Both Los Angeles and Auckland are remarkably alike in many ways, but not in the only ways that you might think (sprawled, auto-dependent cities). In actual fact, both cities are relatively dense (new world) cities and both developed around rail (in particular tramways). In fact, in the early and mid 20th century Auckland was the leader in public transport in the Anglo-world.
Seems strange to say after a childhood constantly hearing the opposite but it is the truth. Don’t believe me..?
Here is Auckland’s tram system in 1950:
It was an excellent system, 5 minute frequencies on all lines, 73 kms in total and covered all of then urban Auckland, (the OR, Owairaka line you can see there terminated on Mt. Albert Rd which was the extent of the city, Onehunga having grown up around the second wharf in the 1800s), all backed up by a well funded rail system and feeder buses. The suburbs covered by this system are some of the densest and most desirable in the city today. As we can see, the city literally grew for the first 100 of it’s 150 year history around the train stations in the outer lying suburbs (New Lynn etc) and the tramways. Over 60% of all trips were via cycle, foot or public transport, the CBD was the place to be and Auckland was untouched by motorways.
This is LA’s Pacific Electric Railway of the streetcar conspiracy fame:
As you can see on the relief itself it was the “largest electric railway system in the world” but believe it or not this system (which used red cars) only carried about 1/3 of tram passengers in LA, it was Los Angeles Railways (or the “yellow car” system), a system focused on the CBD and surrounding dense suburbs that carried the majority of passengers:
In total a staggering 1,872 kms of rail.
So what went wrong in our public transport pasts to lead to the seemingly shared, car dependent, present we have today?
In LA both systems were privately owned, both were poorly run, lost money and didn’t receive the ongoing investment required. Additionally the local and city politicians couldn’t get their act together to purchase the systems for decades, despite seemingly overwhelming pressure from the public. The city couldn’t pay for the system to be upgraded as the citizens didn’t want their taxes going to a private company (quite rightly I think) and by the time the MTA was formed it was too late, the government funded an interstate system and the state funded a freeway system. The rails were finally removed completely in the 1960s – public transport use plummeted.
In Auckland the story was quite different, we had a strong regional transport board for our entire tram history which purchased the trams in 1919 due to public outcry over a fare increase. By 1950 it was obvious the trams were coming to the end of their useful life and it was looking unlikely to find anyone to satisfactorily replace them so the ‘Halcrow Report‘ was commissioned in this year. It recommended the tram network essentially be replaced by electrification of the railways (which had just finished in Wellington), construction of a central city rail tunnel, the re-organisation of buses to act as feeders to the rail system and by expanding the Auckland Transport Board’s powers to include private buses and heavy rail (sounds familiar). Both National and Labour adopted the plan before the 1951 election. Then two individuals basically killed the plan singlehandedly: Auckland’s City Engineer and Professor Kenneth Cumberland, Head of Auckland University’s Geography Department, both fierce road proponents. They convinced the council to set up a committee to prepare a Master Transportation Plan and ensured that only one person from the Railway’s Department was on it, the remainder road engineers and the Professor’s colleague.
Not surprisingly the resulting Master Transportation Plan was a roads-fest, was delayed until just after the 1954 election to try and prevent the (mainly public transport using) public from having a say and it didn’t seem to matter it was more than 4 times the cost of the “Halcrow’s” railways plan. It was moved by junior councillor called Dove-Myer Robinson and adopted. The tram system was completely removed in 1956 and the largest decline of public transport in any city, ever, began.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, LA’s transformation happened seemingly randomly due to political failure, poor running of a couple of businesses and state and federal road funding, while Auckland’s decline was almost a conspiracy by those who thought they were doing the right thing.
Lets learn this time and help ensure the PTMA changes don’t happen (or are quickly reversed under Labour) , we complete the CBD rail tunnel by the 100th anniversary of it’s first proposal, 2024 (if not sooner), reintroduce Light Rail to Dominion Road and ensure that the Auckland Transport CCO is reformed to the type of democratic, properly council controlled organisation that can get true integration.
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Interestingly when we say that something was “ahead of its time” we usually mean it in a good way. I would say that the 1954 Master Transportation Plan was clearly ahead of its time, but in this case it turned out to be in a not-so-good way. In the 1950s and 1960s many Australian and US cities were still investing quite heavily in public transport – this is why Melbourne kept its trams, why Sydney built the Eastern Suburbs Line, why San Francisco built its BART and Washington DC its Metro. Unfortunately in Auckland we had 1970s/1980s transportation policies in the 1950s, which meant that both we missed out on that later surge in PT investment (we could have got it through Robbie’s 1970s plan) and we also started really early on motorway building.
Which meant that we ended up having a particularly precipitous decline in public transport use, a particularly extensive motorway system for our size quite early on, and a particularly neglected rail system.
It’s sad that we’re not ahead of our time in the opposite direction this time heading back towards more diversified transportation policies. Instead we’re lagging behind most international cities.
It would be nice to get the tram network back. It was such a big part of Auckland’s history and even today its effects can be seen in the placement of shops along major arterial roads. How much do you reckon it would cost to put a line down Dominion Road?
While it is really sad what happened to Aucklands PT, the tragic part in all of this is that we haven’t learnt from our mistakes. This seems to permeate both sides of the political spectrum at both a National and Local government level.
James, it wouldn’t be cheap but I think it would be worth it. Already on Dominion Road you have buses running every 5 minutes off-peak, and more during peak times. I can see a tram line being necessary simply for capacity reasons on Dominion Road within 10 years.
So Dove-Myer Robinson was part of killing off the trams? Interesting. He tried to atone later, then, but didn’t succeed.
@max, I thought the train-spotters would like that one… 😉
I think the tram system was dead, either way it was going to be replaced by trolley buses (which started in 1949 and I view the loss of in the 80s as a shame) it was the killing off of the rail plan that was to replace them that was the big issue…
Why would the tram system have been dead? Surely they built new trams (the rolling stock, I mean) in the 50s and 60s!
Toronto and Melbourne kept their trams…. I hope we would have ended up something like Toronto where some lines were upgraded to underground rail while others were kept.
From what I understand, the systems that brought new trams in the 30s were able to survive until the 60s (or till today in the case of Toronto and Melbourne) whereas most of Auckland’s trams were the originals from the 1900s and 1910s and in the early 50s when they needed replacement only Communist countries were producing trams (not someone us good ole US supporters in NZ would buy from)…
@James, conservatively I reckon about $10 million a km, including vehicles capable of 5 minute frequencies and a depot in Mt Roskill…
Trams are kind of slow, and we don’t have an existing tram network to integrate them with. Wouldn’t it be better to just bite the bullet and build heavy rail along — or under — Dominion road?
Not really sj. Trams can be just as quick as buses along an arterial route such as Dominion Road. Plus we don’t need a network to integrate them with. The point with Dominion Road is that the corridor is likely to reach bus capacity in the future.
In terms of heavy rail, it would be hugely expensive to build an underground railway line beneath Dominion Road. You couldn’t ever build something at-grade. Furthermore, Dominion Road is quite a “corridor” of development, rather than having particular activity nodes. Therefore have a tram that frequently stops could potentially serve it better than a heavy rail line with only 2-3 stations.
Additionall it is far more politically possible to get light rail built along this corridor for 2 reasons:
– A Dom Rd upgrade is scheduled to take place in 2016, the council has already spent money in land acquistions and has budgeted (maybe even set aside from memory) $40 million for the work…
– The RLTS schedules the Dom Rd corridor as a QTN, meaning Light Rail is one of the options available under current plans…
Surely Auckland could have found some newer suitable overseas trams if they had really wanted to. A comprehensive refurbishment would have given decent vehicles that could have lasted another 20 to 30 years or so.
A bigger issue could have been the need for dedicated rights of way, as I understand road congestion has slowed the service down somewhat.
That is a bit of a myth, the Master Transportation plan tried to claim Auckland was suffering from congestion, apart from Queen St that was not the case, they struggled to find photos to prove it… A simple answer would have been to pedestrianise Queen St…
55 years is a good nudge for a tram and that was how old some were at the end, literally rattling the passenger to pieces… There is only so many times you can refurbish them… The American and Yanks had stopped building trams at this point… At that point in time we seemed to get British or nothing really, I suppose we could have built our own, but the National Party’s Transportation Minister (Goosman) was very pro-roads (I’m noticing a trend)…
Luke, at the time Auckland’s trams were well and truely shagged, so replacing them was a must. If they had tried hard enough they could have probably found someone to replace them at the right cost, but why would the bother? There were plenty of manufacturers around producing a cheap and effective replacement technology that promised to have all the advantages of a tram with none of the disadvantages of a fixed route, rails in the roadway or ugly overhead lines… they simply thought that buses were the superior option, and at the time they probably were.
I’ll just add here that any new tram in Auckland would have significant sections of dedicated right of way. Not necessarily off street, but certainly lanes free of traffic.
In terms of costs, in 2003 Melbourne opened a 2.3 kilometre extension of the tramway to Box Hill. This extension is all in dedicated right of way and included some fancy new technologies such as rubber track beds for minimal noise and vibration, plus a couple of high quality ‘super-stops’ with level boarding platforms and wheelchair accessibility. This cost $28 million all up, or $12.7 million a kilometre although a longer route would be cheaper by the mile. A new three-sectional articulated tram would cost around $5 million each.
My estimate is a total cost of around $150 million for for the eight kilometre line from Mt Roskill South to Britomart via Dominion Rd and Queen St, including ten new articulated vehicles and a stabling yard and workshop. However once that was in place new lines would be cheaper, for example three kilometres of track along the waterfront and four new trams would cost maybe $40 million.
What is it costing Christchurch to extend their tourist tramway, probably a fair bit because it is all through the busy downtown area and being built to very high standards.
I guess you could argue that we are learning from our mistakes and not rushing into new technology or systems as we did back then, this time we are taking our time before we make our decision and still spending our monies on motorways. But this time with increasing densities we are needing to move more and more people/goods around, and roading is not the most effective way in doing so, therefore by not being world leaders in transport this time round, we are going to end up in more trouble than where we started.
Our transport development needs to catch up to where we were 60 odd years ago.
I don’t think we rushed into any new PT technologies, when we started to build our tram system in 1901 they had been around for at least a decade or so (private enterprise built it anyway) and when we were going to electrify our rail system that technology had been around 60 – 70 years…
We did rush into road building, still waiting for us to slow down actually…
“they simply thought that buses were the superior option, and at the time they probably were.”
I agree with the first part of your sentence, and disagree with the second one. Of course a brand new system outperforms one that is 50 years old. The decision should have been between the performance of new trams and the performance of new buses.
That said, the choice to go for buses probably looked so advantageous from a number of accountanting* aspects – I mean, just think of the cost-saving of losing one whole system by going buses only (because the decision was never “trams OR buses”, rather it was “trams AND buses” or “buses only”?). Look at all the savings! Uh, yeah, look at how patronage dropped.
*The bane of our society: Rule by accountants. Not “advice by accountants” – “RULE by accountants”.
Would Dominion Road trams go down the middle of the road or be at the sides? The road would need to be significantly reworked for them to go down the middle one would think…
The road would need significant work in any case. I think the centre is superior because the tram tracks can function as the flush median of the roadway. I wouldn’t advocate allowing general traffic to drive on the tracks as the do in many parts of Melbourne, but perhaps they could be allowed to use it to turn right mid-block provided they do not hold up trams by basically using the same rules that let people enter a bus lane to turn left or access driveways. In a street like Dominion Rd which isn’t particularly wide I think this is important. In the existing width that could mean the difference between having a flush median or having say some high quality cycle lanes.
Also, at intersections tram lines at the sides of the street would block not only cross traffic but also all left and right turning traffic, where as in the centre trams phases would allow left turning traffic to proceed also (plus straight-through traffic of course).
Wouldn’t getting pedestrians to the stops (which would be in the middle of the road) be a tad dangerous? I mean I’m sure it’s done overseas, just wondering how these issues are generally overcome.
I am not aware of ANY tram systems that regularly go along the sides of the roads… (I know some that do in locations where there is no separate right of way for trams anyway) – and as Nick R has pointed out, that would cause some major issues. And also as he has noted, using tram tracks as a raised median has some advantages too.
Jarbury, getting peds to the station in the median won’t be as bad as one might think. At worst it will be two lanes mid-block (not perfect, but still possible to cross without too much trouble or need of signals) while at the intersections, pedestrian signals will already be in place.
Of course I have my doubts that they will go for trams on Dominion Road. If we are lucky we will end up with something that is futureproofed (I know that term causes some cynicism here, but hey – better than not).
Side tracks were proposed for Queen St in the old light rail project, see here:
http://www.railway-technology.com/projects/auckland_rapid/auckland_rapid3.html
In regards to the station/stop locations I don’t think that is a problem, the bus proposal has off-street bus stops at the two main centres to begin with, and secondly what we are talking about is a high quality QTN route where stops will be fairly significant structures acessable by signallised crossings, perhaps at existing intersections or maybe at new midblock stops.
Something like these:
http://orangeestate.beeqee.com/userfiles/images/project/1/48/Ruby/Ruby3.jpg
http://disabilitysafetyaudits.com.au/common/images/gallery/009_01_lg.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/31/StanleyRoadTramStop.jpg/303px-StanleyRoadTramStop.jpg
In that first link is an old pic of the CPO, it looks so much better now :-), its just a shame we can’t get QE2 square back
http://www.railway-technology.com/projects/auckland_rapid/images/image5.jpg
We still have QE2, it’s just a lot smaller. The old one was a bit crap IMHO.
It was still better than having it full of buses, I think they should be moved back to behind the CPO and take out that stupid carparking site.