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.
Another state highway project and another pretty animation, this time it is the turn of Puhoi to Warkworth.
Some of the earthworks in this project are going to be absolutely massive although in this video doesn’t really show them as well as the previous video due to it being zoomed out a bit more. Also I find it interesting how the NZTA is very reluctant to say anything about what the time savings of this road actually are, for pretty much every other project they tout how much faster it will make journeys e.g. they say Waterview will take 15 minutes off the journey from the Airport to the CBD. I suspect this is because the time savings aren’t actually that great. It’s also interesting how they show the the existing road all the way to Whangarei, I wonder if this is their attempt to tie Northland into a project that exists solely with the borders of the Auckland Region or if they are indicating that they want to eventually extend the motorway all of the way to Whangarei?
Here is a similar video they releases last year when the indicative route was announced, you can see a bit more clearly some of the huge earthworks and viaducts that are being planned.
The madness of our current transport spending priorities have been highlighted a lot in recent weeks, even getting a pretty good airing on the National Party aligned Kiwiblog, thanks to a superb Guest Post by Green Party transport spokesperson Julie-Anne Genter. Behind the scenes, Labour Party transport spokesperson Phil Twyford has also been digging up a whole pile of interesting information through written questions to Minister of Transport Gerry Brownlee. In particular, a series of questions compare the amount of money NZTA is spending on new and improved state highways in Auckland, Wellington and Canterbury with the amount of money being spent on public transport infrastructure in each of those three cities.
I think it’s good to focus on NZ’s three biggest cities, as obviously that’s where the need for public transport infrastructure is always going to be most concentrated. The numbers are, shall we say, mind-bogglingly lop-sided: While it’s important to remember that rail track infrastructure is not included in PT infrastructure spending – for some strange reason – there’s a huge imbalance here. The public transport infrastructure funding pool is used for things like integrated ticketing, bus priority projects, ferry terminal upgrades, rail station improvements and similar projects. Let’s put the difference between the two funding totals in another format: Even I am surprised to see how unbalanced the spending is between these two funding pools.
The NZTA has announced its preferred route to build a motorway from Puhoi to Warkworth which is part of the Puhoi to Wellsford Road of National significance. The route makes a few changes to what was announced about a year ago and said to be due to them having refined the engineering and environmental issues along feedback from locals from consultation. Hidden in the information is news that they plan to start building the motorway in 2014 with a completion date for this section of 2019. Reading through the announcement and various bits of information it raised a lot of questions but first, here is the new alignment aldong with the key changes:
We have already seen that the previous alignment would require some absolutely massive earth works along with multiple viaducts and I don’t think that this has changed much. The first question I have comes from the yellow box at the bottom of the image where they quote that Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga generate 36% of the countries GDP. The problem with that is Auckland alone currently generates 37% of the countries GDP so getting basic facts like that wrong is not a good start. Here is the key part of the media release:
As the main road link for the freight industry, the new route will better connect Northland to the markets of Auckland and the central North Island to stimulate economic growth in Northland and the Upper North Island.
NZTA State Highways Manager for Auckland and Northland, Tommy Parker,says the agency’s traffic modelling shows that the average number of vehicles travelling between Puhoi and Warkworth each day is expected to increase from an average of 19,700 in 2012 to Puhoi and Warkworth to 31,300 per day in 2026.
“Drivers will make significant time savings on an Auckland-Whangarei journey in 2026 when the Puhoi to Warkworth section of the RoNS is operating, and these time savings are expected to be greater for heavy vehicles carrying freight.
“A divided motorway with a central median barrier will also greatly improve safety, eliminating the kind of head-on collisions which have claimed four lives on this stretch of highway since 2006.”
It seems that with this project you really need to read between the lines because what they aren’t saying is often just as important as what they do say. They claim that 31k vehicles will use the route by 2026 but the key thing here is that it is across both routes, not just the motorway. I also wonder if that increase in vehicles is based on the same growth projections used in other projects and still get used despite traffic volumes being static or even reducing over the last 7 years.
They claim that there will be significant time savings for vehicles but the key thing here is that the benefit is only for drivers coming from further north, that is because the only connection to Warkworth will be on the northern side of town. That time saving benefit was estimated in the past to only be about 5 minutes and those that live in the town will have to drive North to get to the motorway before heading South again which means for many that there will be little to no time saving benefits over what they have now.
There are quite a few other things that could have a big impact on this road. The NZTA have said that they haven’t made a decision yet on whether it should be tolled. Their experience with the existing motorway from Orewa to Puhoi is that even though that piece of road has greater time savings than this new section is expected to deliver, about 30% of traffic still uses the old free route. Using that ratio as an example it would mean that we would still see about 10,000 vehicles per day using the existing route and the motorway would carry about the same amount of traffic as the existing road does today. I believe that would mean it is carrying less traffic than any other motorway in Auckland and less than most arterials.
They have also said that at this stage they won’t be building an interchange at Puhoi which would have interesting outcomes.
The residents on Puhoi and Mahurangi West would no longer have direct access to the motorway. They would instead be forced to use the free road which takes longer and is more dangerous. I wonder if that has been taken into account in the BCR.
As there is a big impact on vehicle numbers if the road is tolled, no interchange at Puhoi means that the NZTA either have to toll the whole motorway from Orewa to Warkworth or remove the existing toll. If they take the latter option they should include the remaining debt that the toll is currently paying into account as that would still need to be paid and so it should be added to the costs for the project.
The NZTA is going to get this consented via a board of inquiry like they did with Waterview, and you can be sure that the locals of Puhoi and Mahurangi West will want ramps built. Given the mitigation that was required for that Waterview with things like vent stack locations, I suspect the locals will have a good chance of winning but that raises another question. Part of me thinks that the reason for not including ramps at that location is that the NZTA know their time savings estimates are bogus so are going to try and force as many people as possible to use the motorway as that would make the old route much longer once again.
So what about the financial and economic aspects of the project, this is what the NZTA has to say:
Estimated costs for the Puhoi-Wellsford project are $760m for Puhoi-Warkworth and in the order of $1b for the Warkworth-Wellsford section
The Puhoi-Warkworth section has a BCR of 1.5 and the overall Puhoi-Wellsford project has a BCR of 1.0
From memory $760m is a little cheaper than when the route was announced last year but still bloody expensive for how many people will use it daily. The total cost of the project has increased though from $1.65b to 1.76B. The more interesting thing is the Benefit Cost Ratio (BCR), it isn’t clear if this includes things like wider economic benefits or what discount rates have been used, one thing we can be sure of is that they will be the best case scenario. Taking these numbers at face value they suggest the section to Warkworth is marginally ok but that the section from Warkworth to Wellsford has a BCR of only 0.6. This once again highlights one of the biggest problems with the RoNS, to get some of the bad and uneconomic parts built, they are lumping them in with other projects to bring their scores up. The NZTA hasn’t actually released that much information so I think an OIA request will probably be in order to get a copy of the latest business case.
Other than the costs, there also has been no new information the section from Warkworth to Wellsford. The indications are that they still can’t find a workable route through what is one of the most geologically unstable regions in the country. Perhaps the people working on it also know how stupid the project is and are trying to delay it as much as possible because if spending $760m on a road that currently carries only ~20,000 vehicles per day is bad, spending $1b on a road that carries less than 9,000 vehicles per day is just madness.
The NZTA have released a new video about the Waterview Connection (they actually released it about a month ago but I have only just seen it now). It is definitely a very pretty video but I get the feeling from the ending that it is partly to help push their case for moving the vent stack from the one mandated by the Board of Inquiry. This is something they were pushing back in Feb but I thought they had now dropped the issue.
Of course one does have to ask just how much was spent on this video, I bet it wasn’t cheap.
While out on my trip to Manukau yesterday I stopped off at Ellerslie to see how things were going with the station upgrade. A brief history for those that haven’t followed what is happening, The NZTA are paying for the station upgrade as they have narrowed the platform by 2m which is enough to allow them to build an extra northbound motorway lane. I last visited in Feb and while it is still a construction zone, things look really close to being finished.
I do like the covered bridge and stairs and wish we could get that at other stations. It would also be nice if it could be extended along the platform so that there isn’t gaps in the shelter. The image below gives a great example of how much room has now been created by moving the platform to allow the extra motorway lane. As I have said before, I really do hope that we can get a nice noise barrier installed. I used to use the station daily and never thought about it but in the last two times I have visited I have really noticed just how loud things are with traffic passing by. It makes listening to things like music while waiting for the train much harder and a less pleasant experience.
The lifts look really nice and stand out well
And here is the entrance from Kalmia St including the other lift
Stuart’s twoposts on traffic volumes in the last couple of weeks have highlighted the indisputable fact that we’re driving less, that we’ve been driving less for quite some time now and perhaps most interestingly, that us driving less is actually not a bad thing for the economy. The best data available is for state highway traffic volumes, where we can see three distinct phases of traffic growth/decline since 2008:
The data is from NZTA, and I have just overlaid the red lines and text separating out the phases. The key coloured line is the pink one, which shows the three month rolling average for all vehicles compared to the previous year. It tracks the green line, which is for light-vehicles, quite closely.
Phase 1 is pretty much 2008, and starts with a dramatic decline in volumes in the earlier part of the year – with the rolling average for all vehicles in July bottoming out at around an 8% decline from the same months in 2007. In the later months of 2008 the decline reversed, but it took until 2009 before we saw ‘month on month’ positive growth rates re-emerge.
Phase 2 is 2009 and is pretty much the only time when we actually saw higher traffic volumes compared to the same month the year before. However, a key reason for this is obviously because it was recovering from the massive declines in 2008. And in actual fact, many of the 2009 increases weren’t big enough to offset the 2008 declines. For example, traffic growth in June 2009 was 2.5%, but the decline in June 2008 had been 6.6%, meaning the 2009 numbers were still 4.3% below 2007 levels. Overall, only January and December 2009 had higher traffic volumes than the same months in 2007 – the rest were lower.
Phase 3, which I think we’re still in, covers all of the last two years and is actually pretty boring really, showing pretty much no increase in volumes, although the decreases are not as dramatic as in 2008. After the huge fluctuations in 2008 and 2009 it has been a calmer period, but certainly has not reverted to the long-running trend of pretty constant growth in volumes that had occurred up until 2008.
Before I get onto the cause of these trends, I think it’s worth noting the differences between heavy vehicle trends and the general trend. Heavy vehicle volumes held up a bit better in 2008 (although the trend was downwards) than for general vehicles, but didn’t recover until much much later in 2009. In phase 3, heavy vehicle volumes have increased significantly more than general vehicles, although even they have tailed off in the last few months.
There are likely to be multiple causes for these trends. Stuart’s posts highlight changing demographics, changing cultural attitudes towards cars, technological change, transport saturation, ongoing urbanisation and rising transport prices as all contributing to this fundamental shift – which on a per capita basis has actually been quite a significant decline in the amount we’re driving. It’s hard to get good data on most of those contributing factors, except for one that I think has had perhaps the most immediate impact over the past few years: fuel prices. Using the handy AA Petrolwatch information, we can see how the price of 91 Octane fuel has fluctuated over the past four years (not adjusted for inflation by the way – something I probably should do for future posts): We all know the story: in the first half of 2008 oil prices spiked, sending petrol in New Zealand over $2 a litre for the first time. Then in September 2008 the global economy tanked and oil prices crashed – with petrol hitting a low of $1.33 a litre in December 2008. Prices held relatively steady (though generally increasing) throughout much of 2009 and 2010, before increasing in early 2011 (Libyan crisis?) and have stayed above $2 a litre ever since – most recently propped up by concerns over Iran and a slowly recovering global economy.
So what happens if we overlay the graphs on each other? Well, to further iron out some fluctuations in traffic volumes I have taken a 6 month rolling average, then overlaid that onto the graph above (though the horizontal lines relate to the volumes to make it clear where zero is): What seems to correspond best, just glancing at the graph above, is the relationship between petrol prices and the slope of the traffic volumes graph. I guess that’s natural when you use rolling averages, because it takes some time for the impact to really show through.
I’m not much of a statistical whizz, but overall there does seem to be quite a clear link between the two – showing that higher fuel prices really are a significant contributor (in my opinion) to declines in traffic volumes. With the likelihood of fuel prices increasing in the future seeming higher than the likelihood of them decreasing, it seems a fairly safe assumption that the stagnation in traffic volumes isn’t going to end any time soon: terrible news for NZTA and the Ministry of Transport who are trying to justify the spending of billions on new motorways, but great news for the rest of us as chances are congestion isn’t going to increase much in the future.
In my last post I suggested NZ is at a transport cross-roads: Evidence shows people are driving less and that they have been doing so for some time. Along the way I could not help but poke fun at the NZTA and MoT for resolutely sticking to the line that “traffic volumes are growing”, when they quite clearly are not and have not been for sometime (either in NZ or overseas).
My main idea (which is not particularly original) was that a combination of demographic, socio-economic, and technological factors are reducing per capita demand for vehicle travel. For this reason I suggested NZTA/MoT should consider deferring (at least for now) major investments in state highways.
After last week’s post I have done some further digging and analysis. The first thing I did was to check whether the decline in demand for vehicle travel is evident in other data sets.
And indeed it is: data from the MoT’s household travel survey shows that total vehicle kilometres travelled have fallen by approximately 3.2% in the last five years, while per capita vehicle travel has fallen by 7.8%. The rate of decline even seems to have accelerated over the last two years, as shown below.
The second thing I wanted to check was the relationship between state highway travel and economic activity. The chart below plots vehicle kilometres travelled on the state highway network versus (real) GDP (both per capita). It shows that vehicle travel has started to fall, whereas GDP continues to grow. This trend is consistent with evidence found in a number of other countries and implies that New Zealand’s economic growth is not dependent on growth in vehicle travel.
The “decoupling” between economic growth and state highway travel is further highlighted if you divide the total kilometres travelled on New Zealand’s state highway network by the real GDP recorded in each year. When you do you get a graph that looks similar to that shown below. The y-axis in this graph measures the number of vehicle kilometres that is undertaken on the state highway network in order to produce one dollar of GDP.
Maybe I’m a nerd but this graph makes me sit up and take notice; if MoT/NZTA weren’t nervous before then they certainly should be now.
The graph suggests that, since 1998, NZ’s economic growth has increasingly outpaced the growth in state highway traffic – a decoupling that continues unabated to the present day. During this period, the number of vehicle kilometres travelled per $ of GDP produced declined by 25-30%. Ultimately this suggests NZ’s economy has, during the last 14 years, been able to develop in ways that do not depend on (or subsequently cause) growth in state highway travel.
But wait there’s more. Analysis by the OECD actually suggests that New Zealand’s historical investment in state highways (“motorways”) has had negative impacts on macro-economic performance. The impacts of highways are particularly bad when compared to positive benefits found for other types of transport investment, such as roads (in general) and rail.
** NB: I’m not completely sure but there seems to be a slight methodological issue with the OECD analysis, in that the investment in “roads” category appears to include investment in “highways”, while the latter is also included separately in the regression. So if Roads = Local Roads plus Highways, then the effects of Local Roads on its own would be calculated as Roads – Highways, or 1.85 – (-0.34) = 2.19. But that’s a econometric detail that would not change the key result …
You may be sitting there wondering why investment in highways would negatively impact macro-economic performance?
One possible explanation is that highways are very, very expensive. Thus investment in highways creates the need for the government to raise additional taxes, which in turn has negative macro-economic impacts. Another possible explanation is that NZ’s investment in highways simply caused our cities and towns to disperse, which in turn undermined potential agglomeration economies (i.e. external benefits of density).
Irrespective of the rhyme or reason for the negative macroeconomic season, all this empirical evidence casts serious doubts over the wider economic benefits of the Roads of National Significance” (RoNS). It also raises questions over why National has increased funding for state highways at the expense of other categories of transport investment, such as local roads and rail, which seem to have more positive macro-economic impacts.
So where does this leave us? Well, my original suggestion was that kiwi’s were driving less and loving it. We now know that not only are kiwis driving less, but we are also growing our economy at the same. And all this evidence is directly at odds with the claims of the National Government, and the bureaucrats at the MoT/NZTA. Honestly, what gives?
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.
Hindsight may show that the transport sector is in the midst of unprecedented change.
NZTA’s latest report on state highway traffic shows that volumes were down 1.2% in 2011. And if you look further back you can see that total vehicle volumes on the state highway network have been static since around 2004. In the same period, New Zealand’s population has increased by approximately 7%, while real GDP grew by around 11% (Sources: Statistics NZ and Reserve Bank of NZ). Taken together, this data suggests that per capita demand for vehicle travel has declined by around 1% per annum in the last seven years.
The plateau in vehicle volumes since 2004 is an unprecedented change from the last century, when we experienced consistent growth in vehicle travel.
In the 1950s and 60s this growth was largely driven by a combination of increasing vehicle ownership and sustained low fuel prices. And then in the 80s and 90s increased workforce participation (i.e. baby boomers and two-income households) caused a second spurt in the demand for vehicle travel. Throughout this whole time drivers were aided and abetted (albeit unintentionally) by poor planning/pricing practises that subsidized vehicles over other modes of travel. Homogenous land use zoning and minimum parking requirements being among the most notable (despicable?).
Since 2004, however, this momentum has clearly dissipated: Vehicle volumes on New Zealand’s state highway network have been static or even falling. And as this earlier post notes very similar trends are emerging overseas, even in countries that are considered to be ‘culturally remote’ from NZ. This in turn suggests that the emerging trends in state highway traffic volumes in New Zealand are not a localised abberation, but in fact reflect broader forces that are changing people’s travel choices.
NB: The graph uses data up to 2007, which was the peak in NZ’s highway traffic volumes. More recent data would show a longer plateau or even the beginning of a downward trend. Nonetheless, a marked slowdown is already apparent in most of these countries.
So what gives? Why are kiwis (and people overseas) driving less? I think the following five factors are likely to lie behind the static/declining trends in per-capita vehicle travel that has been observed in New Zealand and overseas:
Travel saturation – People already drive about as much as they can, given other constraints on their daily lives. I suspect that for many people’s their lives are “saturated” by vehicle travel – hence they are unwilling to travel further. This was not the case a few decades ago …
Demographic shifts – The baby boomers are getting older and simply don’t need to travel so much, especially at peak times. Meanwhile, young people simply aren’t as attached to their cars as previous generations; smart phones are the new i-sexy item. Thus the need/desire for vehicle travel being undermined in both the younger and older age groups.
Ongoing urbanisation – While we like to tell stories about our rural heritage, the reality is that NZ is a highly urbanized population, and increasingly so. One of the key reasons people are attracted to urban areas is because they can reach many more activities without having to travel as far, especially by car. My parents are in this category – not only are they semi-retired baby boomers, but they have also recently moved into the “city” from a lifestyle block on the urban periphery. They now consequently drive far, far less than they did previously. And they love it!
Transport costs/policies - High fuel prices has slowly but surely driven small changes in travel and land use choices and increased demand for substitutes to vehicle travel, such as public transport and home delivery. In downtown Auckland and Wellington, the removal of minimum parking requirements has allowed the value of parking to rise to more reasonable levels, which has in turn driven considerable mode shift and allowed for more intensive development patterns (NB: Minimum parking requirements should be abolished). Meanwhile, the price of domestic airfares have reduced faster in real terms compared to car travel, which has subsequently chipped away at the demand for long distance vehicle travel.
Technological change – the internet, which powers this very blog, is having a profound impact on travel demands. Booking flights and internet banking are just two examples of tasks that are now routinely undertaken from home, without needing to travel anywhere. More interesting, however, is the impact on global/domestic supply chains. Whereas previously you would drive to the store to buy a book that had been delivered by truck from a warehouse, the same book is now delivered straight from the warehouse to your door, potentially replacing several intermediary trips. Meanwhile, online journey planners and smart phones have helped to demystify public transport networks. And finally telecommuting is slowly coming of age: I work from home at least 1-2 days per week and travel to work outside of peak times when I do, mainly because technology now makes it easy to do so.
These five factors are, I believe, causing much of the stagnation and subsequent decline in per capita demand for vehicle travel (let me know if I have missed something that you think is important!). And the key point is that (aside from fuel prices) they are all the result of people’s choices. And for this reason you would have to assume that the people making these choices are doing so because it makes them better off. Yes that’s right – Kiwis are driving less and they are doing so because it makes them better off.
Unfortunately, the government seems to be cursing kiwis for making these choices, or at the very least are in denial about the fact that is occurring. To provide a somewhat banal example, to access data on traffic volumes through NZTA’s website you actually have to click on a green box titled “Traffic volumes are growing – see how much“, as illustrated below.
Errr …. no, they’re not growing actually. And in the entire time that NZTA has existed as an organisation they have actually been falling. But, honestly, what do facts matter?
More concerning, however, are comments made by the General Manager of MOT. When he was recently questioned by parliamentary select committee on recent trends in traffic volumes, he suggested that we should not base future forecasts on recent trends. Errr …. yes, you should actually. The GM is mistaken for several reasons. Firstly, these trends are not that recent; they have been evident for approximately 7 years. Standard traffic engineering analyses will base their calculations of future growth on the last 5-10 years of data. This means that very soon what the GM has dismissed as a “recent trend” will actually be “the only trend in town” (unless of course transport engineers sneakily start extending their time horizons back in time). Second, as mentioned previously the very same trends are evident in other countries overseas, i.e. they seem to be a global phenomenon, and in some countries they have been evident for some time.
So what gives? If kiwis are driving less and loving it, why is NZTA and the MoT so keen to dismiss their behaviour as an irritating aberration? Do they begrudge the fact that people are freely and willingly choosing to curtail their driving? I’m not a conspiracy theorist but I can’t help but suspect that the attitude MoT/NZTA is quite deliberate and has nothing to with either a) reality or b) what the public wants. It’s all about them.
Very soon static/declining traffic data will have catastrophic implications for the business cases of many of their projects. The Puhoi-Wellsford business case, for example, assumed annual traffic growth of 4% per year over several decades, before being “trimmed back” to only 1.5% thereafter. So if the MoT/NZTA actually acknowledged that traffic volumes were not actually growing that much, then it removes much of the justification for their pet projects. It’s really just pure, unadulterated bureaucratic self-interest (please, can someone who lives in Wellington track Bill English down and let him know that the MoT/NZTA are out of control and are wasting billions of dollars? As Minister of Finance he really needs to know).
Given that the views of MoT/NZTA are increasingly irrelevant then we will just have to think through the wider implications of the decline in per capita travel demands for ourselves. Here are just some impacts that spring to my mind (I’m sure there are others):
Major road capacity expansions should be deferred: Overall vehicle volumes are not increasing – not unless the background population growth is sufficiently large to offset the decline in per capita demand for vehicle travel (approximately 1% per annum). I would suggest that all major highway capacity expansions are deferred for the foreseeable future.
Declining fuel excise revenue – NZTA and the MOT will simply have to make do with less money. The revenue implications may even be amplified by a shift towards more fuel efficient cars, which pay less excise tax per kilometre. With less money coming into the NLTF it’s important that public transport becomes more efficient and reduces its dependence on operating subsidies. Otherwise we risk being in a situation where we have increase demand for public transport, but less revenue available to fund it.
Flatter peak travel demands – the factors listed above are also likely to result in flatter peak travel demands. I expect that (semi-)retired baby boomers will simply elect to arrange their lives to avoid travelling during the peak period, and why wouldn’t you? Also, technological changes may continue to cause more people to work from home in the morning before heading into the office later on. Taken together, I would expect the peak/base ratio to reduce over time.
Public transport networks need to focus on all-day travel – This is a natural extension of the previous comment. Our public transport services typically focus services on meeting demands during peak periods, rather than all-day travel. As travel patterns increasingly disperse (in a temporal sense) they will need to focus on all-day demand patterns.
None of this is to suggest that roads will suddenly be unnecessary or that targeted capacity expansions are not needed. Indeed in rapidly growing areas some capacity improvements may well be warranted. For the average New Zealander cars will still be “king”, and will continue to be so for the forseable future.
But the key point is this: Decisions on major new investment should be driven by the marginal user; it is their behaviour (rather than the average users) that should be the primary determinant of future investment. And it seems patently clear (based on the available evidence) that, at the margin, New Zealanders are choosing to reduce their demand for vehicle travel. To put it bluntly MoT/NZTA need to wake up from their self-induced coma so that they can revise their planned transport investments in light of this “new information” (which I guess in Government is defined as anything that happens within the last decade or so, or if you’re a conservative then anything within the the last millennium is considered “recent”) .
It’s quite simple really: Per capita demand for vehicle travel has been declining steadily for around seven years and for many people, like my parents, has left them better off. We’d be even better off, however, if the MoT/NZTA recognised that these changes were occurring and responded by revisiting their proposed transport investment mix. How about it?
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