I went to see Australian transport academic Paul Mees talk on Friday night about transport policy issues, in particular focusing on debunking the various arguments used against Auckland having a better public transport system. He was in Auckland after giving a presentation in Wellington at the Smart Transport conference that I discussed in this post. With the huge interest in transport matters in Auckland in particular, his visit has generated quite a bit of media activity. Including this article in today’s Herald:
Auckland has been lambasted by an Australian transport expert as one of the world’s most “car-biased” cities.
Paul Mees, who for 10 years has portrayed Auckland to his students at Melbourne universities as having worst-practice transport systems, said the city would rank top of a world league table for motorways.
“But if you compare its public transport with the best in the world, it’s right down the bottom, even with the improvements that have already happened,” he said from Wellington, where he spoke to a conference sponsored by the Labour and Green Parties.
“The area which should have priority for improvement is where there is the biggest gap between the current situation and global leaders.”
I’ve read both of Paul Mees’s books over the past few years: A Very Public Solution and Transport for Suburbia. Transport for Suburbia in particular gives a really detailed assessment of Auckland’s transport history – which I have touched upon in various previous posts. The key point to note from Auckland’s transport history is how our car dependency was very much a policy decision, not a natural outcome.
“For half a century Auckland has pursued the most car-based transport policy of just about any city in the developed world, so it would be amazing if the car didn’t dominate the travel patterns of Aucklanders,” he said.
“But if you asked Aucklanders if they are happy that they have to drive everywhere as public transport is not really an option, they will tell you they are not happy.”
He said most people in his “pin-up” Swiss city of Zurich once travelled to work by car, but they now had superior public transport.
“The question is not what people are doing when they haven’t really got a choice – the evidence is that the very modest public transport upgradings that have happened already in Auckland have been flooded by passengers.”
At Friday’s talk Mees said that if the only thing you ever do as a Government is simply provide for existing patterns, no matter whether they’re desirable or not, then really what’s the point of bothering with being involved in politics? I thought this was a pretty good point.
The Herald article has an amusing end to it though:
The National Road Carriers have, meanwhile, greeted Friday’s Waterview announcement with a call for other projects such as an east-west corridor between East Tamaki and Onehunga to be accelerated.
“Waterview’s completion cannot come fast enough, but other critical road projects also need to be moved along as fast, if not faster,” said executive director David Aitken.
He said completing the western ring route, in which Waterview will be the final link, would see far more freight travelling on local roads between the Southern Motorway at Mt Wellington and State Highway 20 at Onehunga.
I see already that plenty of different organisations are becoming terrified of the prospect of the Waterview Connection being seen as the completion of the motorway network. Sigh.
Processing...
I see already that plenty of different organisations are becoming terrified of the prospect of the Waterview Connection being seen as the completion of the motorway network. Sigh.
That they’re calling for something publicly is a sign that they’re not as strong as they would like – if they had total power they wouldn’t need to make public statements. The debate has shifted significantly in the last 5 years. Public transport certainly hasn’t won, but it’s getting more powerful in this discursive environment.
But Paul Mees is *wrong*. Stephen Joyce says so.
But Jennifer, Steven Joyce is generally wrong about everything else, particularly matters of statistical accuracy, so it’s more than likely that he’s also wrong about Paul Mees being *wrong*.
Chris i think you may have missed the ironic tone of Jennifer’s *wrong*
And of course the fact that 85% of trips are by car shows that we have over invested in this mode…
Patrick, don’t worry; I’ve a fairly developed sense of irony. It’s just that I tend to loose it in respect of the Hon Steven Joyce and his horribly damaging and expensive antics.
CT, I know how you feel. I do think that although he doesn’t know it the pressure against his blinkered world view is growing irresistibly…
While I absolutely agree that Akl needs more PT and that PT is the way to go in the future, I have to admit that the very low off peak car traffic and the generally good motorway system makes it very easy to go around by car, probably one of the best cities in the world for that.
If like me you don’t work normal office hours and you can avoid the rush hour, it’s very easy to move around by car, hard to deny that.
I only take the bus because I know it’s the right thing to do to save the whales and the gannets, but economically it would make more sense to take the car.
I agree Gian, but at such an enormous cost to the quality of the city itself, such a diversion of resources and especially land. In order to improve Auckland’s viability and livability it really is vital that we reduce this dependance and build real alternatives to car trips to every destination on every occasion.
Of course maintaining the road resource that is already there but it’s just that there is an urgent need to divert the planned pointless further extension of motorways into alternatives.
Don’t forget that the more roads we build, the more that must be spent on maintenance. That’s not necessarily a good thing.
couldn’t agree more. Here’s a radical thought – perhaps the introduction of high speed broadband across the country might start to encorage corporations to abandon their expensive CBD head offices in favour of smaller satellite offices closer to where people live. People could work from home or local satellite offices on a deliverable rather than a time basis. Local video conferences with virtual teams based anywhere. Then we might start to see the need for trunk roads to the city centre(s) diminish and the city can be given back to the people. Technology has been a radical disruptor of more than one long held way of living and working – perhaps its time that we employed technology to remove the need for people to travel into the city for work. Then we can remove the need for high speed motorways and focus on local roads and local PT.
I think your example just shows how much effort we have invested in our roading system at the expense of all other forms of transport. Cars are useful and I don’t think we should be demonising them but rather the issue is the lack of viable alternatives that mean for many trips driving is the only viable option.
I think we can safely say that if over the next few decades we were to start putting some focus on many of the suggestions mentioned on this blog then our PT system would be considerably better and much more able to compete with that off peak car trip. At that point we would have a pretty awesome transport system with decent road and PT networks allowing us to get around the city easily.
As an example of how poor our admittedly much-improved public transport offerings are, consider this: I need to get to and from Main Highway, Ellerslie, to St Georges Bay Rd, Parnell. Later, I need to get to the CBD. From there, I need to get back to Newmarket, then back home. Since I expect to be leaving Newmarket around 5, there’s no way I’m driving for that bit. But getting from here to Parnell by public transport is an awful experience. Lots of connections, lots of cost. So I won’t. I’ll drive to and from Parnell, then use a train to get back to the CBD and a bus to get from the CBD to Newmarket. It’s still going to cost me over $6 to do so, what with our non-integrated tickets and all, and were I not leaving Newmarket right on peak hour I would probably drive the entire thing. I only need 30 minutes of parking in the CBD.
Until we have properly integrated fares, with time-based transfers, public transport for anything that’s not point-to-point will struggle. I want to use public transport for this trip, but I don’t have a spare half-hour to waste around the Newmarket/Parnell transfer issue when there’s also a significant cost penalty involved.
I have loaded the app for Auckland buses on to my new phone (thanks Andrew for your direction).
Looking up bus stop 8115 which is on the main thoroughfare of Great North Rd used by most of the main operators, at the top of Chinamans Hill.
At latest interrogation I get the following really useful information:
163 BRITOMART Now; 080 BRITOMART 2 min; 135 BRITOMART 25 MIN; 049 BRITOMART 26 min; 090 BRITOMART 27 min; 154 BRITOMART 37 min; 087 BRITOMART 46 min; 113 BRITOMART 51 MIN; 163 BRITOMART 62 mins.
Get the drift – if this choice of service weren’t so abysmally useless it would be comical.
Thanks Patrick – of course we know who’s actually wrong, and in fact I spelt Steven Joyce’s name wrong…
Paul Mees noted in his address on Friday that one of the drivers to converting people to PT is not a congestion charge, but congestion per se. Showed a slide of Strassbourg with banked up traffic and a free PT lane. It’s a pretty bad admission I know but there are 3 adults living in my house in Grey Lynn, and each morning 3 cars drive out. Outrageous really but the fact is, car is significantly quicker than PT because road lanes are there and PT lanes aren’t. I would take the bus except that the outward bound services are so unreliable, anything from 6 to 14 minutes late arriving at the inner city boarding stop. I will be interested to see if the 020 service is any quicker but I suspect looking at the route, it will be even slower.
Paul was interviewed on Radio NZ on Friday. He’s pretty blunt in his assessment that Auckland is in dire need of a change of transport direction. More lane-kilometres of motorway per capita than pretty much anywhere else in the world, lower levels of off-peak public transport use than Los freaking Angeles, and congestion and pollution levels normally associated with several times the population.
The concept of lane-kilometres is interesting and one I haven’t heard mentioned before. Paul Mees noted that Auckland has more than Melbourne but without stating actual figures. Does anyone know where we can find out more about this? Is there a list or table available for various cities?
I just emailed Mees to ask for the numbers but he said that they are out of date now [so many new lane ks in auckland recently] that he would want to update them before publishing them again….
Does NZTA make this calculation?
Let’s hope so George. Even the Herald seems to have taken a more friendly line towards public transport in recent times.
The suggested link road already exists. Apart from the section from Onehunga Mall to SH20 there is one of the widest roads in Auckland. Surely we don’t need a motorway here? The recent times I’ve been out this way the traffic around the bottom Onehunga Mall is terrible and from there it’s light. Surely fix the issues in this area (which seem to relate to endless roadworks) and then do nothing more.