Sins of our Fathers: fall & rise of rail in Auckland

Last week ARC Chairman Mike Lee presented a paper at the Urban Rail 2010 conference in Melbourne, Australia. The paper gives an excellent overview of urban rail in Auckland over the past 60 years, showing its dramatic fall from the 1950s onwards, and then its revival over the past decade and a bit. Mike has kindly let me upload the paper in its entirety so you can all have a read.

Here’s the abstract:

One of the most interesting diagrams in the paper is a comparison of Auckland’s population and public transport usage statistics over the past 60 years. It makes for quite sad reading: There are some interesting trends in the graph above. It’s interesting to note that the precipitous fall in public transport use didn’t really happen until after 1955 – the year the “motorway mad” Auckland Transportation Master Plan was released, and not in the late 1940s when rationing of petrol from World War II was finally lifted . Then in the 1970s we can see that patronage recovered a bit, right through until the end of the 1980s when the 1989 deregulation of public transport happened – and we saw a second precipitous fall. Of course the story is more complex than simply these two events, but the point that I generally argue – and Mike Lee also argues in his paper – is that the story of the past 60 years was not inevitable.

It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that falling public transport use is an inevitable outcome of rising wealth and the ability of more and more people to own a car. It is also easy to fall into the trap of thinking that Auckland’s urban sprawl in the second half of the 20th century also undermined the ability of public transport to be useful. This ignores the fact that in many other low-density cities public transport usage is far higher than Auckland, and also ignores the fact that many inter-war developments in Auckland were extremely low-density. Many of Auckland’s quarter acre sites actually date from the inter-war period. After WW2 sections were often smaller. The graph below, once again from Mike Lee’s paper, shows Auckland’s public transport use compared to a number of other Australian, American and Canadian cities – most of which have similar (or in some cases lower) densities to Auckland:

Mike points to the destruction of Auckland’s tram system in 1956 as the catalyst in Auckland abandoning public transport, and certainly the timing matches up pretty well. Auckland’s tram system was one of the best and most well used systems in the world for a city of its size, with trams operating at 5 minute frequencies all day along many of the main lines. Auckland was never a major “rail city”, as the rail system effectively just linked together a number of villages on the outskirts of the city with major industrial areas like Westfield, Southdown and obviously the employment hub of the CBD. But Auckland most definitely was a tram city, and I certainly think that the demise of the tram system contributed greatly to the mess where we find ourselves now.

But that is not to say that keeping the tram system was essential to Auckland not ending up at the bottom of the heap, as is shown in the graph above. Basically every city except Melbourne and Toronto ripped out their tram systems, yet their PT usage statistics aren’t anywhere near as bad as Auckland’s. The problem was that the tram system was never replaced by anything much: you didn’t see the rapid-rail system that Toronto, Washington DC, San Francisco (and later in the piece, Vancouver) got in the mid 20th century, which allowed public transport to truly compete with the car in these cities. And the reason that didn’t happen was because of the 1955 Master Transportation Plan, and then because the “Robbie’s Rail” plans (which included electrification, a CBD rail tunnel and further rail extensions to the North Shore and elsewhere) were canned in the 1970s. This is what we could have got in the 1970s if the government hadn’t canned it (from Mike Lee’s paper again):

Over the past 10 years we have certainly seen some significant steps in the right direction. Britomart has opened, the rail system is being upgraded, the Northern Busway has been built, rail electrification is happening and we are getting integrated ticketing. Most interestingly, where significant improvements to the public transport system have been made, people have rushed to them in droves. Rail patronage has more than doubled in the past five years, patronage on the Northern Busway continues to have 20% annual growth, and the system as a whole has benefitted from these core improvements, with patronage generally increasing over the past decade (and particularly in the last 2-3 years as many of these projects have come to fruition).

In my opinion, what this history lesson tells us is that policy matters. Rising car use and falling public transport patronage was not an inevitable process in the mid-20th century – but rather came about because specific policy steps were taken to focus almost exclusively on building motorways rather than improving the public transport network – even though we had two clear opportunities (in the 1950s and then again in the 1970s) to take a different path. It wasn’t inevitable trends, but rather specific decisions (to rip up the trams, to go with the 1955 Master Transportation Plan rather than the earlier more balanced plans, to not build Robbie’s rapid rail system and so forth) that have brought us to where we are now.

But that’s it for the bad news. The good news is that the very same process works in the opposite direction – just as policy decisions  created Auckland’s aut0-dependency, it will be policy decisions that bring us out of the mess. As I try to emphasise to everyone I talk to about transport, people make rational and logical transport decisions. If driving to work is the most logical choice, from a cost/convenience/time perspective, then people will drive to work. If catching the bus or train makes more sense, then they will do that. I don’t believe that Aucklanders have ‘chosen’ to become so car-dependent, just that the transport network has been built in such a way over the past 60 years, and has encouraged the city to grow in such a manner, that for the vast majority of trips it simply makes more logical sense to use the car. That doesn’t mean it’s the best choice – for the person, the community, the city, the environment and so forth; it’s just the most logical choice – because the public transport alternative is generally so slow, inconvenient and relatively expensive (generally it seems expensive because driving is so relatively cheap due to massive hidden subsidies). If there was a better public transport alternative available, then people will use it – and we have clearly seen that with the rail system and the Northern Busway over the past few years.

What all this means is that making public transport in Auckland more popular is not really about changing the mindsets of the general population. Aucklanders are just like any other people around the world: given a public transport option that makes logical sense, a decent number will choose it. However, there does remain a bunch of people whose mindset does need changing if Auckland is to have a hope of getting off the “bottom of the pile” when it comes to public transport patronage levels (by the way, higher PT patronage is the means to the ends, not the ends in itself – which I will explain further in a future blog post) – and they are the decision makers. Whether those are big decisions made by politicians, or lower level decisions made by officials, these are the people whose decisions and actions either will or won’t create a higher quality public transport system.

In a way, these are the people with the real “choice” about whether Auckland remains a car-dependent city, or whether we aim to have a more balanced transport system – like many other international cities such as Vancouver, Brisbane, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Ottawa and even Wellington. Some decision makers – like Mike Lee – get that ultimately they are the ones who hold the future of Auckland in their hands. Others, and I don’t really need to mention any names here, clearly don’t (or they think that a car-dependent future is a good idea somehow).

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