Guest Post: Alternative Auckland? Notes on Perth

This is a Guest Post by transport expert Chris Harris.

Earlier this November, I paid a visit to the roughly Auckland-sized Australian cities of Perth and Brisbane. This blog entry records my impressions of Perth, which of all cities is perhaps the closest to an “Alternative Auckland,” for the following reasons:

• Perth’s urban area extends north-south for roughly 100km, between coastline and coastal ranges. Much narrower in east-west direction. (cf layout of Auckland between Silverdale and Pukekohe).
• Perth has a large lake just to the south of the CBD, limiting CBD freeway (motorway) access from the south to three lanes each way on a narrow bridge and causeway (cf SH 1 Mount Wellington)
• Perth’s CBD is surrounded by ring of motorways (cf Auckland’s ‘Spaghetti Junction’)

All three of these features are visible in the following panorama, in which the hills can just be seen in the background. The large building in the centre which is being worked on by cranes is close to the new Perth Underground Railway Station. Directly underneath it can be glimpsed the entrance of the railway tunnel. A closer view of the CBD lakeshore follows the panorama:

Thirty years ago Perth and Auckland were even more similar. However, since then, and for political reasons, their fortunes have diverged. One of the biggest differences is that Perth has invested in rapid rail and general railway electrification, whereas Auckland has not. The longer, north-south routes in Perth are served by electric rapid rail with wide stop spacing and 130 km/h inter-stop speeds. For much of their length, these lines are located in the former grass motorway medians for safety and for a minimum of interference with other train services. East-west routes are served by slower suburban electric railways with longstanding, closely-spaced stops, much like Auckland’s Western Line.

A photograph taken out the window of a fast train follows, overtaking traffic on the Kwinana Freeway, the equivalent of Auckland’s Southern Motorway. This is followed by a photo of a suburban station (Subiaco) on a slower east-west line, and a completely segregated on-road cycleway that leads to the Subiaco station. A cyclist is just visible in that wide-angle panorama view, between the two hedges that define the cycleway.

Subiaco station has a lot in common with the recent New Lynn undergrounding, since it too was originally on the surface and a barrier to traffic. Development in the area shot ahead after the Subiaco station was placed underground.

The ‘alternative Auckland’ parallels are heightened by the fact that Perth’s railway gauge is the same as New Zealand (1067mm) and Auckland uses ex-Perth Diesel railcars, supplied to Auckland when Perth electrified its railways in the early 1990s .

Perth’s bus services are tightly coordinated with rail and form a rationalised grid pattern (unlike Auckland). Frequencies are high by Auckland standards. New buses must also meet the highest clean air standards, either natural gas or EEV Diesel (beyond Euro 5). Save in one remote suburban town, black puffs of smoke from buses were not seen.

Another photograph shows mid-day rail frequencies at Perth Central station, 1:47 pm on a weekday. Mandurah and Cockburn are on the same line:

Public transport is controlled by the West Australian Public Transport Authority (PTA), which is accountable to the Director-General of transport but otherwise enjoys a high degree of autonomy and administrative seniority, see chart. The PTA controls everything to do with all aspects of public transport in Perth and in the regions, up to and including the construction of new passenger railways. The PTA owns all the buses in Perth and private contractors only drive the buses, along routes designed by the PTA.

• In particular, this structure puts the PTA on the same footing as Main Roads WA , avoiding the situation common elsewhere in which public transport plays second fiddle to road engineering. Less obviously, the PTA is also independent of the freight railway system. Experience elsewhere shows that if a single railway authority is given the job of both freight and passengers under present-day conditions, there is a danger that management will focus on more profitable freight services and neglect passenger services.
• The PTA has an enviable reputation for getting things done on time and on budget, due to its extensive powers, long-term career structures, and state backing. In this respect it matches the professionalism of a typical main roads authority or freight railway authority, but without being under the thumb of either. A senior official advised me that integrated ticketing cost Perth only A$35 million to implement. The southern leg of Perth’s rapid rail line, including underground works in the CBD, was built for well under A$2 billion.

Another important difference to Auckland is that a significant part of the Perth equivalent of Spaghetti Junction has been covered over with a concrete lid and developed above. This has mainly occurred in a cafe district known as Northbridge, the local equivalent of Parnell.

The following photo shows a park reconstructed over the top of the freeways in Northbridge. The trees to the left show the area that was not disturbed, the park area to the right is on a concrete platform over the freeway. In the background are some three-to-four storey flats built over the freeway as well.

The next photo shows a public building being erected in the same area, again above the hidden freeway:

High rise development has taken place in the CBD proper over the new Perth Underground Station, roughly analogous to the proposed Aotea Station on Auckland’s proposed CBD loop.

There is extensive public-sector land redevelopment via authorities such as Landcorp and EPRA . This includes the development of airspace over motorways and railways which have been given the cut-and-cover treatment.

There is no formal (‘hypothecated’) financial link between public sector land development and the costs of the transport system, in the sense of actually earmarking the profits of land development near new railway stations and air rights over tunnels to the works that make the developments possible, but the WA government may be about to make the link more robust.

Another interesting difference is that far more historical buildings have survived in downtown Perth than in Auckland, and this is also true of sub-centres like Fremantle and Subiaco. Old buildings have been vigorously protected since at least the mid-1990s.

As the following photos show, this preservation of the past gives Perth a character which is in many ways more like Dunedin or Christchurch (or even London) than Auckland, once you are out of the actual financial district.

To rub salt in the wound of Perth’s successes as an alternative Auckland, one of the buildings saved from the wrecking ball in Perth was the iconic His Majesty’s Theatre. The ‘Maj’ was bought by the West Australian state government in 1977 and placed on the register of the National Estate.

Those parts of Perth’s ‘Spaghetti Junction’ which have not been covered over have either bridges or underpasses, which can be used by pedestrians, every couple of hundred metres. The underpasses are standard road width with car lanes in the middle, not the narrow and spooky kind. In general the Perth Spaghetti Junction is not the barrier to pedestrian movement that Auckland’s is.

The following photograph shows part of Perth’s ‘Spaghetti Junction’ with typical spacing of overbridges / underpasses and a cycle path to the left.

To continue, the downtown area is widely pedestrianised, and much of this is on two levels, with overhead arcades and pedestrianised rooftops in addition to pedestrianisation at street level. Perth’s multilevel pedestrianisation is strikingly similar to British expert Sir Colin Buchanan’s 1966 recommendations for the Auckland CBD, which were ignored at the time, probably because they seemed impossibly radical.

Three panorama images of multilevel pedestrianisation follow. These wide angle views often look a bit empty because people tend to congregate round the edges, especially in bad weather, when these pictures were taken:

The following image, in the same general area, shows a pedestrian bridge leading to the main Perth railway station. Cranes signifying high rise development in the area of the new Perth Underground Railway station are visible a few blocks further back. The area in the foreground is the rooftop of a carparking building, also visible in the last panorama. 
According to a newly-published history of transport in Australia, these differences reflect some thirty years of commitment to public transport excellence, following the political collapse of a state Liberal party opposed to a growing campaign for rail revival in Perth:

Perth’s suburban trains faced the possibility of total closure as the then Liberal state government was unremittingly hostile to passenger train operations. It got what it deserved at the next election and community pressure saw a revival of trains between Perth and Fremantle in 1983 with a promise of electrification…. The impact was immediate and brilliant, so much so that an entirely new railway was built to the northern suburbs, the first section to Joondalup opening in December [1992]…. Even more stunning though was the construction of the 82-kilometre Perth to Mandurah line, which included an underground section and station beneath the city… Built in four years by contractors Leighton Holdings for the extremely reasonable price of about $1.6 billion, it opened in December 2007. Within three months patronage had reached 80 percent of targets with about 40 000 passengers a day, up from the 16 000 a day who had used buses operating on the route previously. (Robert Lee, Transport: An Australian History, 2010, p. 333)

All in all it looks like Auckland is, politically, where Perth was some 30 years ago, and National might do well to ponder the wisdom of a politics that seems to revolve around frustrating Aucklanders’ wish to live in a more progressive city. The excuse that “we are not as wealthy” or that “we don’t have the mining money” seems all the more reason not to waste what money we have on roads to nowhere.

The lessons of Perth are not as well known as they should be in Auckland, because of the two cities’ mutual remoteness. It’s been said that more Sydneysiders have been to Paris than to Perth, and that must surely be even more true of the inhabitants of Auckland. Still, it is useful to know of the existence of this distant mirror, which is after all not really that distant to visit, once you have a reason to go there.

All photographs taken by the author, November 2010.

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