AT have released their 6 monthly report to 31 December 2012 and it highlights just how biased our transport spending is, even in a city where the majority of our elected officials are supposedly PT friendly. Here is their press release about the report:
Auckland Transport has today released its half year report for the six months to 31 December 2012.
The report shows Auckland Transport has invested a further $278 million in Auckland’s infrastructure, the vast majority $188 million was spent on roads while $39 million went towards public transport.
Auckland Transport chairman Lester Levy says it’s been a busy period. “Upgrade work continues on the rail network ahead of electrification, the new electric trains are on the production line in Spain and our biggest-ever transport project is being built in Auckland’s east.”
The $1.5 billion AMETI project is Auckland Transport’s largest construction initiative. It unlocks the potential for 40,000 new jobs once key transport links are improved. AMETI also includes improvements to public transport, walking and cycling facilities and will give residents greater transport choices.
At this stage much of the work is centred around Panmure where a new traffic bridge has been built and work is well underway on an integrated transport centre.
In another big project, Kiwirail has completed much of the work around electrification. Dr Levy says “Improvements are well underway on the rail network. We are counting down to the arrival of the first electric trains.”
Electric wires can now be seen around much of the Auckland rail network. The depot to house and maintain the new electric trains is under construction at Wiri and is due to open in July. The first electric train will arrive in Auckland in September for testing.
Work continues on planning for the City Rail Link (CRL). The “City Centre Future Access Study” released in late 2012 concluded that the CRL is necessary to meet future demand for travel in the city centre. Work is progressing on the CRL with Auckland Council publicly notifying the Notices of Requirement for the project.
And the AT HOP card was launched in October. Auckland Transport is in the process of working its way through the implementation – AT HOP is now available on trains and ferries and will be introduced on buses later this year.
Other highlights for the December 2012 half-year include:
Work continuing on upgrading Auckland’s rail stations
Significant progress on revitalisation of New Lynn with new shared spaces and a transit-orientated development
35 new schools join the School Travel Plan initiative
4,235 people receive cycle safety training
1,488 new registrations for “Let’s Carpool”
And here is the report itself.
After quickly having a look through the report, in some AT is actually not fully reporting things in their press release. On top of the $39 million in PT capital expenditure is an additional $45 million that was spent on our new electric trains. However no matter which way you look at it, AT still spent more than 2/3rds of all capital expenditure went to roads as shown in this table from the report.
Its also woth noting that this spending also ignores money was spent by the NZTA on motorways as well as Kiwirail on electrification. The big problem I have is that without fixing up the massive imbalance in our transport spending, we are going to continue to struggle to see transformational change in how we get around this city.
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Bit of a shocker really considering almost all councillors, even many of the right wing ones, were elected on PT platforms. For the vast majority of money to continue to be spent on roads with a rather pathetic amount spent on PT is really just a case of business as usual.
I like how nearly all their pictures are of PT, buses, train, bus/train stations, etc, or people on bikes, and yet almost none of the money was spent on this. If this isn’t PT-washing this document I don’t know what is.
Yeah NZTA must have spent there entire comms budget on shots of cyclists while spending 99.9999% of their capex on new State Highways….
Really strange for Auckland Transport to be boasting about spending the bulk of their budget on roads when the Mayor supposedly wants public transport to be the priority.
‘Business As Usual’ has a lot of momentum. Time for AT to show that they are looking at transport problems without already having chosen the solution.
Expanding the road space has never worked anywhere in the world to improve access in a city suffering from car congestion. Doubling down on the auto-depenancy subsidy cannot improve a problem born of there being too many cars on our roads at once.
AT is essentially run by traffic engineers and motor vehicles are what they consider to be the most efficient form of personal transportation in this city. These are the people who determine strategies and implement them; they’re not terribly interested in PT because in their view that’s a sub-optimal form of transport employed by lower income groups. So, until our local body politicians finally bite the bullet, grasp the nettle or whatever, these are the guys who will be allocating the budgets and determining what’s spent and where. It helps them that their interests coincide with the present government’s, ie more roads, more cars and faster. Tragic, but that’s what you get when you have a form of governance determined by right wing politicians.
I don’t know why you brand all engineers as people who love cars & hate PT. I’m an engineer myself & I believe more money needs to be spent on PT & that there are some road projects that are unnecessary.
In the same vein that there are people who believe that those who support PT hate cars. It’s just a generalisation although, in my limited contact with AT engineers recently, the car gets full preference over bikes and pedestrians. Try suggesting a ‘road diet’, even when there is proof the single lanes would cope, and out come the excuses.
To be fair he did specifically say traffic engineers, not engineers in general. Presumably traffic engineers are very pro traffic based solutions!
Most engineers I’ve spoken to share this anti-PT view and were quite shocked at my suggestion that roadspace cold be dedicated to anything else such as a cycle lane – but who’s going to pay for it were their cries?!?
Those “traffic engineers” just had their annual conference down in Dunedin. Interestingly it seemed that a good proportion of the papers were explicitly about PT/walk/cycle/TDM and in many others it was part of the issue being investigated & discussed. See http://conf.hardingconsultants.co.nz/ipenztg2013/programme/ and scroll down to see a list of the papers. Quite a lot from Akld, and quite a lot of those were not just focused on how to get cars faster from A to B…
Yes thats a bit of a discriminatory sentiment. Although I agree that it indeed applies to some engineers the overall balances would be no different to the general population.
You may even find traffic engineers are more pro PT. They are not the ones who make the decisions however, they only advise the decision makers who are generally more of and accountant or business management background.
Most of the road expense is “fixing” the crap roads AT have inherited from the councils. These have been mostly haphazardly developed over the last 100 years, with little thought to future technology, and population and commercial activity. We will need good roads regardless of the best PT plans we may have, so let them get fixed
Huh? Not sure what you mean by this? So all transport funding should be spent redoing all the roads in Auckland because they’re ‘crap’?
No that’s not the case at all Pete, the maintenance budget was not increased and there was a slight increase for roading improvements. However pt cap ex has declined. The belief that we need to respond to growth and increasing congestion by fixing bottle necks is a predominant one. City councillors may have good intentions but the continue to succumb to the exaggerated demand responsive aspirations of their so called strategic planners and engineers. It is only when they start to realise that in order to make transformational change we need to transform the investment balance by reducing considerably on
New roading capacity and increasing investment in desired modes. There is a real opportunity in the green fields areas to try and implement a new approach.
On the other hand, AT seems to love repairing roads which don’t need repairing – for example, throwing rocks on a beautifully smooth piece of tarmac and calling it a day. Or ten weeks.
Be interested to know how much is spent “fixing” the roads, how much is maintaining them and how much is enhancement.
If you scroll down to the bottom of the report, there’s more detail than you’ll ever need about what they spent the money on.
About $90m in road renewals, and $98m in new roading, of which nearly half is AMETI.
Oh, and of the $39m spent in 6 months on PT capital expenditure, $10m was for the CRL. Yet the CRL budget for the whole year is $110m, so I guess they want to start doing some serious property acquisition in the next few months.
Roads includes footpaths, which account for about $15m of that road renewals figure.
I wonder exactly how AMETI “unlocks the potential for 40,000 new jobs once key transport links are improved”.
Smells similar to the 130,000 jobs Key keeps threatening to create.
Someday…
Actually it’s not called AMETI any more. The new name is AMELDI for the Auckland Manukau Eastern Land Development Inicative.
So as part of that I can see quite a few new jobs being created through all the new housing construction.
EMU is not Electric Motor Unit, , it is Electric Multiple Unit , sigh, I would have though AT would know better
Did you know that about 90% of PT trips occur on a road? Did you also know that 100% of properties in Auckland require road access? Did you also know that 100% of local roads are owned and operated by the council?
Looking at that table I’m rather impressed they managed to spend 30% of the budget on PT.
Actually in Auckland it’s only 76% on road if you measure bus boardings, 15.6% are on rails and 7.4% on the water. That figure counts the busway as a road which is debatable. If you measure passenger-km it is even less by road, as longer trips tend to be taken by rail and a lesser extent ferry (i.e. the Waiheke route).
It might pay to note that the table above is capital expenditure, not operating expenditure. So that makes the existing level of road use by PT or any other mode mostly irrelevant to the discussion, as maintenance isn’t covered by capex.
Also not technically true that 100% of properties requiring road access, there are a small number of coastal and island properties that do not have road access.
Nearly half of the roading capital spend in that chart is for maintenance, since they count resurfacing, replacing bridges etc. as capex.
Yes sorry about that. I should have said that 100% of PT trips require a road even if only 76% use roads for the total length.
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