RWC + Auckland’s public transport = epic fail?

An interesting article appeared in the Dominion Post today, and is also on the “Stuff” website, raising the question of whether Auckland’s public transport system will be able to cope with the influx of visitors expected for the 2011 Rugby World Cup. The article quotes a July 2009 ARTA report, which raised some serious issues and problems, stating that with expected public transport demand during the RWC being four times what is typical, the system would not be able to cope. Here’s the full article:

Auckland is not ready to cope with tens of thousands of international visitors set to flood the city for the 2011 Rugby World Cup, a report reveals.

Transport Minister Steven Joyce and Auckland Mayor John Banks say they are confident the city will be prepared, but a draft transport strategy released under the Official Information Act shows transport planners are worried.

The Auckland Regional Transport Authority report, written last July, warned of complacency over demand for services.

“During presentations and meetings with decision-makers an attitude of `this is a small increase in business as usual’ has been encountered,” the report says.

“The levels of patron movement and operational standard [needed for the RWC] are in reality significantly above what is currently delivered.”

The cup is the third-biggest sporting event in the world and is expected to attract a television audience of up to four billion, plus 60,000 overseas visitors.

The influx of visitors would place more than four times the demand on public transport than Auckland had seen before.

“In a number of areas there are limited people who are able to perform tasks that are either needed, or may be needed,” the report said.

Nearly 2km of roadside parking had to be found around Eden Park for 130 buses and the entire fleet of 38 Auckland trains would be needed on match days.

Mr Joyce said last night the report showed there was “considerable work to do”, but good progress had been made since the report was written.

“There are a number of organisations with a lot of skin in this game, the Government not the least one, so I think everybody is pretty focused.”

Mr Banks said $58 millon was being spent on the Eden Park precinct and thousands were expected to walk from the central city well ahead of game kick-offs.

It would take about 30 minutes to walk to the ground from a central city hotel with widened footpaths and improved signs.

“It’d be a great walk.”

It seems to me as though there are two ways of looking at this – either from an optimistic point of view that we’ll “manage to get by”, or a pessimistic point of view that “it’ll be a total disaster”. At the moment I am probably sitting on the fence, and I think there’s probably a fairly even chance of either of those two outcomes happening.

Which is the problem really. It would be pretty terrible PR for the whole country if our train system was to grind to a halt just before the World Cup Final, with thousands of people potentially not being able to get to the seats they’ve paid thousands of dollars for… and so forth. Yet it seems to me as though there’s a reasonable chance that might happen, as at the moment we have regular signalling and points failures on the rail system – and that’s without the huge pressure that will be placed on it by having four times the number of people using public transport compared to normal.

So what’s the real problem here, and what could be done over the next 18 months to sort it out?

There are a few aspects of this mess which we can’t really do anything about now, as it’s too late. This includes having electrification ready for the World Cup, which should really have been the number one priority, but somehow ended up below the Mangere Bridge duplication (somewhat understandable), the Victoria Park Tunnel (useful if tourists somehow bring their cars with them on the plane) and the Newmarket viaduct replacement on the priority list. Up until early last year it was possible that we’d have at least some of electrification (Otahuhu to Britomart and Britomart to Morningside) completed, but then the government went and changed the funding structure for the project (which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing), and took a year to work out the details. This has meant that we’re likely to struggle to complete electrification by 2013, let alone 2011. We should have also taken the opportunity of the RWC to really do something about creating a proper transport interchange around Eden Park, so that the ground could handle a massive number of buses linking it with other parts of Auckland. Unfortunately, and rather stupidly, that was the first thing to get the chop when money got tight for the stadium upgrade.

Nick R, a regular commenter here, and on the Campaign for Better Transport Forums, details the “missed opportunity” (in transport terms at least) that this World Cup has been (taken from a post on the CBT forums):

It simply beggars belief that the powers that be have done basically nothing to prepare for the world cup except build a pedestrian underpass at Kingsland station, which in itself is only a token effort to manage what will be a serious safety issue due to the huge peak crowds attempting to use a small two track suburban commuter station.

Meanwhile all the rhetoric of ‘getting it done before the RWC’ has been used to justify over half a billion dollars of motorway works at Mangere and Victoria park, but surely not even the National party and NZTA actually believe that these works are needed for the cup. Even they must be aware that foreign tourists don’t bring their cars with them and any festival/event goers tend to use public transport anyway.

Typical Auckland, the opportunity to seriously improve the public transport system and urban environment to support a major international sporting festival, but instead half a billion is spent of freeways. And they are happy spending $390 million to add 12,000 mostly temporary seats and a fancy facade to Eden Park , yet the initially planned transport interchange around the No.2 ground was the first thing to be dropped when the penny pinching started.

Can you imagine what the primarily British and other European visitors are going to think when they arrive in Auckland and start figuring how to get to the stadium from their hotel?

Well at least they have several options:
-Catch a supremely overcrowded late train that is liable to catch on fire, be stuck at signals for half an hour, or otherwise never make it at all.
-Walk for 45 mins to an hour across a hilly, rainy, pedestrian unfriendly city, somehow finding their way around the central motorway junction and through suburban Mt Eden.
-Hire a car, drive it four kilometres through gridlock and try and find a park on the side of the road somewhere in Balmoral or Morningside.
-Catch a bus, sit in it for four kilometres of gridlock then be dropped off on the side of the road somewhere in the vicinity of the stadium.

Nevertheless, given the fact that while it’s satisfying to grumble about the stupidity of past decisions, it doesn’t really help us in the present, what can we do between now and September next year to – shall we say – improve the likeliness that we’ll ‘scrape by’? A few things come to mind.

Firstly, the integrated ticketing project simply has to be fully completed by then. Everything I have heard from ARTA suggests that the project will be ‘substantially progressed’ by the time of the World Cup – which means something very different to completed. It beggars belief that we can build the entire Victoria Park Tunnel project in less than two years, but can’t roll out an integrated ticketing system during the same time period. Ensuring ticketing simplicity for people who aren’t used to the public transport system will be one of the most important factors that determine how the transport system is seen by visitors – and by the world in general. I can easily imagine British newspapers laughing at the fact that their bus ticket covered travel on these four bus companies but not those other three, on some trains but not others, and perhaps on some ferries but they really weren’t sure. If there’s any transport project that needs to be completed by the time of the World Cup, it is integrated ticketing.

Secondly, we have to sort out the signalling and points issues that seem to be causing massive delays on the rail system on an almost weekly basis. One of the most disheartening aspects of these problems is that they often seem to happen to the newest parts of the system – Newmarket and Britomart. Now while I realise rail signalling is complicated, it’s clearly not impossible to get right. Considering that Tokyo shifts three times as many people on their train system in a day as Auckland shifts in a year, I don’t see their system being plagued by signalling failures all the time. So what we need to do is to absolutely 100% ensure that we have the best possible signalling system, that it’s well bedded in, that we’ve solved all the gremlins and – perhaps most importantly – that we have a Plan B for the times that something goes wrong. While we’re at it, how about a Plan C and a Plan D? Backups on backups on backups, I really don’t care how much redundancy there is in the system, one suspects that we’ll need it – because it is absolutely essential that nothing goes wrong for people travelling on the train from the city to Eden Park and back.

Thirdly, let’s create a “bus only” path between the CBD and Eden Park for match times. I don’t know what the best route would be – perhaps Sandringham Road, New North Road, Ian McKinnon Drive and then to Queen Street – but having such a route would make it fast and easy for people to travel between the city and the ground. You can also have a bus leaving every 20 seconds or so after the game, whereas the trains will only be coming and going every 5 minutes (which makes me wonder why we can’t have trains more frequently than that, probably Britomart’s lack of capacity again).

ARTA have made a press release saying that they are going to be ready for the RWC, and that they even have someone in a role dedicated to ensuring our public transport system is ready for this big event. I certainly do hope they’re right, and to be fair on ARTA a lot of the stuff-ups (like electrification) haven’t exactly been their fault.

Getting the signals and points right is KiwiRail’s job, creating a bus-only path between Eden Park and the city is probably Auckland City Council’s job (for now), but ensuring that integrated ticketing is finished is most certainly ARTA’s job between now and next September. I’m sure they could do it if they really tried, I mean heck – it’s not like we’re asking them to build a motorway tunnel or anything like that.

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