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By Matt L, on May 17th, 2012 NZTA is funded from petrol tax and road user charges, which obviously comes from cars, trucks, vans and buses using fuel (or travelling kilometres) along our roading network. The theory is that this creates a relatively ‘user pays’ situation, with money raised from road users being spent on projects that benefit road users (including public transport, walking and cycling, which obviously reduce the number of cars that would otherwise be on the road).
There are two types of roads in New Zealand, state highways and local roads. State highways are owned and 100% funded by NZTA – building them, renewing them and maintaining them. Local Roads are owned by local councils (there’s a rather weird legal situation in Auckland where I think the council own the road but Auckland Transport manage it on their behalf) and are funded roughly by way of a 50/50 split between NZTA and council (generally rates) funding. So already we clearly have a situation where roads are subsidised by ratepayers as part of councils’ 50% share in funding their construction, renewal and maintenance. But let’s leave that aside for a minute.
What’s interesting in this situation is that you effectively have Central Government charging (by way of fuel tax and road-user charge) road users for using a piece of infrastructure that’s owned, maintained and renewed by local government. In essence, it’s a somewhat strange situation – an analogy might be that I own a theatre: I built it, I maintain it and I look after it. But people using my theatre actually pay someone else for the privilege: not me. Obviously, the unfairness of the situation is largely resolved by NZTA part-funding local roads – in our analogy giving me back about half of what it costs to renew and maintain my theatre.
A good way of measuring whether local councils are getting their “fair share” of NZTA’s money is to look at the split of actual travel (and therefore technically revenue) which happens on local roads versus state highways and then compare that with the split of spending on local roads and state highways. We already saw that in Auckland the split in travel is approximately two-thirds on the local road network and one-third on the state highway network:  If we were to take a fairly strict “user pays” approach to road spending in Auckland, there’d be an argument for roughly a two-thirds/one-third split for local roads and state highways. With public transport largely on the local road network, arguably the split could be even higher.
Where I’m getting with this relates to an amusing document released under the Official Information Act to Green Party transport spokesperson Julie-Anne Genter, which she has passed onto bloggers on this site. It relates to a Ministry of Transport response to Steven Joyce last year, when he was seeking some technical justification for shifting even more money into state highways at the cost of money that would usually go to local councils. You can see this point outlined in the paragraph below: 
Unfortunately for the Minister, the actual figures tell the complete opposite story. We learn that the local road share of travel is increasing (very slightly), but bizarrely we see that the state highways share of expenditure is increasing – a huge mismatch: 
The table clearly highlights that over the past decade there has been an enormous increase in state highways spending and a much slower increase in local road funding, even though the share of VKT between the two has stayed relatively constant. Back in the early years of last decade we can see that there was a reasonably match-up between VKT and expenditure, but since around 2005/2006 that has changed enormously due to the huge ‘spend-up’ on state highways.
In effect, what we see is local councils now pretty much subsidising state highway projects, in particular the big budget items of the Roads of National Significance. Meanwhile the amount of money available for local roading projects is getting squeezed harder and harder, with less spent in the 2011/12 year on local roads than was spent in the 2006/07 year. With the 2012 Government Policy Statement proposing a further big increase to state highway spending, while putting the squeeze on local road spending, it really does become obvious that our local roads are getting screwed over.
P.S. the Ministry (wisely) suggested that such a table not go in the cabinet paper!
By Peter M, on April 30th, 2012 The madness of our current transport spending priorities have been highlighted a lot in recent weeks, even getting a pretty good airing on the National Party aligned Kiwiblog, thanks to a superb Guest Post by Green Party transport spokesperson Julie-Anne Genter. Behind the scenes, Labour Party transport spokesperson Phil Twyford has also been digging up a whole pile of interesting information through written questions to Minister of Transport Gerry Brownlee. In particular, a series of questions compare the amount of money NZTA is spending on new and improved state highways in Auckland, Wellington and Canterbury with the amount of money being spent on public transport infrastructure in each of those three cities.
I think it’s good to focus on NZ’s three biggest cities, as obviously that’s where the need for public transport infrastructure is always going to be most concentrated. The numbers are, shall we say, mind-bogglingly lop-sided: While it’s important to remember that rail track infrastructure is not included in PT infrastructure spending – for some strange reason – there’s a huge imbalance here. The public transport infrastructure funding pool is used for things like integrated ticketing, bus priority projects, ferry terminal upgrades, rail station improvements and similar projects. Let’s put the difference between the two funding totals in another format: Even I am surprised to see how unbalanced the spending is between these two funding pools.
By Peter M, on April 6th, 2012 It has been really refreshing to see transport discussed so much in parliament this week – with the results of the exchanges spilling into the media, as evidenced by the interviews on Breakfast TV a couple of days back.
What seems to have really kicked this off are numbers coming out of the Ministry of Transport, and in a series of answers to written questions, highlighting the ever-increasing dominance of our transport budget by projects that have very low cost-benefit ratios. This was first highlighted in the Ministry of Transport’s briefing to the incoming minister – which included this graph:  A series of written questions from Phil Twyford to Gerry Brownlee has dug up some further detail on the numbers that sit behind the graph above (at least for the last couple of years) and also updated it with 2010/2011 data. I’ve put together the answers to a series of written questions into the table below – first by dollar amount and then by percentage: Finally, a couple of questions asked by Mr Twyford look at the proportion of the state highway spend on projects with low cost-benefit ratios that are related to Roads of National Significance projects. The answers highlight that in 2009/2010, $527 million of the $587 million spent on projects with low cost-benefit ratios related to RoNS project (just under 90%). In 2010/2011, $468 million of the $583 million spent on projects with low BCRs related to RoNS projects (just over 80%).
Now let’s put them all together into a graph showing what’s happened since 2005/2006 – effectively adding the 2010/2011 data to the earlier graph in this post: 
Geez what happened from 2008/2009 onwards that triggered such a dramatic lowering in the cost-effectiveness of our state highway spending? Oh that’s right, the current government came to power and introduced the RoNS projects.
By Guest Post, on March 25th, 2012 This is a Guest Post by Peter and continues his series on overseas cities.
Los Angeles is a poster child for automobile dependent sprawl – a moniker that is somewhat justified, even if it also happens to be one of the denser American cities (if you use the rather dodgy measurement of average density). But Los Angeles’s story is actually a bit more complicated than the normal story – especially if you look at where LA is now heading with its transport policy and its funding priorities.
To start with, Los Angeles’s highly dispersed urban form was not originally the result of the automobile, but rather the result of it once having the world’s most extensive electric railways network – the Pacific Electric System:  At its greatest extent in 1925, the Pacific Electric Railway system had over 1600 km of track – linking towns with each other and with downtown Los Angeles. Coupled with the “Los Angeles Railway“, a system of streetcars in the very inner suburbs of LA, you would have struggled to find many cities in the world in the 1920s with a more extensive rail network: particularly as population wise Los Angeles wasn’t the huge conurbation that it is today.
Obviously in later years Los Angeles decided to go down the “build motorways exclusively” path, arguably to a greater extent than just about any other city in the world – particularly in terms of constructing such an extensive system relatively early (the Arroyo Seco Parkway opened in 1940). By the 1970s Los Angeles didn’t have a passenger rail network – quite staggering for the second largest city in the USA, and leading to pretty massive congestion and pollution problems. So for much of the last 20 years, a major focus for Los Angeles has been the construction (or in many cases reconstruction) of the city’s rail network. A lot has been achieved:
- The Blue Line (opened in 1990) is a light rail line running between Downtown Los Angeles and Downtown Long Beach.
- The Red Line (opened in 1993) is a subway line running between Downtown Los Angeles and North Hollywood.
- The Purple Line (opened in 1993 as part of the Red Line) is a subway line running between Downtown Los Angeles and the Mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles.
- The Green Line (opened in 1995) is a light rail line running between Redondo Beach and Norwalk in the median of the Century Freeway (I-105), providing indirect access to Los Angeles International Airport via a shuttle bus.
- The Gold Line (opened in 2003) is a light rail line that runs between East Los Angeles and Pasadena via Downtown Los Angeles.
- The Metro Expo Line is Metro’s newest light rail line that will open to the public on April 28, 2012. The line has been delayed for nearly 2 years.The line will initially operate between Downtown Los Angeles to La Cienega/Jefferson and in the summer 2012 to Culver City. It will share 2 Metro Blue Line stations (7th Street/Metro Center and Pico).
Along with a couple of bus rapid transit lines, Los Angeles has managed to build a fairly decent network over the past 20 years – pretty much from scratch: But what makes Los Angeles particularly interesting is looking at where it’s headed now. Despite the investment over the past 20 years in the network shown above, as well as a pretty clever bus system, Los Angeles remains a car dependent city that continues to suffer from congestion and pollution. However, unlike Auckland – where we remain under the illusion that perhaps if we just widen one more motorway we might finally fix congestion for good – Los Angeles has come to the realisation that the only solution is to offer people alternatives to sitting in their cars getting stuck in traffic. In short, there’s a general realisation that the vast bulk of investment in transport needs to go into these alternatives.
Reflecting this general understanding in the population, in November 2008 Measure R was passed by a two-thirds majority in Los Angeles County. Measure R added 0.5% onto the existing county sales tax over 30 years, with the money raised from that sales tax increase being specifically allocated to transport projects. Over the 30 years, the tax is expected to raise around $40 billion – with all money raised needing to be split across different transport activities in the following way:
- 35% for transit capital projects (i.e. new rail and bus rapid transit lines).
- 3% for transit capital on the Metrolink commuter rail system.
- 2% for transit capital on things like rail cars and rail yards.
- 20% for highway capital projects.
- 5% for operations on new rail lines.
- 20% for bus operation improvements.
- 15% for local return (i.e. transportation money that individual cities decide how to spend).
The graph below also illustrates the funding split quite well: While there probably remains some uncertainty about where the local improvements money will end up, generally the funding split for Measure R funds is tilted extremely strongly towards public transport projects, as well as ensuring there’s sufficient money available to also improve services.
The map below shows that a pretty extensive range of projects are able to be advanced due to Measure R: The biggest project of the lot here is the Westside SubwayExtension, with the full project expected to cost around $9 billion (but is hugely needed as it runs under Wilshire Boulevard, an enormously dense activity corridor).
What becomes increasingly clear, when you look at the long-term transport plans of supposedly auto-dependent cities like Los Angeles, is how they’ve realised the pointlessness of continuing to add more and more motorway capacity, just to watch it fill up again. But for some reason Auckland doesn’t quite get this yet, for some reason even a 50/50 split between roads and public transport funding is seen as “too extreme” – the Auckland Plan shifting away from that general funding split that had been in the Regional Land Transport Strategy. It seems that anywhere else in the world a 50/50 split would be seen as extremely roads-focused, yet in New Zealand it’s the complete opposite.
Why are we so out of step with the rest of the world when it comes to transport matters?
By Matt L, on February 28th, 2012 Auckland Transport’s first Regional Land Transport Programme (RLTP) has been released for consultation (not to be confused with Auckland Council’s Long Term Plan) – with submissions due by 4pm on Friday 23 March 2012. You can read the draft RLTP as a PDF document here. The RLTP does not set transport policy, in the way that the Government Policy Statement (GPS), Regional Land Transport Strategy (RLTS) and Auckland Spatial Plan do, but rather shows how the transport policy set by those other documents will be given effect to over the next three years. Importantly, a transport project needs to be included in the RLTP for NZTA to then include that project in their National Land Transport Programme (NLTP) for funding. The web of transport policy in New Zealand certainly is complex, but the RLTP plays a fairly critical role in setting out the transport programme for the next three years – providing detail to what we had perhaps only previously thought about as high level strategy.
The RLTP picks up on the general direction of the Auckland Plan, by saying that Auckland’s significant population growth over the next 40 years will place a huge amount of pressure on the transport network – meaning that serious investment will be required. There’s a useful graph highlighting that between 2006 and 2051, Auckland’s population growth will account for around 75% of the whole country’s growth. In other words, Auckland will add three people for every person the rest of New Zealand adds: That graph is a useful thing to roll out every time someone says Auckland is focused on too much when it comes to transport spending.
Perhaps the next most interesting thing in the RLTP (after we get past all the usual pretty talk about transport investment contributing to economic growth, the ‘one system approach’ etc. etc.) is some genuine funding set aside for advancing the City Rail Link project – showing that the project really is shifting beyond being something in “far future strategies” to an actual realistic project with a path well established that will lead to its eventual completion.
Even with the CRL’s construction, roads expenditure seems to dominate what happens over the next decade though – suggesting that there may be a number of large-scale roading (especially state highways) projects that may prove to be unnecessary and could be cut back to free up funds for projects like the CRL if there’s a shortage of money (and the RLTP suggests there is): Looking at the graph above, it would seem that 2018 and 2020 would be the only years we end up spending more on the CRL than we spend on building new motorways. A pretty strange situation considering the Waterview Connection is supposed to “complete” Auckland’s motorway network (and it’s due to be finished by 2016/2017). Presumably the big spending on state highways in the later years is due to the Puhoi-Wellsford road, suggesting that the two projects do compete for funding at around the same time (contrary to what many National Party MPs were suggesting before the election).
The other interesting thing to note in the graph above is the steady, or even declining, amount of money proposed to be spent on public transport services (bus, rail and ferry subsidies). The funding demand for PT services has skyrocketed over the past decade, at a much faster pace than patronage has grown – meaning that to achieve the graph above will require a radical change to the way we operate the public transport network to make it more efficient. The very low amount of money set aside for PT infrastructure continues to be quite confusing, part of this is because the big money for projects like the AMETI busway, Dominion Road upgrade and other PT infrastructure projects will actually be coming out of the local roads allocation.
A more detailed funding allocation table is included below – which focuses on the first three years, those of direct relevance to the RLTP (later years are given just for indicative purposes): Once again probably the most interesting line in the above table relates to the City Rail Link. If we’re proposing to spend close to half a billion dollars on the project over the next three years that suggests some pretty serious progress being made on it – actual construction works beginning and not just consenting, design work and property acquisition I would guess. As an interesting comparison, here’s a very similar table from the 2009 RLTP: Looking at the total spend each year in the forthcoming RLTP has a bit more than what was proposed to be spent in the current/previous RLTP, which suggests that it’s not a completely unaffordable programme as a whole, but rather that it just needs a bit of “fat” cut off it here and there.
Another table that’s very interesting compares the amount of money Auckland is effectively asking NZTA for with the amount of money available across the whole country in that particular activity class – so we get an idea about the proportion of the whole country’s transport spend in different areas that will be dedicated to Auckland: You can see the draw on NZTA funding for public transport infrastructure and new local roads will be pretty dominant, but even for new state highways Auckland will have not far off half the country’s total spend over the next three years – which is pretty incredible as Waterview is pretty much the only large state highways project to be built in that time period.
It is difficult to know what to suggest people submit on, as the RLTP is very much a “details” document for strategic decisions that have already been made, so there’s little point submitting to say that the funding split should be radically changed – for example. Perhaps the most useful submissions might be on some of the details – is there a small-scale transport project that should be done in the next few years but has been missed? Is there a project that should have money set aside for its further investigation – particularly if changes to the Auckland Plan which have occurred in very recent times (presumably the RLTP is based on the Draft Plan) might necessitate such a change. Bringing forward further investigation of a busway along State Highway 16 might be a good example of this, if the Auckland Plan proposes to vastly increase the number of people living in Auckland’s northwest corner.
By Matt L, on February 27th, 2012 I have been reading through the council’s draft Long Term Plan which looks at what will be done by the council over the next 10 years and how they fund it. I will do a post on the details of some of the spending related to transport in the next few days but as I was reading through it I decided to check a few numbers and I could quickly see that some things just didn’t add up so first I want to address some of these weird transport numbers in the document.
The document has a table that shows the current and expected patronage broken down by mode over the next 10 years. The current patronage most closely matches Decembers results but they are not exactly the same (note: numbers are in thousands)
At first glance things seem OK and look like they move fairly logically but that is until you look deeper, specifically at the percentage increase year on year. Looking at rail specifically I have added on the annual patronage results since 2003 for a comparison and put it all into a graph so this post doesn’t become a huge amount of boring words and numbers.
The key things I have taken from this are that we go from a period of consistent double digit patronage growth down to low single digit increase over just a two year period. This is just as we finish getting our nice and shiny EMUs, which are much cleaner, faster and quieter than what we have now plus will have almost double the capacity yet we see patronage increases drop away to about 3%. What you can see from looking at the numbers is that from 2016 they have just increased the total by 500k per year which seems to have no relevance to what has happened in the years before this and it is pretty clear that someone has just put an arbitrary number in. One part of me thinks that this is OK as it means that when we get to that point we will see patronage well ahead of projection but the other part thinks that this underselling on the impact of electrification is quite serious, after all one of the reasons the government rejected the CRL business case was that they said there was still plenty of capacity available after 2021. It also goes against the ‘sparks’ effect seen in a number of places where electrification leads to big increases in rail use and one of the best example is Perth where it was truly transformational as Patrick mentioned yesterday.
On the issue of rail projections, when putting this post together I went looking through other recent documents to see if there were any similar tables. Sadly none of the other official plans or strategies and this info and the closest I could find was some post electrification figures which tell an interesting story in their own right. ARTA’s 2006-2016 Passenger Transport Network Plan suggests there will by 15.6m trips on the rail network by 2016 (with 79m trips across the entire PT network), another document, a working group report on electrification from 2009 suggests 15.7m trips by 2016. Fast forward a few years to now and we see patronage expectations are now over 17m per year by 2016 which is quite a jump and by the time 2016 actually rolls around it could be quite a bit higher again.
These odd numbers aren’t just for rail though, the busway projections also have some quite big questions in them.
Patronage has been increasing at about 15% for a number of years now yet it is only forecast to increase by an average of about 5% from now till 2018. At that point it then jumps by quite a bit for a two years before settling back to lower than it was before. There is nothing in the plan that suggest why this would be and the only reference to further development of the busway is a station at Rosedale/Greville but that is planned for the very end of the 10 year period.
There are lots of other oddities in the plan and I won’t cover all of them but I will look one more and it isn’t a patronage forecast but an expected revenue source. In the financials it breaks down where the money is coming from to pay for these things. There is one particular line that seems to refer to the amount of money that will be collected by fares as it is called Activity user charges and fee (this is a generic title used in other parts of the document). As you can see in the table below there is one month that stands out above the others with no explanation as to why this is, I have added on the % increase (numbers are in thousands of dollars).
In my submission on the plan I will be saying that these need to be clarified and because at the moment they almost seem like a joke but more worryingly is if we are basing our infrastructure development off them then we could easily be spending big money at the wrong times for the wrong projects.
By Patrick Reynolds, on February 26th, 2012 The word ‘Transformational’ is turning up frequently around discussions about Auckland’s future. I am encouraged by this as it surely means change. More than that doesn’t it particularly mean making bold decisions precisely designed to lead to different outcomes than we have now? This is important because it goes to the heart of the debate between the Council’s plan to invest in public transport versus the road lobby’s determination to prevent that and continue to build ever more motorways.
Here are a couple of examples, the first is mayor Len Brown talking a few weeks ago about the MIT campus that is now being built directly on top of the yet to open Manukau City Station, big ups-ing its transformational nature:
“The Hayman Park site is a superb example of an integrated, transformational project aligning MIT with the local community, business and industry, Auckland Council and Auckland Transport.”
And here is Bill English a little less sure that he has any transformational projects but sure he’d like some:
“I mean, if there are transformational ideas out there we will grab them with both hands and do them. We just wish there was a few more.”
So it is an idea that gets politicians excited, and why not, because generally that’s the way they can try to improve our world: Change things. And transformation is a kind of change with bells on. Transformation is required when things need to be ‘turned around’. It implies a bold and imaginative quality. Transformation suggests a break with the past, a ‘fresh start’. A complete change.
Here is a dictionary definition:
Transformation is the process of changing from one state to another.
So it was interesting to hear Councillor Quax on Morning Report argue in the context of the council’s transformational plan to prioritise investment into public transport over roads that:
‘nothing can be transformational if it only moves a small amount of people and freight around, that’s why roads need to take precedence over rail’
In other words Quax is arguing that because we are not already in the new transformed state, the place the transformation is intended to get us to, we shouldn’t make the necessary changes to get there. Errr? Are you sure you understand what the word means, Dick?
This is clearly an absurd argument; the whole point of the transformational is to change those numbers around, so in fact, the current imbalance between road and non-road movements is the very reason for changing what we invest in. Because you get what you invest in. More roads: more driving: new alternatives; less driving. Which will then, of course, free up the existing and extensive road network [along with all the other improved health, energy use, and quality of place outcomes we know come with increased PT use].
It is interesting to see that Quax is not arguing against transformation, as you might expect, but rather simply that he can’t imagine it happening. Like Bill English above who is presiding over an enormous and expensive continuation of last century’s highway building plans [while preaching austerity] simply because he too can’t perceive any transformational projects. Is the inability to see and understand the transformational because these men are looking in the wrong place? They don’t seem to grasp that the transformational, by definition, requires a break from the past.
The problem is that if you are only prepared to look backwards it will be hard to see a better way forward. This is the hegemony of the status quo, it takes a little more effort and enquiry to see how things could be different. Because the future is uncertain isn’t it?
So to be fair to Quax it is worth rephrasing his rather wooly headed statement above into a more useful question;
‘if we do invest differently, ie if we stop building ever more motorways and instead build a rail and busway network will we get the transformation we desire?’
What evidence is there that we can change things in Auckland? If we do invest boldly in new rail and busway infrastructure for the next decade or so will people use it? First of all it is clear that we can’t, as Quax is doing, just look at the current state to see what future we could have, so we will have to look elsewhere for a model. But we can also look at what trends there are already present in Auckland to see if we get changed outcomes from changed investment.
The clearest model from the recent past is Perth. Because it is culturally not dissimilar to Auckland, a similar size, is in fact an even more spread out city, and has done many of the things that the Auckland Council has been arguing we should do here to transform both our habits of movement and the quality of the whole city. So what happened?
This is Rail patronage in Perth and Auckland to 2011[Auckland is now around 11 million]. Perth’s first jump was on the back of electrification, bus coordination stations, and the construction of an underground CBD line. Patronage from a level similar to where Auckland’s is now, trebled, then doubled again with the addition of the all new Mandurah Line. This is what Transformation looks like. Before the early 90s investment rail use was bumbling along. It is clear there is no point in looking at the 1980s figures to see what could be achieved though changed investment.
Now that we’re all facing the right way let’s see what else could happen if we are really bold, like Mayor Len Brown said he was going to be when he started his term, proposing new transit infrastructure throughout the city:
Here we’ve added Vancouver. Greater Vancouver has about 2.3 million people. So where Auckland is expected to get to quite soon this century. Vancouver’s extremely successful Sky Train only began in the 1980s and is being added to constantly because it is a huge success and means that the city does not need to spend billions and billions on highways and parking and all the other hidden costs of auto dependency. This technology is ideal for new lines in Auckland like across the harbour to the North Shore. Nick argues here that this would be considerably cheaper than any further road crossing and certainly would help transform more than just the North Shore. It also could be the answer to the transport problems in Dick Quax’s Eastern suburbs too.
Well that’s great for Perth and Vancouver, but would that happen here in Auckland? Well here is the pattern of change in Auckland since the construction of Britomart and the other improvements to our existing rail network, and remember these changes were only about fixing the existing badly neglected system, and doesn’t yet involve modern electric trains or the great changes that the CRL will bring to the whole network, let alone extending the network to new areas. So not yet what you could really call Transformational investment:
So a very consistent uptake by Aucklanders, give us a good quality alternative to driving and a lot of us will take it, leaving more room on the existing road network for the rest. The numbers are still low but are very much beginning to make a big difference especially at peak time. But really we are just at the point that this existing resource could become a very significant influence on patterns of movement and also quality of place in Auckland. So transformation is without a doubt possible but only if we choose to make it happen. What we build will determine what we get and how we live. And it is absolutely certain that if we mostly just continue what we have been doing- building roads- all we will get is more driving and more over-crowded roads no matter how much we spend. And no transformation.
The best way to live in the 21st century is to stop living in the 20th century
-Umair Haque Havard Business Review
By Patrick Reynolds, on February 20th, 2012 With so much focus on the Auckland spatial plan at the moment, words of “step change”, “transformational” and “public transport led approach” being bandied around, discussion about new ways to fund this “step change” and “transformation”, and the excitement of a single Council looking at transport issues in a long-term way, it’s easy to forget that it was not even two years ago that we put together Auckland’s previous 30 year transport strategy. The 2010 Regional Land Transport Strategy was actually tasked with the very job of taking a long-term vision of Auckland’s transport future. It was, in fact, the first RLTS to look at transport with a 30 year horizon in mind – the same horizon (with a couple of years difference) as the Auckland Plan is focusing on.
Previous posts, and an excellent column from Brian Rudman, have highlighted the credibility gap between the pretty words of the Auckland Plan, when it comes to transport matters, and the reality of where the money is proposed to be headed. But how does this plan compare to the 2010 RLTS? Did the RLTS have a big funding gap too? Is the Auckland Plan really a step change towards a public transport focused transport strategy, when compared to the RLTS?
There are quite a few graphs in the RLTS that provide us with a useful insight into where it saw the money going. This one is a good start, which compares the expenditure envisaged by the strategy over the next 30 years with the funding available: While there’s certainly a misalignment between the expenditure envisaged by the strategy and the funding available, overall there’s actually not a gap between the amounts. In other words, there’s enough money to deliver the RLTS, we just need to shift around what that money is spent on.
Another graph breaks down where the RLTS proposed to spend the $46 billion (presumably updated slightly due to inflation to become the $50b baseline used in the funding gap discussion) over the next 30 years: It’s fairly close to a 50/50 split between new roads and roads maintenance/renewals on one side and public transport infrastructure, PT services and travel demand management, walking and cycling on the other side. In short, the definition of a balanced transport strategy. We even see the funding split broken down by each of the decades covered in the strategy: Oh if only there was anything close to this level of detail available in the transport section of the Auckland Plan. Strangely the Auckland Plan seems completely devoid of such detail, perhaps because it would highlight something that goes against what all the pretty words of the plan are saying?
Thankfully, Rudman’s column provides some of the numbers to help fill in the gaps. With a couple of assumptions and a bit of maths we can start to make comparisons (not on a decade by decade basis sadly, but overall) between the RLTS and the Auckland Plan on that key matter – where is the money going? This comparison highlights quite a few surprises. Instead of the step-change towards public transport spending we see both PT infrastructure and PT services spending remain relatively unchanged from the RLTS – the small increases probably reflecting little more than inflation. There’s no distinction made in Rudman’s column between spending on Local Roads and State Highways, so we have to lump the two together, but that shows where the real “step-change” in the Auckland Plan is, and also highlights where the funding gap has originated.
Using this comparison, we can make a few helpful conclusions:
- The additional roads proposed in the Auckland Plan, compared to the RLTS, are the source of almost the whole funding gap.
- All the public transport projects proposed in the Auckland Plan and the RLTS are affordable under current funding arrangements, we just need to change around the allocation of funds.
- The Auckland Plan is not a step-change towards a public transport led transport strategy at all, it’s a step change towards spending billions and billions on new roads.
In fact, it seems like the 2010 RLTS was the real step-change document. The Auckland Plan just proposes to spend hugely more on motorways, a continuation of the transport policy which has failed Auckland for decades.
What changed? Where did all these roading projects come from? Given that it is clear we cannot build every thing everyone wants even if every proposed scheme is a good idea [and these road projects are of debatable value at best], don’t we have to be clear about priorites and direction? After 60 years of building and re-building the grand motorway plan for Auckland it will be functionally complete with the big Waterview connection and the total rebuild of the North Western. Isn’t it clear that we must focus our resources on maintaining this road asset and provide for growth and resilience by building the missing complementary [and booming] public transport systems?
Is it because vested interests are fighting against the very idea of change in collusion with our state institutions, as described in a recent comment by Mike:
NZTA holds the power everywhere. All the regions can do is recommend projects in their Regional Land Transport Programmes, ranked so that Strategic Fit (what the government wants) outranks the other two criteria of Effectiveness and Efficiency (=BCR), which are used to “inform” NZTA’s National Land Transport Programme. Ultimately it’s NZTA’s decisions based on MoT’s criteria based on the Government Policy Statement. Any local/regional input is a charade.
Is it a top down thing from Government, because they and their close friends just like motorways?
By Matt L, on February 19th, 2012 Brian Rudman’s Friday opinion piece in the NZ Herald hits the nail on the head when it comes to the problem with Auckland’s transport strategies, that we seem to ignore the low hanging fruit when it comes to making PT better. It also seems like he’s been reading this blog, as he makes similar points to this post in particular: asking the question of whether we really need to be spending such a vast amount of money on transport projects over the next 30 years, compared to what might we achieve through rather smaller scale improvements like better bus lanes. Here’s what he says about the low hanging fruit:
Like why doesn’t Mayor Len Brown wave a wand and remove the few offending car parks that are holding up the completion of the short rush-hour bus lane past Les Mills Gym to the Victoria Park Markets.
This would instantly aid the highly successful Inner and Outer Link buses to do their job. While he’s at it, he could copy the Sydney traffic law which forces motorists to give way to buses pulling out from a stop.
Neither the above proposals are as grand as a $2.86 billion rail tunnel, or a $5.3 billion harbour tunnel, but they are both cheap and easy to achieve, and would instantly improve the flow of the city bus fleet. No doubt if the mayor were to consult my fellow public transport sufferers, they’d come up with other easily implementable, bright ideas.
I agree that many of these little things could make a huge difference although I would point out that it doesn’t mean that some of those grand projects are important in their own right. When it comes to these larger projects Rudman also notes the imbalance between spending on roads and spending on public transport which is particularly surprising as Len Brown was elected mayor on a “public transport led” transport policy:
The most disappointing aspect of the transport section of the proposed Auckland Plan, is how steady-as-she-goes, be careful not to frighten the horse, this so-called “transformational” document is.
Certainly it talks the talk, when it comes to warning that Auckland is rapidly running out of space for more roads, and preaching the need to embrace public transport in our new compact, intensified, liveable city.
But wade through the figures and the reports and the spreadsheets, and the revolution is hard to spot. The plan seems to be to try to keep everyone happy, by offering up more roads to mollify the pro-road clique, while teasing the public transport supporters, with the promise of, but no funds available, such vital improvements as the city rail loop, the $1 billion Avondale-Onehunga-Southdown rail extension, the $600 million Northern Bus way extension and improved ferry services.
The roads-as-usual bias is highlighted in a breakdown of the proposed $63 billion wishlist. Over the next 30 years, building new roads and repairing the old, will cost $40.6 billion or around two-thirds of the total budget. Public transport spending will total $21.2 billion, of which only $7.6 billion is new capital expenditure.
When it comes to the funding gap, the shortfall for public transport is $5.8 billion or more than a quarter of the transport “need” list. The roads shortfall is a fraction less in money terms at $5.7 billion but only half as large as a fraction of the total roads budget.
The 2010 Regional Land Transport Strategy proposed a 50/50 funding split between roads and public transport over the next 30 years. The Auckland Plan, released just a couple of years after the RLTS and supposedly with a more public transport led approach than Auckland has seen before actually shifts the balance of funding away from PT and back onto more roads with a ratio of about 65/35. The numbers above certainly suggest that the Auckland Plan is really turning out to be a hypocritical mess when it comes to transport.
By Matt L, on February 16th, 2012 A few days ago the council asked the question about how we should pay for Auckland’s transport infrastructure as they have estimated that over the next 30 years that their is a $10b-$15b funding gap. Of course one of the big elephants in the room is that the transport shopping list is quite long and contain a huge amount of motorway projects but I don’t want to discuss that. Instead I want to look at what the funding options suggested are and which of them are my preferred options based on my initial understanding of them.
The discussion document was in yesterdays Strategy and Finance Committee meeting, and as a result of the meeting some of them have already been cut from the list so now we have :
- general rates
- targeted rates
- development contributions
- tax increment funding
- regional fuel tax and RUC diesel levy
- tolling new roads
- road pricing on existing roads (This is in two forms, network pricing and congestion/cordon charging)
- additional car parking charges
- visitor tax
- airport departure tax
There is information on each of the options which have been assessed based on the following criteria:
Fairness – That the amount paid by individuals or groups should reflect their ability to pay balanced with the benefit received for the service funded by tax or charge
Administrative Efficiency – the costs of raising the revenue should only be a small percentage of the amount raised. That is it should not cost 50 cents to collect a dollar.
Transparency – those paying should know how much they’re paying and what it is they are paying for.
Neutrality – paying the tax or charge should not cause undesirable changes in behaviour, e.g. congesting suburban streets because charges are payable on motorways.
Capacity – the source of funds should be large enough to provide the revenue needed without causing unacceptable hardship to those paying.
These all seem pretty straight forward, My personally feeling is that the many of the suggestions would be too hard to collect, would meet too much resistance or have too many issues with them i.e. encouraging development where we don’t want it. Here are the options that I like and how they rate with the criteria above (you can read all of them in the funding paper here which is from page 73 onwards)
I think that routes like the East-West motorway link would be perfect for tolling however my only concern is that with a cost of over $1b, tolling won’t make a big enough impact as even with a decent toll it might only be possible to collect half of the money needed.
This probably has the ability to raise the most money out of all of the suggestions made. Using the figures in the section above indicates that even if a network wide charge was implemented for all trips over 10km of say $1 per trip on working days and with collections costs of about 30c per $1 then would raise about $1m per day and just under $250m per year. $2 per day shouldn’t impact on peoples finances too much so would probably get a lot less resistance than many of the other suggestions made.
I don’t know how many commercial car parks there are across the city but lets assume 200,000 and lets assume they are only charged on working days. A small $1 charge per car park would work result in about $32m per year generated. I think the council would definitely need to remove minimum car park ratios though to allow property owners to develop the site as a way of avoiding the charge.
I think we have to be really careful how much we charge tourists but once again a low cost of say $1 per guest night is unlikely to break the bank would bring in about $6m per year. Perhaps the money could be ring fenced for improvements to airport access (i.e. airport rail)
Again another one that we have to be careful about as we don’t want to put tourists off but seeing as departure tax is quite low by regional standards we could look at bumping that up a little. An increase of $5 per departure would bring in an extra $16m per year (again perhaps it needs to be ring fenced for airport transport improvements)
All up with these suggestions we get about $300m per year which over a 30 year term would equate to about $9b. Not enough to fund everything but we should at least be able to cross our most important projects off the list, it is also worth adding that the only one that would need government agreement on is the network charges one. If only we could decide what were the most important projects are and focus on those rather than just continuing with a massive shopping list we should be fine.
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