|
|
By Stu Donovan, on February 15th, 2013 A Norwegian friend (whom I affectionately refer – and defer – to as the “Socialist Dictator”) recently alerted me to this article entitled “Why you should travel young“.
If you are looking for a delightfully introspective, relatively insightful, and genuinely motivating article on the virtues of travel then I’d encourage you to read this article. Why? Because it makes points that have been resonating in my bones for a while now, but been unable to articulate. For my part, the pleasure I derive from travel relates to its ability to simultaneously make you feel more aware of both yourself and the world around you.
Having read the article I was then sufficiently motivated to add some of my own biofuel to the travel fire started by Patrick’s post on his recent trip to Antartica. The destination for my own recent travels were nowhere near as glamorous, although it was probably more sustainable and definitely more readily reached (at least for those of you whom reside in Auckland). So I’d like to ask you to join me for destination “Waitakere Ranges.”
Now I know what most of you are probably thinking: “Been there done that”. But, if I may be so bold as to have a follow up question: Have you ever walked the Hillary Trail? If you have, then well done; you may want to read on for nostalgia’s sake. If you have not, then you should read on to find out why a four day, three night hike is something that all Aucklanders with a love for travel and a reasonable degree of fitness and knowledge of the outdoors should do.
Before we get onto the trail itself, I wanted to answer the question of “how does one get there?” A question to which my emphatic response is: The Western Line. That’s right, you can “hop” on the train right to Glen Eden, from where a short (and fast) taxi ride will take you right to the start of the track (Arataki Visitor centre), as shown below.
But that begs another question: “why would you take the train rather than drive?” Well, for me the main reason is that I don’t actually own one of these so-called “private automobiles”. But for those of you who are burdened by a car there’s another good reason to leave the car at home: The Hillary Trail is not a loop track. Thus, unless you want to leave vehicles at both ends, or spend time getting someone to drop you back to the start once you’ve finished, then a combination of public transport and taxi is actually a fairly good option. In the photo below I provide a demonstration of the correct posture to use when one is trying to “tag on” to the start of a hiking trip wearing a pack.
Once the logistics of getting to the start of the track have been sorted then all you really need to do is walk. 70km in fact, as per the route map shown below. The Hillary Trail route takes you from Arataki Visitor Centre to the Karamatura, Pararaha, and finally Craw Campgrounds on the first, second, and third nights respectively. On the final day (which is a long one!) you walk out to finish at Muriwai Beach, where an icecream and a swim provides a fitting end to an awesome hike.
Now I realise that sounds like a lot of effort. And it is: The Hillary Trail is not without its challenging sections. But the “pay-off”, as they say, is huge: Even though I have lived in Auckland for all my years and been in the Waitakeres on a good many occasions, I found that there was nothing like hiking the Waitakeres from top to bottom to get you a more connected sense of how it’s various coves, beaches, and ranges fit together.
It also really rams home the extraordinary biodiversity that Auckland has sitting on it’s western door-step. That’s enough talking from me; to finish I’d just like to share some of my many photos taken from from the Hillary Trail itself. I’d suggest you do it while you’re still young  . No ifs, no buts.
P.s. My random “travel highlight” was wandering out to the public reserve at Whatipu only to be showered in freshly baked scones that were leftover from a gathering of the Orpheus Society (NB: The Orpheus is the name of a ship that sank entering the Manukau Harbour and has the unfortunate honour of being New Zealand’s most deadly maritime disaster). Then, to cap it off, Mr Bob Harvey himself – one of the instigators of the Hillary Trail concept when he was Mayor of Waitakere – wanders over to have a chat about life in general. Viva!
Day #1: Settling in for the night at the Karamatura Campground
Day#2: Close to Whatipu, looking west towards the northern shore of the entrance to the Manukau Harbour.
Day #2: Looking east along the northern edge of the Manukau Harbour
Day #2: Volcanic peaks around Pararaha Campground
Day #3: Hiking north along the beach towards Anawhata
Day #3: Isolated and inaccessible beach (Mercer’s Bay), just south of Piha
Day #3: Nikau groves just north of Piha
Day #4: Lake Wainamu, just south of Bethells Beach
Day #4: Looking south over Te Henga and Bethells Beach
By Stu Donovan, on January 24th, 2013 Yesterday’s post considered the recently released Demographia survey on housing affordability. Thanks to everyone who commented; the discussion was useful for honing my thoughts on follow-up posts. Such as this.
But first let’s re-cap: Demographia’s key findings were 1) New Zealand has increasingly unaffordable housing and 2) this is the direct result of urban containment policies.
The main issue I took with the Demographia report in yesterday’s post was 1) the lack of strong economic justification/references supporting their housing affordability indicator of choice (namely the median-multiple ratio) and 2) the lack of discussion/investigation of potential alternative indicators.
Indeed, my quick web search threw up at least two alternative indicators of housing affordability, namely the rent-multiple ratio and the home affordability index, neither of which appeared to lend much support to Demographia’s findings. Of course, this does not prove their conclusions are incorrect, but it does suggest they are premature.
In this post I wanted to look beneath the hood of Demographia’s housing affordability indicator a little more. The reason being that when you do you start to see what they are measuring and, perhaps more importantly, what they are not measuring. In Demographia’s case, they calculated their housing affordability indicator as follows:
Median-multiple = median house price / gross median household income per annum
This then measures, in a simple sense, the cost of the median home relative to the median household income. While that may sound reasonable enough on the surface, the devil is in the detail. Two of the more obvious issues with Demographia’s indicator that spring to my mind are discussed in the following paragraphs.
Demographia’s definition of “income” excludes taxes and transfers. This is pertinent for at least two reasons:
- First, some taxes have direct impacts on property prices, e.g. local rates. These will simultaneously tend to affect property prices (higher rates = lower property prices) and post-tax income (lower), but not gross income. Somewhat perversely, this would mean that jurisdictions with higher property taxes would tend to exhibit more affordable housing, at least according to Demographia’s indicator.
- Second, most taxes directly impact on a household’s disposable income and in turn affects their ability to afford housing. In New Zealand tax rates have changed considerably over time, especially for different segments of the population. Consider for example the impact of Working for Families on demand for certain types of housing.
Such issues mean that the median-multiple housing affordability indicator, as it appears that Demographia have applied it will not pick up on relevant differences in taxes and transfers, both spatially and temporally.
The spatial differences are likely to be fairly minimal within a country like NZ – where local taxes don’t vary that much from place to place – but this is certainly not the case when making international comparisons. Many countries have much higher rates of property taxes (and even local income taxes) that will tend to impact on house prices and thereby affect their housing affordability relative compared to New Zealand.
On the other hand, the temporal differences introduced by changes in domestic tax and transfer policies are likely to be fairly large, even within a country. The potential impacts on housing affordability of recent tax changes to the top personal tax rate, ability to claim capital depreciation on properties, and commercial tax rates are hard to predict in advance. Tax impacts may well spill over national boundaries as well; NZ’s lack of capital gains tax, for example, is frequently quoted by my Australian colleagues as a primary driver of their decision to invest in New Zealand’s property market.
These issues would make me extremely cautious about drawing broad, sweeping conclusions on trends on housing affordability both within and between countries simply based on the median-multiple indicator.
“C is for cookie and that’s good enough for me” – The following (deliberately facetious) statement helps I think to highlight a dimension of the housing affordability debate that is all too frequently glossed over, namely:
You don’t measure the affordability of cookies based on the cost of buying the cookie factory.
The point is that housing is a actually a type of good, or more specifically a service, which is “produced” by a house. You can gain access to housing without necessarily buying the factory that produces it, i.e. rent a house. Obviously, some people do this already and they’re called “renters.” Like me.
Even in New Zealand many people rent by choice. And in many countries in central and northern Europe renting is even more prevalent. But the key takeaway message is that the affordability of housing, which is what Demographia sets out to investigate, is probably better measured (from an economic perspective) using rents rather than house prices. This is especially true for low income households that are more likely to rent.
And that’s why I’d place more emphasis on the graph produced by the Productivity Commission, which calculated the ratio of rents to household disposable income over time than the median-multiple indicator presented by the Demographia study. This showed the rent to income ratio in New Zealand declining since the 1990s, contrary to Demographia’s findings and casting some not inconsiderable doubt on their conclusions.
My preference for using rents is also related to the first point on the impacts of taxes on house prices: Unlike houses, which are an asset, rents measure the cost of housing services. I suspect it’s far easier to “net out” the impact of services taxes in various jurisdictions, i.e. GST, on rents than it is to adjust for changes in the myriad of other income and asset taxes that might affect house pricing.
That’s all for tonight, but tomorrow’s another day and I’m already fomenting ideas on the next Demographia post; in the meantime I’d welcome your comments/suggestions/criticisms.
By Joshua Arbury, on November 1st, 2011 On November 1st last year Auckland Council came into being and we saw the seven former councils plus the Regional Council disbanded. It is interesting to note what I said on October 31st last year, looking ahead towards what this new era for Auckland would bring:
Overall, thanks in large part to the results of the election a few weeks back, I now feel confident and hopeful that the local government amalgamation will turn out to be a good thing for Auckland. I hope that it will provide us with a ‘fresh start’ of sorts – a chance to finally tackle regional issues in an integrated manner, to finally take on central government and get a better deal for the city and a chance to generally speak with one voice. Of course I still have many reservations: who will play the environmental watchdog role that the ARC has importantly done in the past 20 years? Will the Auckland Transport CCO be an open, accountable and transparent organisation – or will it operate in secret and be dominated by 1960s-mentality road engineers? How will we be able to integrate our land-use and transport thinking when they’re now located in two completely separate agencies? How much staff knowledge and expertise will be lost in the transition process? And so on.
However, I’m hopeful that things will be better with this new structure because, quite frankly, the old structure didn’t work very well at all. The city councils were too big to be local, but too small to speak with much weight to central government and think regionally. The ARC was hamstrung by efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to destroy it (ARC Chairman Mike Lee has written an excellent history of the ARC here by the way). In transport matters, the councils rarely agreed with each other, or with the ARC, or with ARTA or with NZTA on what their priorities were – with the result being that generally not much got done outside state highway upgrades (because NZTA could just get on and do them without having to worry about what the councils were doing). ARTA was rarely able to improve the cost-effectiveness of its bus services through extending bus priority measures – because they weren’t responsible for those: that was up to the city councils. The city councils couldn’t really see the direct benefits of bus lanes, just the noise made by those moaning about them, so were (and remain) incredibly reluctant to expand them.
So, apart from the oversight provided by the ARC on planning and environmental matters, I don’t actually think I will miss much at all when it comes to the old local government system. But the big question remains about the new system: while it might be difficult for it to be much worse than what we had, is it likely to be any better?
On transport matters, the signs are promising. Auckland’s new mayor and council seem highly willing to take their transport vision to the government and demand to be heard. It would even seem as though the government has got the message – and is making the most positive noises towards rail transport heard since it took office. But it’s not just the big expensive rail projects where I’m hopeful the new system can deliver better outcomes – it’s also the small stuff. It’s things like Auckland Transport having an incentive and the ability to improve bus priority measures because enabling buses to go faster will increase patronage, lower operating costs and improve their bottom line that will make a huge difference. While the early signs aren’t great, I’m confident that Auckland Transport will (eventually) become a pretty open and transparent agency: plus having all transport aspects thrown together into the one organisation will hopefully mean better consideration of public transport in all transport projects.
But these improvements aren’t just going to happen magically. There will undoubtedly be internal upheavals within the council’s structure for a few years yet, there will be the incredibly difficult process of working out how to fairly pay for all these grand ideas without pushing rates through the roof, there will be attempts by staff to establish opaque fiefdoms and much much more. If the new Council wants to achieve its very very admirable transport goals, then it will need to be on the ball and keep pushing things along every step of the way. I think it should have very detailed and well thought out plans for what it wants achieved by the end of 2011, 2012 and 2013: both in terms of taking steps towards the “big three” rail projects, but also in terms of maximising the benefits of integrated ticketing, electrification and ensuring we have a number of good “quick wins” along the way.
In a general sense, I have probably been somewhat pleasantly surprised by the way the Council has worked over the past year. The ‘big picture vision’ for Auckland has been turned into something fairly concrete – by way of the Auckland Spatial Plan. For transport, we’ve seen something of a mixed bag but it comes out slightly on the side of positive. In terms of ‘day to day’ activities, by most accounts things have transitioned fairly smoothly – although much of the most difficult work is yet to come with contentious issues like rating and the long-term plan.
If we focus on transport, there have been a number of really great positives:
- The ongoing strong support of the Council for the City Rail Link as the key transformational transport project for Auckland. The Council confirmed this project as the top priority transport project for Auckland and continues to push for it as strongly as possible.
- Auckland Transport has generally been surprisingly responsive and willing to engage with the public. They opened up their meetings, they publish their board agendas (an increasing amount of which isn’t in confidential), they have engaged via social media like Twitter and so forth.
- In key plans like the City Centre Master Plan we can see a more nuanced approach to transport, as a key balancing act between shifting people while not destroying the quality of space, than I’ve ever come across before.
- Thanks to the hard work of Auckland Transport (and other involved agencies) we have ended up with the fantastic surprise of ending up with far more electric trains than we’d originally envisaged.
- Setting aside the disastrous opening night of the Rugby World Cup, the transport planning seemed pretty good – especially on the last weekend highlighting that key lessons (such as closing Queen Street to cars) had been learned.
Of course there have been a few low-lights:
- The short-comings in the original business case for the City Rail Link which gave the government leverage to criticise the project and shed doubt on its cost-effectiveness. Lots of hard work has happened since then, but we’ve been playing catch up over the past year.
- The failure of Auckland Council to make more tough decisions in the Auckland Spatial Plan over which projects are priorities and which ones aren’t. This can still be remedied as the Plan is only in draft form.
- The disastrous opening night of Rugby World Cup, which seemed largely due to extremely poor communication and co-operation between some of Auckland Council’s CCOs and the lack of a “Plan B” when things started to go wrong.
It will be an interesting next year. We’ll have a finalised Auckland Plan, we should start making real progress in getting consents for the City Rail Link and resolving remaining areas of difference with the government (assuming the government doesn’t change) about its funding, we’ll be getting pretty close to completing the infrastructure side of electrification, we’ll see integrated ticketing implemented fully and we’ll hopefully see more comprehensive improvements to the bus network.
How do you think Auckland Council’s first year has gone? What have been the successes? What have been the failures? And what do you hope to see from the Council over the next year?
By Joshua Arbury, on August 14th, 2011 There’s a fairly long and quite rambling opinion piece in today’s NZ Herald, about transport in Auckland and particularly about the relatively poor quality of the city’s public transport system. There’s nothing particularly surprising about this, and the article’s look back at Auckland’s transport history – in particular the tale of Mayor Dove-Myer Robinson’s rapid rail proposal – is a useful reminder about how efforts to improve Auckland’s rail system have generally found huge public support.
But there are a couple of paragraphs in the article that stood out as being a bit weird:
Mayoral hopeful John Banks’ master plan focused on an improved rail service, including an inner-city loop and airport link. He wanted to see central city stations and an integrated ticketing system.Increased ferry connections and improved cycleways were also part of the plan. Many Aucklanders, including Banks, attribute his failure to land the Supercity top spot to the ambitious plan.
“The people kicked my arse right out of the mayoralty,” he said this week but declined to discuss it further. “I spent two mayoralties building transport infrastructure around Auckland. I think I’ll leave it to the new mayoralty.”
Uhhh… really?
My recollection of the super city mayoralty race was that both John Banks and Len Brown came across as fairly pro public transport for most of the campaign, except that by the end of it Banks was starting to declare war on South Auckland and back-tracking a bit on his public transport aspirations. Len Brown ended up winning, and has made improving Auckland’s public transport system his top priority. Hardly consistent with the idea that Banks lost because he promised to focus too much on improving our transport system.
There are a few weird other things in the article, like “Electric trains are expected to be running within the next three years, including an inner-city link” (what inner city rail link? Or are we talking about buses now?)
I’m not sure whether Abby Gillies, who wrote the piece, just isn’t that well informed – or whether John Banks put together the story to come across as less pro public transport as part of his campaign to win Epsom for Act, who have generally not been the most public transport friendly party around.
By Joshua Arbury, on December 24th, 2010 As the year draws to a close I have been having a few discussions with friends about whether 2010 has been a good year for public transport or not. There are probably arguments either way.
On the bright side first
- Perhaps the biggest boost was the results of the Auckland Council local government election, and in particular the election of Mayor Len Brown on a very strong public transport platform. As well as the final result of the Super City election, I was also heartened by the emphasis we saw throughout the election period on the necessity to improve Auckland’s public transport system. For example, we saw survey results in the NZ Herald showing rail to the airport was the project most people thought we should prioritise.
- We’ve also seen the CBD Rail Tunnel business case released, showing an excellent cost-benefit ratio of 3.5 – once you include employment-related wider economic benefits (which, contrary to what Steven Joyce says, are also included in all the BCR calculations of the roads of national significance).
- We saw a number of railway stations open: including Newmarket, Grafton, New Lynn and perhaps most satisfyingly, Onehunga. 2009 was a bit of a ‘hard slog year’ when it came to PT: much work done but not many results to show for it. In 2010 we saw the results of that hard work, which has been great.
- The ARC came up with the 2010 Regional Land Transport Strategy, just before they disappeared. This is probably the best transport strategy Auckland has had in 60 years – although it remains to be seen to what extent it’s implemented.
- Patronage continued to boom: particularly on the rail network and on the Northern Busway. It’s only a matter of time before we achieve a million rail trips a month: perhaps in March next year, perhaps in September or October when the world cup is on.
Of course not everything has been great. On the down side:
- Steven Joyce’s reaction to the CBD tunnel business case was disappointing and exceptionally hypocritical considering his illogical support of the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway”.
- The relentless pursuit of the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” has been disappointing, especially considering its cost-effectiveness seems to become worse and worse the more it’s analysed.
- The farebox recovery policy didn’t get much news, but over the long term could prove to be exceptionally destructive to public transport in New Zealand. Once again, it seems that this was an arbitrary decision from Steven Joyce to impose a 50% requirement with absolutely no supporting research.
- The emergence of a $30 million rail funding gap – entirely caused by the policies of (you guessed it) Steven Joyce.
- The whole bus lane ticketing saga. While Auckland City was certainly acting a bit daft, the Herald’s general crusade against bus lanes may end up being particularly damaging to the cheapest and fastest way of dramatically improving public transport in Auckland – extending the bus lane system.
On balance, I do think we’re in a better place than we were this time last year. Electrification is about to kick into its next phase and become visible, integrated ticketing (despite its many flaws) looks like it’s going ahead. We have a Mayor and Council who are willing to take the fight to the government’s transport policies if need be, and who appear to be strong PT advocates. This year could have a been a whole heap worse, that’s for sure.
By Joshua Arbury, on October 31st, 2010 And so, a year and a half after the Royal Commission into Auckland’s local government reported back its findings, the Super City begins. It’s goodbye to Auckland City, Manukau City, North Shore City, Waitakere City, Rodney District, Papakura District, Franklin Districts and (perhaps the only one I’ll be sad to see go) the Auckland Regional Council – and hello to the new Auckland Council. Over the past 18 months I have taken an intense interest in how this whole process has panned out. From my initial thoughts on the Royal Commission’s report, to concerns I had about uneven ward sizes and my fluctuating opinions on the creation of the Auckland Transport CCO (first I thought it was a good idea, then a bad idea, now I’m back to thinking that it’s probably OK) it has been interesting to closely follow this process in Auckland’s history.
Overall, thanks in large part to the results of the election a few weeks back, I now feel confident and hopeful that the local government amalgamation will turn out to be a good thing for Auckland. I hope that it will provide us with a ‘fresh start’ of sorts – a chance to finally tackle regional issues in an integrated manner, to finally take on central government and get a better deal for the city and a chance to generally speak with one voice. Of course I still have many reservations: who will play the environmental watchdog role that the ARC has importantly done in the past 20 years? Will the Auckland Transport CCO be an open, accountable and transparent organisation – or will it operate in secret and be dominated by 1960s-mentality road engineers? How will we be able to integrate our land-use and transport thinking when they’re now located in two completely separate agencies? How much staff knowledge and expertise will be lost in the transition process? And so on.
However, I’m hopeful that things will be better with this new structure because, quite frankly, the old structure didn’t work very well at all. The city councils were too big to be local, but too small to speak with much weight to central government and think regionally. The ARC was hamstrung by efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to destroy it (ARC Chairman Mike Lee has written an excellent history of the ARC here by the way). In transport matters, the councils rarely agreed with each other, or with the ARC, or with ARTA or with NZTA on what their priorities were – with the result being that generally not much got done outside state highway upgrades (because NZTA could just get on and do them without having to worry about what the councils were doing). ARTA was rarely able to improve the cost-effectiveness of its bus services through extending bus priority measures – because they weren’t responsible for those: that was up to the city councils. The city councils couldn’t really see the direct benefits of bus lanes, just the noise made by those moaning about them, so were (and remain) incredibly reluctant to expand them.
So, apart from the oversight provided by the ARC on planning and environmental matters, I don’t actually think I will miss much at all when it comes to the old local government system. But the big question remains about the new system: while it might be difficult for it to be much worse than what we had, is it likely to be any better?
On transport matters, the signs are promising. Auckland’s new mayor and council seem highly willing to take their transport vision to the government and demand to be heard. It would even seem as though the government has got the message – and is making the most positive noises towards rail transport heard since it took office. But it’s not just the big expensive rail projects where I’m hopeful the new system can deliver better outcomes – it’s also the small stuff. It’s things like Auckland Transport having an incentive and the ability to improve bus priority measures because enabling buses to go faster will increase patronage, lower operating costs and improve their bottom line that will make a huge difference. While the early signs aren’t great, I’m confident that Auckland Transport will (eventually) become a pretty open and transparent agency: plus having all transport aspects thrown together into the one organisation will hopefully mean better consideration of public transport in all transport projects.
But these improvements aren’t just going to happen magically. There will undoubtedly be internal upheavals within the council’s structure for a few years yet, there will be the incredibly difficult process of working out how to fairly pay for all these grand ideas without pushing rates through the roof, there will be attempts by staff to establish opaque fiefdoms and much much more. If the new Council wants to achieve its very very admirable transport goals, then it will need to be on the ball and keep pushing things along every step of the way. I think it should have very detailed and well thought out plans for what it wants achieved by the end of 2011, 2012 and 2013: both in terms of taking steps towards the “big three” rail projects, but also in terms of maximising the benefits of integrated ticketing, electrification and ensuring we have a number of good “quick wins” along the way.
I do think we have the opportunity to make a fresh start on Auckland, to give the city a better and brighter future – not just transport wise, but generally. It’s going to be interesting, that’s for sure.
By Joshua Arbury, on October 29th, 2010 One of my biggest gripes with the decision to hand transport matters in Auckland over to a semi-independent “Council Controlled Organisation” as part of establishing the Super City was whether that agency would end up doing most of its work in secret. At the moment (well, until Monday when the new Council is formally established) there’s quite a bit of information available on what transport stuff the various councils are up to. One of my best resources has been the agenda and minutes of the ARC’s Transport and Urban Development Committee, as well as what the Regional Transport Committee got up to over the last couple of years as it stitched together the RLTS. Information from the Transport Committee of Auckland City Council, and other committees from the various other councils often proved fertile ground for gathering information on the latest happenings in Auckland related to transport.
In contrast, ARTA have acted pretty secretly, with the only information they’ve shared being the Monthly Business Reports. While these reports are certainly very interesting, particularly in updating us on patronage statistics, by in large we’ve been left in the dark as to what else ARTA has been up to. For example, how’s progress going on integrated ticketing? Nobody really knows as we haven’t been able to read up on the various reports from ARTA staff to their board that I am sure must have been written over the past year since ARTA signed the contract with Thales to implement that system. How’s progress going on completing the CBD Rail Loop study that was meant to be finished in September? Once again, nobody knows because of ARTA’s secrecy.
So will Auckland Transport turn into a much larger version of the highly secretive ARTA, or will it turn into an open agency much like the transport committees of the various councils that exist at the moment? The final details of the legislation surrounding the establishment of Auckland Transport suggested that because the CCO will be doing so much work that was previously undertaken by Councils, it would need to be more transparent and accountable. But how will this actually translate into reality? Who knows?
In part there is some selfishness behind this concern, in that a lot of my potential blog posts over the next few years will depend on knowing what Auckland Transport is up to – if they make it difficult to find out what decisions are being made and what is happening, then that will make it difficult for me to keep ‘up to date’ with what’s going on. But there’s also a more fundamental reason why they should be open – transport will account for over half of Council’s spending and it’s arguably Auckland’s number one issue. We need to know what Auckland Transport’s up to because we’re trusting them with a huge amount of money and trusting them to help improve Auckland’s biggest problem: its transport situation.
Early signs are not necessarily that promising. Over the past week or so the websites for Auckland Council and Auckland Transport have emerged and progressively been updated and populated with information from the old websites of ARTA and the various Councils. As I noted in yesterday’s post about St Lukes, the Council website already has been populated with agenda items for the first meeting of the new Council next week. It’s obvious on the website where further information will go, and now we know what the structure of the Council will be I imagine we will see the establishment of various places where meeting agenda and minutes will be uploaded to.
By contrast, while the Auckland Transport website is fairly comprehensive in what it says about various transport projects happening around Auckland, there seem no obvious place where we will be able to find out what their board is up to and what decisions are being made. Perhaps it might be added over the next few weeks when the Transport CCO board has their first meetings, I certainly hope so.
Ultimately, I think it is critical that Auckland Transport is as open and transparent as possible about what it gets up to. Over half the Council’s spending is likely to be on transport matters. While the Council’s transport committee will certainly play an important role in setting the big picture strategies, goals and plans the Council wants Auckland Transport to implement, many of the important decisions in terms of implementing these strategies will be left to the Board of the CCO. It’s important we know what they’re doing with such a significant amount of public funds. It’s important we know what progress they’re making on implementing the Council’s vision for transport. It’s important we know the reasoning behind decisions they make, so that those decisions can be analysed and critiqued.
It’s extremely important that Auckland Transport does not become a secretive agency. We have a right to know what they’re up to without having to go through the long-winded process of making official requests for information. I look forward to seeing Auckland Transport being an open, transparent and accountable agency.
By Joshua Arbury, on October 28th, 2010 The make up of the new Auckland Council was announced today by Mayor Len Brown. The structure of the council, and the chair of each of the committees, sub-committees and other forums are outlined below:
Structure and appointments:
Committees of the Whole
Strategy & Finance Committee – Penny Webster
Accountability & Performance Committee – Richard Northey
- CCO Strategy and Appointments Sub-Committee – His Worship the Mayor
- CEO Review Sub-Committee – His Worship the Mayor
- Tenders & Procurement Panel – Jami-Lee Ross
Regional Development & Operations Committee – Ann Hartley
- Social & Community Forum – Cathy Casey
- Culture, Arts & Events Forum – Alf Filipaina
- Economic Forum – Arthur Anae
- Community Safety Forum – George Wood
- Environment & Sustainability Forum – Wayne Walker
- Parks & Heritage Forum – Sandra Coney
- District Plan & Urban Design Forum – Cameron Brewer
Auckland Future Vision Committee – His Worship the Mayor / Deputy Mayor
- Transport Committee – Mike Lee
Standing Committees
- Hearings Committee – Noelene Rafills
- Regulatory & Bylaws Committee – Des Morrison
- Audit & Risk Committee – Sharon Stewart
- Civil Defence & Emergency Management Group – Michael Goudie
Advisory Panels
- Maori Statutory Board – Alf Filipaina
- Pacific Peoples Advisory Panel – Arthur Anae
- Ethnic Advisory Panel – Mike Lee
- Business Advisory Panel – Cameron Brewer
- Rural Advisory Panel – Des Morrison
- Youth Advisory Panel – Michael Goudie
- Social Policy Forum – Calum Penrose
No real surprise to see that Mike Lee has been appointed chair of the Transport Committee. It will be interesting to see the split between work done by the transport committee and work done by the board of Auckland Transport.
The structure is summarised in the diagram below: In planning terms, it seems as though Ann Hartley and Cameron Brewer will be the key councillors in ensuring that Auckland gets its planning documents right over the next three years.
By Joshua Arbury, on October 25th, 2010 One of my biggest hopes from the changes to Auckland’s local government currently underway is that we will have a stronger voice at the “bargaining table” with central government. I think there’s a reason why central governments have – over the past 150 years or so – avoided creating a strong and unified local government for Auckland, that reason being the risk that Auckland would become too powerful. So we have seen a “divide and rule” attitude towards New Zealand’s biggest city, with battles between the councils weakening Auckland’s negotiating position with central government for the funding that it needs – particularly the funding that it needs for infrastructure.
A figure that often gets bandied about is that Auckland pays far more in petrol taxes than it receives in transport spending – with the figure being in the many billions of dollars over the past 20-30 years. This trend has been stopped in the past five or so years – mainly through the insane amount of motorway building that has occurred, but also through the first real investment in the rail network for around 80 years. Auckland has finally received – at least on a per capita level – the funding that it deserves.
But is ‘per capita’ really the best way to measure what could be called “transport infrastructure need”? In parts of the country where the population is static, growing very slowly or even declining, will the transport infrastructure need be particularly great? I tend to think not. Invercargill is unlikely to need any new motorways any time soon, and while certainly we need to ensure there is adequate maintenance of transport facilities in areas with stable populations – I just doubt there will be much need for significant new infrastructure in these places.
Looking at population data – both historical and projected – from Statistics New Zealand provides a really interesting insight into the extent to which Auckland truly dominates New Zealand’s population growth. Firstly, let’s look at historical data over the last three censuses – showing how Auckland’s population growth between 1996 and 2006 compared to the country’s growth as a whole: This shows that in the 1996-2006 decade Auckland’s population growth absolutely dwarfed growth in the other big cities: Wellington and Christchurch, and also contributed to more than half of New Zealand’s population growth. Auckland’s population increased by more than 256,000 whereas the entire remainder of the country only increased its population by slightly more than 196,000.
Because Auckland is the primarily settlement area for immigrants, and because Auckland’s population is much younger than the rest of the country (people come here to study, work and have families – people move to the rest of the country to retire) in the future this trend continues and becomes even more exaggerated: During these 25 years (four of which have already happened, it will be interesting to see the data that comes out of the 2011 census) Auckland’s population increase of 573,700 is significantly more than the increase experienced by the rest of NZ – of 390,300. For every one new resident in the Wellington region, Auckland adds 7.6; for every new resident in the Canterbury region Auckland adds more than five. Auckland’s population will grow by three times the number of Wellington and Canterbury combined.
Push the dates out to 2050 and, as we might expect, the trend becomes even more significant. By this stage the rest of the country’s population is declining – due to its aged demographics. However, because of Auckland’s high level of immigration and its youthful population – we’re still growing: from 1.9 million in 2031 to over 2.3 million by 2051. ARTA pointed this out in a recent presentation they made to the NZTA board: If we take 2006-2051 as a whole, we see that Auckland’s population is set to grow by around a million, while throughout the entire remainder of the country there’s only anticipated to be a population increase of around 330,000. These are quite staggering numbers: both in terms of how dramatically Auckland’s population will grow, but also how little the population of the rest of NZ will grow during this time.
So what does this all mean? Well in terms of transport investment it provides a damn strong argument for why Auckland will need significant transport investment – particularly in rail projects as we really have just about built all the motorways we could ever hope to construct. It is an excellent argument for why Auckland deserves a far better deal when it comes to ‘new transport infrastructure’ investment, that even receiving equal ‘per capita’ funding with the rest of the country is inevitably going to leave us with a massive infrastructure deficit in the future.
This information really shows how much of a raw deal Auckland has got over the past few decades when it comes to transport investment. Let’s hope that the new Super City puts an all-time end to this and Auckland finally gets the investment focus that we need.
By Joshua Arbury, on October 17th, 2010 One of the most exciting results in the Super City election was the makeup of the Waitemata Local Board. Those elected were Shale Chambers, Pippa Coom, Jesse Chalmers, Tricia Read, Christopher Dempsey, Rob Thomas and Greg Moyle. To summarise, there are five City Vision board members, one independent (Mr Thomas) and one Citizens & Ratepayers (Mr Moyle). Waitemata Local Board covers a critical part of central Auckland: the inner suburbs and the CBD. While it’s yet to be known exactly how much power will be given to the board, one would think that – along with the excellent Mike Lee as councillor – the elected representatives for the area will have a pretty strong say in what happens in this part of central Auckland.
And this is quite exciting, as a number of the board members are known cycling advocates and really do understand the benefits of making inner-cities more vibrant and interesting places. It seems highly likely that they would strongly support the expansion of the current shared streets programme while other exciting ideas – like pedestrianising parts of Quay Street (or even parts of Queen Street) may also have the local board’s strong support.
Next year’s Rugby World Cup provides a fantastic opportunity to trial options to “humanise the CBD” a bit more. I’ve often thought that it would be a great idea to close Queen Street off to traffic on weekend days, so why not trial something like that during the Rugby World Cup? With two main fan-zones being Queens Wharf and Aotea Square – wouldn’t it make good sense to link the two via a pedestrianised street that itself represented a giant fan zone: filled with stalls, markets, entertainers and the like. Similarly, with Queens Wharf being ‘Party Central’, it would be stupid to cut the place off from the rest of the city with a four-lane highway known as Quay Street.
The beauty of using the RWC as a trial for things like this is that people will have the opportunity to see how awesome Auckland will be with pedestrianised areas, but at the same time businesses aren’t freaked out that the changes will be permanent. A trial will give businesses the opportunity to see that they actually make money from pedestrians walking into their shops – rather than from cars that drive past. If for some amazingly unknown reason the concept doesn’t work, then it was just a trial after all and things can go back to normal – though I very much doubt that would be the case.
Settings aside the Rugby World Cup, my mind simply boggles at the possibilities of what we could achieve with this local board, and with Mike Lee as councillor for the area. There are so many opportunities to humanise the CBD, to make it a far more attractive place for the vast majority of people who walk and use public transport – even if that comes at a cost to the minority of people who do silly things like drive the length of Queen Street. So what are some ideas for humanising the CBD?
- As I noted above, the shared streets programme should prove to be a huge success, and the momentum that brings should be extended to more and more streets. High Street seems like such an obvious candidate to become a shared street, as the vast majority of its users are pedestrians and not motorists.
- We should take some inspiration from what New York City has done in Times Square, with a bit of what I call “fast and cheap pedestrianisation”. You don’t need to repave roads, you just put up some barriers, paint the asphalt an interesting colour and dump a heap of tables and chairs all over the road. Even if we did this to one block of Queen Street (between Shortland Street and Customs Street perhaps) it would liven the place up spectacularly. Buses could be rerouted to Albert Street without too many problems, or could be allowed through the area at slow speeds as the only vehicles.
- The CBD is currently a nightmare for cyclists. We could take inspriation from what Montreal has done with its cycle lanes – creating a dedicated path along a street like Hobson Street for cyclists, shielded from traffic and allowing two way flow.
- We could look at rehabilitating the entire western part of the CBD by turning our two defacto motorways: Hobson Street and Nelson Street, into two-way boulevards with planted medians. The aforementioned cyclelanes could even travel down the middle of the planted medians.
In my recent North American travels it was fascinating to note how many cities were taking steps to humanise their city centres. There seems to be a growing realisation that encouraging cars to your CBD by building hugely wide roads causes far more harm than it achieves good. Turning roadspace into ‘human space’ achieves two huge objectives: making the city centre a far nicer place to live, work and play (and generating all the economic benefits that accompanies such improvements) while also discouraging vehicle use in the CBD and therefore reducing all the noise, pollution and congestion they bring.
We have a fantastic opportunity to make Auckland’s CBD a great place, a fantastic opportunity to humanise it in ways that encourage people to visit, hang out and have a great time. I hope our new local board, and the new Council in general, makes the most of that opportunity.
|
Recent Comments