in my opinion there is still a point where demand reaches a level that starts to be difficult to serve by buses (particularly if they’re operating at-grade rather than on a grade-separated busway), but isn’t high enough to justify spending billions of dollars on an underground railway line. There is also the issue of what kind of corridor we are trying to serve, and the technology that best suits that requirement: is it a widely spaced series of nodes that are well suited to being served by a train line that stops every kilometre or two, or do we have (or potentially have) a more even corridor of development where you would want more frequent stops?
If we’re being sensible about looking at the place of light-rail in Auckland (or any city for that matter), proper consideration must be given to the fact that it is expensive, particularly in terms of its capital costs, and that we want to make sure we’re measuring its benefits in the right way. As Jarrett at Humantransit loves to say, light-rail probably won’t provide you with any mobility benefits over and above what you could get out of good bus-priority (which would probably be a lot cheaper than a light-rail line). Light-rail is unlikely to be faster than what you could achieve from a bus, as what determines that is usually whether you have bus lanes, how good you are at boarding quickly, how much priority your buses/trams get at traffic lights and so forth. So it should be recognised that we’re not doing this for speed reasons, although the level of investment that would go into creating a tram line means that you probably would end up with better priority measures than you would for a bus lane.
There would be the capacity reason to do light-rail. As the picture above shows, the vehicles can be pretty long and therefore can carry a large number of people. This means that one tram every 5 minutes could carry as many people as a bus coming every 1-2 minutes. In the longer run, this is good for operating costs as you have fewer drivers – and I imagine electricity is cheaper (or certainly will be in the future) than diesel. It also means that if you do run trams every 2 minutes, your corridor capacity is much greater than what would realistically be possible with buses (once you start getting large numbers of buses they start blocking each other and slowing each other down, even given priority). Auckland’s CBD is starting to have problems with the number of buses heading in and out of it at peak times, particularly around Britomart. More people on fewer vehicles has some big advantages as the ability of the CBD to cope with more and more buses in the future is pretty limited.
The other main reason why I think light-rail could benefit Auckland is through those rather ephemeral things called “wider economic benefits”, or perhaps more specifically in the case of light-rail: the way in which providing such a line would result in intensification and economic development along the corridor being served. There are also potentially significant benefits in making it easier for tourists to get to the various places they want to go – and that becomes quite clear in the location of one of my lines. In terms of the secondary benefits to the economy, and to the achievement of our land-use plans and strategies, this has often been the main reason why North American cities have promoted light-rail lines over the past couple of decades. If we take Portland as an example, the light-rail system has played a huge part in the regeneration of ex-industrial areas and in helping Portland achieve their growth management strategies. Portland’s actual number of public transport riders isn’t particularly amazing, around a 12% modeshare – higher than Auckland’s but lower than Vancouver, Seattle and many other North American cities – but perhaps that’s not necessarily as important as the secondary effects of light-rail on the redevelopment of areas or the intensification of corridors.
Bringing things back to Auckland, as I said at the start of this post I think there is a place for light-rail in Auckland’s transport future. While in many respects it is a tragedy that Auckland ripped out its trams in the 1950s, the way the city has developed since then means that simply re-creating that system wouldn’t make too much sense today. The two lines that I would create are shown (approximately) in the map below (higher resolution here): As you can see, the system is not particularly extensive, at least not initially. I have also stuck to routes in the inner-isthmus area, as North American cities have also generally used light-rail along reasonably short inner-city routes (at least when it’s not grade-separated). I am hesitant to use light-rail further out, at least initially, because either you’re going to end up needing to operate very long routes (which are likely to be slow for travellers) or you’re going to be operating your routes as feeders to the heavy rail system, in which case I think it’s reasonably unlikely you’d need anything beyond a bus. Furthermore, the type of intensification that light-rail routes can generate is most suitable and desirable in the more inner parts of the city.
So we have a green line and an orange line. I will describe both lines and my reasoning behind them:
Green Line:
Effectively this is the Dominion Road corridor, which I have discussed as being suitable for light-rail in the future in a few earlier posts. The potential suitability for Dominion Road to have light-rail in the future is part of my thinking of why having median bus lanes may also be a good idea: as you’d be most of the way there towards creating a light-rail line in the future: just slap down some rails and up some wires when the capacity necessitates the upgrade.
At its southern end, the line would at some stage in the future connect with the Avondale-Southdown heavy-rail line, and in the meanwhile would be a hub for feeder buses serving the southwest part of the Auckland isthmus: suburbs from Hillsborough, through to Lynfield and Blockhouse Bay could all feed into the tram line, which would then offer a high-quality, high-capacity ride into the city and along the corridor.
At the city end, the route runs down Queen Street, then turns left and serves the Wynyard Quarter. The tram-loop that the ARC is currently planning would become a key part in turning the trams around before they headed back south on their journey out of the city.
In terms of satisfying my above criteria for light-rail, the Dominion Road bus route is already pretty damn popular, being close to capacity for the current bus lanes during peak times and busy enough to justify 5 minute frequencies during the weekday inter-peak period. With further development likely to happen along the corridor in the future and higher petrol prices likely to mean a general greater uptake of public transport, it’s not hard to see the current bus lanes being overwhelmed at some point in the not too distant future. So it ticks the capacity box. In terms of potential to stimulate land-use change, Dominion Road has masses of potential here, with much of the road (especially south of Balmoral) being bounded by low-rise 1950s housing of not particularly fantastic merit. The potential for that to be replaced with 3-4 level townhouses and terraced houses is immense, something just needs to help “make it happen” – and a light-rail line could be that catalyst. So the other box is ticked.
Orange Line:
The orange line is a longer, and more complex line – going from Unitec in the west to St Heliers Bay in the east. Effective it is two lines joined in the middle: one serving the inner-west part of Auckland and the other running along Tamaki Drive. Undoubtedly this line is a bit more questionable than the Dominion Road one, and would almost certainly be built later, but that’s not to say that it wouldn’t be a good idea: because I think it would.
Starting with the western section of the line, there are a very large number of buses that travel along Great North Road – so there may be some capacity issues along this road in the future. A lot of the buses come from a long way west, but that may change in the future as buses in the west get terminated at New Lynn for people to either transfer onto a train or onto some sort of high-frequency bus link between New Lynn and Britomart via Great North Road. There is also the potentially significant patronage generator of Unitec, some top tourist attractions in the Zoo, Western Springs Park and MOTAT, and huge intensification potential between Ponsonby and Grey Lynn along the Great North Road ridge.
I would then have the line duck down through Freemans Bay to emerge at Wynyard Quarter. Freemans Bay also has significant redevelopment potential: at least along the streets that aren’t full of lovely heritage housing. Wynyard Quarter is a massive potential trip generator in the future (and will have to be well served by public transport because there is so little road access), so it makes sense to link through to there, then onto Britomart.
With the western section, this would operate as quite a different types of line: largely for leisure travellers and tourists rather than commuters – along Tamaki Drive. While the capacity issues of the green line and the western section of the orange line may not apply here, and also it’s unlikely to generate much intensification – I think that there may well still be significant economic benefits of this line, achieved by linking together many of Auckland’s top tourist attractions on the one line, and also making the connection high-quality. Much of my enthusiasm for this part of the line is based on the enormously successful F & Market Line in San Francisco, which similarly operates along their waterfront.
I do think these two lines have the potential to transform Auckland in a way that simply wouldn’t quite be possible through a bus route. Now that’s not to say that many of their benefits wouldn’t also be enjoyed through the creating of a high-quality bus route – but when it comes to capacity, the ability to stimulate development and the ability to attract leisure and tourist trips that would almost certainly otherwise be made by cars, along certain corridors I do think there’s a place for light-rail in Auckland’s transport future.
While the recent announcement of the reintroduction of trams in Auckland, via a small heritage tramway in Wynyard Quarter, is in some ways the smallest possible step towards trams playing a large role in meeting Auckland’s future transportation needs, it’s interesting to see some of the plans being discussed in Perth, Western Australia at the moment about the role that modern trams may play in their public transport future.
Auckland can learn a lot from the renaissance of public transport in Perth over the past 20 years, as Perth’s an even lower density city than we are, so I’ll be following what comes of this.
It has been interesting to see the reaction to last week’s announcement that the ARC will be bringing trams back to Auckland’s waterfront, through a 1.5 km loop around Wynyard Quarter.
Statements supporting the tram circuit invariably mention its potential to be part of the region’s wider public transport network, with a route wending around the southern and eastern edges of the Viaduct Harbour to Britomart.
This, however, raises separate issues. It is true that at some stage, when the apartment market recovers and the residential sector of the development takes shape, there will probably have to be a direct connection to Britomart.
Buses have been suggested. But they would be a blot on the landscape, undermining the views from the bars and restaurants and introducing an unpleasant aspect to the public places where people like to stroll.
Trams or light rail might be preferable, but the whole question warrants reappraisal and should be set to one side.
Fortunately, that must be the case anyway because any public transport will have to await the replacement, in 2016, of the temporary foot bridge that will link the Viaduct Harbour with the Wynyard Quarter during the cup.
Set in isolation, the tram circuit is a reasonable idea provided the cost is in keeping with the inherent risks. One way of mitigating these would be to use Motat’s technical expertise as far as possible.
Heritage trams have been a big drawcard elsewhere. There is no reason, with the correct back-up, a similar popularity cannot be achieved in Auckland.
Auckland regional councillors are rushing through plans for their little Tank Farm heritage tramway, claiming it’s all about the Rugby World Cup. But the haste has much more to do with the desire of light rail enthusiasts like chairman Mike Lee, to scrawl “Kilroy was here” before the waterfront falls into the clutches of the new waterfront CCO in a few months.
There’s an almost evangelical hope that once built, this 1.5km circuit around the boundaries of the Wynyard Quarter development site will prove so popular, that the inheritors of the ARC dream will have no option but to extend the tranway into the CBD and onwards along the waterfront, up Queen St, down Dominion Rd and who knows where else.
As a fan of a waterfront light rail, I’d love them to be right. But I fear it’s just as likely to become a little-used, out-of-the-way clanger that puts the cause back another 50 years…
…The big appeal of the ARC’s little tramway proposal is that it’s cheap, at around $7 million, can be funded through ARC’s proxy development company, Sea+City, and be locked into place before the November 1, Super City takeover. But in the haste to leave a legacy, the risk is it will become a legacy of the wrong sort, a reminder of why the November revolution was needed. I hope not.
Mayoral candidate Len Brown seems to be a fan though:
Trams on the right track says Len Brown
Mayor Len Brown has praised the return of electric trams as a being on the right track for the future of Auckland’s public transport.
“This is the most exciting development for inner-city transport seen in many years,” says Len Brown.
“These innovative ideas show that with consensus driven leadership and vision progress can be made towards an efficient world-class transport system.
“I can see future options for the development of electric trams across Te Wero Bridge to further down the waterfront or up into the inner city streets.
“I am delighted that tram travel will, once again, be a reality for Aucklanders, in a way that contributes to the development of the waterfront and the success of the Rugby World Cup.
“Congratulations to Mike Lee and the Auckland Regional Council for their success in bringing back transport options for Aucklanders..
What I find particularly interesting out of all these reactions is that people are now talking about “where could this go next?” and thinking about the role that trams – whether in their heritage form, or in the form of modern light-rail vehicles, or perhaps a mixture of the two – has in the future of Auckland’s city centre. That’s pretty exciting I reckon. As an example of how this announcement has really got people thinking, there was an interesting extract in an otherwise unrelated story on a possible convention centre being located around where the old train station is in Friday’s NZ Herald. Here it is:
“We see it as a golden mile. The vision should be that it leads to the development of the whole of Quay Street. We’re an anchor site. The two points of the bottom of the anchor are the Viaduct and us, with Queen Street as the middle.”
With the Auckland Regional Council bringing back trams to the Tank Farm in time for the Rugby World Cup, there was also no reason a line connecting the two couldn’t be paid for by the developers.
That would move tourists around the city sharing out economic benefits, he said.
So just one day after the announcement we have a completely separate organisation thinking about how having a tram line could help their project. In many ways, I feel as though that is half the point of the first little loop – to get the ball rolling.
So where could things go next? I guess that depends on how we want to think about the future of trams in Auckland. Do we want a future tram system to be mainly for the benefit of tourists and other recreational visitors – or do we want it to be a serious commuting alternative along certain routes? What kind of mix between heritage trams and modern light-rail vehicles would we want?
Looking at it first from a tourism/recreational perspective, there are two obvious future extensions (in addition to the obvious link to Britomart) – and they involve an extension along Tamaki Drive to Mission Bay or perhaps even St Heliers – and at the western end an extension to Ponsonby and perhaps even a link back through K Road to Queen Street and Britomart, creating some sort of a loop.
Here’s the possible Tamaki Drive extension – with the link to Britomart in green and the blue line showing an extension along Quay Street and Tamaki Drive out to Mission Bay. I don’t think this would be too problematic to build as the road is fairly wide for the majority of the way, although perhaps some on-street parking would need to be removed at some pinch points. Linking the city with Kelly Tarltons, Okahu Bay and Mission Bay via a tram would be really popular both with tourists and locals I reckon. And here’s the possible Ponsonby extension. The planned Wynyard loop is in red, the Britomart extension in green and the remaining extension in blue. In some areas the tram would need to share space with buses (such as along Ponsonby Road and also on K Road and Queen Street) but I don’t see that as too problematic. I think this route would be popular as a link between many of Auckland’s entertainment hubs:
The F-Line and Market in San Francisco shows us that heritage trams can be immensely popular as tourist attractions, but also often very useful for locals if the route is right. I think both these routes potentially offer benefits to both, although I would promote both of them mainly as tourist/recreational projects. If we wanted light-rail for predominantly commuters, then I think we’d start with Dominion Road.
Even with just the link to Britomart I think the tram line would be pretty popular, as in the future there will be a lot of people working/living/shopping/visiting the Wynyard Quarter area – and very limited road/parking capacity available for them to drive there. Maybe it would take quite a while to extend the system in one of the ways I have mentioned above, but I think it’s good for us to have a think about longer-term possibilities.
But if I’m realistic, I realise that there was no real hope in hell that this railway line would happen any time soon. To avoid massive environmental effects, most of the section between Glen Innes and Highland Park would probably need to be in a tunnel, while most of the section between Clover Park and Manukau City would also have to be in a tunnel. All up, a project like this would probably have a pricetag of around $3 billion. While I think it’s probably a better spend on $3 billion than a North Shore Line (and certainly a better spend than another road-based harbour crossing), it’s damn clear that we’re unlikely to have such amounts of money rolling around any time soon to embark on something like this.
These graphs show what is a quite staggering observation: that between 2006 and 2051 Auckland’s population will grow by three times as much as the rest of New Zealand put together. In numbers terms, around 1 million extra people will live in Auckland, while the whole of the rest of the country will only experience population growth of around 330,000. If there was ever a good argument for Auckland getting a significantly larger slice of the “new infrastructure pie” than we get at the moment, then this data is that argument.
Recent Comments