There have been a couple of articles in the NZ Herald this week relating to the ongoing saga around whether the Wellington Street onramp will be reopened. First yesterday:
Pressure is building on the Transport Agency to honour a commitment to reopen an Auckland motorway ramp which it closed during its $406 million Victoria Park tunnel project.
Western bays residents battling against having roads clogged by refugees from the continued closure of the Wellington St ramp won support yesterday from the Auckland Council’s transport committee.
The Automobile Association is also demanding the ramp be reopened, saying it understood the closure was to be only temporary, and the lack of motorway access from Wellington St was causing unacceptable congestion to local roads.
Although the Transport Agency spent an undisclosed sum upgrading the ramp, its future became uncertain when it opened two of the tunnel’s three lanes late last year, and was initially overwhelmed by long queues of traffic trying to get through it.
The article goes on to quote NZTA saying that they have an open mind around whether the ramp will be reopened or not, which does beg the question about why they haven’t reopened it yet to see what happens. Or the really interesting question about why their original plans to reopen the ramp have changed so much. Surely they should be analysing this kind of thing when designing a project?
This “the ramps were part of the deal” issue was then highlighted in another article in today’s NZ Herald, which points out the interesting question of whether the resource consent for the project relied upon the ramp being reopened:
Residents campaigning to reopen the Wellington St motorway ramp from central Auckland have been told its retention was a condition of approval for the new Victoria Park tunnel.
Former Auckland City Council member Graeme Easte has told them he believes the Transport Agency will need to obtain a change to the motorway’s land designation if it wants to keep the ramp closed to general traffic.
Mr Easte, one of a seven-member hearings panel which, in 2006, approved a designation application by the former Transit NZ, said: “We were told that the Wellington St on-ramp would be retained in modified form.
“As local councillor, I was well aware of resident concerns about existing traffic loads on Curran St and would not have approved closure of the Wellington St on-ramp if it had been proposed.”
One would think that if keeping the Wellington street onramp was a condition of the Victoria Park Tunnel project proceeding, then the ramp will need to be reopened.
My feeling is that this is just another example of how selfish and narrow-minded NZTA have become over the past few years in trying to improve traffic flows on the motorway any way they can – including by pushing congestion off the motorway and onto local roads. The ramp signals are often a classic example of this mentality: yeah sure they speed up traffic a little bit on the motorway, but they do that simply by shifting the congestion onto the onramps and onto the streets feeding into the motorway. There’s no net gain, just endless frustration of sitting there going nowhere for ages.
I’m enjoying seeing NZTA getting egg smeared all over their face on this issue. They deserve it.
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
The Auckland Council’s business advisory group has decided, based on what wisdom I don’t know, that the best way to raise the supposedly necessary additional funding to build Auckland super-expensive motorways like an Additional Harbour Crossing and the East-West Link, is through tolling people who travel on the motorway network. It sounds a lot like an idea that was proposed by the NZ Council for Infrastructure Development last year. With the briefest of analysis, the tolling idea seems like it might have some merit because of the large amount of money that could be raised – with (NZCID estimate) 915,000 vehicles joining the motorway network each day, even a fairly low toll for each vehicle would raise a lot of money that could be spent on transport projects. Compared to other revenue raising systems, the idea is also relatively simple: just toll gate every motorway onramp.
Here’s how it was described in a NZ Herald article earlier this week:
The council’s business advisory panel believes a toll of about $2 a day would be fairer and more effective than 12 other options raised by Auckland Mayor Len Brown to fill an $11.7 billion transport funding gap.
Councillor Cameron Brewer, who chairs the forum, said yesterday that there could be some variation in the toll according to time of day and location but an average of $2 would raise about $700 million a year.
“That would go a long way to servicing and making inroads into the $11.7 billion funding shortfall,” he told the Herald.
However, the idea has a number of significant flaws – one of which really kills the whole concept. Firstly, the ‘non-fatal’ flaws:
The system is likely to disproportionately impact upon lower income Aucklanders by pricing them off the motorways (at least at peak times). While the system seems like it’s designed to raise money as its primary purpose, rather than to reduce congestion, clearly adding a charge to driving on the motorway will dissuade some from doing so, who by definition will be priced off the road (the big question is ‘where do they go). Set against that argument is the reality that this is how markets work, and we live in a market economy for most things – why not roadspace? We can, arguably, achieve social equity in other ways such as a progressive tax system and through the social welfare system.
The next flaw, as pointed out by Brian Rudman’s column yesterday, relates to the efficiency of these tolling systems at raising money. As a way of raising money, tolling is far less efficient than – for example – simply whacking up fuel taxes. You need to build a whole pile of infrastructure to capture people getting onto the motorway, you need to set up a very large and complex computer system to process it all, you need to send out a lot of letters reminding people to pay their bills, you need to take a few people to court to ensure they pay their bills. It’s just complicated and costly, particularly when compared to fuel tax which is just done through sending the petrol companies a bill once in a while. Set against this argument is that perhaps, even despite the massive collection costs, the system could raise enough money to still be worthwhile.
These issues aren’t necessarily fatal to the concept as a whole. If Auckland’s population can be convinced that we need to waste billions more on additional motorways, to the extent that we’re willing to pay $2 each and every time we get on the motorway, perhaps with different pricing schemes to reward those travelling outside the peak for shift-work, maybe we can get past the social equity issue. And perhaps, if the operating costs for this system could be minimised – in comparison to the amount of money raised, then the efficiency argument becomes a bit less critical.
However, there remains a flaw that I don’t think has a solution – and that is a little thing called diverted traffic. If motorways are tolled but not adjacent arterial roads (and the system’s complexity would be increased hugely if we included non-motorway roads), then surely a fairly significant chunk of traffic is going to shift away from the tolled routes and onto the free routes. This has a number of rather perverse results:
The big, wide and fancy new motorways that we’ve spent billions on will be largely empty, except for rich businessmen to drive along (maybe that’s why they like the idea?)
The arterial roads which people actually live in, where we run our buses, where we have pedestrians, cyclists, driveways, where we want to improve the balance between movement and place functions, will become horrendously busier and more congested as people use these roads to avoid having to pay the motorway tolls.
In short, we shift traffic away from where we want it (on the motorways) and into places where we don’t really want much through-traffic (the streets and roads where we live, work and play).
The only way to get around this flaw is to also start charging for travel along local roads. In which case we’re really shifting to a GPS-based congestion pricing scheme which, although probably more sensible in terms of avoiding problems like the above, is likely to be much much more complicated and expensive to implement and may well face significantly greater political opposition.
In short, tolling motorways to raise money (in isolation) may sound like a good idea in theory, but when you look at it in reality, it’s pretty damn stupid.
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.
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.
Along with ‘Transformational’ the other phrase suffering from misuse in discussions around Auckland’s transport plans at the moment is ‘Multi-Modal’. This seems to have come from the logistics sector where it refers to the sending of goods over a variety of technologies and/or involving handling by various companies to get to their destination. In the urban transport context it seems to have at least three meanings:
1. A journey that uses more than one kind of movement, eg walk/bus/walk, or drive/rail/walk, or bike/ferry, or even bus/bus/bus [3 different bus rides] and so on.
2. An infrastructure project designed to facilitate different modes of movement, eg the AMETI project includes highways, buslanes, cycleways, and train station redevelopment, so can be described as multi-modal.
3. An analysis of needs for an area that sets out to not proscribe what mode, or combination of modes, will provide the best outcome. Currently there is [yet another] study into the transport needs of south west Auckland that aims to be multi-modal, which is to say it will look at whether trains, bus systems, more motorways, or maybe teleporting [!?], will best suit the needs of the area and at what cost.
So we can see how the phrase can mean various things, although generally we can say it is intended as a positive; as it sounds like a good thing, sounds like it offers choice, democracy, and in a sophisticated way. Who doesn’t want that?
Here is Auckland Central MP Nikki Kaye:
I support, as does the Government, the development of a robust multi-modal plan for future transport into the CBD, which includes a thorough analysis of all the alternative modes to transport.
Sounds good doesn’t it? Except this is from at post on her website where the MP is detailing the government’s refusal to support the construction of the City Rail Link, because, somehow, it supports ‘a robust multi-modal plan’. So when you don’t want to support something but still want to appear all positive it seems calling for ‘a thorough analysis of all the alternative modes to [sic] transport’ seems like a cunning choice of phrasing; go all multi-modal. Okay, so perhaps we’ed better look at this phrase a little deeper.
The multi-modal journey.
Almost all public transport trips are multi-modal. With the occassional exception of someone who say works at Westpac, whose offices are directly above Britomart and who also happens to live right next door to another train station, all PT trips can be assumed to involve getting to the point of connection with the transit system by some other means, usually walking, and then doing the same at the other end of the transit journey. This fact is one of the reasons that cities with more effective public transport systems consistently record better health statistics than those without. Simply because with more people using PT, more people are getting more exercise.
The chief advantage of the vehicle mode is that it can be point to point. Straight from your garage at home to the carpark at your office. So while very handy also both extremely sedentary and completely mono-modal; therefore cities dominated by car use report poorer public health outcomes. There is all the evidence in the world for this for example; here, here, and here.
Of course park’n'ride journeys are also multi-modal, but usually involve less walking. And when I ride my bike to University I am only using one mode point to point, but still getting more exercise than those rainy days when I take the bus. But despite these two examples a place that supports more PT journeys, and therefore more multi-modal journeys, reports better health outcomes.
Nikki Kaye again:
Twitter with Nikki Kaye
Yes well Multi-Modal does include cycling and walking, and it’s great that Kaye knows this but do her government’s transport policies actually encourage more of either? There is nothing, for example, about opposing the construction of the City Rail Link that supports either Multi-Modality or cycling and walking. In fact quite the reverse. All PT encourages walking, offers choices other than driving, and frees the streets up to be available to cyclists and walkers. And fully underground and transformative projects like the CRL do these things extremely well.
So lets look at some more examples.
It is often gloomily noted that in order to get funding for a cycleway in Auckland you first need to find a billion dollar motorway project to attach it to. Certainly this is true of the Waterview project [and here] which despite taking place on a rail designation its only claim to any multi-modality is that the Environment Court has forced the addition of some pretty good funds for cycleways and paths as a means to mitigate the negative effects of this motorway on the local community. It has no public transport component -so other than the mitigating paths and bridges it is not really a multi-modal project. Hopefully AT will add buslanes to Gt North Rd after this project is complete but there is no funding or specific inclusion of bus priority in the Waterview project itself.
Multi-modality can be retro-fitted to an ordinary road too. Here is a multi-modal street in Manhattan: From left; bike lane, parking, general traffic, dedicated buslane. And to top it off pedestrian priority in the foreground. Four modes each with their own priority, clearly to do this you need a fair bit of road width, and that presupposes other systems of movement to compliment the road space. Of course Manhattan has a comprehensive subway system to free up this roadspace.
First Avenue NYC photo: NYC DoT
This pattern of strict separation isn’t the only way to multi up the modes; there’s also the ‘shared space’ way, this offers a more anarchic multi-modality that can work extremely well, especially in narrower streets where vehicles can be calmed by enough users of other modes, this type of system is common with trams too:
Shared Street in Copenhagen
Or we could think of particularly mono-modal systems; motorways are not only restrictive of what travels along them [no walking or cycling, and very little successful public transport] they also break connections across them for other modes, especially walking and cycling, but also for more local motorised connection too. Not only that but the quantity of traffic that they then dump onto to local streets severely limits the exercise of multi-modal patterns seen in the examples above.
Auckland's CMJ
This is what a Mono-Modality looks like. So anyone looking for a ‘robust Multi-Modal plan for future transport to the CBD’ would be wanting to urgently add the modes that are missing from this picture, and could well be looking to limit the use of systems like this one: the largest Motorway interchange in in Australasia.
So I guess the question I want to ask the government is how sincere are they really about Multi-Modality? I agree a truly multi modal Auckland would be a great improvement but successive governments have deviated very little from a highway dominant policy and the current one has greatly accelerated it, and therefore increased our Mono-Modality. The Government Policy Statement makes it very hard to get funding from NZTA for any mode at all other than state highways, in fact it seems designed to enable motorways to get funding no matter how poor their cost benefit analyses. So under this government the share of Land Transport funding going to anything other than state highways has shrunk. And now they are planning to make it even more difficult for the local authority to make its own investments that may differ from this bias.
These actions then are the exact opposite of promoting the Multi-Modal. I know this may seem naive but I would very much prefer politicians to back up their sweet words with actual actions.
The Victoria Park Tunnel (VPT) project makes a lot of sense in theory. It does address a tight point in Auckland’s motorway network – significantly boosting capacity for southbound traffic heading towards Auckland’s city centre and connections with SH16 heading west and heading towards the port. It also (from later this month) adds another northbound lane, which should reduce (but probably not eliminate) capacity constraints for traffic heading from SH16 (both the port and from the west) that’s heading north over the Harbour Bridge. Although by adding another lane heading to the bridge without resolving merge issues at Curran St and introducing a merge on the Fanshawe Street onramp, it can be argued that all it really does is move the bottleneck half a kilometre on.
Comparing the VPT with other Roads of National Significance highlights the obvious fact that, out of all the projects, this one makes much more sense than any of the others:Also because NZTA agreed to put the new lanes under the park instead of add another viaduct as they first proposed the negative outcomes on the city are at least not as bad as they might have been.
Despite the fact that the project makes logical sense, especially southbound, and that it stacks up extremely well when compared to other proposed motorway projects, it seems as though pretty much everything about it in recent times has been an unmitigated disaster. Let’s start with the traffic problems that occurred when the tunnel first opened:
Nightly traffic jams on Auckland’s Southern Motorway are still being blamed on drivers’ unfamiliarity with the new Victoria Park tunnel, four days after two of its three lanes were opened.
Traffic was by about 4.30pm today backed up to Otahuhu, at least 13 kilometres south of the 450-metre one-way northbound tunnel. By 6pm the queue had shrunk slightly, with the tail at Mt Wellington.
Queuing to reach the tunnel has frustrated commuters every evening since two of the tunnel’s three lanes were opened for the first time, replacing the northbound carriageway of the Victoria Park motorway viaduct.
Yet it really is hard to see why this is the case, as even before the opening of the third lane there has been no reduction in lane capacity through here, and in fact because of the continued closure of the Wellington St on-ramp there really should be a decrease not only vehicle volumes but also in merging complication at this point in the system. Are Auckland drivers really so unable to adapt to a new road layout? Or is it really that the continued attempt to funnel so much traffic through the CMJ is just a lost cause?
And then there is the curious issue of the Wellington St on-ramp. If it is isn’t to open why was it rebuilt at all, and at what expense? Is NZTA’s traffic modeling so poor that they were surprised by the outcome here? Frankly I think it is no bad thing for Freemans Bay that it isn’t now open as motorway bound traffic no longer clogs up this neighbourhood’s streets – although it seems much has just shifting to clogging up streets in Herne Bay and St Mary’s Bay as people access the Curran St onramp. But it’s not like that is why they’ve closed it; very hard to get NZTA to consider that sort of outcome of their works, no. Their concern is only with the flow of traffic on their asset, that’s why it remains closed.
It seems that this outcome from a project that rates so highly in NZTA’s own predictions highlights the diminishing returns we are getting from the endless and expensive rebuilds of our urban motorways. Forcing the main road connection through the heart of the city was always a controversial idea, and in fact not what was even advised when Auckland’s motorway system was first designed [SH1 was to be routed on the western ring route]. And to have pursued it so doggedly so that it is still the only interconnected transport system for both the city and the regions is bound to create problems. We are forever offered another motorway widening project to ‘fix’ congestion, yet no city has ever road built its way out of congestion.
Clearly our investment would achieve a far higher return by complimenting this mature network with some alternatives instead of trying to add small increases in capacity at great cost. Capacity that is almost immediately absorbed by the existing traffic volume. And perhaps the best arguments for this are near this project but remain overlooked. No fewer than 78% of the people that travel on Fanshawe St in the peak are doing so on buses. Yet despite the total rebuild of the St Marys Bay motorway the Fanshawe St buslane ends where this new work begins (as shown in the diagram below – from here). And this route is a designated RTN, and with the bridge carries a disproportionate and increasing number of people by bus but without the priority that clearly the RTN designation requires.
Could it be that NZTA or their masters have lost sight of their real purpose and are not focusing on moving people and goods as efficiently as possible, but rather just on expanding the general road network whether this works well or not?
First up we have an opening date of 26th March for the third northbound lane through the Victoria Park tunnel.
The third lane in Auckland’s Victoria Park Tunnel will open on Monday, 26 March and the NZ Transport Agency says it will make drivers’ journeys on State Highway 1 to the North Shore and beyond much quicker.
On the same day, the moveable lane barrier operating on the Auckland Harbour Bridge will start its extended run to the Fanshawe Street intersection – providing an additional fifth lane through St Marys Bay for northbound traffic during the afternoon peak.
‘On 26 March we will be unlocking the full potential of the Victoria Park Tunnel project,” says the NZTA’s State Highways Manager for Auckland and Northland, Tommy Parker. “When we have the third tunnel lane open and the extra lane through St Marys Bay, journeys from Greenlane to the Auckland Harbour Bridge will be quicker and easier.”
“In January we delivered big improvements for drivers going south by reconfiguring the Vic Park flyover for four southbound lanes. It’s estimated that drivers are saving six to eight minutes on trips south of Fanshawe Street.
“Now it is the turn of those driving north to benefit from the increased motorway capacity built as part of the Victoria Park Tunnel project.”
Mr Parker says people will need to drive with care until they get used to the new northbound driving conditions.
When the moveable lane barrier machine ends its afternoon run to Fanshawe Street at about 3.30pm, a gate will open to provide drivers from both Fanshawe and Beaumont Streets with access to the peak lane. The peak lane will close at 7pm when the lane barrier machine begins its return trip to close the fifth lane on the bridge.
The opening of the northbound motorway improvements means that, for the first time, the number of peak-time traffic lanes through St Marys Bay will match the five lanes open on the Auckland Harbour Bridge.
The tunnel’s third lane will extend back to the ramp signals where traffic from the Northwestern Motorway (SH16) and Grafton Gully merges with SH1.
It will be interesting to see just how well this gated “peak lane” works in real life because when watching the video below I think it will cause all kinds of confusion for drivers.
The last part of the press release also raises a few questions.
“In time, as further improvements are made in Grafton Gully, we expect this exit to become the preferred route home for commuters who work east of Queen Street,” Mr Parker says.
The Victoria Park Tunnel project is one of the seven roads of national significance and completion of the project, which includes the 450 metre-long tunnel, will eliminate the last serious traffic bottleneck on the central motorway junction between the Auckland Harbour Bridge and the Newmarket Viaduct.
“For years, that section of motorway through Victoria Park has been the most heavily congested on the Auckland network. That will all be in the past when drivers become used to the completed project and benefit from more reliable and safer journeys,” Mr Parker says.
Mr Parker says it is not planned to re-open the Wellington Street on ramp when the third lane in the tunnel opens. A joint Auckland Transport and NZTA team will make a decision on the future use of the Wellington Street on ramp later this year.
What are these further improvements to Grafton Gully and how much will they cost? Also while it might no longer be the most congested part of the motorway network that doesn’t mean it won’t still be congested which is the impression I get from the wording.
The second piece of news is a $35 million upgrade of the Papakura interchange started today.
Construction has started on a $35m project to upgrade the Papakura interchange on Auckland’s Southern Motorway (State Highway 1) after a ceremony this morning to mark the start of work.
The improvements are aimed at allowing for the future growth in Papakura and Karaka in the next 20 years and improving safety for all road users.
“This project is a vital one for the community to ensure that the future transport needs of the area, particularly Hingaia and Karaka are met” says the NZTA’s State Highways Manager for Auckland and Northland, Tommy Parker. “This is a busy interchange, and one that will get busier, and the improvements will increase safety – not just for drivers, but for walkers and cyclists.”
The project will include a new 3 lane 16.8 metre wide bridge over the motorway which will include a shared pedestrian and cycle path, an additional northbound on-ramp at Hilldene Road, and traffic signals at key intersections.
Local iwi led by Ngati Tamaoho and community leaders joined the NZTA and its contractor, HEB Construction, at this morning’s event. Auckland City Councillor for Papakura, Calum Penrose, took control of a digger to turn the project’s first sod.
The project is due to be completed in December 2013, and one of the most significant improvements will impact on drivers from Karaka, who will no longer need to cross on-coming traffic to get onto the motorway northbound. .
“It’s a challenging job making improvements in the middle of a busy interchange, and we will be doing everything we can to keep disruptions to a minimum. Drivers will be travelling through a live worksite and we ask them to take care for the safety of themselves and their passengers, and for those working to upgrade the interchange,” says Mr Parker.
Readers of my recent post may recall that I’m no fan of the proposed second harbour crossing. That has a lot to do with the fact it would actually be our third harbour crossing, and our third motorway crossing at that. With traffic levels static on the Upper Harbour Bridge and actually declining on the Auckland Harbour Bridge it seems a little silly to be planning yet another motorway across the harbour, especially once we consider how effective the busway has been.
It’s not actually a case of fewer people crossing the harbour each day, that figure keeps climbing, it’s just that all the growth has occurred on public transport. More and more people cross the harbour each day… on a bus. This begs the question, why aren’t we planning a public transport crossing? A projected cost of more than five billion dollars for a harbour tunnel and it’s all just for cars and trucks. Something needs a rethink methinks.
The real problem with proposals like this is that they just won’t go away. No matter how poor the business case, how low the BCR (around 0.2 to 0.4 if you’re asking), no matter how damned expensive… I just can’t shake the resignation that sooner or later this motorway tunnel is going to get built anyway. All it takes is one minister to start using words like ‘policy alignment’ and ‘strategic fit’, and all the extensively researched economic evaluations aren’t worth toilet paper.
With that though in mind I went back to the drawing board and started to think about how we could really make a harbour tunnel work. If it abso-friggin-lutely has to be built come hell or high water, what can we do to make it a real bonus for Auckland? How can it also improve public transport, walking, cycling and urban design?
After all, it’s not like this megaproject couldn’t have some additional benefits. For a start the plan is for the tunnel to carry State Highway 1 though to Spaghetti Junction and leave just citybound traffic on the existing bridge. If they do this right the new tunnel would function as a bypass of the CBD, by taking all that heavy traffic and sending it underground and out of the way. With only city bound traffic on the bridge we could reallocate a pair of its lanes to buses, and without heavy freight traffic we would have enough strength in the clip-ons to add the proposed walking and cycling path.
More excitingly, without any need for a link between the bridge and the other motorways we could tear down the Victoria Park viaduct and free up that corner of the city. The remaining Victoria Park tunnel could be reused as a two-way link for traffic through to Cook St, perhaps even taking the bulk of traffic off Fanshawe St. In any case we could almost halve the number of lanes through St Mary’s Bay, if those lanes need only enough capacity to service the city streets and not the motorway.
There might even be a case for demoting the St Mary’s Bay motorway to an avenue style expressway, a sort-of western version of Tamaki Drive extending from a revitalised Fanshawe St boulevard. Auckland’s city waterfront could then stretch right across to it’s natural anchor at the foot of the bridge. I can see it now: rows of leafy trees, a stretch of waterside grass, cyclists whizzing along to the North Shore, kids eating ice creams as mums and dad watch the comings and goings of the marina and the harbour.
The plan for St Mary's Bay today. Fourteen lanes carrying city traffic and State Highway 1.
... and what it could look like if it only carried citybound traffic.
This all sounds very good, positively bucolic even… but truth be told we’re not really getting much value out of this yet. Five billion bucks to get some bus and cycle lanes on the bridge and tidy up the waterfront? To be frank that is the sort of thing we can do anyway at a much lesser cost, we don’t need a motorway tunnel for that. If we really want to get value out of a harbour tunnel it has to carry public transport, and I mean proper high capacity and fast rapid rail transit. Nothing else is going to move enough people to swing the numbers. Adding a rail line to the motorway tunnel could triple it’s carrying capacity at very little extra cost, if only some space could be found inside the same pair of tubes.
If we look at NZTA’s most recent proposals we are actually talking about some pretty big holes through the ground. One of the issues with boring a tunnel like this is that motorway lanes are basically rectangular in cross section, while tunnel bores are circular. It’s very much a case of fitting a square peg into a round hole. In this case the round hole will apparently need to be about 15.5m in diameter to fit in a square peg 12m wide and 4.5m tall.
The NZTA proposal for the harbour crossing. Two tubes like this would be tunnelled under the harbour.
That’s quite a lot of tunnel indeed, and in fact some of it ends up wasted. I’ve clarified the labels there because they are too hard to see, but the bottom right corner of the cross section is simply ‘cement stabilised backfill’. In other words that is just a mix of concrete and dirt poured back into the tunnel to hold the road deck up. Could we not put this space to better use?
Closer inspection of the cross section reveals the sorts of things you might expect in a tunnel: lights, fans, smoke extraction ducts. But underneath the road deck there is also a sump area to extract water, and a cable tunnel to carry pipes and wires across to the North Shore. That cable tunnel is actually pretty big, about 4m tall and 3.5m wide, could we fit a train through there? Probably not one of our new electric trains, they’re a bit too big and their overhead power lines need more height. But I do think a more compact light metro vehicle would fit in comfortably, particularly as they have a low floor height and get their power from between the rails instead of an overhead wire.
This picture shows a Bombardier ART driverless metro train to scale in that same cable tunnel, nestled in under the road deck. Instead of backfilling the empty space under the road, I’ve used it to relocate the cable tunnel to one side. This could also double as an emergency exit, or an access path to whatever emergency system they would have to install in the motorway tunnel anyway.
The same tunnel with a Bombardier ART light metro train under the road deck.
Basically, it seems with a little rejigging of the layout of our big harbour motorway tubes we could also fit through a light metro line to the North Shore. Given that it’s the same pair of bored tunnels, this rail crossing could be tacked on for minimal extra cost.
Now I must say I am no civil engineer and I couldn’t confirm if this is actually feasible, but a quick looks suggests that we very well could get both three motorway lanes and a driverless light metro track into what NTZA were proposing to build for the motorway alone. The benefits of this would be immense.
Three motorway lanes can carry about 6,000 vehicles an hour at best, which at our occupancy rates translates into about 7,500 people. The light metro systems in Vancouver and Kuala Lumpur currently carry about triple that on each track at peak times, and can theoretically move well over 30,000 people an hour each way.
Stacking metro tracks in under the road decks could easily quadruple the person carrying capacity of a harbour tunnel, and one can only imagine what that would do to the cost benefit ratio. If we must build a hugely expensive motoway tunnel under the harbour, then a shared motorway and metro tunnel could be just the thing to make the numbers stack up too.
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?
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:
Also because NZTA agreed to put the new lanes under the park instead of add another viaduct as they first proposed the negative outcomes on the city are at least not as bad as they might have been.
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