As I have noted before, there is a giant assumption behind just about every proposed transport project – particularly behind every proposed roading project. That giant assumption is that people will continue to drive more and that traffic will continue to increase and congestion worsen. Projects are generally justified (sometimes for good reason, at other times potentially for not such good reason) on the assumption that future congestion will be horrible, and therefore particular roading projects are needed to avoid that “congestion armageddon”.
However, in recent years there have been a few signs that bring into question this giant assumption. Perhaps one of the most obvious is looking at the graph below, which shows total state highway traffic volumes around New Zealand for the past couple of decades:
The graph above shows that after 15 years of steady, continuous growth in traffic volumes, since around 2004 the volumes have bumped around without really going anywhere.
This is also reflected in very recent statistics that have been released on the volume of fuel sales throughout the Auckland region – shown in the graph below:
Fuel volumes used in Auckland doubled between 1986 and 2004 (from 755 million to 1.6 billion litres), and has been roughly static ever since. Fuel use in Auckland in 2009/10 was 1.54 billion litres, which is 3% less fuel than was used in 2004/05.
One possible explanation for this would be if cars have become more fuel efficient over this time, but Ministry of Transport data tends to show that this isn’t the case. Furthermore, as Auckland’s population has continued to grow over this period, you would have assumed that even if people continued to use the same amount of fuel each, the amount consumed in total would rise. But it hasn’t, and it fact total use has fallen, which means that the per-capita use of fuel must have fallen quite significantly. The statistics show that this has definitely been the case:
Fuel use per capita in Auckland has declined from 1,191 litres in 2004/05 to 1,058 litres in 2009/10. That’s a saving for every Aucklander of 133 litres of fuel, or $234 at today’s prices. (Thanks to ARTA for this information). Who knows exactly what the cause behind this decline has been – my guess is higher fuel prices in 2008 and then a recession in 2009 (which we’re still struggling to really emerge from). Perhaps increased public transport use has played its part as well.
It will be interesting to see what happens to this kind of data once we really do emerge from the economic downturn – whether the past few years have been be “blip” or whether these trends point to a more long-term change in transport patterns. My personal opinion is that we are likely to be stuck between a bit of a rock and a hard place in the future with petrol prices: in that either we will have an economic downturn or we will have very high petrol prices. Both of those situations indicate that this is likely to be a more long-term trend.
Seems a bit of an odd time to throw $11 billion at building motorways over the next decade doesn’t it?
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What does the State Highway Traffic Index in the first graph represent sorry?
It would be great if you could look at the distance covered by each vehicle on the road, also the totla number of kms travelled per year/month. The data is available since they record it when you get your WOF, see http://www.carjam.co.nz/. You can get the stats per vehicle there.
You should also need to break the statistis down between private and commercial vehicles.
Well, time will tell
A lot of info is here
http://www.transport.govt.nz/research/pages/newzealandvehiclefleetstatistics.aspx
A little trickier is to find these statistics per region but there is a lot of data there to look at!
yeah, page 6 of this document (pg 7 of the pdf) has total kms traveled. It shows a similar flattening out to the Auckland region fuel sales graph above. Maybe we’ve reached Peak Traffic?
Had the misfortune last week to hear Stephen Joyce trot out his usual line that as ‘85% drive to work” we should keep supporting their choice i.e roads, roads, roads. My response, although unable to present it, is that in 1950’s UK 70% of adult males said they smoked- this has not stopped governments working to reduce that figure as the huge benefits of not smoking became apparent. Walking, Cycling and PT have massive benefits to the community that surely means they deserve support to make them the viable first choice of our community.
the very high oil prices will probably trigger a recession – so we’re really a bit screwed either way if we keep on pursuing our fuel dependent ways… Now pass me a motorway!
This one’s tricky. The best check is to look at per-capita fuel consumption in Wellington, with its well-developed public transport use profile. If their use trended down at a similar rate to Auckland’s and stayed down then the effect is mostly economic. If it was at a lesser rate, though, or rebounded after downturn, then the effect that Auckland’s seeing is mode-share changes induced by other than economic factors.