A very interesting article in today’s Herald on how the new Manukau Connection motorway – linking State Highway 20 with State Highway 1, is actually create massive congestion on State Highway 1 just south of the connection.
A new $220 million Auckland link road designed to take the pressure off State Highway 1 is having the opposite effect, forcing transport bosses to install traffic lights to ease congestion.
Ramp signals will be erected to give traffic travelling south along SH1 a chance against motorists muscling their way on to the road from the Southwestern Motorway at Manukau.
The signals are expected to be running within three months, at a point that was originally intended to be a seamless connection.
To make matters worse, the Transport Agency says a longer-term plan to widen SH1 southbound from Manurewa to Papakura has yet to gain a funding allocation in its 10-year highways programme.
The Southwestern Motorway – part of the 48km Western Ring Route between Albany and Manukau – has been promoted as necessary to reduce Auckland’s reliance – and subsequent congestion – on SH1 and the Harbour Bridge.
Transport Agency highways manager Tommy Parker said it always took time for traffic to settle down around new road links, but he hoped the ramp signals and altered road markings would balance flows.
He acknowledged that a proposal to widen SH1 south from Manurewa was not on any funding schedules for the next 10 years, but said it could always be brought forward if necessary.
The tragic thing is that NZTA’s only response is “well looks like we’ll need to widen another motorway then”. What happens when traffic fills that up? You widen again? And again… and again?
Where does this end?
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I don’t know how they thought they could merge 5 lanes into 3 without causing congestion somewhere, I was caught on SH1 in early September going away to the snow, it took 2 hours just to get out of Auckland andI imagine it would be a nightmare if it was like that every day. It also makes you wonder why they are going to allow two lanes to join SH16 as part of the Waterview upgrade. Sadly I don’t think we will learn, we will probably hear Joyce announce the next widening project before the CBD tunnel as the widening will now be “urgent”
Waterview is even worse than that – there are going to be three lanes each way in the tunnel. No wonder they “have” to make SH16 a million lanes wide westbound.
Perhaps this example needs to be highlighted in a submission
“it took 2 hours just to get out of Auckland”
You should have taken the train, you’d be halfway to National Park by then!
Except then Matt would have left at 7:20am. Not ideal if he needed to be in auckland that morning. Ski-fields are pretty car-centric too.
If they got their act together- a Friday night train up, Sunday late afternoon train back down and good options for getting up the mountain this would be viable. The train station is right in both National Park and Ohakune junction after all…and given no one is driving you could get into the mood right from the station…
“Ski-fields are pretty car-centric too.”
Maybe in the South Island where you have plenty of fields to choose from, but in the North there is just the two. Sure plenty of people chuck the chains on and drive up and down the Bruce etc, but you might as well just get the shuttle. There’s certainly nothing to use the car for at the ski field itself except leave it in the car park all day.
There are two problems, one there is no train that leaves after work on a Friday and gets back on a Sunday afternoon. 2. we were staying at Ohakune, the price of the shuttle is $30 per person, over two days that would be $180 for a weekend without even using the mountain, add to that I had a work car and free petrol and driving stacks up pretty well unfortunately.
In my case above it would have been quicker to drive out west, up Great North Rd etc and get on SH20.
Shuttle, at $20 per person to go up touroa and $30 for Whakapapa (return ex Ohakune) I think i, like most people will be driving. With 2 or more people the shuttle is just too expensive (I took a van with 11 people 2 seasons ago). If you want to maximize your snow time driving is the only option, especially when leaving from Tauranga. I typically go direct to the skyfield on the first day, and direct home on the last day, hard to do that via PT, you would have to pay for more nights accom, miss more time from work and uni etc.
“If you want to maximize your snow time driving is the only option,”
That’s what i love about many of the french fields. If you want to maximise your snow time you take the train.
Friday after work head to the champagne bar at London St Pancras for a bit of ‘avant de ski’, then an overnight train to the Alps.
If you don’t mind taking a little longer and changing in Paris then there is even the proper sleeper train with onboard disco carriage http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/winter_sports/article5719910.ece
You arrive in the mountains approx 6:30am and depending the field you are heading to, either you are there already, or take a public or private shuttle bus to your accommodation. Plenty of time to pick up passes, rental gear, and breakfast before the lifts open.
Plus you are staying on the mountain, so you don’t need any transport while you are there, just walk or ski to the lifts and bars.
Dept Sat evening and arrive back in london Sunday morning. 8days skiing for a week trip, vs 6 days if you fly or drive.
I have often wondered whether a Friday evening train (leaving at say 6pm) down to National Park in the winter months would be worth running. You could really sell it as the special “snow train” – could be popular.
I think they used to do, it could be popular but only if it was faster as based on the current timetable of the Overlander it would take about 6.5 hours to Ohakune.
Make it run even slower, so it takes 8 hours, and make the carriages sleepers. Then you save on a nights accommodation.
That sounds pretty sweet actually.
Auckland to National Park by train is 5.5 hours each way and the return ticket will set you back upwards of $220. A train leaving Auckland at 6pm will see you checking in to your accommodation around midnight. Hardly enough time to drink a dozen beers, sleep, and be up at 7am to catch an early shuttle up the mountain.
Whereas if you knock off work early and get a good run driving south, you’ll be settling in for an evening of drinking about 8pm and the tank of petrol will cost you about $50. Which is even more of a bargain if you take a couple of friends in your car.
There is no way that rail travel around NZ will ever be an attractive proposition for anyone other than the wealthy elderly demographic who feel nostalgic for trains and perceive it to be a luxury product. That’s true for Australia as well… you want to see typical Ghan travelers! For the rest of us the choices are driving, flying, or taking a coach.
Well one thing with taking a train is you can drink a dozen beers and sleep on your way down…
I take it you haven’t been on a long distance train in NZ then? I did a whole tour of the country back in January and it was mostly backpackers and families on board. It was a very attractive proposition,
With the $379 scenic rail pass my girlfriend and I went Auckland to National Park for a night, National Park to Wellington for two nights, got the ferry from Wellington to Picton (included in the pass), back on the train to Kaikoura for two nights, then onward to Christchurch for two nights, then across the alps to Greymouth. From there we took coaches to Franz Josef, Wanaka, Queenstown and Milford Sound.
It was amazing scenery, cheap and nice not to drive for hours at a stretch (I’m a huge guy and don’t fit in cars very well). My only gripe is they’d closed the lines to Rotorua, Tauranga, Dunedin and Invacargill already!
That is based on the current speed our trains run at. If you could get the time down to 4-4.5 hours I could see it being quite popular as you could have a beer and meal onboard, something you can’t do if driving. Of course the pricing would have to be good as well.
isn’t a lot of that $750 million going into smoothing out curves so that trains can run faster on the main trunk?
ahh… hard proof of induced demand on our own doorstep perhaps. $220 million=slower trips, more congestion…compare that to $10 million (Onehunga line)= faster trips, less congestion.
Every day right now I read something which leads me to believe that the major shift in transport thinking among the public is even bigger and moving faster than I thought
I’d object to widening the motorway south of the SH20/1 merge on the basis that it is outside the original scope of “completing the motorway network” that the original project was part of. It’s finished. That’s it.
“If you want to maximize your snow time driving is the only option,”
That’s what i love about many of the french fields. If you want to maximise your snow time you take the train.
Friday after work head to the champagne bar at London St Pancras for a bit of ‘avant de ski’, then an overnight train to the Alps.
If you don’t mind taking a little longer and changing in Paris then there is even the proper sleeper train with onboard disco carriage http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/winter_sports/article5719910.ece
You arrive in the mountains approx 6:30am and depending the field you are heading to, either you are there already, or take a public or private shuttle bus to your accommodation. Plenty of time to pick up passes, rental gear, and breakfast before the lifts open.
Plus you are staying on the mountain, so you don’t need any transport while you are there, just walk or ski to the lifts and bars.
Dept Sat evening and arrive back in london Sunday morning. 8days skiing for a week trip, vs 6 days if you fly or drive.
It took me an hour to get from Khyber pass to past this new on ramp last Friday when I got on the motorway at 3pm. I know nothing about the arcane subtleties of traffic planning and management, but surely common sense should have told them that the new link was going to cause a massive bottleneck.
ALARM! PANIC! A new transport EMERGENCY. A fresh outbreak of congestion has been reported in south Auckland, with thousands suffering from their journeys taking a bit longer. Officials initially failed to appreciate the seriousness of the risk despite the clear presence of risk factors (two big motorways crashing into each other). However, better late than never, NZTA is considering sending out its crack team of emergency road-builders to provide relief of the symptoms.
If Auckland’s transport system is chonically ill, with boils (congestion) popping up all over the place, you either treat the symptoms (“fix” comgestion) or try to prevent the original illness.
SH1 in south Manukau does NOT need widening. Be warned that a bunch of consultants will start telling NZTA that it DOES. Well, they would wouldn’t they! It’s big money. If you agree, be vigilant and be prepared to block any bandwagons which may appear over the horizon.
A bit of an immature headline. Building motorways does not only shift congestion, they can remove them. What other motorway building in Auckland has shifted congestion lately? Manukau Harbour Crossing? Mt Roskill Extension? Grafton Gully? Upper Harbour Motorway? Did the Christchurch Northern Motorway shift congestion?
So without the hyperbole the simple story is that the then Transit NZ screwed up by not including the SH1 widening in the project in the first place. Merges always create those problems, so yes there does need to be extra lanes for a distance to allow for weaving to be undertaken efficiently. It isn’t a reason to bring out the inane “you always need to build more motorways” cliche, it is rather basic traffic engineering. What has happened is that the modelling wasn’t done properly to incorporate the southern widening into the project.
So this does need an engineering solution. However, as I never tire in pointing out it ultimately needs a pricing solution.
This is no proof of induced demand, it simply means traffic flows are now uninterrupted and has shifted from the route it replaced (and from the SH16/SH1 route via the CMJ). Particularly given there is unlikely to be any mode shift to the car (when there isn’t a reasonable alternative PT service for many people doing the dispersed trips that will use SH20). People don’t drive just because there is a new road, but they will over the longer term make decisions on where they can work and live that reflecting the generalised costs of travel (and a new road always expands those options). The key issue is ensuring that they are always exposed to the marginal costs of their decisions, which means with distance based road pricing urban sprawl gets priced efficiently, and with charging varying by time of day congestion gets priced off the network.
The point is that you widen this bit of motorway and you only shift the bottleneck south slightly, so then you need to widen a bit more, then a bit more and so on….
A classic example is the Northwest Motorway. I remember it used to go down from 6 lanes to 4 lanes underneath St Lukes Road. Then that got widened to 6 lanes out to Te Atatu, then the St Lukes to City bit went to 8 lanes, then 9 lanes. At peak times the motorway is still congested.
Now NZTA proposed to have the causeway at 9 lanes and much of the rest of the motorway at 8 lanes – even though their own traffic modelling suggests that in a few years time it will be just as congested as it is now. Where’s the congestion solution there?
People do just drive because there is a new road Liberty… The travel time savings induce them to do so, they take a trip they otherwise wouldn’t have – because it is faster – and the economic value of these new trips is usually highly questionable, the time savings degrade over time as more and more people choose to do so and eventually you end up with more road space just as clogged as before…
As you say pricing could discourage these often low value trips…
Jeremy, the same can be said of public transport. Yes, “it is cheaper to do this trip than before” increases demand. I’d like the same lack of enthusiasm for generating demand for subsidised trips on public transport as there is for growth in private car traffic.
However the simplicity that “things go back to where they were before” is wrong. Most of the time the roads being discussed flow freely, so there is utility gained from the majority of users who use them at those times, and even when congested there is utility for those using it that wouldn’t otherwise exist. The problem is price, and whilst there continue to be rather banal arguments about roads when they are so badly priced at peak times, this is what will happen.
The same happens with public transport, it is underpriced at peak times (resulting in people standing and massive overdemand) and overpriced offpeak (with much of the capital lying idle). Once roads are properly priced, public transport can be as well.
The difference is that up to a point higher PT use, especially on rail, improves the way the system works – as frequencies are bumped up. On the road system, the more cars you have the worse the system works.
And how do you factor in the benefits that accrue to private transport users from public transport users at peak time? NZTA estimates that each peak-time rail passenger gives a benefit of $17 to private road users, and buses also provide benefits to car users by removing cars from the road.
You want public transport to be priced based on demand, but will you offer refunds to the passengers for the utility benefits they’re giving to users of private transport?
I am absolutely staggered that these highway building clowns are now saying
1) oh, its just happened earlier than we thought (thats an explanation!?)
2) We’ll put lights in so its all ok.
You have got to be kidding! If they have now woken up to the fact that anything more than 1 lane might struggle to merge onto a critical section of motorway, there needs to be a serious flaming inquisition. How much public money have they wasted creating two lanes from SH20 needing wider bridges, bigger trenches, retaining extra dirt along the merging lanes… all simply so they can now spend more money on TRAFFIC LIGHTS!?
Beyond ridiculous. I look forward to hearing about the consultants getting sued and the NZTA planners getting relocated to Gore.