ARTA’s Public Transport Vision

At the July 2010 Board Meeting of NZTA, ARTA made a quite interesting presentation – what they called “Auckland’s Public Transport Strategy”. The whole presentation can be downloaded here (it’s really just a quick Microsoft Powerpoint display), and there are some parts of it that are worthy of sharing – and of further comment.

The presentation does start with the basics, with the fundamental initial question being “why does Auckland need to grow its public transport system?” The basic answer to that being “because the population is growing – and growing quickly!” In fact, between 2006 and 2051 around 75% of New Zealand’s population growth is expected to occur in Auckland. This is shown in the graphs below: Given this statistic, I would say there’s a reasonable argument that around 75% of spending on new transport infrastructure should be within the Auckland region. I’m not quite sure what the percentage is at the moment, but I suspect it would struggle to be half of that. So at a basic level, there is a good argument that Auckland should get a bigger slice of the funding pie when it comes to transportation spend in New Zealand on new infrastructure (of course maintaining existing infrastructure is a completely separate matter).

What this population growth means for Auckland is a significant increase in the number of trips anticipated to be taken on a daily basis. ARTA has estimated daily person trips to increase by 65% over the next 40 years – from 3.2 million to 5.2 million. That’s a lot of people to get around the city. With the motorway network pretty much complete and very limited ability to build more roads, additional peak hour trip-making will need to be accommodated on the public transport network for the foreseeable future.

So there’s certainly a need for more transport infrastructure over the next 40 years to accommodate this significant increase in trips being made. Couple that with a very limited ability to add roading capacity and it makes you realise that improving public transport in Auckland isn’t just “a nice idea”, it’s utterly critical to ensure the city continues to function in the future. Of course that will require significant investment, and a significant number of new public transport projects – most of which I have talked about at length before on this blog (such as the CBD rail tunnel and rail to the airport). The basics of the strategy are included below (black dashed lines being the first step of RTN improvements, red dashed lines being the second step):There’s nothing particularly new about what’s in this strategy. Perhaps what is more interesting is the work that ARTA has put into analysing what the benefits of this strategy would be (which are outlined on the first page of this report – I will blog on that more in the near future).

Undertaking the first steps of this vision, to help achieve 100 million public transport boardings by 2016, would result in the following benefits (compared to the ‘business as usual’ roads, roads and more roads approach): The figure which really stands out for me is the fact that getting 7000 vehicles off the road during peak periods (which seems like a relatively low number) can result in a huge $144 million of reduced congestion costs. How come getting such relatively few people to switch from driving to public transport create such huge benefits?

Well, it would seem that the secret to answering that question is considering the type of trip that is most likely to be taken on public transport – which increasingly seems to be long trips taken on the Rapid Transit Network (busway or rail), which means the person travelling is now completely separate from the roadway. This is illustrated below – note in the graph on the left particularly how the RTN does lots of the “hard work” of the PT system in terms of passenger kilometres even though it only makes up 10% of the route length of the PT network: Because the Rapid Transit Network is comparatively popular, and the trips along it are comparatively lengthy (see graph on left of above image) – attracting more riders to the RTN creates a pretty massive amount of decongestion benefit: around $25,000 annually. Let’s say the CBD rail tunnel encouraged another 15,000 rail users per day onto the system (both through its better access to the CBD and through it allowing trains to be run at higher frequencies than one every 10 minutes), then there’s potentially $375 million of annual decongestion benefits that it would bring – quite a staggering figure. It’s the length and the type (CBD bound, so suffers the worst congestion) of trip that rail can do most effectively which leads to its decongestion benefits being so huge.

The strategy goes on to talk about some of the recent success stories that we’ve had. Most notably the Northern Busway: The top graph doesn’t really show anything we didn’t already know – patronage on the busway (and particularly on the Northern Express) has increased dramatically in recent times. I wouldn’t worry about the downturn right at the end – that’s what happens when you go from March to April each and every year. What I find more interesting is the bottom graph – which shows the percentage of people going either by car or bus over the harbour bridge into the CBD during the morning peak hour. Since 2005 it looks like we’ve gone from having around a quarter of person trips over the bridge being by bus (5000 out of 20,000) to having over a third (9000 out of 25,000) of the trips being by bus in 2010. But perhaps most critically, what this has enabled is simply more people than ever before to get across the bridge at peak times. What is the benefit to Auckland’s economy of being able to get 25,000 people across the Harbour Bridge at peak times as opposed to 20,000? I don’t know – but I imagine it could be significant.

The final aspect of the presentation that I find useful is what’s said about integrated ticketing. The most exciting this about this page is that map – perhaps a first step towards the “zone based” fare system that Auckland so desperately needs. It would be great if in the future you bought a ticket (two hourly, daily, weekly, monthly) based on how many zones your trip would travel through (and regardless of how many legs to that trip there were), rather than each and every route having fare boundaries, many of which are often confusing and contradictory. If ARTA really are looking at implementing a zone-based system then that would be fantastic.

It would have been interesting to hear NZTA’s reaction to all this (we get a hint of how things might have gone in the NZTA board paper and its suggested questions to ARTA on the final two pages). Achieving this outcome won’t be easy, especially given how poorly the government’s current transport priorities (build motorways everywhere) align with the region’s priorities. Here’s hoping the new Super City will have a bit more muscle to implement this vision.

Share this