Herald columnist Brian Rudman has also picked up on the growing tensions between Auckland Council’s and central government’s, vision for how Auckland should grow and develop over the next 20-30 years.
Auckland’s future, as outlined in the papers issued by Local Government Minister Rodney Hide, is a rather different vision to that envisaged by the mayor.
He talks of a future that integrates social and economic prosperity with the recreational and cultural wellbeing of Aucklanders. The Government’s emphasis seems to be on economic prosperity alone. It also wants to muscle into the planning of the region in a way not seen before.
Noting how urban form has a significant influence on achieving government objectives in the areas of housing affordability and choice, transport, economic development and environmental outcomes, the report writers say the creation of the spatial plan is a good time for the Government to abandon its usual backseat role.
There’s a strange conflict between the way in which the government has created an enormously powerful Auckland Council, yet at the same time seems to be trying to get greater central government control over land-use planning and transport policy in Auckland than ever before. Rudman continues:
What the report is proposing though, will not come as “positive” in the eyes of many Aucklanders.
What is being proposed as a new start reads very much like old policies Aucklanders have tried and rejected.
The authors criticise the existing regional growth strategy, and in particular the metropolitan urban limits and other planning regulations, suggesting they weren’t working because, among other things, developers and property owners didn’t like being constrained. Which, one would have thought, was a sign the rules were working.
What is proposed is “a more realistic approach to regulation (zoning and district plan rules) … that would encourage appropriate development rather than tell people where to locate”.
What annoys me about this “vision” for Auckland is that it is basically a rehash of what we’ve been doing for the past 50-60 years and are now realising hasn’t worked out that well. This is particularly true when it comes to transport matters:
The business-centric emphasis is at its most obvious in the Transport Trends document which opens with the bare admission that “the Government’s top priority for transport is to maximise the sector’s contribution to economic growth and productivity”. It wants more roads, and more capacity on existing roads. And when trucks are being held up, the rest of us should get out of the way.
“The performance of the motorway and arterial network is critical to effective freight distribution. Freight movements should have priority in key freight corridors.”
Without denying the importance of economic growth, a transport system designed to put trucks first is hardly the stuff of Mayor Brown’s “world’s most liveable city” dream.
The paper also calls for a “realistic” approach to transport investment.
It concludes, no surprises here, that cars will continue to be king. But more fundamentally, it gives a quick survey of the decline of public passenger transport over the past 50 years – not mentioning that was the result of a deliberate government policy to pander to the public love of cars. It then predicts, based on this record, that this pattern won’t change, so we’d better keep building roads.
We’re realising that it hasn’t worked and we’re voting for politicians who will provide a good public transport system. But for some reason that message just can’t filter through to central government and its bureaucrats.
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I really wish newspaper reports would stop referring to Auckland’s apparent dependance on motor vehicles as the ‘public’s love of cars’. One can anthropomorphicise motor vehicles till the cows come home but ‘love’ is not the right word; addiction might express the connection more accurately.
I prefer ‘arranged marriage’ to ‘love’. That sums it up quite nicely.
“Arranged marriage”? Not necessarily, when you look at what people are prepared to spend on their cars.
If it were just about an arranged marriage, people would get by on fairly basic motoring (as I did in Wellington, for years, and I only used my car when I had to). Instead, they spend an awfy lot to be mobile, more than they would have to.
I think the analogy is still apt. I wouldn’t suggest that all arranged marriages are failed or loveless, and likewise many people get a lot of value and reward out of car ownership. The point is by and large there is no choice in the matter, whether it works for them or not. Certainly there are some enthusiasts that really love their cars, but in other cases it would be simply making do with something that can’t be helped, or perhaps just not knowing any different.
There is also the chance of being in both camps. When I was younger and living in Auckland I was a member of a classic car club and spent a lot of time and effort adoring my beautiful Mini 1275GT… yet at the same time I was completely fed up with commuting on the motorway from the Shore to Glen Innes every day, and longed to go back to the relatively stress free bus commute to town that I did previously. I would suggest that a lot of real car lovers would be quite indifferent about picking up groceries or commuting to work in their pride and joy, and would probably be happy to save them for weekend cruises and long drives in the country.
…and if you think people don’t spend an awful lot on an arranged marriage you obviously haven’t seen a traditional Indian wedding! 😉
Josh – I reckon you might re-publish a key graph in Mike Lee’s brilliant piece, the Sins of the Fathers.
The graphic quite clearly shows the then tramway system on an upward growth trajectory through the early 1950s to peak at over 100 million riders.
Yet, the then National government backed the city council to destroy the tramway system and within 5 years the patronage had collapsed to around 55 million. Patronage continued to progressivley decline. We have only recently recovered patronage of the commuter network back to 58 million.
The level of that initial decline cannot be attributed to any gradual societal changes – the collapse in patronage was an act of deliberate vandalism by a National Party government who viewed roads as good, and rail based public transport networks as a socialist evil.
This religious fervour is still prevalent all these years later with the recent government attitudes to their Holiday Highway versus the CBD rail tunnel…….a case of figures being subverted to idealogy.
Looking at ChristopherT’s comment – if newspapers refer to the ‘public’s love of cars’ now, then those same newspapers also need to refer to the public’s love of tram-cars back in the 1950s before it was taken away from them.
The good thing with our current situation………
In the more questioning and transparent modern era, people like yourself have well and truly exposed a proverbial litany of lies with your considered arguments, facts and figures.
Keep it up and keep one step ahead…… This government is in a number of areas demonstrating that it views democratic processes as a road-block to be removed.
This government is like the Republicans in the US in that they say they want democracy but are in fact deeply autocratic…. it is so absurd that this ‘plan’ was released by that buffoon Hide who pretends to be fronting an individual freedom party but is trying to force things on Auckland that we do not want and voted against. Just an old fashioned ideologue and bully.
Steven (let the market decide) Joyce is the person ‘driving’ the road focus. He wields complete power and the Opposition, apart from the Greens, offer no alternative vision. The public are addicted to the car because no real alternatives are being offered.
There is almost no market based forces in any of the transport systems in NZ…
If there was they’d be no parking requirements, zoning laws or petrol taxes and all roads would be tolled and all PT and rail unsubsidied…
I’d bet we’d see a big rise in urban densities and PT use…
Oh – I should have left a link to Mike Lee’s blog site – my source of reference for that graph and another site with much of interest.
Here is the link to the ‘Sins of the Fathers – The Decline and Rise of Rail Transit in Auckland’
http://www.mikelee.co.nz/speeches-and-articles/
I had another look at Mike Lee’s paper, and what fascinated me were the statistics on per capita public transport use (chart on page 10). I have done a plot of those against urban area size and saw some fascinating patterns come out. But, some specific comments:
* Usage (note the chart) picked up rapidly after the end of the depression, and also after the end of the war, but it appears that (although Mike doesn’t supply the numbers) that per capita use was already beginning to fall, even before the trams were removed. It would certainly have fallen anyway, as Auckland motorised, even if the trams had stayed. It was observed some years ago that when people in Auckland got a car, it meant two less trips a day on public transport, two more trips a day by car – and then, additional trips which the car made possible, which were not possible on public transport.Mike’s paper would have benefitted from including data on car ownership over this period.
* Tram systems were removed from a lot of Western cities at this stage – I suspect that one main culprit was that many if not all of the systems were life-expired and were going to need a lot of money spent on them. This was certainly the case in Britain. So, while public transport demand fell very sharply after 1958, the authorities would have been more interested in the money that they saved.
* What Mike doesn’t mention is the way that successive governments, until about the mid-1980s, also did a lot to discourage car use, especially through very high sales taxes. I am old enough to remember the Australian quip that described New Zealand as the land where Morrie Minors went to die. We kept ancient cars on the road for as long as we could, because of the cost of replacing them, and this also explains why so many people rode motorcycles. When ‘Jap imports’ began arriving in the mid-eighties, a lot of these people shifted to cars – with a profoundly positive effect on our road safety statistics. The resulting and significant decrease in the real cost of motoring after 1989 explains more of the decline at that time, than the onset of bus industry deregulation.
* And because I have to mention it, why did Wellington’s public transport use numbers stand up so well? The figure for Wellington City proper is about a hundred trips per person per year, which is quite respectable, I would have thought.
Rodney Hide is putting his party in a precarious position promoting this anti-Auckland vision. I’d say the Act Party has no hope if he stays in charge. The way he is trying to exploit the city that put him in power is about as sustainable as the mining he wants to conduct in our national parks.
What mining is unsustainable..?
Sorry that should read, “What mining is sustainabe..?”
Mining sand might be at times? Mining landfills for dumped metals? Obviously Mr Hide doesn’t have any concerns exploiting land for a quick buck, even though we’ve set it aside especially to prevent this.
It would be nice if he could think before he acts, but track record of being ‘perk buster’ with snout deeply in the trough and ‘zero tolerance’ while backing his convicted colleague makes me think there is no hope… unless… he becomes the motorway and sprawl promoter that secretly builds us some public transport!
Various NZTA reports make it clear that car ownership per capita in NZ has slightly more than doubled since the 1950s. However this overstates the change per household as households were much larger in those days. A lot of the growth in car numbers since then reflects liberalisation of Japanese imports on the surface, but on a more fundamental level, it reflects the the reduction in household sizes, which means that there are two households where formerly there was one, so obvously more cars needed. Also, because of declining housing affordability, more people need to go to work and that means more commuter traffic as well. However, the fragmentation of households introduces a profound and neglected policy paradox, because one- and two-person households are attracted to apartment living and therefore more easily serviced by PT than the 1950s model of mum, dad and four kids on the quarter acre. So blindly following the trend of rising car ownership and car commuter volumes begs the question of whether we are failing to service small households with PT, when that is what we should be doing. After all, as Mike points out, they had a 50% PT mode share (mostly trams) in the days of mum, dad and the quarter acre, so we should be doing a hell of a lot better today with all our apartments, singles, elderly people and DINKS (double income no kids).
i would just like to point out that up to the 1950s, working class aucklanders did NOT generally live on a quarter-acre section in the suburbs. have you looked at older inner suburbs (herne bay, pobsonby, etc.)? the houses are crammed close together on small sections. there were lots of boarding houses. the outer suburbs did not exist, they were other towns. the older suburbs with large sections were all for RICH PEOPLE. remuera, st. heliers, etc.
That had started to change by that stage though as look at some of the housing stock built at that time, i.e. around the state houses on the ‘wrong’ side of Glendowie, Glen Innis etc.
The sections there are pretty large, but that was mostly driven by the government. Perhaps private developers decided to follow suit after seeing what the government was doing?
Chris: The Auckland region had 828,000 registered cars and motorcycles in 2010 (excluding trucks, commercials, buses etc). At the same time the population of Auckland aged fifteen or older was 1,155,100 people.
This means Auckland has three private vehicles for every four people who could legally get a drivers licence. It simply reflects a trend toward an almost completely car based transport system, where just about any adult requires access to their own car to be productive.
Interesting points. NZTA reports state that Auckland actually has more cars per capita than New Zealand as a whole which is precisely the opposite of what you would expect for a big city.
Secondly, I’m not talking about the absolute warrens of Ponsonby and Herne Bay (~1900) so much as former tramway-era and State Housing suburbs like Mt Eden, Mt Albert, Glen Eden, Mt Roskill. The old “quarter acre” included the street, i.e. gross density, so it’s a bit of an elastic concept, a bit more generous in Palmerston North for example and always less so in Auckland.
In Auckland “quarter acre” means a 600 square metre section, typical of all mid-C20 Auckland suburbs and indeed motorway-era Auckland suburbs as well like Pakuranga. A lot of these sections have since been infilled to 300 square metre section densities. Mount Eden delivered a 50%-odd PT mode share by tram in the 1950s and 50% by bus today for northbound commuters. Likewise Birkenhead/Northcote, where a bus-carpool lane in operation since 1982 delivers two thirds of commuters by bus or carpool.
What the government invests in, is what it gets. So the question is why equally dense suburbs in Pakuranga or Glenfield have close to a zero PT mode share and gridlock their local streets instead. Answer – they don’t have the bus/carpool lane and services are less frequent, a vicious circle.
I would suggest that if we put on a serious all-directions web of high frequency PT services and priorities through intersections etc as in Vancouver, which looks a lot like Auckland from the satellite, we would end up with the same PT patronage results. And I don’t think it would take long to get there either.
At the same time we would need to invest in clean air buses, we have been very slow to get rid of smoke-pissing Diesel dungas that actually have fumes in the cabin, the sort of thing that screams “loser cruiser” in marketing terms and endangers the health of riders such as women with young kids. In middle class suburbs like Browns Bay they have campaigns mobilised to get rid of buses on health grounds. So that’s another very obvious part of the problem.
The operators have Euro V clean diesel buses, but I’ve seen them blow black smoke. It’s nearly impossible to control Diesel emissions if the drivers have to put their foot down to get up a hill or away from a bus stop, and cities serious about regulating emissions, including noise, go to higher standards still, such as are offered by this Lower Hutt based company, set up in the era when CNG buses were common in NZ, which does quite a lot of work overseas: http://www.dieselgas.co.nz/ . Among other things a Diesel engine running on this technology loses the harsh note to its sound and emits a more automobile like purr.
All subtle marketing intangibles that basically didn’t seem to be anybody’s job in ARTA to follow up. In fact there was always a very great concern that to constantly go on about such issues was a form of troublemaking, a bad-mouthing of the existing system, that people in Browns Bay etc should “toughen up,” or that officials should toughen up in dealing with these local eco-freaks instead of spending all day listening to their concerns, and that was definitely the message you got in certain parts of the pre-Super City transport bureaucracy. I’m sure it’s all quite different now.