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By Patrick Reynolds, on April 15th, 2012 Fantastic aerials of the the biggest urban motorway junction in Australasia under construction. From the Whites Aviation collection at the National Library:
 1968, Dominion Rd flyover in the foreground Auckland City used to just flow into its surrounding inner suburbs. Weirdly, as seen above they started with arguably the daftest part of the whole plan: The massively over engineered Dominion Rd/New North Rd flyover. Some engineer was allowed to get more that a little carried away that day. Ah: Brave New World.
 1966. Newton. George Courts on K'd on the Left Site clearance already beginning; anticipating SH1 being shoved right through town. You can see why K’Rd was such a successful shopping precinct; direct connection with its community. Plus of course being at the heart of the well used tram network.
 1967. Domion Rd flyovers, looking west Unusual view. Western Line on the left. Easy to see how out of scale the Dom Rd flyover is, and needlessly complicated. The scar of the pointless destruction of community that is to become dumb little mini-me motorway of Ian McKinnion Drive on the right.
 1969. Symonds St in centre. work starting on SH1 through the city Work begins. Check out the on-street parking. They’ve got to go somewhere if this is the mode you invest in. A big additional but uncalculated cost of the auto-dependent choice.
 Not sure of the date 1970s. The full CMJ sandpit. Fantastic print. Whites clearly invested in some better kit by this stage. A Hasselblad maybe; looks like it could be the great 40mm Distagon, or possibly the 38mm Biogon on the SWC, developed by Zeiss and Hasselblad as an aerial reconnaissance camera for the Luftwaffe in the 1940s! [A fact you don't see in their advertising]. And still great. Happy to be corrected, if anyone knows. Forgive me for indulging my inner camera nerd.
 CMJ, with gardening Severance at its best; no way across to K’rd now, hey guess what?, it’s never recovered commercially.
 CMJ_lost street pattern  1950s "Master Transport Focal Point" And how they sold it. Doesn’t look like much does it? A few little lines, nothing that’ll totally cut the CBD from its inner suburbs and nearly kill it for example. The text talks of tunnels. Yeah well that would have been much better, human life could have continued so much better if the surface hadn’t been reduced to a few car dominated bridges.
A fine monument to central planning. South Seas Soviet style. This whole effort was planned and built by government apparatchiks in Wellington immune to any input from the locals, including the local elected officials.
Well there you go: How modern Auckland was made by a city engineer with the phrase: “It’s a technical matter”. Never let the pricks get away with that one again.
Edit: Just added the accreditation for the photos
- Auckland motorways, Dominion Road interchange. Whites Aviation Ltd : Photographs. Ref: WA-67442-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23121284
- Newton, Auckland with motorway construction on right of Grafton Bridge. Whites Aviation Ltd : Photographs. Ref: WA-66170-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23119567
- Auckland City, including Southern Motorway and Eden Crescent. Whites Aviation Ltd : Photographs. Ref: WA-67026-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22595451
- Motorway junction, Symonds Street, Auckland. Whites Aviation Ltd : Photographs. Ref: WA-68574-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22792353
- Auckland motorway construction, Newton, with ‘spaghetti junction’ roads. Whites Aviation Ltd : Photographs. Ref: WA-74702-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22722332
By Patrick Reynolds, on April 11th, 2012 Tuesday’s Herald had a lot of good coverage of transport issues. No fewer than four good reports by Mathew Dearnaley. Rudman on the Remuera buslane rebellion, covered here on this site. And even a piece on the transformation of LA back towards being a transit town.
There was also really good coverage of this site’s founder, Josh Arbury, in his new role as Transport Strategist at the Council on value for money in Auckland’s PT; here. A piece on design of the new trains, here. And coverage of ways to raise infrastructure investment funds via proposed road pricing here. This issue deserves its own post and will get future coverage on this site. All this follows earlier an report on fewer road deaths here, and a really encouraging report on Shared Spaces with not only Alex Swney of Heart Of The City saying really good things about the improvements they bring but even the AA’s Simon Lambourne managing to not see the world ending at the removal of parking spaces; here, although still demanding more parking buildings.
But the one I want to look at in detail is about a seemingly insignificant little road with a boring name; who was/is Ian Mckinnon? Dearnaley’s article is here.
I have always hated this road. I hate driving on it. I certainly hate cycling on it. I hate the detail of its design. I hate its programme of speeding vehicles up briefly in the middle of the city. I hate the way it turns its back on its surrounding sites. I hate the way it cuts off Eden Terrace. I hate the way it spreads the quality of a motorway a little further into the surrounding area. And now it turns out to be so bad that it kills its users too….. In short the whole thing is a disaster. Why? Well first let’s look at its reported problems.
Although the road was built almost to motorway standard for the 30,000 vehicles that use it daily, and includes long downhill sections in both directions, it lacks a median barrier and has become notorious for crashes on its main bend.
So the idea of building a road ‘almost to motorway standard’ to link ordinary streets in the middle of the city has led to bad outcomes. Surprise me. And despite a road design that encourages speed it is now expected that declaring a lower speed limit will fix the situation, although police concede that this is unlikely.
But although the police intend monitoring the new limit, they are expected to “exercise discretion” until drivers get used to it, with prompting from electronic message signs over the next two weeks.
Hopeless really, it should have the physical characteristics of a city road; in particular it would be best to reduce it to one lane each way to help slow drivers. This would also provide the opportunity to add a real cycle lane here on the resultant spare tarmac. Something urgently needed because the NorthWestern cycleway stops at the Newton Road overbridge and this annoying little road could provide a way to link the cycleway up to K and Queen, to Symonds Street and therefore the Universities and the hospital, through to the Domain and so forth. A low cost way to get a great deal of cycling connection and some traffic calming thrown in for free! Like this:
 Ian McKinnon Drive as a way to extend the NW cycleway to Upper Queen St and beyond Now let’s go back a bit further and look at what else is so bad about this road. Here’s a wider view from above:
 Dom Rd/New North Rd flyovers bottom. Ian McKinnon Dr top. Ian McKinnon Drive is a relatively new road [anyone got a date?] inserted through a much older street pattern and a sorry consequence of the terribly over-engineered and land gobbling monument to post-war planning that is the Dominion Road/New North rd interchange. Originally designed to be part of the Dominion Rd Motorway, yes!, this interchange clearly needed somewhere to head to once the motorway was thankfully abandoned, so Ian Makinnon was rammed through. Here is how it was:
 Dominion Rd + New North Rd with rail line pre interchange Ok you can see the problem; both Dominion Rd and New North Rd converging into one road city bound. You can also see what’s good about this intricate and interwoven neighbourhood street pattern; housing and employment mixed together, walkable and interconected streets; a modern urbanist’s dream. But to allow [or force] a car based transport model on a city like this can only mean getting out the wreckers ball. It also means, of course, choosing to prioritise those living further out and wanting/needing to drive in over the value of the land and buildings and the community already existing in this inner area. New outer suburbs over older inner ones. Spirit of the times. Here is work by Kent Lundberg showing what value was directly destroyed by putting this road in [Twitter: @kentslundberg]:
Interesting to see just how much of old inner Auckland has been lost to expanding the roadspace to accommodate our imbalanced car focussed system, especially in the light of how valuable this kind of inner city property has become. What great rating income if nothing else has been abandoned by choosing this kind of city. Lost wealth. But that isn’t all, this demolishing and severance, as well as the presence of more and more vehicles rushing past has kept the remaining odd parcels of property low value, underdeveloped, and underperforming. Auto-dependency waving yet again its magic wand of anti-agglomeration. In the top left you can see a stretch of Newton Gully which has also, of course, been sacrificed to auto infrastructure. Making complete the separation of the remaining housing of Eden Terrace into a strangely stranded island. And one that few walk to and from as Ian McKinnon and motorway form such barriers to pedestrians.
You can also see there is a rail line running through these pictures. Had the earlier versions of the City Rail Link been built and a real Auckland passenger service been invested in so many of the commuters that these interventions were designed for could have still got to the CBD efficiently. Then could the costly destruction of so much of this neighbourhood have been avoided? It would have had to have been considered valuable for that to happen or at least there would have had to have been the ability for local view to have been heard and considered instead of distant decisions being forced down from City Hall and Wellington. We could still do much to improve this area, undo a lot of the damage, but we’ll never get the old street pattern back. The good news is that reducing the road space will become more and more viable as we build effective alternatives car commuting and as it would release a fair of land for productive use such rehab work might pay for itself. Here is an earlier post about this by Josh Arbury.
Let’s also remember the wider lesson from this story, we must balance place value and movement benefit more sensibly than was done here. Motorways and other invasive insertions are always more likely to happen in areas of low value but are those values permanent? How much have we already lost? Grafton Gully, for example, is a terrible loss to the city and clumsy separation of the city and the Domain, and put through in an age when we valued wild places a little less. Is it any surprise that the road lobby are now proposing to complete the total separation of Onehunga from its harbour by motorway; a lot easier to get its payday among the poorer and less connected of South Auckland after getting a bloody nose in the eastern suburbs.
So we can see in this one example how the auto-dependent model is considered the least productive and most wasteful system of movement for a city; it is a costly destroyer of place value. But we’ve always known that:
 De Leuw Cather report 1965, detail
By Matt L, on April 1st, 2012 The NZ Herald reports:
The New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) yesterday announced that it was commencing investigations into a new motorway between spaghetti junction and Hillsborough, along the approximate route first proposed in the 1960s.
The agency confirmed it was seeking community views on the project. While the route is in early stages of investigation, the agency said that it would provide for four lanes of traffic in each direction, with grade separated interchanges at Mt Albert Road, Balmoral Road and New North Road. Connections to State Highway 20 would be provided at its southern end, while links with all motorways feeding the central motorway junction, at its city end, would be provided.
Regional Highways Manager for NZTA, Tommy Parker confirmed that investigations had begun: “Our traffic modelling has shown that even with the Waterview Connection built and with the proposed East-West Link connection to the Southern Motorway, by 2025 congestion in Auckland will be worse than ever, especially for north-south flows across the isthmus.”
“This project has been in the plans since the 1960s, the first section of it was even constructed, which is why the Newton Road bridge is so long and why there’s an interchange between Dominion Road and New North Road,” said Mr Parker. “While we have not yet decided whether the eight-lane motorway will be tunnelled or provided at surface level, we note the likely high cost of a tunnelled option.”
Transport Minister Gerry Brownlee was encouraged by the news: “Congestion in Auckland is proposed to get worse and worse, according to my officials at the Ministry. That’s just unacceptable for the country’s largest city, and my officials have informed me that the only way we will avoid congestion getting significantly worse across all parts of Auckland is to significantly expand our motorway network.”
“Anyone who suggests otherwise doesn’t want this country to shift forwards and probably wishes it was still full of dirt tracks,” Mr Brownlee added.
Auckland Mayor Len Brown was enthused upon hearing of the investigations. “Look we’ve got a lot of projects in the works at the moment, but we’ve got to tackle congestion, we’ve got to get the blood really pumping! I’m really excited about this project contributing to the complete transformation of this part of Auckland.”
The concept of a motorway near Dominion Road was included in a 1963 transport plan for Auckland, by international consultants De Leuw Cather Limited. The Plan also included other proposed motorways that have not yet been built in Auckland, such as the Eastern Highway and a Henderson to New Lynn Motorway. The study had been presumed lost for many years, before being discovered in the Auckland University Library by a junior NZTA staff member.
NZTA’s Mr Parker highlighted the agency’s recent discovery of the document: “For many years now people have been saying that constructing the Waterview Connection would complete Auckland’s motorway network. Understandably, this was very distressing news for us at the NZTA as there would have been significant job losses once the Waterview Connection is completed, had we not found this study.”
“You can understand our excitement at discovering a whole series of new projects we can now focus our efforts on. This will keep us in work for many years to come as Auckland’s motorway network is actually far from complete.”
Auckland Business Forum chair Michael Barnett was also pleased with the re-discovery of the document: “We’ve been thinking up motorway projects for years and had just about run out of ideas. We’re extremely pleased to see such a large number of projects and expect them to be completed in the next three years, otherwise Auckland’s economy will grind to a halt.”
A number of Auckland Councillors spoken to had mixed views on the proposed Dominion Road motorway. Mike Lee, chair of the Council’s Transport Committee and Auckland Transport Board Member, spoke passionately against the project when it was unveiled at a council meeting yesterday. “There’ll be blood on the streets! This is mindless provincialism at work here!”
Local Councillor Cathy Casey also spoke passionately against the project: “This is a disgraceful outrage. The motorway will sever communities and destroy thousands upon thousands of homes. Worst of all, it will displace Auckland’s last remaining off-leash dog exercise area.”
NZTA’s board is expected to provide the required $4 billion in funding for the project at their meeting tomorrow.
By Nick R, on December 2nd, 2011 I had a few moments spare in the city library yesterday and thought I’d have a peek up at the Auckland Research Centre. This section of the library is great for finding old plans and proposal on anything related to transport or urban planning (by the way, just about every report, plan or meeting minutes from any council in Auckland is held on desk copy in the archives in the library basement. If you ever wanted to know about any council document it is there).
While there I luckily found what I was looking for, a copy showing the 1972 Rapid Transit Plan for Auckland. The history of this plan is eerily similar to our current situation in many ways. It was a revolutionary scheme championed by the charismatic mayor of Auckland Dove Myer Robinson (leading to the nickname ‘Robbie’s Rapid Rail’), despite the mayoralty and council not having the means to actually fund the thing independently. They began working on alternate funding solutions such as a targeted land tax but found them impossible to implement without support from Wellington. In the end by the Labour government reluctantly offered an election pledge to fund the proposal, but failed to deliver on that pledge. A wholly unsupportive National government were voted into power in 1975 and in 1976 the plan was cancelled completely.
The 1972 plan was based on the De Leuw Cather report of 1965, and it actually goes into very fine detailed design, modelling of patronage and economic analysis. It even goes so far as to include scale diagrams of the necessary grade separations on the western line, designs for park and ride stations and timetables for the integrated bus feeder services. One wonders if project DART planners couldn’t have simply checked this document out from the library and got stuck in!
I’ve taken photos of two pages that outline that out line the main components of the scheme so I’ll go through the interesting features of each one. Overall it is such a huge shame we didn’t build this scheme, as it would have provided us with a five line rapid rail transit system with a central city underground loop, fed by integrated bus feeders and park-n-ride and a focus on development around key nodes. Auckland would be a much different (and in my opinion better) place if we’d had such a system shaping the city’s development for the last thirty years.
The city loop (an actual loop)
Unlike the current proposals for a City Rail Tunnel, the 1972 scheme did actually contain a tight loop of tunnels under the core of the CBD. Two main stations were proposed: one downtown in the vicinity of theQueen St/Shortland Street intersection, and a second midtown between Queen Stand Mayoral Drive, about halfway between Aotea Square and Albert park. A third city station was to be built at K Rd, but this would have been a stop on the western line only.
 The City Loop proposal from 1972. Click to view full detail. Now I’m generally against rail loops, especially one way loops but this one seems to be small and tight enough to work. With only two stations and about a two kilometres right around it would be very quick to circuit and would have worked well. (Compare this to the modern suggestion of using the City Rail Tunnel and the existing Newmarket to Britomart line as a loop: that would be 9.3km around with seven or eight stops on the way. Just plain loopy!).
We can see that the main link to the existing system comes via a tunnel and viaduct leading to the old Auckland Station. Indeed next to the former railway hotel opposite the station buildings there is still the empty section of cliff where the viaduct was to enter the tunnel. A good benefit of this scheme is that it maintained the old terminus as a proper ‘central station’ for long distance trains and generally kept them clear of the suburban tunnel operations. Also visible is the tunnelled link to theNorthShoreline, which passes underneathWynyardWharf. If only we had that tunnel today we could already have the station for the waterfront development.
As an aside, if you look closely at that page (sorry about the quality, I snapped it on a camera phone) you can see the full central motorway junction plans in all their monstrous glory. Notice how the spaghetti stretches right down Grafton gully to a elevated Eastern Motorway, while the CMJ is insanely complex due to the links to the mercifully never built Dominion Motorway (note how the Dominion Motorway runs beside the huge new North Rd interchange, rather than through it as commonly assumed). Could we image the traffic nightmare the full junction would be today, not to mention the urban destruction? Sounds like Dante’s tenth circle of hell to me, a combination of Limbo and Treachery.
The suburban network
Moving on to the second image we see the real extent of the rapid transit system proposed. One thing I can’t quite figure out is whether the dots indicate the only stations, or if they are simply the major stations. If it is the former then the plan involved a major rationalisation of stations and would have been a really rapid rail system.
For example the southern line would have only six stop between Newmarket and Papakura allowing for some lightning transit times! I guess we can assume that every station would have been a major bus interchange and almost all passengers would have used a feeder bus to get to their local station. An interesting omission here is a Manukau link, perhaps we would have seen Papatoetoe or Manurewa be the ‘centre’ of south Auckland instead, or perhaps they would have simply built the branch at the time Manukau was first developed rather than thirty years later. Looking at the lines in turn now, perhaps the most obvious addition is the North Shore rail line. Not surprisingly the station locations are almost exactly the same as the busway interchanges. The first is one at the bottom of Onewa Rd in Northcote, originally planned for the busway but never built. Next we have stations as Barry’s Point (aka Akoranga), Wairau valley (aka Sunnynook), Sunset Rd (aka Constellation) andAlbany. From there the line takes quite an interesting route north, via a station at Redvale (presumably a big park n ride?) it curves around the waterfront at Stillwater to a station half way along the Whangaparoa peninsula like a sort of rail based Penlink. Again with only six stations between Whangaparoa and the CBD transit times would have been around 30 minutes or less.
 The rapid rail network proposal from 1972. Click to view full detail. The western line appears much the same, except for the fact there are only four stations remaining between Henderson and town. The main difference is that the route leaves the existing line at Ranui and curves north along a ridge beside Don Buck Drive to terminate at as station called ‘Hobsonville’, which if we look closely is actually right where Westgate exists today. A quick glance at Google Maps shows that this ridge line is still largely undeveloped, perhaps we could still use this route to extend the rail line up to Westgate and the upper harbour?
Over on the Eastern Line close inspection shows something interesting. Unlike the Western and Southern which use the existing tracks, it looks like the eastern rapid rail would have run alongside the existing tracks in the same corridor. In particular we can see a station at St Johns Rd and an alignment that appears to cross over the existing tunnel, both of which suggests the new line was intended to climb up the hill rather than use the low level tunnel. I guess this is in order to keep the old ones for port freight. Perhaps this is something we could still look too in the future (that is keeping the existing eastern line tracks for freight and building a new set in the corridor to specifically to take rapid transit), especially if we were considering some from of light rail or light metro for a line out to Botany and beyond. At Panmure the rapid rail line has definitely deviated from the main line and it passes east of the Panmure lagoon before passing further east to new stations at Pakauranga and Harris Rd (just before contemporary Botany Town Centre) to terminate at Howick. Apart from the last station, this route is pretty much the same today on the Auckland Plan and the AMETI busway plans. This is an interesting concept, modern designs have rapid transit to Botany then heading along Te Iririangi Drive, but a spur out toward Howick would certainly get right deep into the neighbourhoods on the Howick peninsula.
The last line is quite a curious one. The outer section of this is extremely similar to current proposals for an Airport/southwest suburbs line, more or less following the motorway corridor from Onehunga to the Airport via Mangere Town Centre. The interesting bit is on the inner section: rather than travelling along the Onehunga branch and the Southern line into the city, it actually swings up part of the old Avondale-Southdown corridor through to Mt Roskill then along Dominion Rd straight into town. Certainly this would be quite a good way to get a direct trip to the airport plus take care of the central ithsmus transport needs at the same time. A close look at the map suggest the line runs parallel just east of Dominion Rd, presumably in the same corridor as the proposed motorway. Luckily for us we never carved that horrific scar across the central suburbs, however unfortunately that likewise make such a rail line quite infeasible today. I suppose a long Dominion rail tunnel or some sort of light rail or metro system could work (if we had the funds), but generally I think a rail line via Onehunga paired with trams on Dominion Rdwill take care of those transport needs.
From a modern viewpoint this system is extremely radial and CBD focussed, like the system in Melbourne. However if we had had these lines in place by the late 80s we can assume that other lines would have been built since, for example the Te Irirangi – Flatbush corridor probably would have included a rail link between the eastern and southern lines in addition to an expressway, and probably over to the airport too. Likewise completing the gaps in the route between Avondale, Onehunga,Westfieldand Panmure would have been a logical choice for an ithsmus line linking all the main radials.
A real shame this network ended up being cancelled shortly before it got started, but perhaps there is a thing or two we could learn from this proposal for the future of rapid transit in Auckland.
By admin, on November 9th, 2011 One interesting element of the new Outer Link bus service is that it operates at the same frequency all the time: one bus every 15 minutes. This is pretty unusual for a bus service, as typically you see a huge increase in service frequency at peak times and then a big drop-off during off-peak times. Obviously demand is ‘peaked’, and we’re already starting to see Outer Link buses being filled up (only yesterday one drove past me in Herne Bay because it was too full to pick up passengers), but it seems the point of keeping frequency the same whenever the service runs is to ensure we get good off-peak frequencies – enabling people to think about using PT for more than just the trip to work.
Personally I think the Outer Link will need to add additional peak time capacity in the not too distant future, which will mean a shift away from its “same frequency all the time”. But you can go too far the other way, with peak frequencies being good but off-peak frequencies being fairly rubbish (most of Auckland’s bus routes are like this). While demand is obviously the highest at peak times, providing peak time services are really expensive (because you need to own the bus and employ the driver for just a few trips a day), so you really want to be sure that the balance between peak and off-peak services is nicely fine-tuned.
Some experiences of Campaign for Better Transport member Andrew along Sandringham Road in recent weeks and months suggest that this is a route which has the opposite problem to the Outer Link: it has too many services at peak times and not enough during off-peak times. Here’s what Andrew sent me recently:
Peak loadings are very uneven. The early AM expresses I used usually have most seats taken, sometimes some standees. The later AM expresses are pretty well used.
The PM expresses are the emptiest, although I suspect it’s because they often depart the CBD just after, not before, all stopper services. Those who just get on the first available bus that comes along would therefore end up on the all-stopper, even if the express were the better bus for them.
Interpeak and evening services are often full standing, turning passengers away at some points as described in those tweets. Both the 233/243 and the 249 have this problem.
To explore this issue, I’ve compared service frequency patterns of Sandringham Road services with those along New North, Dominion and Mt Eden Roads. All four routes are generally similar, following key north-south arterials across the central part of the isthmus: (All the routes tend to split away south of Mt Albert Road and some have variations in their routes to what’s shown but this is a general guide).
If we look at the timetables for each of the four routes and measure the time each service either arrives (for inbound) or departs (for outbound) the city centre, we get an idea for the peak/off-peak split. The first graph below shows the varying frequencies for inbound services: Obviously for inbound services the big spike in frequencies is during the morning peak. In the 8:00-9:00am hour most of the routes have around a bus every three minutes, although Dominion Road has a significantly higher frequency than this – presumably to cope with the higher demand. Interestingly, Dominion Road maintains a far higher level of inter-peak service than any other route, but drops off in the evening peak whereas for all the other routes they get a bit of an increase (presumably because they’re sending so many buses into town to shift people out of town).
Looking at the PM peak, things are a bit different – with a more spread out peak in services from around 3:00-6:00pm: The precipitous drop-off in service frequency after 6pm on all four routes is quite surprising – and perhaps suggests that you might be most likely to find your bus completely full if you try to catch it between 6pm and 8pm. Not exactly ideal if we want to encourage more of a ‘spreading of the peak’ to enable the more efficient use of our bus resource.
Putting the inbound and outbound together and you get the full picture of how frequencies fluctuate throughout the day:  Some quite interesting observations can be made of the graph above. Firstly, it’s rather surprising that we have almost as many inter-peak buses on Dominion Road as we have evening peak buses. And with all routes we see that huge fall in service levels after 6pm.
If we look at the numbers of buses specifically, take the morning peak as buses arriving in town between 7am and 10am and the evening peak (as determined by bus numbers) as those leaving town between 3pm and 6pm, we can compare how “peaked” each of these routes are. There’s an interesting spread: While there’s not too much difference between New North Road and Sandringham Road services, we do find that Sandringham Road buses are the most “peaked” in terms of the service provision. This appears largely due to the poor inter-peak frequencies that both New North and Sandringham Road have – which more than make up for Dominion Road’s huge inbound peak numbers.
There doesn’t seem to me to be any particularly logical reason why Sandringham and New North should have much more “peaked” service provision than the other two routes although I know Dominion has particularly high demand so it perhaps justifies a higher inter-peak level of provision than the others. Perhaps it’s most surprising that New North Road has such a highly ‘peaked’ level of provision, as it duplicates the inner part of the Western Line and seems to be mostly used by university students (whose trips are likely to be spread throughout the day more).
It seems to me that if we were a bit smarter about service provision for both Sandringham and New North Road services we could perhaps knock a few peak time services away and use the significant money we save to spend on boosting inter-peak frequencies. For all routes it seems that a big boost in evening frequencies (6-9pm) is likely to be justified. With a bit of clever thinking, many of these changes could be made at little or no cost.
By admin, on August 24th, 2011 If there’s anything that annoys me, it’s how the design of the streets in Auckland is so frequently horrifically unfriendly to pedestrians. As I have pointed out before, there are busy intersections in the city centre that have traffic lights, but no pedestrian phase to them. Other horrific pedestrian environments include much of the eastern side of Albert Street – thanks to the stupid slip-lanes that run between Wyndham Street and Wellesley Street, as well as Hobson Street – in the Sky City block, where you don’t even have a footpath.
Treating pedestrians like rubbish isn’t limited to the city centre though, as I discovered at the corner of View Road, George Street and Dominion Road in Mt Eden today: No pedestrian crossing at the southern end of the intersection. Good luck trying to get across Dominion Road here. This is the crossing of George Street, one leg of the intersection. No pedestrian signal, no crossing. Nothing. As the photo above shows, it is a fairly complex intersection and there is a pedestrian crossing at probably the most important bit, so you can get across Dominion Road – but because there’s only one crossing point chances are pedestrians will all need to detour significantly. Plus not having any pedestrian crossing of George Street just feels downright dangerous.
It wouldn’t be hard to fix intersections like this to make life much easier and safer for pedestrians. I’m not quite sure why it doesn’t happen – I suspect it’s because traffic engineers do much of this work designing intersections, phasing, which lights are necessary and which aren’t. And generally, they just don’t care about anything but cars.
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 19th, 2011 As a kid I was always fascinated by the bizarre interchange between New North Road and Dominion Road, between Kingsland and Eden Terrace. You know the one – it looks like this: From Dominion Road/Ian McKinnon Drive, the interchange looks like this:
 You can see from the above photos how “out of place” the interchange is with its surrounding area. This is further reinforced when you see what the interchange looks like from above: The interchange, as well as the semi-motorway that is Ian McKinnon Drive, exists because it is the first section of what was to be a complete motorway down Dominion Road (or very close to it). This was a key part of the 1960s motorway plan for Auckland (the Dominion Road motorway is outlined in red): It’s pretty common knowledge that our transport priorities in the 1960s were crazy, leaving us with some pretty massive urban scars like this interchange. But I wonder if it could make sense to remove this excessively large interchange – humanising this part of Auckland, freeing up some space for development and maybe even the whole thing could be self-funding?
To look at the issue a bit more closely, let’s see how much space the current interchange actually takes up – as shown in the map below it’s around a whopping 5 hectares – 50,000 square metres (assuming those places on Ace Place have an area of around 2,000 square metres):
 Even if we remove the interchange, we’re still going to need to dedicate some space through this area to roads – something like what’s below:
 To link up a few of the local roads (like Aitken Terrace) it might require a bit more space, but probably not too much (say around 2000 square metres). So overall, broadly, it seems that we could free up around 30,000 square metres for development through this area – 3 hectares!
How much might three hectares of urban land be worth around here? To get some sort of idea, let’s take a look at the land value of a nearby site: With this 422 square metre site having a land value of $630,000 – that equates to around $1500 a square metre. Multiply that by 30,000 and you get around $44.7 million. And that’s just taking the land value of a site with a fairly small building on it as our guide – potentially you could build quite high densities around the intersection of two major arterials.
Perhaps we could tie this in with the building of the City Rail Link project – as the Western Line in this area will probably need to be lowered quite a bit to ease the slop of the Rail Link tunnel.
By admin, on July 11th, 2011 Auckland Transport has today finally got around to giving us some insight into where things are at on the proposed Dominion Road upgrade. This project has had a pretty long and messy history – coming to a head late last year when the former Auckland City Council wanted to turn the street into a four-lane superhighway when they preferred a T2 lane option over the normal bus lane that staff had suggested.
There’s no doubting that Dominion Road is a “tough nut to crack”. You have a busy road, an extremely popular public transport corridor, a string of businesses continually undermined by planning decisions elsewhere in the city allowing bigger and bigger megamalls and a desire to provide cyclists with better and safer options. All this on a road which has a very constrained width and a complete inability to widen it at various key points.
Here’s what Auckland Transport have said about their preferred way to move forward on improving Dominion Road:
Over the years a number of schemes have been proposed, including 24 hour bus-lanes running to and from the central city (known as a “rapid transit system”). However, following a review by Auckland Transport and consideration of feedback from community consultation, those plans have been scaled back.
Auckland Transport has agreed to extend bus-lanes around the Mt Roskill Village Centre, and Balmoral Village, and in the area Mt Roskill bound through to Valley Rd.
These will operate only at peak times. On-street parking, which was a critical issue for businesses and residents, will be retained, with the bus-lanes utilised for parking off-peak.
Cycleways will be included where room allows. The work will also see significant maintenance of the road surface.
More details will follow as the project design is developed in consultation with business, other stakeholders and the Albert-Eden Local Board.
First things first, one would hope that Auckland Transport might know what ‘rapid transit’ actually is (clue: it’s certainly not what was ever proposed for Dominion Road). But moving on to the substance, it seems that Auckland Transport are definitely shifting towards a “do minimum” approach to upgrading Dominion Road. Aside from the possibility of slightly lengthened operating hours for bus lanes, and hopefully a greater continuity of their operation, it seems that for the most part not much will change except for around the town centres, where an original proposal (which Auckland City Council had moved away from last year) will be revived and the bus lanes ‘taken around the back’ of the village centres.
I have mixed feelings about sending buses behind the shops. At Onehunga the bus station is located behind the main street of shops and it just screams “you are a second rate citizen if you catch the bus, loser!” Very careful design will need to take place to ensure this does not happen at these town centres. I also worry about the detour behind the shops adding delays to bus catchers – effectively delaying them so that cars can travel a bit quicker: not really the message we want to send I wouldn’t think.
As I have explained many times before, ultimately I think modern light-rail is likely to be the solution for Dominion Road: because it can achieve the tricky ‘win-win’ of both providing significant passenger transport capacity while at the same time not destroying the fairly fragile urban fabric of the various town centres along Dominion Road. If we keep that endgame in mind, perhaps not spending a huge amount of money at this stage on a half-ass solution might be a good thing.
However, on the other hand if all the designations are lifted at the completion of what now seems to be a very minor upgrade, perhaps we will have lost our ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity to dramatically improve public transport along this corridor. It’s really hard to say at the moment, perhaps some design details will shed light on whether today’s announcement is a step in the right direction or not.
By Stu Donovan, on July 7th, 2011 Welcome back and thanks to everyone who commented on yesterday’s post, which tried to highlight some ‘inconvenient truths’ about light rail (LRT). In today’s post I will try to synthesize and respond to those comments, before moving on to what I think are greener pastures. Taken together I hope that these two posts inject some excitement into conversations about the future of public transport in Auckland.
First let’s consider some of the important general comments from yesterday post:
- Context of the debate – BrisUrban highlighted the importance of context. Let’s be clear: We are discussing transport technologies that will be used in Auckland in the future. And let’s be even more specific, we are talking about post-2020 transport scenarios. Why? Well for the next 10 years all available public transport funding in Auckland is already committed. Unless I’m pleasantly surprised and the Nats get rolled in November.
- Redundant arguments – In another comment, George D suggested that those who support light rail in Auckland are already aware of its weaknesses. This does not match my experiences. From where I’m sitting it seems like LRT is often thrown out there as the default transport technology Auckland aspires to (e.g. by Len Brown), without much awareness of a) its limitations and b) other potential transport technologies.
And now let’s respond to some of the technical comments:
- Capacity – Patrick R (and others) argued that the Bogota BRT does not show that bus rapid transit (BRT) can match LRT’s capacity because it has two lanes in each direction, rather than one. But do the math – if you divide Bogota’s total throughput (40,000 pax/hour) by two lanes then you are left with 20,000 pax/hour/lane, i.e. about the same as LRT. So it is a fair ‘apples and apples’ comparison: LRT and BRT have similar capacities. It’s true!
- Resilience – Matt L suggests that observations of the fragility of LRT focus on “worst case scenarios.” But any discussion of technological resilience is an exercise in risk management, i.e. we must consider unlikely yet high-impact events. I don’t think it’s silly to consider how light rail would function in an earthquake, or in situations where cars get in the way – they are real risks involved in operating public transport in New Zealand, and they are risks that do not seem to affect buses as much as LRT.
Other commentators put forward advantages of LRT that were not discussed in yesterday’s post:
- Corridor width – Josh suggested that the narrower width of LRT was advantageous in constrained road corridors, such as Dominion and Mt Eden. But if this was really important we could simply build narrower buses. Also, I suspect that the emerging transport technologies (discussed below) will neutralize this problem because of the advanced guidance systems that they use.
- Market image – Nick R suggested that buses have an image problem. I’m skeptical of how important this is for three reasons: 1) the Northern Express has successfully got the suits out of the closet in Auckland; 2) bus systems overseas are well-used by people on high-incomes (e.g. Brisbane, Edinburgh); and 3) 15 year olds who start catching buses in 2020 will have a completely different image of buses from us oldies. We remember the bad old days of Auckland in the late 1990s, while the youngsters hopefully benefit from all our hard work over the next 10 years
 . Finally, “image” is highly malleable, especially for new users coming from younger demographics.
- Mix of technologies – A number of commentators suggested Auckland’s future public transport system should involve a mix of transport technologies. This was never in question. What was in question is whether that mix includes light rail. I think not, or at least not in its current form. Even on “sensitive” corridors such as Dominion and Mt Eden, I suspect that existing transport technologies will work fine until better transport technologies (which are discussed below) become available.
Let’s now step back a second to consider what an ideal public transport technology (let’s call it a “BAM!” i.e. a Bus trAM) might look like. Ideally, a BAM would combine the advantages of buses, such as low capital costs, with the advantages of LRT, such as ride quality, while avoiding the disadvantages of both. That means we want to have higher vehicle capacities than can be accommodated on buses, while avoiding the need to run tracks and overhead wires. Even so BAM must be mainly electrically powered. We are really talking about some form of “technological convergence.”
But is the BAM a figment of my sore right knee or is it a realistic transport technology? Well, it actually already exists – sort of. A BAM (called the “Phileas”) was up and running in Eindhoven (those crafty Dutch) in 2004, as illustrated below (photo source).
That’s not to say that the Phileas ran smoothly straight up: There were problems with drive-trains and engines, which required a fairly substantial re-design from the manufacturer. But the Phileas seems to be developing nicely, and has since been tested by Douai (France) and Korea.
The Phileas website mentions some impressive headline technical specifications: The 26m hybrid diesel-electric version carries a maximum of 141 passengers and has a turning radius of only 12.5m (thanks to all wheel steering). This largely neutralizes concerns expressed by several commentators about buses leading to frequency overkill, or large buses failing to navigate through K’ Road. One of the most exciting developments included in the Phileas is its electrical guidance systems, which basically means it can steer itself – removing the need for drivers and potentially saving heaps in operational costs. BAM BAM!
But my faith in future, rather than past or present, transport technologies rests not on one product. Yesterday’s post also linked to Siemen’s BAM offering, which they are promoting as eBRT.
In contrast to the electric-diesel set-up used by Phileas, Siemen’s eBRT offering uses a fully electric power system based on super-capacitors (electricity buckets) that empty between stops. The super-capacitors are then re-charged (in 20 seconds) via overhead wires at the next stop (NB: Super-capacitors have been in development for several years as a cheaper and greener alternative to electric batteries). As with the Phileas, optical guidance systems are used to keep eBRT ontrack – so again it’s potentially driverless.
One final example of an unrelated but cool emerging technology is Avego, a real-time car-pooling (“ride-sharing” in U.S. parlance) software that runs through your SmartPhone. I know car-pooling has been talked about as a transport solution ‘fa-eva’ (in NZ parlance), but I get the feeling that the growth in GPS enabled smart phones will greatly reduce the transaction costs involved in finding someone to car-pool with. It may be at a stage where it takes off; although these initiatives are all about critical mass. If it does, then this may re-shape the transport landscape. Watch this space.
Some commentators (like KarlHansen) point out that these technologies are as yet unproven and it’s a very valid point. But I’d just like to point out that most of the technology underlying BAM is not new, even if the application is relatively novel. Moreover, time is on Auckland’s side, we have ten years before we need to chose the transport technology that will ply our major urban public transport corridors. Time is on our side, especially while the “Colossus of Roads” Steven Joyce is steering NZ’s transport agenda.
In conclusion, I suspect the future of Auckland’s (surface) public transport system will not include light rail as we know it, but it may well make use of new transport technologies that combine the advantages of light rail with buses.
To finish, I want to ask whether Auckland should be passive receivers of transport technology, or an active driver of technological change? We basically know what we want from the BAM, and we more or less know when we will need it.
Should we be making eyes at potential industry partners? Or if we’re too small to gain their attention should we be working together with Wellington, Christchurch, or other cities with similar technological demands.
Does anyone know why don’t cities collaborate with each other and then engage with relevant industry players to set a research agenda that delivers the type of transport system that we want? The EU tends to play this role in Europe and I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on whether we should be doing the same.
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