Hopefully one of the most useful aspects of this blog for readers is that I can do all the tricky stuff – digging through incomprehensible transport committee agendas, scouring ARTA monthly business reports and keeping watch on all new transport announcements – and then break it all down into somewhat readable chunks for your average person to make sense from all this mess. Of course I throw in a fair number of opinions on what’s happening in the realms of Auckland’s public transport developments – but so much is wrong with the current situation that it’s very difficult to not do so.

Anyway, in my digging around I have come across an interesting academic journal article on the history of transport planning in Auckland, by Paul Mees and Jago Dodson. Mees is an Australian academic who has taken a particular interest in transport planning in Auckland, and is probably most memorable in how he describes Auckland’s public transport system as perhaps the worst in the developed world, and the rail system as certainly the worst in a developed world city of its size. Once you start comparing Auckland on the international stage, it’s actually pretty hard to argue with him – and the journal article lays out a pretty compelling analysis of how we ended up in this mess. It also looks at how we haven’t learned lessons from the mistakes we made in the past, and this was even before Steven Joyce and his roads-fetishism started dragging us even further in the wrong direction!

The article describes Auckland:

New Zealand’s largest city is also one of the world’s most car-dependent; conversely, public transport usage rates are among the lowest in the world. The irony of this situation, in a country that markets its ‘green’ image to tourists as ‘100 per cent pure New Zealand’, is not lost on the region’s 1.3 million residents, who for over a decade have expressed strong dissatisfaction with traffic congestion and the absence of a viable public transport alternative.

Indeed, our per-capita use of public transport is amongst the lowest in the world, as shown in the image below. And there’s no inherent reason why this should be the case. While people often point to lower population densities in Auckland, our densities are twice that of Perth and Brisbane, and yet their public transport use is much higher than Auckland’s.

auckland-ptThe obvious question to ask is “why so low?” What makes public transport in Auckland so particularly unattractive to its residents? The Perth and Brisbane examples seem to indicate that it isn’t density, the dispersed employment might well be a strong factor – but then employment is dispersed in many other cities around the world without them having such extremely low levels of use. What is it about Auckland that has led to us being right at the bottom of the pile? The article suggests that the answer to this question lies in the direction of transport policy over the past 50-60 years – which is one of the most extremely car-focused transportation policies of any city in the world, and continues to be (even more so recently). This is outlined below:

We contend… that these explanations have masked a more important factor, which is that Auckland’s transport policy-makers themselves have pursued one of the most extreme automobile-oriented transport policies in the world, beginning in the 1950s, but continuing to the present day.

Since the late 1990s, elected officials in Auckland have attempted to re-balance transport policies, and the ensuing policy documents have promised a greater role for public transport. This new rhetoric is largely a response to strong public support for a new transport policy direction. But the substantive policies pursued have remained dominated by motorways despite the changed rhetoric. We argue that the attempts to reverse car dependence in Auckland have failed because the region’s transport planners continue to employ policies and processes that promote road capacity expansion over investment in other modes. This bias, which appears to be only partly deliberate, is a result of a strong pro-automobile mind-set collectively held over decades by Auckland’s transport planners, and of similar national mind-sets that are expressed through New Zealand’s institutional framework for transport planning and funding. We further argue that the technical assessment procedures followed by Auckland’s transport officials have served to disguise these biases.

This line of thinking is very similar to the criticisms that I’ve levelled at many of Auckland’s transport planning documents – the rhetoric is there supporting public transport and all, but when it gets down to the nitty-gritty of funding we’re still throwing the vast majority of our money at roading projects.

Moving along to looking at how Auckland went from having one of the highest levels of public transport use in the world during the early 1950s, to our current situation at the bottom of the list, a quite fascinating blow by blow history of how public transport has been shafted over the years emerges:

…in 1950, a comprehensive plan was prepared to electrify and upgrade the Auckland rail system, following on from a similar project carried out in Wellington from 1937 to 1955 (Harris, 2005). The rail scheme was prepared by British consultants Halcrow & Partners at the request of Auckland’s regional planning authority, and included a tunnel to extend the rail system through the central business district from the main terminal station, which was inconveniently located, plus a restructuring of bus routes to provide feeders to the rail system.

In 1955, the rail plan was abandoned by the regional body, then known as the Auckland Regional Planning Authority (ARPA), which successfully requested the national government to spend the funds instead on a motorway network. This critical turning-point in transport policy has been examined by a number of authors (Bush, 1971; Gunder, 2002; Mees & Dodson, 2002; Harris, 2005), who have pointed to a range of factors, including the popularity of American ideas, the influence of road engineers and pro-motorway academics (notably Professor K.B. Cumberland, head of geography at the University of Auckland from 1946 to 1980) and the national government’s road agency.

These changes to the focus on the transport system, made in the 1950s, have had an enormously significant long-lasting effect on Auckland. Auckland’s motorway system started being constructed in the mid-1950s, which is particularly early for Australasian cities – as many Australian cities didn’t get stuck into their motorway systems until the 1960s and 1970s. The fast pace of Auckland’s growth throughout the 1950s and early 1960s meant that a revision of the 1955 plan took place in 1963, by an American firm: De Leuw Cather & Co. The plan recommended expansions to both the motorway system and the rail network – of course we know which half of that plan went ahead:

While De Leuw Cather (1965) recommended additional motorways, they also revived the rail proposals rejected by the 1955 master plan – even American consultants were less dismissive of public transport than Auckland’s transport officials (Mees & Dodson, 2002). The rapid transit proposal was pursued in a celebrated campaign by Sir Dove-Meyer Robinson, who served as Auckland’s mayor for all but three of the years from 1959 to 1980. But ‘Robbie’s rapid rail’ scheme was refused funding by the national government, following the release in 1976 of a review of the De Leuw Cather reports by the Auckland Regional Authority (ARA), which had replaced the ARPA. The 1976 report (ARA, 1976), prepared by a technical advisory committee of similar composition to that responsible for the 1955 master plan, supported all the motorways proposed by De Leuw Cather, but opposed the rail upgrade. By the early 1980s, ARC officials were seriously proposing closing Auckland’s rail system altogether, but were defeated by public opposition (ARA, 1983; Mees & Dodson, 2002).

Thankfully, we have emerged from the dark days of the 1980s and 1990s (I think public transport patronage bottomed out in the early 1990s). However, in a way the more things change the more things stay the same. Throughout the last 15-20 years there have been a number of supposedly pro public transport strategies and plans that have emerged, but yet – as I said above – when it comes to the crunch, funding, roading projects continue to always win out. An example of this (wow this all sounds so familiar) emerges when we look at the work that went into the 1998 Regional Land Transport Strategy:

The RLTS consultations revealed strong public support for improvements to the region’s public transport. But the technical modelling and contents of the eventual plan reflected the strong post-1950s road bias by effectively reproducing the incomplete 1965 and 1976 motorway schemes as the main projects to be achieved (Mees & Dodson, 2002: 295). The transport planners were aware of the communicative dimensions of the policy development process as the following example demonstrates. The 1998 draft of the RLTS had stated that ‘analysis has shown that heavy investment in passenger transport is not likely to increase the overall proportion of people using passenger transport because of the dispersed nature of trips in . . . Auckland. . . . Most . . . investment will be in roading’ (ARC, 1998: 29, 8).The road bias of the draft strategy was strongly criticized by community groups. So the planners modified their rhetoric for the final plan: ‘The most significant change proposed by this strategy is an increase in passenger transport investment’ (ARC, 1999: 16). But the road and public transport projects in the final report were basically the same as those in the draft – only the rhetoric had changed (Mees & Dodson, 2002).

And we see the same process for the 2005 Regional Land Transport Strategy:

The unwavering technical rationality that favours motorways and the seemingly predetermined nature of Auckland’s transport planning processes is emphasized by the fact that the ARC staff did undertake quite detailed evaluations of specific road and public transport proposals to cost the various options and their likely effects. These options were tested internally through a series of internal ARC technical reports that were referenced only as footnotes in the RLTS drafts and were accessible only by specific request to the ARC. The mundane ‘technical’ ascription acted to deflect the significance of their content as the actual basis for many of the decisions made in the 2005 RLTS.

All six of the options involved spending more money on roads than on public transport: even the ‘high public transport’ options (5 and 6) involved spending twice as much on roads as on transit. Only a further ‘extreme public transport option’, which was developed and tested privately, involved spending comparable amounts on roads and public transport (ARC, 2005c: 4, table 4; 6, figure 4) but this was never released to the public. The idea of spending more on public transport than roads – a stance which is bipartisan policy in cities such as Perth, Vancouver and Portland – was so radical that it could not be evaluated even as an unpublished ‘extreme’ scenario!

If you can get your head around the academic-speak, the whole journal article actually does make for fascinating – if incredibly depressing – reading. It does seem quite bizarre that for all the public support that public transport has received over the years, and for all the fancy rhetoric that surrounds the need to focus on public transport investment, that we have failed so utterly comprehensibly over the past 50 years in creating a balanced transport network, which it seems the people have asked for time and time again. While things have definitely improved over the past few years, and will hopefully continue to improve in the future, so many of the issues that still come up – like the gap between rhetoric and reality when it comes to transport funding – are still the same as they were decades ago. In the meanwhile, the rest of the world is leaving us behind.

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10 comments

  1. I’ve mooted it before… Public transport party for 2010 supercity elections… The only way things are going to change…

  2. If the Auckland council was elected via a proportional representation system, then that might work. But as it seems likely to be FPP, I think the bigger goal will be to influence the parties (most likely the centre-left bunch, but you never know) to be really pro-public transport.

  3. I’d disagree, even 5% of the vote will change councillors mindsets about how important the issue is to Aucklanders more than lobbying alone…

  4. Yeah but with FPP you’re just going to lose each seat by miles – even if you got 5% all up. Like I said, if we have proportional representation then it would make sense, even if we had STV it might make a bit more sense, but with FPP clearly the super-city elections will end up being a centre-left group battling against a centre-right group. I doubt anyone else will have a chance.

  5. For the average Aucklander it all comes down to dollars and cents. They think their roads are fully paid for by their fuel taxes and any diversion of these taxes to public transportation is woefully unfair. What I believe organisations like bettertransport.org.nz should really be concentrating on is a public education campaign showing Aucklander’s the truth that roads are more than 50% subsidised by them the ratepayers, plus the fuel excise.

    Maybe then, the average hydrocarbon addict will realise that they are the ones getting the free ride and take ownership of the burden they place on the cities purse.

  6. Paul Mees has next to no credibility in public policy circles. The article has numerous mistakes of fact and assumptions of cause and effect that need closer scrutiny. If I have time I’ll go point by point on the errors.

    Wellington’s electric passenger rail system was built in 2 spurts, the first was purely because steam couldn’t operate through the Tawa Flat deviation, so electric traction was used to manage that through to Paekakariki. The Johnsonville line was the old main trunk and was electrified because WCC refused to take it over and convert it to a tramway, although this had been offered. Rather than abandon the old line, it was decided to trial electrifying it with rolling stock that would then be trialled to Paekakariki. The Hutt electrification was part of a wider plan that saw the highway widened, the line diverted through the suburbs so that large scale housing developments in the Valley could gain access to downtown Wellington. It was no grand plan.

    Secondly, Mees regards success purely on the basis of mode share. Not on the basis of transport costs or economic benefit, such as travel times or congestion. It is telling as he is not an economist, so largely regards success as a modal preference, not outcomes.

    Thirdly, it is worth noting that Auckland had several chances for major public transport investment, rail based, but government wanted Auckland to come to the party. Aucklanders voted repeatedly to not put any local money into it. So they floundered. Aucklanders also voted for councils that starved the monopoly locally owned bus operator of capital, so it floundered too. Much like buses in most North American cities.

    Finally, Mees interpretation of what happened on Auckland transport since the 1990s is so woefully wrong as to be laughable. He imputes bureaucrats pushed agendas, when the agendas were driven politically, and strongly. In the 1990s the agenda was to commercialise roads, leading to road pricing, which would mean public transport would develop (both bus and rail) commercially, and be sustainable in its own right. There were proposals put up by Tranzrail to advance Auckland urban rail at relatively low cost that ARC ignored because it saw the writing on the wall for the Nat government and expected Labour to write cheques to build a far more grandiose scheme.

    Under Labour, the agenda was driven by Heather Simpson, Jan Wright and David Stubbs, all political appointees by the PM. They all clearly took the view that Auckland could only be fixed by completing the motorway network, improving public transport dramatically and ultimately introducing road pricing, but politically the latter couldn’t be done without the former.

    The article is woeful, it uses newspaper articles and a handful of selected reports (much more are available) to justify a particular perspective. The perspective is “if public transport investment is denied it is bias”, “pro road bias” is nothing of the sort, it is just producing results Mees doesn’t like.

    What is particularly tragic is that an area of public policy which should be about delivering result has become so dominated by self styled academics who produce nonsense that is totally ignored by those in power, because it is so woeful.

    Mees might, for example, ask why both Sydney and Melbourne, despite extensive rail based public transport schemes, have by far the worst congestion and per km delays per vehicle in Australasia, and both have embarked on largely lucrative major motorway schemes (lucrative because in almost all cases, the users are willing to pay significant tolls to bypass the congestion) to plug major gaps in their networks. Maybe because rail is useless for intra-urban freight and almost all non radial trips?

  7. You make some valid points Liberty – in that I’m not so sure whether there’s such a clear-cut “politicians had the right idea, bureaucrats had the wrong idea” split that Mees tries to make out. In many cases I think the opposite is true, particularly these days where ARTA’s staff are really pushing for a focus on public transport, but the funding (decided by politicians) just isn’t there.

    However, I think what I found most significant is what Mees says about Auckland compared to overseas cities, in that what’s typical overseas (more funding for PT than roads) is considered so outrageous in Auckland that it’s not even worth including as an unpublished extreme option! I don’t think there’s any reason for Auckland to stand out on its own as such a car-dependent city, when compared to places like Brisbane, Perth, Vancouver and Portland. Our transport policies do seem to mirror what those other cities were doing 20-30 years ago – they’ve shifted their thinking, why haven’t we?

  8. What are the outcomes in those cities? What is the average travel time? What are congestion levels like? Measure of things that matter (modal split doesn’t fundamentally matter if people travel quickly, efficiently, at low cost, with reasonable environmental outcomes). That’s what gets me. Put Mees on one side, Randall O’Toole on another, and find the truth somewhere in between. You are closer than Mees, I am closer to O’Toole, but I think we are both bright enough to realise is right.

    Why are people prepared to use cars over public transport? What is wrong with people driving? What distortions exist to produce certain outcomes? You see I don’t care if everyone drives or everyone uses public transport. What I care about is efficient allocation of resources, and people paying for what they use. I don’t understand why people earning the highest paid jobs (CBD workers) should get a privilege for using a capital intensive mode that is grossly underutilised almost all of the time. Similarly, motorists shouldn’t get subsidised parking or queue up for road space at congested periods.

  9. Liberty, I also want the most efficient outcomes. That’s why minimum parking requirements infuriate me, that’s why the fact that Auckland spends far more of its wealth on transport than your average European or Japanese city also infuriates me. Just take a look at an aerial photograph of Manukau City some day and look at all that valuable space wasted on parking. Surely it would make more economic sense to provide good public transport to the area than to waste so much space for car storage?

    There are also other externalities of cars that aren’t measured at the moment. What about their CO2 emissions? What about all the particulate matters they spew out that kill hundreds of people a year in Auckland alone? What about the fact that we have to import billions upon billions of dollars worth of oil each year to run our car fleet?

    I agree that we shouldn’t simply look at mode-split as a sign of success or failure. However, when you look at the enormous negative effects of car dependency, I think mode-split probably gives a pretty good indication about the other “end-point” factors I have mentioned above.

  10. although they say it is not viable for rail system, it is the only and best solution which of course is out of budget but in my opinion the best and only solution. In addition…….when people do short mediocre trips , like even getting milk, or going to shops going via train not bus and not car will be quicker and reduce transport congestion on the roads.. When i say a rail system I mean a rail system spread out all of auckland to the best of their ability , yes there are hills…yes there are existing development so space is limited but again and again it must be done unless you want to push the bus concept which will only attract half those interested in using public transport.

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