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By admin, on September 30th, 2011 An exceptionally kind blog reader bought me “The High Cost of Free Parking” byDonald Shoup recently. This is a book that I’ve flicked through on a number of occasions in the past, but I’m incredibly grateful of the opportunity to read through it properly, particularly at a time when it seems that Auckland Council is fundamentally reassessing the way it handles parking policy. Page 16 of the “Urban Auckland” chapter of the Auckland Plan says some pretty optimistic things about how the council will be relooking at parking policy matters:
Inappropriate regulations and inflexible standards can impact on good design. These can act as impediments to the development of intensive housing and mixed developments. One factor that can affect the affordability of such projects is unnecessary parking requirements. Sometimes traditional parking standards (minimum numbers of car parking spaces) have been imposed in areas where alternative options (for example parking buildings or investment in public transportation) would imply that such minimums are counterproductive to delivering the goal of intensification, mixed use and affordability. The Council intends to review its approach to parking as part of the development of the Unitary Plan.
Minimum parking requirements have a number of flaws, but a fundamental one is that they effectively force you to spend a lot of money (particular in inner urban areas) to provide for one particular mode of transport (car storage), regardless of whether you actually want two spaces, one space or perhaps even no spaces.
The High Cost of Free Parking outlines a really good analogy between parking policy and hamburgers that’s useful to consider:
Suppose cities required all fast-food restaurants to include french fries with every hamburger. The fries would appear free, but they would have a high cost in money and health. Those who don’t eat the fries pay higher prices for their hamburgers but receive no benefit. Those who do eat the fries they wouldn’t have ordered separately are also worse off, because they eat unhealthy food they wouldn’t otherwise buy. Even those would order the fries if they weren’t included free are no better off, because the price of a hamburger would increase to cover the cost of the fries. How are minimum parking requirements different? Minimum parking requirements force people force people who are too poor to own cars to pay for parking spaces they don’t use, and they encourage others to buy more cars and drive them more than they would if they had to pay separately for parking.
Just as the only people who would really do well out of forcing hamburger purchases to include fries would be potato growers, arguably the only people who do well out of minimum parking requirements are those who build cars, roads and parking buildings. The rest of us, regardless of how many cars we own, are either worse off or at best, in the same position as we would be without such requirements. The sooner we get rid of them the better.
By admin, on August 29th, 2011 The most commonly cited characteristic of urban sprawl is its low-density. In fact, density is often used as the sole way of determining whether a city is sprawled or not – and (following on from that) whether a city’s urban form is conducive to public transport or not. However, you only need to look at a comparison of the density and auto-use of many different cities around the world to see that things might be somewhat more complicated than that: Overall city density is actually, I think, a fairly poor indicator – except at the extremes – of whether a city is dominated by urban sprawl and whether it has a form that works well for public transport or not. The digram below illustrates this point fairly well, assuming that each dot on a map represents a certain number of people, you have two places with the same overall density which are actually vastly different environments: But even then, I think that what I consider to be “urban sprawl” has much more to it than simply what density an area is – even if what we’re looking at is a small part of a city.
A good post on the New Jersey Future blog highlights this issue further:
Low density is certainly one of the dysfunctions of New Jersey’s (and the nation’s) dominant development pattern since 1950, but it is not the only one. Separation of uses – keeping homes, stores, and workplaces each in their own segregated zones, distant from each other – and a lack of connectivity in the local street network (with lots of looping streets and cul-de-sacs and a lack of direct through-routes) also contrive to make it hard to get around without a car. These other two factors can force people into their cars for most daily activities even in neighborhoods with high housing density.
This, of course, means that we can have ‘non-sprawled’ urban areas, even where the density is not particularly high:
Conversely, a mix of land-use types (residential, employment, shopping, etc.) puts a variety of activities – not just a variety of buildings all housing the same activity – in close proximity, shrinking the distances among multiple types of destinations. And a well-connected, grid-like street network ensures that physical proximity actually translates into easy accessibility by offering multiple, direct routes among destinations. That is, it means short as-the-crow-flies distances are also short walking, biking, or driving distances that may not require a trip out onto the regional highway network. And of course, putting dense, mixed-use, well-connected neighborhoods near transit creates yet another option for getting to desired destinations that are farther away.
Los Angeles is given as a good example of a city characterised by large amount of high-density sprawl, with the following paragraphs coming from here:
But if we measure sprawl by population density, LA would not sprawl at all. In fact, it would be the least sprawling urbanized area in the country. How can Los Angeles be so dense and yet also exhibit so many characteristics associated with sprawl, including high levels of car travel (both in per capita and absolute terms) and low rates of walking, bicycling and transit ridership?
… density by itself—the simple ratio of population to square mile—is not a very useful way to measure sprawl. What matters is the distribution of density, or how evenly or unevenly an area’s population is spread out across its geographic area. If we look at the density distribution in Los Angeles, we notice that its suburbs are much denser than those of other large U.S. cities, such as New York, San Francisco or Chicago. These high-density suburbs compensate for the comparatively low density of LA’s urban core, and, in so doing, increase the average density of the area as a whole …
The LA region’s combination of high, evenly distributed density puts it in an unfortunate position: it suffers from many of the problems that accompany high population density, including extreme traffic congestion and poor air quality; but lacks many of the benefits that typically accompany more traditional versions of dense urban areas, including fast and effective public transit and a core with vibrant street life. Los Angeles has, to borrow a term coined by urbanist William Fulton, “dense sprawl.”
As Paul Mees reminded us last week, Auckland’s population density is relatively high – at least compared to other Australasian cities: Auckland’s higher than expected population densities might somewhat be the result of development in parts of the city like Ponsonby and Royal Oak that I wouldn’t consider to be “high density sprawl.” However, some of the more recent development in areas like Botany seem to fit the definition of high density sprawl almost perfectly:
 At least with these places there are some shops across the road. Pity the road’s a 6-8 lane megahighway, about as uninviting environment for pedestrians as you’ll ever see. Just down the road in Flat Bush, we have arguably an even better example of high density sprawl, as here there are very few shops anywhere near these new apartment buildings. I tend to think the best definition of urban sprawl is the type of urban development that promote car dependency. And while Auckland may be reasonably high density compared to other cities around Australasia, we certainly have an urban form (as well as a transportation system, obviously) which significantly contributes to our auto-dependency. Solving that issue will involve a lot more than simply raising urban densities.
By admin, on August 22nd, 2011 The response to my post on whether we should remove the Dominion Road and New North Road interchange was quite interesting, and illustrated what I think is an interestingly varied approach to the ultimate question that we all think about: “what is the goal” we’re trying to achieve through our involvement in Auckland transport issues? Often when I meet up with people, as a result of this blog, the question I most frequently get asked is why do I have such an interest in transport issues? What am I trying to achieve? What would be a “better” transport situation for Auckland and so forth. Ultimately, this all comes back to the question of “what’s the goal?”
As far as I can tell, people come at transport from different perspectives. Some have a economics interest – how can we make the transport system as economically efficient as possible? Some seem to have an engineering perspective – how to move people through space in the best way possible. Some from a planning perspective, how to best integrate our transport decisions with the kind of city we’re creating, and so forth.
I do think that each person comes at things slightly differently, so therefore they will have different goals. Some people might have the goal of promoting public transport patronage, with that as the “end goal”. Some might want to eliminate congestion, some might have the goal of Auckland having a transport system much less reliant on oil, some a transport system that is less polluting, some a transport system that keeps the trucking lobby happy (*cough* Steven Joyce *cough*) and so forth. For example, I think Len Brown’s transport goal is for Auckland to have a world class transport system (both road and rail) that we’re proud of and which can really put a dent in the level of congestion around the region. That’s not exactly the same transport goal as I have, but there are plenty of areas of overlap – so I’m generally supportive of his vision for Auckland’s transport system.
For me, my background as a planner – someone primarily interested in making an awesome city – is instructive in my ultimate goal. I was not always particularly interested in transport issues, for example my Master’s Thesis was written about the Auckland Regional Growth Strategy and the question of whether Auckland should (and could) grow mainly through intensification or sprawl. After a while observing how Auckland worked, along with a trip to Europe and watching the fantastic “City of Cars” videos, I came to the realisation that it was extremely difficult (if not impossible) to actually make Auckland a nicer place unless we really focused on sorting out its transport system – because, typically, it was transport decisions turning Auckland into a pretty horrible place.
Exhibit A: In fact, it seemed to me as though there’s a pretty universal “urban law of physics” – an inverse relationship between ‘quality of place’ and ‘priority given to cars’. Something like this:  Occasionally it’s possible to get around this rule. Many of the boulevards of Paris provide significant capacity for vehicles, while still being really nice urban spaces. But generally, I think the rule applies.
But we’re not Venice (somewhat unfortunately), so having an entire city of Vulcan Lanes and Fort Street shared spaces isn’t really going to work. We need to be able to travel around the city easily, plus we don’t have the space to create a huge number of Parisian boulevards, with central roadways and side alleys. Plus, of course, Paris only works the way it does because the Metro and RER systems shift a vast number of people underground.
So we need good public transport, for the sake of our city. To enable people to be able to get around in large numbers (and for long distances) in a way that provides an alternative to endless carparks and intersections like what we see in Botany – in the picture above. As an example, the Northern Busway helps get many people into central Auckland without the Northern Motorway having to be even wider (and billions wasted on another harbour crossing) and without even more of downtown Auckland being dedicated to parking buildings. So I’m a fan. But at the stage when there are so many bus trips that the city starts to suffer as a result, I would advocate for a rail option – even if it didn’t yet make sense from a pure cost-benefit perspective. It would be necessary, for the sake of the city.
Of course this is not the only reason why I think we need a better public transport system in Auckland. I am concerned about our unpreparedness for peak oil. I am concerned about the economic strain our auto-dependency places on families, I am concerned about the loss of productivity that results from traffic congestion – which generally exists because people must find it cheaper, faster and more convenient to sit in traffic than to take public transport.
But ultimately, my goal is for Auckland’s transport system to help make the city a better and nicer place to be in. So I can accept that messing with the Dominion/New North interchange would probably create a bit more congestion – because I think that cost would be outweighed by the urban benefits of the project: stitching back together a really interesting part of inner Auckland. I can understand why others question transport projects that won’t necessarily have transport benefits – but ultimately I think it’s generally quite well accepted that Auckland has focused too much on shifting people around the city in the past (particularly by car) at the expense of ensuring the city is a nice place to be.
What’s your transport goal?
By admin, on August 1st, 2011 I’m reading a really interesting book at the moment, The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream by Christopher B. Leinberger. It’s a good book because it takes a historical look at the shift in the mid 20th century away from what’s termed “Walkable Urbanism” and towards a “Drivable Suburbanism” as the main form of building cities and transportation systems and then starts considering more recent urban trends – suggesting a shift back towards walkable urbanism as the economics and environmental effects of drivable suburbanism start to no longer make sense. Changing demographics, particularly the shift away from “two parents with kids” households is also seen as a major cause of the trends back towards the type of urban form (and transport system to support it) that was more common before the Second World War.
There are potentially a few future blog posts to come out of the book, but one thing that I found particularly worth outlining are some of the economic effects of the extreme extent that urban development has gone down the drivable suburbanism path.
Transportation costs were eighteen percent of household income in 2005, second to the amount US families spent on housing (twenty-four percent). This compares with fourteen percent spent on transportation by the average family in Europe, where public transit is much more developed and there is more walkable urbanism. The geometric increase in VMT also indicates the increasing share that automobile transportation plays in US family finances. AAA calculated that the average cost of car ownership and maintenance for a typical car in 2006 was $7,800 per year. This covers loan payments, fuel, parking, maintenance, insurance and incidental costs…
…The result is that owning an average car is the equivalent of having an additional $135,000 mortgage (mortgage interest is tax-deductible, and this calculation assumes six percent mortgage interest). In essence, drivable suburbanism has probably been shifting family spending away from investing in a long-term appreciating asset (e.g. a house) or savings to a short-term depreciating asset (e.g. a car).
This is one of the hidden issues of auto-dependency. If people don’t perceive that public transport is good enough to meet their requirements then they will feel they have to buy that extra car in order to properly participate in society. And buying that extra car can end up being a huge financial burden. Thinking of Auckland, and the particularly crap public transport serving “blue collar” working areas like East Tamaki, Penrose, Mt Wellington, Auckland Airport, Wiri and so forth, the impact on lower income workers is likely to be particularly severe. This seem to be the case in the USA, as the book continues:
The above calculations were for a typical car-owning family, but the findings become even more grim for a working-class family. A 2006 study of eighteen metropolitan areas throughout the country found that working families spend even more on transportation than on housing, a reflection of the ‘drive until you qualify’ affordable housing strategy. “In their search for low-cost housing, working families often locate far from their place of work, dramatically increasing their transportation costs and commute times.” The unintended consequences do not stop there; this mean less time with the family, increased traffic congestion for the region, and greater greenhouse gas emissions.
Traditionally US cities had their poorest residents in the centre, with richer people shifting outwards as they acquired more money. This seems to now be changing, perhaps to reflect more how things are in a city like Auckland – where definitely the cheaper real estate is further out – creating that tricky trade-off of transportation against housing costs.
I think that it would be fascinating to look at the personal costs to families of Auckland being so auto-dependent. Many poorer parts of the city (Mangere & Massey immediately come to mind) suffer some of the worst public transport provision – probably forcing a large number of families to own more cars than they would ideally want to, pushing a big financial burden onto them and making it even more difficult for them to get ahead in life. I’m not sure how you would necessarily go about focusing transport investment in such a way so that it could help lower the extent to which these families need to have more cars than they’d ideally want – but car ownership rates in certain parts of the city could be quite a good measurement tool to work out whether transportation policies were working or not.
By admin, on June 7th, 2011 I think we’re only just beginning to recognise the useful ways in which technology can be combined with public transport to both make the trip nicer and to also analyse the PT system and work out ways in which to improve it. Much of this work is going on outside official agencies – which seem stuck in the dark age when it comes to such matters (try using the MAXX journey planner on a mobile phone, a painful process!)
Back in January we saw Auckland’s entire PT network simulated over the course of a day, in this fantastic video put together by Sciblogs.
An animated map of Auckland’s public transport network from Chris McDowall on Vimeo.
Now there’s a new piece of software, known as “Mapnificent“, that provides an incredibly useful resource: the extent of a city that’s accessible within a certain timeframe via public transport at various different hours of the day. This video explains how it works:
Mapnificent from Stefan Wehrmeyer on Vimeo.
Some of the functions are incredibly useful, I suspect particularly for those searching for houses or working out whether a particular job will be accessible for them via public transport in a feasible way or not. It would be interesting to see, over time, whether real estate agents reckon this is a helpful tool in trying to sell places – it’ll be particularly obvious the parts of the city within say a half-hour PT commute from downtown. If you worked across the road from Britomart train station, and accepted up to a 15 minute walk, you can see in the image below how much of the city would be within 30 minutes of travel time: It’s a surprisingly small portion of the city really, although I guess that’s because of walking times to and from the bus stop or train station. Interesting how effective the Northern Busway is at creating points on the North Shore that are dramatically more accessible than what’s around them. It’s crazy that most of the catchment of Akoranga Station is a golf driving range, and most of Smales Farm’s catchment is a golf course and a massive parking building. If there were ever parts of the city appropriate and attractive for intensification, these are those point. The fantastic speed of trains on the Eastern Line, and I assume the good speed of buses along Remuera Road and Tamaki Drive give that part of the city a surprisingly good score.
Push the time limit out to 60 minutes, and we start to see which parts of the city have particularly bad public transport – in that they can’t even get a peak time trip to Britomart in less than an hour: If you ever wanted a visual representation of why it’s stupid to have focused so much of Auckland’s urban development in Flat Bush, Botany Downs, Dannemora and so forth – then this is that proof. Heck even Beachlands and parts of Waiheke Island are more accessible to the CBD than a vast swathe of southeast Auckland. But there are interesting holes too – Te Atatu Peninsula and Massey are suprisingly excluded, a good argument for the Northwest Busway perhaps?
But Britomart is a really accessible point of downtown. How about if we shifted the focus point to somewhere outside easy walking distance of the current rail network – like the Auckland Town Hall. What impact does that have on what’s accessible in an hour long PT trip or less: Accessibility from the south and west is reduced quite significantly, while that southeast area is now well outside the 60 minute accessibility area (indicating that it would probably take people a lot longer than an hour to get to the town hall from these places. One big advantage of the City Rail Link project is that it will bring much more of the city within a reasonable commute of all the CBD, not just the area around Britomart.
However, if we think public transport to the CBD is bad, remember that only 13% of Auckland’s jobs are in the CBD. Other large employment hubs include around Greenlane/Ellerslie, in East Tamaki, Albany and at the Airport. The 60 minute accessibility zones for these are are pretty terrible (and remember that this is for an hour each way, probably the very limit of acceptability):
    I wonder if such maps might make our planner reconsider the merits of decentralising employment. I would also think twice about shifting to Flat Bush any time soon – remembering that the map shows areas within a one hour commute:
 The potential uses for this tool are endless. What a fantastic resource!
By admin, on May 29th, 2011 As a planner by profession, I can quite honestly say that more often than not we do urban planning in Auckland utterly terribly. We focus enormously on silly details: recession planes, consistency with minutely detailed assessment criteria, road-widths, numbers of parking spaces per unit, number of units coming off driveways and so forth – but we miss the really obvious stuff. Like the following:
- Will it actually be feasible to operate a bus service through this area?
- Can people walk to the local shops?
- How can we create vibrant and interesting neighbourhoods?
One particularly important part of urban planning that tends to get completely overlooked – or tossed over to the road engineers, is the fundamental question of “where will the streets go?” As I noted in Friday’s blog post, street patterns have an enormous ability to influence the viability of public transport – with a grid of arterial routes (like Vancouver has) making life far far easier when it comes to serving an area with a decent bus network.
One thing that’s extremely depressing is to see how some of the most recent parts of Auckland are actually the most utterly hopeless at providing a decent street network. In fact, there are areas of the city built in the past few years that are actually nigh on impossible to serve with any form or public transport at all.
An extreme example of planning stupidity is down Schnapper Rock Road near Albany. There are probably hundreds of houses down this road and the various streets that come off it – all developed within the past few years. Potentially well over a thousand people might live down this road – but look at how massively disconnected from the rest of the city they are: By my analysis of the aerial photographs, and a couple of visits to the area, there are no shops at all down Schnapper Rock Road, meaning that your options for doing anything without driving at almost non-existent. How about the public transport – well that’s an interesting route option to try and ask MAXX about: a peak time trip from Dove Place to town gives some interesting options: It takes me an hour and a half, costs me nearly $10 and requires a trip on a freaking school bus! Talk about designing for auto-dependency.
Just down the road things are arguably even worse – thanks to the failure to connect up the two ends of Kyle Road, which should have been an absolute requirement before any development took place around Upper Harbour Primary School: Quite bizarrely, some planner made the decision that William Gamble Drive shouldn’t connect with Huntington Park Drive – which means that the two residential areas located right next to each other are hugely isolated from one another. Furthermore, the one road connecting the William Gamble Drive area with the rest of the world doesn’t even have a footpath along most of its length – meaning that to get anywhere else without driving is pretty much a suicide mission. Fortunately there is a pedestrian connection between the two ends of Kyle Road, which means that it’s only a 1.5 kilometre walk from William Gamble Drive to the nearest bus stop.
Moving further south, the new developments on the Hingaia Peninsula near Papakura aren’t much better, once again having exceedingly poor connectivity to the rest of the road network: This is another place that has some rather amusing public transport options: So I get to walk for two and a half kilometres in order to have the pleasure of a 90 minute bus trip into town. Gee that sounds fantastic!
Even in more inner areas, new developments have often seemed to design their street networks with the expressed purpose of being as useless for public transport as possible – Stonefields near Mt Wellington is a classic example of this: While Stonefields has quite a nice grid, the fact that no effort was ever made to connect up the street network with its southern and western edges means that every future bus route through the area will need to be a pointless loop. While I obviously realise this is a former quarry site and there are some pretty big stone walls making the connection difficult, I am sure if a southern street connection had been a condition of allowing any development in the quarry, it would have happened.
The poor street connectivity means that the new residents of Stonefields need to take a 1.5 km trek to access a bus service: Now I hear there’s an entire “land-use transport integration team” at Auckland Transport these days. Let’s hope that their primary job is to ensure that nothing as stupid as the various recent subdivisions I’ve shown above ever happen again.
By admin, on March 16th, 2011 Herald columnist Brian Rudman has also picked up on the growing tensions between Auckland Council’s and central government’s, vision for how Auckland should grow and develop over the next 20-30 years.
Auckland’s future, as outlined in the papers issued by Local Government Minister Rodney Hide, is a rather different vision to that envisaged by the mayor.
He talks of a future that integrates social and economic prosperity with the recreational and cultural wellbeing of Aucklanders. The Government’s emphasis seems to be on economic prosperity alone. It also wants to muscle into the planning of the region in a way not seen before.
Noting how urban form has a significant influence on achieving government objectives in the areas of housing affordability and choice, transport, economic development and environmental outcomes, the report writers say the creation of the spatial plan is a good time for the Government to abandon its usual backseat role.
There’s a strange conflict between the way in which the government has created an enormously powerful Auckland Council, yet at the same time seems to be trying to get greater central government control over land-use planning and transport policy in Auckland than ever before. Rudman continues:
What the report is proposing though, will not come as “positive” in the eyes of many Aucklanders.
What is being proposed as a new start reads very much like old policies Aucklanders have tried and rejected.
The authors criticise the existing regional growth strategy, and in particular the metropolitan urban limits and other planning regulations, suggesting they weren’t working because, among other things, developers and property owners didn’t like being constrained. Which, one would have thought, was a sign the rules were working.
What is proposed is “a more realistic approach to regulation (zoning and district plan rules) … that would encourage appropriate development rather than tell people where to locate”.
What annoys me about this “vision” for Auckland is that it is basically a rehash of what we’ve been doing for the past 50-60 years and are now realising hasn’t worked out that well. This is particularly true when it comes to transport matters:
The business-centric emphasis is at its most obvious in the Transport Trends document which opens with the bare admission that “the Government’s top priority for transport is to maximise the sector’s contribution to economic growth and productivity”. It wants more roads, and more capacity on existing roads. And when trucks are being held up, the rest of us should get out of the way.
“The performance of the motorway and arterial network is critical to effective freight distribution. Freight movements should have priority in key freight corridors.”
Without denying the importance of economic growth, a transport system designed to put trucks first is hardly the stuff of Mayor Brown’s “world’s most liveable city” dream.
The paper also calls for a “realistic” approach to transport investment.
It concludes, no surprises here, that cars will continue to be king. But more fundamentally, it gives a quick survey of the decline of public passenger transport over the past 50 years – not mentioning that was the result of a deliberate government policy to pander to the public love of cars. It then predicts, based on this record, that this pattern won’t change, so we’d better keep building roads.
We’re realising that it hasn’t worked and we’re voting for politicians who will provide a good public transport system. But for some reason that message just can’t filter through to central government and its bureaucrats.
By admin, on February 15th, 2011 Every time I hear the saying “but Aucklanders love their cars” I generally roll my eyes. My reply is generally along the lines of: “yes, it is true that Aucklanders are very auto-dependent and that we have one of the highest rates of car ownership in the world. However, that’s not because we naturally love our cars more than Wellington (or wherever), it’s because our transport policies of the past 60 years have focused almost exclusively on making it easier to get around by car than by any other mode.”
In short, for most trips in Auckland the logical transport decision is to drive. If you own a car, have a license to drive it and can afford to put fuel in it – generally driving will be faster, more convenient and/or cheaper than other transport modes for most trips.
The problem I have with such an outcome is that we have sacrificed the quality of Auckland’s urban environment to a significant extent to create the current transport situation. We bulldozed thousands of houses to create spaghetti junction, we continue to degrade central Auckland by having arterial roads resembling full-scale motorways, we’ve build soulless new suburbs like Dannemora and Botany Downs with every little design detail of these places having the car in mind – and everyone else very much as an after-thought. Looking into the future, continuing this trend simply doesn’t make sense: there is nowhere for future motorways to go, widening any of our arterial roads is likely to be extremely difficult and expensive, we can’t give private vehicles any more priority in the central city without destroying the place completely.
There are exceptions of course; the biggest one being that paying for parking in the CBD is expensive, so public transport becomes a more attractive financial option. Also, for some trips to the city centre – in particular along the Northern Busway and the Eastern Railway Line (as well as some bus routes like Dominion Road and Onewa Road) the public transport is fast enough to be competitive with driving – and as a result the services are extremely popular.
Of course a certain portion of the population will always need to use public transport: generally those that don’t own a car or are unable to drive one. There will also be the odd nutter like me who catches public transport even when it doesn’t make logical sense and I have the driving option available. When I used to live in Sandringham and work in Avondale I often caught the bus to work just to be a good public transport supporter, even though driving would have been much faster and probably cheaper.
While we must obviously ensure that those with no transport choice retain decent public transport, I think the main test for improving Auckland’s buses, trains and ferries is to see whether the improvements make public transport the logical choice. As it’s going to be nigh on impossible (both financially and practically) in the future to build more roads (or widen our existing ones), reducing vehicle congestion is wholly dependent on getting people out of their cars and onto more efficient means of transport. But in order to do that we can’t simply think it’s going to magically happen, and I don’t think we’re going to get particularly far by appealing to altruistic tendencies: that catching the bus is going to save the planet and so forth. In the end, we need to make public transport the logical choice.
So how does one do that? I suggest there are three main ways:
- Speed. In fact, I could say that the three ways of improving PT are speed, speed and speed – this is just so critical. Public transport is generally just so incredibly slow that it will struggle to attract people who have viable alternatives. Why would you spend two hours a day commuting by bus when you could instead spend one hour doing the same thing by car? To increase speed requires more bus lanes, faster boarding times, faster trains and simpler bus routes. We simply must do everything we can to make it go faster.
- Quality of ride experience. One big advantage of using public transport is that you can do something else on your trip than simply driving. With smartphones you can check emails, with laptops you can prepare reports, with a book you can simply have a nice read. We should be looking to both sell this advantage of PT, but also enhance it. Why not put free wifi on our trains, or even our buses – for example? We should also make sure as time goes on all our buses and trains have air-conditioning and that they offer a top-notch ride quality.
- Make the system easy to use. Often I think that many people are put off using public transport because it’s simply “too hard”. Getting in your car and driving somewhere is easy: you don’t have to worry about timetables, you don’t have to worry which bus company operates a route and whether they’ll accept your pass, you don’t have to try to decipher impossibly complicated maps to work out where you bus route goes, or where in the city your bus back home will leave. Catching public transport should be just as simple: a ticketing system accepted on all buses and trains, high enough frequencies that you don’t need to bother with a timetable and a bus route system simple enough to stick in your head like the London Underground map.
This is not an impossibility. The success of the Northern Express shows that when you have a fast, simple and convenient public transport option people will leave their cars at home and use public transport. When public transport becomes the logical mode option for more and more people we will see patronage skyrocket, and we will have succeeded in reducing our auto-dependency and creating a world-class transport system.
Patronage increases won’t happen by magic though, we need to continuously improve our public transport system – with a focus on speed, quality, convenience and simplicity.
By Nick R, on September 13th, 2010 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.
By Nick R, on September 8th, 2010 It’s been a while since I posted anything so I thought I’d step in while Josh is away to help keep things ticking over, my apoligies for the length and wordiness of this one!
The outcome of last Sunday’s motorway closure in Newmarket left me with some sense of vindication as a public transport advocate. After coming out with predictions of mass gridlock while the Newmarket viaduct was closed, NZTA developed strategy of scaring people away from travelling anywhere at all (much to the chagrin of the Newmarket Business Association!). To me that seemed a bit draconian with the distinct flavour of the old ‘auto-apocalypse’ line of thinking. Would the city really grind to a halt with one motorway out of action? Did they really think that the only way to manage a motorway closure was to stop people going anywhere at all? Is Auckland really so dependent on it’s motorways that there is no other conceivable transport management strategy than a virtual curfew on leaving the house?
Luckily ARTA saw what was going on and came to the party by providing free trains and a more frequent timetable all day long. Certainly many people took advantage of that offer and patronage counts of 30,000 were reported, six times those of a normal Sunday . At the end of the day there was no car-mageddon, Auckland didn’t have a fatal heart attack because one if it’s arteries was pinched.
Now of course we don’t really know how much of this was due to people shifting to trains for the day and how much was due to people taking the advice of NZTA and not going anywhere at all… although Mike Lee of the ARC suggests that over 80% of train trips last Sunday (25,000 journeys) were due to drivers shifting to the train for the day. I have to question that figure myself: it seems he’s attributing everything above normal Sunday patronage to car drivers making the switch which seems a little too simplistic to me. However at the end of the day the massive increase in train patronage and the lack of gridlock does suggest one thing: that a combination of public transport ‘carrot’ and road ‘stick’ will get some people to shift their mode of travel, if only temporarily.
So this outcome got me thinking again about one of the great debates of public transport, should we make public transport free all the time? If one-off free trains sextupled the average Sunday patronage should we look at doing it every day?
Suggested benefits of fare free public transport
With this in mind I went off to revisit some of the websites around that promote free public transport, and at first glance they make a compelling argument. They talk about greater mobility, better transport efficiency, social justice, clean air and people friendly streets. For example, Fare Free NZ list the following as the benefits of free public transport:
- Drastic decrease in emission of exhaust gases
- Less noise
- Less traffic jams
- Better traffic safety
- Enormous savings in energy and raw materials
- Creation of new jobs
- Ascent of efficient economical development
- Considerably lower public and personal expenses
- Empowering of social justice
- Higher cultural dialogue
- Creation of friendlier urban environment
Assumptions around going fare free
Now this all sounds fantastic, but if you think about it this isn’t a list of the outcomes of free public transport, this is simply a list of the benefits of people driving less and using public transport more. None of this necessarily has anything to do with fares and I guess my number one issue with the fare free concept is this assumption. Advocates seem to automatically assume that getting rid of the personal cost of public transport will mean that people will ignore any other problem they have with it and all of a sudden the system becomes efficient and very well patronised. So at this point we have to examine a few assumptions in turn:
Is the cost of public transport the main reason most people don’t use it, or even a major reason?
I guess the argument is that the cost of travel is a major barrier to use, or perhaps that if there wasn’t any cost people would overlook the other barriers. If you look at the results of surveys or comments on forums and in the papers cost does come into it but there is plenty else going on too. The main issues seem to be about service levels and accessibility, things like “the bus doesn’t go anywhere near my work”, “I live miles from a train station”, “the bus only comes once an hour”, “the last train is half an hour before I’m finished”, “it takes just too long, two hours by bus for a twenty minute drive”. Now it is obvious that going fare free isn’t going to change any of these nuts and bolts problems about timetabling, routing and speed, although in cases of minor inconvenience we might trade off a little time and effort to save money. My view is there are much bigger problems holding people back from public transport than the price of a ticket, and addressing those first would reap bigger gains. There is only so far people will go out of their way to save money.
Would free public transport mean people shift from driving, or would they simply keep driving the same amount but also increase their public transport usage?
Classic economics tells us that consumption and price are interlinked. Basically the cheaper something is the more we use it, and that usage doesn’t always have much to do with our needs. So, subject to those function constraints outlined above, making it free should result in more use. Perhaps the biggest issue is that those routes that work well already might be swamped, while those that don’t work well wouldn’t see much gain.
It seems quite common to assume that any increase in transit patronage is a good thing, but is that necessarily so? In terms of efficiency and environmental impact the first goal should really be to avoid making trips in the first place. Not taking a trip means no energy usage, no emissions, no congestion. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that simply increasing travel for travel sake isn’t a good idea. The goal should be to limit travel in some cases and shift the mode of travel in others, it should be to improve efficiency and meet the mobility needs of the populace. One reason we have such traffic problems is that there isn’t a direct charge for using roads, and road pricing has been suggested as a way to address that. But on transit there is a direct price, and perhaps that is actually a valuable demand management tool that stops people making wasteful or frivoulous trips? At the end of the day if the roads still see just as much traffic but the buses and trains are clogged too have we achieved anything?
Can the system actually handle a major increase?
This is a potential issue when it comes down to the economics of public transport supply. There is only a limited amount of spare capacity in the public transport system at peak times, but perhaps a fair bit more outside of the peaks. So free fares might mean the system gets used more off peak, but it might place a huge amount of strain on it during peak times. To stop service levels degrading too much there would need to be additional investment in new vehicles, new buslanes and the like, so going fare free might just cost a lot more than the lost fare revenue alone.
Direct benefits of fare free public transport
So there are a few things to think about there, if one or a few of these assumptions are actually true then maybe it’s a good idea after all. However if we put the general benefits of increasing public transport usage to one side, there are a few things that we can attribute directly to having no fares:
The big one is that free fares means no fare collection costs. It takes a lot of money to collect money! Lets consider the amount of time bus drivers spend collecting cash and issuing tickets, the number of people employed on trains and service counters whose job is simply to sell tickets, and all the back end work required to count, check and bank the funds. It becomes apparent that collecting fares actually costs a fair amount of money in terms of labour. Right now it’s pretty hard to put a dollar figure on this cost in Auckland due to the fact there are so many separate organisations involved in public transport. However we can get an idea of the costs involved from Melbourne where all the ticketing in handled by a central state run company called the Transport Ticketing Authority. This company employs 103 people just to operate the backend of the ticketing system, let alone actually sell any tickets. Apparently the Transport Ticketing Authority alone costs the state about $50 million a year to run, albeit for a much larger system that Auckland’s. Both Melbourne and Auckland are working to introduce smart card ticketing systems that will hopefully reduce some of these costs, although the initial outcome from Melbourne has been massive budget blowouts. The new Myki ticketing system is costing over a billion dollars to install and run for ten years, that’s a lot of fares covered.
Another big issue zero fares could remove is the amount of time it takes to pay fares. This is particularly obvious on commuter routes leaving the CBD in the evening peak, sometimes it can take ten minutes for everyone to line up and pay the driver in cash as the board. I remember in my uni days of commuting from the Shore it would often take more time to load up the bus at Victoria St that it would for the bus to make it’s way out of the CBD and over the bridge! No fares means people can effectively just hop on and off buses as they please, using whichever door is convenient. Having no fares would almost eliminate boarding time, but there are of course other ways to get rid of the boarding delays. However a smart card system in conjunction with punitive cash fare rates would also slash boarding time, as effectively payment would be done at a ticket machine or over the internet and getting on board would just be a case of swiping the tag post to verify payment. Another option would be to have clippies on buses the way Auckland’s trains do currently, collecting fares after people have boarded. Other options would be fare-paid areas in the city and more ticket machines at bus stops.
A third potential benefit of free fares is that it also means free transfers. Right now if you want to swap trains, buses or ferries you have to pay another full fare regardless of how far you are actually going. Effectively this limits people to travelling in the one direction their local route goes (i.e. toward the CBD and back), despite the fact that you can get just about anywhere in the city by making a connection. Get rid of the ‘transfer penalty’ and all of a sudden you have the entire network available to you, you can hop on and off vehicles to you’re hearts content to make a journey. Creating this penalty free ‘network effect’ would go a long way to replicating the convenience that private cars afford when you need to make a series of small trips. There are of course other ways to avoid the transfer penalty, the obvious one being a time-based fare structure such as Auckland already has with the Northern Pass on the busway system.
But what are the costs and problems of going fare free?
Perhaps the biggest problem with going fare free is the loss of revenue. Again it is hard to tell just how much fare money is collected in Auckland each year due to the mix of operators and the whole issue of some routes being entirely commercial. However, looking at a few figures I think we can make a stab at it. The latest ARTA monthly report states there were 60.6 millon public transport trips made over the last 12 months, and that figure is climbing rapidly. Now a lot of those trips were made on concessions or the gold card scheme, and we have no idea how many stages was paid for each one. But assuming the average fare works out to a couple of dollars then we are looking at annual fare revenue of well over a hundred million bucks. This means it would cost the city over a hundred million dollars a year to go fare free.
Considering that the Auckland Regional Council’s annual rate revenue was $160 million last year, funding free public transport under the existing arrangements would require ARC rates to be more or less doubled, which is of course a political impossibility. While there might be big savings to be had in terms of reduced labour costs and time savings, none of that is going to result in cash payments back to the ARC although in the long term they could probably negotiate better terms of their deals with the operators. So to go fare free would require a new funding arrangements, something like an ongoing grant from the central government, a regional sales taxi or a regional petrol tax (about 7c a litre would cover it from my estimates). So while a hundred million dollars doesn’t sound much compared to some of the capital expenditure on transport infrastructure in Auckland, it is still a hundred million that the city would have to pull out of thin air. We need to bear in mind that this extra hundred million a year is the cost just to maintain the existing system as it is today, the city would have to find this money before it even started to think about improving the service provision.
Another sticking point of no fares would be the required changes of contracting laws. All buses and ferries are run by commercial operators, they gain their revenue from a combination of fare sales and council subsidies. The train system is a little different, effectively it is entirely subsidised while the council keeps the fare money. The provisions of the Public Transport Management Act allow the council to do the same with the buses and ferries too, but so far it hasn’t happened and the government looks set to change the law back again. Basically the ideology of past and current governments is that public transport should be run as a commercial business wherever possible and going fare free would obviously prevent this from happening. Therefore free fares would require the support of the central government to change the laws appropriately, and that isn’t likely to happen.
Going fare free would almost certainly mean a much reduced human presence on the PT system. On trains and ferries there would be no need to have staff onboard to sell tickets, and regular interaction with bus drivers would be gone too. There would be little incentive to have staff at stations or stops either… however this is also a potential outcome of a smartcard ticketing system and many paid systems throughout the world have only sporadic security staff as their human presence, so I guess it is moot.
There are all sorts of equity and social issues involved too, things like whether it is desirable to have ‘just anybody’ able to get on board any time they like, and whether things should be user pays or socialised public goods etc. I won’t really go into this here because it is a whole other kettle of fish but they could have a large impact.
My concluding thoughts
There are huge gains to be had by improving public transport patronage and the efficiency of the system in Auckland, but until the cost of public transport fares is the major barrier to PT use I think we should avoid going fare free.
Certainly removing user costs would make public transport more attractive and boost patronage, but there are perhaps much better ways to do that while still recouping some revenue from the users, Indeed patronage has increased in leaps and bounds over the last few years despite the requirement to pay fares, as each bus and train capacity and performance improvement have been met by resulting improvements in use. Zero fares would remove much of the time and delays associated with collecting fares and would remove the transfer penalty, but so would an improved ticketing system based around an integrate fare structure. Furthermore using the provisions of the PTMA act to shift to a totally gross contracted model with a central ticketing agency would gain a lot of the proposed benefits.
Perhaps the only unique benefit of going fare free would money saved by removing the labour and back end costs of fare collection. However as long as these costs are lower than the amount of fares collected and patronage is growing regardless, then the system is better off with that additional revenue stream.
I think free public transport is something for mature, wide reaching transit systems to consider, as much for social and equity reasons and functional ones. However in Auckland’s relatively undeveloped network there are much more pressing needs for spending those millions. At a billion dollars a decade free public transport is anything but free. Personally I’d rather see a city rail tunnel or a couple of busways built with the money that have ten years of fare free transport but no additional improvements. If anything, we should be looking at pricing private car travel, rather than un-pricing public transport.
As always folks feel free to leave your comments. Cheers -Nick R.
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