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By Peter M, on May 18th, 2012 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.
By Peter M, on May 16th, 2012 There’s an article in yesterday’s NZ Herald which notes ridership on the Wynyard Quarter tramway has, unsurprisingly in my opinion, dropped away quite a lot in the past few months.
Figures given to Auckland Council member Cameron Brewer show the two heritage electric trams carried fewer than 20 per cent of forecast passengers over their 1.5km circuit in March, when patronage slumped to 1933 people.
That was well below October’s figure of 15,322 – after which patronage previously boosted by the Rugby World Cup plummeted to 2391 before rising to 4357 in December and then falling again.
But council organisation Waterfront Auckland said yesterday that the figure for April – which was not given to Mr Brewer – rose to 4664 passengers after a successful Easter holiday programme for children.
As the tram is currently rather overpriced and goes from nowhere to nowhere, it’s unsurprisingly that hardly anyone catches it. I certainly haven’t been on it and don’t really see the point of it while the only route is takes is a loop around Wynyard Quarter. However, the whole point of the Wynyard Quarter tramway was to be a “beach-head” as many people described at the time, to just get some tracks in there before Wynyard got built up, get things going so it was then possible to look at options for taking the tramway to Britomart and then potentially elsewhere.
Which means that it’s pleasing to see later on in the article that thought is being given to extending the line to Britomart – so that it can actually be linked in with the rest of the network and serve a useful transport purpose:
The council had also included $8.2 million in the first year of its draft long-term budget for an extension of tramlines across Viaduct Harbour.
There will always be endless arguments about trams versus buses, but I think if you ask most Aucklanders they generally consider the ripping up of our tram system to have been one of the biggest mistakes in the city’s history, and the effect of ripping up the tracks on PT patronage was disastrous. The vertical line in the graph below shows approximately when the tracks were ripped out:
Of course the network was quite extensive back then and just as a reminder, here is a map of our former tram network:
If we can get the tram tracks across Viaduct Harbour to Britomart then we really open up the possibility of further extending trams in the future – most likely up Queen Street and potentially in the longer term along Tamaki Drive. We also provide a really good transport link from the main PT hub of Auckland to a fast-growing employment area.
We’ve had a bit of time for the trams at Wynyard to be a tourist plaything. Now it’s time to make the infrastructure actually useful.
By Peter M, on May 11th, 2012 Well this idea has come out of left field. The NZ Herald reports:
Supporters of a central Auckland rail loop are suggesting an overhead rail track as a cheaper alternative to a 3.5km pair of tunnels costing almost $3 billion.
Engineers and architects of the voluntary Greenways Project believe an attractive high-tech link could be built above city streets and the motorway junction for $700 million less than an estimate of $2.4 billion for underground rail.
That estimate is calculated to top $3 billion in inflation-adjusted terms by a target completion date of 2020, before being trimmed to $2.86 billion by selling surplus land yet to be bought along a tunnel route to Mt Eden.
Greenways has put the cost of its alternative at $1.68 billion to staff of Auckland Mayor Len Brown, and say it should be seriously considered before the council approves a 10-year funding plan next month.
Its suggestion would entail a wider loop than the tunnels, carrying trains above Fanshawe St from Britomart and skirting around Victoria Park to head south. Trains would then run above the motorway – but under the Karangahape Rd bridge – to a junction at Mt Eden with the western line.
Although that would take them further from Queen St than the proposed tunnels, which would run below Albert St to Karangahape Rd and beyond, the group is suggesting a feeder tram circuit for an extra $50 million to maximise patronage.
Aside from the fact that an overhead twin-rail track would be oppressively ugly, enormously destructive, potentially unfeasible due to gradients, the route suggested (perhaps to ease the gradient?) is just dumb – a long way from the “heart” of the city centre, when a critical goal of the project is to bring rail into the very heart of Auckland at Aotea Station.
I can see that the group is genuinely concerned that the forever increasing project cost might mean that it doesn’t happen, but I don’t think proposing a nonsensical alternative really helps things. Perhaps we should instead focus on getting an understanding of why the project’s cost seems to keep going up and do something about that.
By Peter M, on May 8th, 2012 Wow another surprise, surprise this morning – Snapper are ruining integrated ticketing by being too useless to get their machines up to spec. Here’s the NZ Herald story:
A $98 million integrated ticketing system for Auckland is ready to go, but is being held up by Snapper and NZ Bus not installing the technology on more than 650 buses.
This has left Aucklanders – who have paid $42 million towards the system – waiting until November at the earliest to use a single card on buses, trains and ferries.
French technology giant Thales has completed a contract to install the new ticketing system and its New Zealand country director, Peter Beggs, has taken a swipe at Snapper, a sister company to NZ Bus, for delays.
On May 3, Mr Beggs told staff in an email – obtained by the Herald – that the “failure of Snapper to deliver a functional bus system that meets the ratified standard has caused delays to project go-live”.
The Thales contract was signed in late 2009 while the HOP card was officially launched more than a year ago now. If Snapper haven’t been able to get their act together in that time I have little hope that they’re doing anything more than running interference on the whole process and it seems unlikely they’ll be able to sort themselves out by November.
Auckland Transport are also running out of patience:
Within Auckland Transport, patience is running out with Snapper, NZ Bus and its investment company owners, Infratil, who together have been delaying Auckland’s integrated ticketing project from day one.
In March last year, the Snapper card was launched under the guise of being Auckland Transport’s Hop integrated ticket, but Snapper has failed to integrate its system to the Thales system on its 650 buses – and already missed one deadline to prove its system could link into the Thales system.
Last night, Auckland Transport chief executive David Warburton said that after sitting down with Snapper and making changes to the transition, he had no reason to doubt the Wellington company would be ready to go live with the integrated ticketing system on November 30.
“We have no intention of having multiple systems. There will be one system that will be the NZTA New Zealand standard,” Mr Warburton said.
So what happens if Snapper can’t meet the deadline? It would be pretty amusing – although annoying in a sense as it would delay the project – if all the Snapper machines had to be ripped out of NZ Bus buses and replaced with machines that can actually do the job properly.
By Peter M, on April 12th, 2012 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.
By Patrick Reynolds, on April 11th, 2012 Tuesday’s Herald had a lot of good coverage of transport issues. No fewer than four good reports by Mathew Dearnaley. Rudman on the Remuera buslane rebellion, covered here on this site. And even a piece on the transformation of LA back towards being a transit town.
There was also really good coverage of this site’s founder, Josh Arbury, in his new role as Transport Strategist at the Council on value for money in Auckland’s PT; here. A piece on design of the new trains, here. And coverage of ways to raise infrastructure investment funds via proposed road pricing here. This issue deserves its own post and will get future coverage on this site. All this follows earlier an report on fewer road deaths here, and a really encouraging report on Shared Spaces with not only Alex Swney of Heart Of The City saying really good things about the improvements they bring but even the AA’s Simon Lambourne managing to not see the world ending at the removal of parking spaces; here, although still demanding more parking buildings.
But the one I want to look at in detail is about a seemingly insignificant little road with a boring name; who was/is Ian Mckinnon? Dearnaley’s article is here.
I have always hated this road. I hate driving on it. I certainly hate cycling on it. I hate the detail of its design. I hate its programme of speeding vehicles up briefly in the middle of the city. I hate the way it turns its back on its surrounding sites. I hate the way it cuts off Eden Terrace. I hate the way it spreads the quality of a motorway a little further into the surrounding area. And now it turns out to be so bad that it kills its users too….. In short the whole thing is a disaster. Why? Well first let’s look at its reported problems.
Although the road was built almost to motorway standard for the 30,000 vehicles that use it daily, and includes long downhill sections in both directions, it lacks a median barrier and has become notorious for crashes on its main bend.
So the idea of building a road ‘almost to motorway standard’ to link ordinary streets in the middle of the city has led to bad outcomes. Surprise me. And despite a road design that encourages speed it is now expected that declaring a lower speed limit will fix the situation, although police concede that this is unlikely.
But although the police intend monitoring the new limit, they are expected to “exercise discretion” until drivers get used to it, with prompting from electronic message signs over the next two weeks.
Hopeless really, it should have the physical characteristics of a city road; in particular it would be best to reduce it to one lane each way to help slow drivers. This would also provide the opportunity to add a real cycle lane here on the resultant spare tarmac. Something urgently needed because the NorthWestern cycleway stops at the Newton Road overbridge and this annoying little road could provide a way to link the cycleway up to K and Queen, to Symonds Street and therefore the Universities and the hospital, through to the Domain and so forth. A low cost way to get a great deal of cycling connection and some traffic calming thrown in for free! Like this:
 Ian McKinnon Drive as a way to extend the NW cycleway to Upper Queen St and beyond Now let’s go back a bit further and look at what else is so bad about this road. Here’s a wider view from above:
 Dom Rd/New North Rd flyovers bottom. Ian McKinnon Dr top. Ian McKinnon Drive is a relatively new road [anyone got a date?] inserted through a much older street pattern and a sorry consequence of the terribly over-engineered and land gobbling monument to post-war planning that is the Dominion Road/New North rd interchange. Originally designed to be part of the Dominion Rd Motorway, yes!, this interchange clearly needed somewhere to head to once the motorway was thankfully abandoned, so Ian Makinnon was rammed through. Here is how it was:
 Dominion Rd + New North Rd with rail line pre interchange Ok you can see the problem; both Dominion Rd and New North Rd converging into one road city bound. You can also see what’s good about this intricate and interwoven neighbourhood street pattern; housing and employment mixed together, walkable and interconected streets; a modern urbanist’s dream. But to allow [or force] a car based transport model on a city like this can only mean getting out the wreckers ball. It also means, of course, choosing to prioritise those living further out and wanting/needing to drive in over the value of the land and buildings and the community already existing in this inner area. New outer suburbs over older inner ones. Spirit of the times. Here is work by Kent Lundberg showing what value was directly destroyed by putting this road in [Twitter: @kentslundberg]:
Interesting to see just how much of old inner Auckland has been lost to expanding the roadspace to accommodate our imbalanced car focussed system, especially in the light of how valuable this kind of inner city property has become. What great rating income if nothing else has been abandoned by choosing this kind of city. Lost wealth. But that isn’t all, this demolishing and severance, as well as the presence of more and more vehicles rushing past has kept the remaining odd parcels of property low value, underdeveloped, and underperforming. Auto-dependency waving yet again its magic wand of anti-agglomeration. In the top left you can see a stretch of Newton Gully which has also, of course, been sacrificed to auto infrastructure. Making complete the separation of the remaining housing of Eden Terrace into a strangely stranded island. And one that few walk to and from as Ian McKinnon and motorway form such barriers to pedestrians.
You can also see there is a rail line running through these pictures. Had the earlier versions of the City Rail Link been built and a real Auckland passenger service been invested in so many of the commuters that these interventions were designed for could have still got to the CBD efficiently. Then could the costly destruction of so much of this neighbourhood have been avoided? It would have had to have been considered valuable for that to happen or at least there would have had to have been the ability for local view to have been heard and considered instead of distant decisions being forced down from City Hall and Wellington. We could still do much to improve this area, undo a lot of the damage, but we’ll never get the old street pattern back. The good news is that reducing the road space will become more and more viable as we build effective alternatives car commuting and as it would release a fair of land for productive use such rehab work might pay for itself. Here is an earlier post about this by Josh Arbury.
Let’s also remember the wider lesson from this story, we must balance place value and movement benefit more sensibly than was done here. Motorways and other invasive insertions are always more likely to happen in areas of low value but are those values permanent? How much have we already lost? Grafton Gully, for example, is a terrible loss to the city and clumsy separation of the city and the Domain, and put through in an age when we valued wild places a little less. Is it any surprise that the road lobby are now proposing to complete the total separation of Onehunga from its harbour by motorway; a lot easier to get its payday among the poorer and less connected of South Auckland after getting a bloody nose in the eastern suburbs.
So we can see in this one example how the auto-dependent model is considered the least productive and most wasteful system of movement for a city; it is a costly destroyer of place value. But we’ve always known that:
 De Leuw Cather report 1965, detail
By Matt L, on March 26th, 2012 There was something in last Thursday’s NZ Herald article about the punctuality and reliability of public transport in Auckland that really stood out like a sore thumb:
But buses stuck to their timetables – or were at least no more than five minutes late – in 99.24 per cent of cases last month and ferries were even more punctual, hitting the mark in 99.73 per cent of cases.
Brian Rudman picked up on these rather ludicrous sounding numbers in his column today:
Auckland Transport’s latest “good news” bus-service statistics read like the electoral results of some tin-pot dictator.
Indeed, they’re so fantastical any self-respecting dictator would have had them scaled down.
The transport overlords claim last month, Auckland’s public bus fleet scored 99.88 per cent for “reliability” and 99.24 per cent for punctuality.
In bus talk, “reliability” means a scheduled bus actually reaching its destination. To score on the punctuality scale, a bus also has to “commence the journey within five minutes of the timetabled start time”.
So AT’s transport number-crunchers are asking us to believe that of the 171,610 scheduled bus trips last month, just 206 failed to reach their destinations – and presumably didn’t start as well – and that only 1304 – 43 a day – failed to start within five minutes of their scheduled start time.
Later in his column, Rudman highlights why such ludicrous numbers occur:
That’s a key word: the statistics are “self-reported”.
Does seem overly trusting of Auckland Council, who hires these various firms at vast public expense to provide a timetabled bus service, to monitor outcomes using some school-yard, “cross your heart and hope to die” method of self-reporting.
The other issue is that, for some bizarre reason, the punctuality of bus services is counted at the beginning of its trip, while the punctuality of rail services are measured when they reach their destination – surely a far more logical measurement. I really don’t care when my bus or train begins its run, I care whether it’s late when it gets to my stop and I care whether it will get me where I’m going on time.
There’s a bit of hope that this laughable way of measuring bus punctuality and reliability is going to change – from the latest Auckland Transport Patronage Report:
Auckland Transport is in the process of developing an automated tracking and monitoring system to report bus reliability and punctuality and provide enhanced data to improve service delivery. A review of the reliability and punctuality of all bus timetables has also commenced to ensure timetables continuously reflect operating conditions.
What we really should be measuring is how the buses compare to their timetable at all points along the route. This information would actually be really useful in highlighting where we need bus lanes or other bus priority measures. With the HOP card I’m sure all the data is available – let’s start using it to improve the system.
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 Patrick Reynolds, on February 16th, 2012 If ever you make the mistake of reading the comment stream on the average Herald article about Auckland you will find this kind of thought from people like Rodney of Howick who states:
For some reason [Mayor] Len Brown seems convinced that there will be more businesses started in the CBD and more people wanting to live there. Sorry Len, but cities grow outward and not inward.
Well Rodney is wrong both in general about cities and in particular about Auckland over the last decade or so. Cities grow in all sorts of ways and recently Auckland has been growing inward and upward [a direction that Rodney seems to be ignorant of] and hasn’t it been fantastic. I recently covered the issue of inner city living in Auckland so in this post I want to illustrate some of the great changes that we have seen in Auckland’s public and commercial world in order to both contradict this kind of thinking and to celebrate these changes.
 Auckland Art Gallery But I also want to make an additional claim about Rodney’s opinion. He’s right. Well, he was right. Auckland, like almost every other city in the western world grew outward in the second half of the last century away from its old centre. There was a consistent and unstoppable move away from inner-city areas for both habitation and commerce throughout this period. The very terms urban and inner-city came to freight negative connotations and lower value was given to the existing structures of the old city centres,
‘Clapham? Surely not! I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s terribly urban, so urban,’ with her feelings centred on the word urban. I wondered if I had mistaken the meaning of urban, if it now meant more than ‘of the city’.
-Janet Frame Angel At My Table p282 original emphasis.
Of course some cities suffered from this phase more than others. Auckland’s inner suburbs were bisected for motorways to feed these new suburbs and the city itself very nearly completely expired through flight and separation. This transformation was the result of public policy, especially as expressed in transport decisions, but that in turn did reflect the spirit of the times [although it was not universally supported- see Paul Mees Transport for Suburbia for good coverage of this]. The move to the suburbs was in, and the destruction of the old city was consistent with the brave new world of modernism which had an exhilarating commitment to the bold fresh start on a blank canvas. And why not, after the appalling wars that seemed to be the culmination of the old world order.
 Detail of the new Auckland Art Gallery by FMJT + Archimedia The most affected cities of this phase have become know as ‘doughnut cities’ because they now have a hole instead of a centre. Detroit is the poster child for this, but Christchurch is another good example. A weak centre ringed by low density suburbs with busy shopping malls sitting in a sea of carparking. The surviving examples of its Gothic Revival past made the old centre like a fairly lifeless full size museum. Of course it now has bigger problems and in fact the chance to fix this imbalance, but it is not clear that it will.
 Takutai Square above Britomart Station Auckland’s centre was largely saved by the failure of those that wanted the University to leave town for a poorly connected greenfields site at Tamaki. Unlike the Christchurch CBD which lost its University, it was largely the growth of the University along with AUT through the barren years of the 1980s that just kept the city going until the tide changed.
 North Wharf by Fearon Hay Architects And a tide it is. We are now in a new phase with a complete new set of economic, social, environmental, and spatial imperatives. Which are in the process of transforming our lives in ways that are just as profound as the one that began with the Great Depression and wasn’t really in full flight until the 1950s. [See Richard Florida's The Great Reset for more on this]. Although these changes are not evenly spread nor always obvious in the midst of them happening.
 Ironbank by RTA Central to understanding the postwar revolution is the rise of the car and huge spatial changes that we made to accommodate it. Likewise it seems that we are currently in an age where the penetration of the auto-centric life has reached its limits and a new order with different patterns of movement are beginning to assert themselves. I am not claiming that we will suddenly abandon all driving but rather its centrality to our lives and the dominant role it has in shaping our communities and routines will diminish. This will take time and like the last big shift will require effort and investment in alternatives, and of course will be contested by those who benefit from the old way, or just identify with it.
 North Wharf at Wynyard Quarter An important driver of this change, and also a result of it, is the desire for a more livable and human-centred spatial order, and perhaps ironically, one better connected to its constituent parts, its suburbs. While the centre is crucial to this dynamic change [See Ed Glaeser's The Triumph of the City], it isn’t at the expense of the hinterland but rather it is a transformation and an intensification of everywhere. It should mean the triumph of the local, a rise in difference, as well as in interconnectedness. And a world where the word urban has reverted to its older connotations, more likely to imply sophistication and growth than decline and despair.
 The Imperial by Fearon Hay Architects  The Imperial Except for our friend Rodney, or others like him whose views were formed last century and are stuck there. Or others living eslewhere in the country for whom Auckland is a distant or unwelcome thought. And this is the world view that the current government holds and is determined to force on us all. That they are clearly fighting against the new zeitgeist that is, like the last one, both global and probably irresistible is cause for optimism. But it also underlines how frustrating it is when we at last have a Council that speaks for the whole city and that ‘gets it’ only to have yesterdays world view being clung to by a dominating authority.
 from Fort Lane, one of the new shared spaces; until recently only used for parking vehicles and trash My photographs here are intended to show that the transformation of Auckland is well underway and not just a theory or the dream of some urban designers at the Council. But a real phenomenon being invested in by companies and public bodies and being successfully occupied by a full range of businesses, institutions, and individuals for all of our benefit.
 A great example of successful transformation: The Auckland Art Gallery These are the amenities and pleasures, business and work opportunities, that are the fruits of intensification and improved interconnection. This is the city we can have if we invest in new forms of movement and liberate the city from being so dominated by the demands of the car. Maybe even Rodney may come to town on occasion and see that ‘up and in’ is the 21st century way and for the simple reason that growth in these directions will help make us happier, healthier, and indeed wealthier.
 New or improved uses for old building are the best way to be able to keep them. Better than a new car park?  Adding exciting new layers to the city can only be afforded through more intense use
 New and old businesses co-existing in new ways: Making the city one big shared space
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