Radio live yesterday dedicated an hour to discussing transport issues and in particular transport funding and amongst others, our very own Patrick Reynolds was on to discuss some of the issues. Here is the synopsis:
Wallace Chapman dedicated an hour of his show on Sunday regarding Auckland’s traffic congestion problem. He speaks with Patrick Reynolds, blogger at transportblog.co.nz, Kim Campbell, CEO of the Employers and Manufacturers Union, Simon Lambourne, Auckland Transport Spokesperson for the AA, Stephen Selwood, Chief Executive of the New Zealand Council for Infrastructure, and Stewart Milne, Chair of the Consensus Building Group on Alternative Transport Funding.
One of the key points that Patrick makes, and one we often talk about is the need for choice. For 60 years we have focused on one mode only and are only now starting to slowly change that. That single mode focus has left the majority of people with little option but to drive to get around the city. By instead focusing on the modes that we have neglected, we will give people a realistic choice and see some dramatic changes occur.
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I’ve been using the existing PT system quite happily for the past 30 years. Where does this 60 year’s of no choice claim come from?
Huh? That question doesn’t even deserve an answer it’s quite clearly trolling.
A better question, snow flake, might be why Auckland’s public transport offerings should fall so short in amenity, value for money, extent of coverage, reliability, performance, etc when compared to other cities comparable to Auckland. Wouldn’t you agree that is a more valuable topic of conversation to mine?
Can’t say I have ever heard of anyone campaigning for such a downgrade. I actually find Auckland PT system pretty good to be honest and darn cheap as well.
With the planned upgrades it will likely be better than quite a few of the much larger international cities I’ve been to.
Dunno which cities you’ve been to, but compared to Vienna, Berlin and Paris (to name but three) Auckland’s got a long, loooooong way to go. It’s more expensive than many other cities, too, particularly given the low wages in this country.
Maybe I’m just an easy to please PT user.
Yes I would say so. Most people will only use PT if it is frequent, reliable, fast and good value for money. For most of Auckland PT has been the opposite to this.
Why do so many people take the bus each day then? It’s something like 40% of the people who work in the CBD get there by bus.
The CBD is the only area with any resonable level of service and guess what? it is used there more than anywhere else, but even that area is subject to delays and overcrowding, as well poor connection to outer areas, which suffer from particularly poor cross town connection.
So as to the rest of your unsupported claims here is Wiki:
Ak still has considerably lower in Transit and Active modeshare than comparable cities elsewhere. Including Anglophone new world cities that can be considered to have similar culture.
Patrick, you will note that when the tram lines were removed they were replaced with a more extensive bus network. You will also note that when they started to build the motorways they never closed the rail lines.
Pretty much what happened was that driving went from being extremely undesirable to a realistic alternative. It was only once that shift had happened that then rail went into disrepair.
Of course I can’t quote anything on my cell phone here.
Tremendous oversimplification, but certainly we have spent 60 years spending almost all our transport money incentivising driving. Rail was run down to a level near zero service, and had the uptake to match, it is not enough to just leave some tracks in place to say it’s still an option. Bus services have recently had investment and attention, and like rail, has increased ridership as a result. Privatisation of the bus sytem was a disaster for users, it is better now than it has been, but that still requires a lot of public money. Regardless of ownership though the replacement of trams with buses can only be seen as a vast mistake from the point of view of transit service quality and uptake. Our current modeshare is not the result of perfect choice but it does perfectly reflect where we chose to invest. What we feed grows.
Yep so we spent 50 years of either building roads or nothing. People then decided to drive to work rather than take the train and therefore little money was put into trains.
A question though.
Motorway building didn’t really get going till the 60s sort of stopped in the 80s and then PT came back in 2000.
So what is the 60 years counting?
They did close the rail network, or at least part of it. The terminus was moved from Queen St to Beach Rd in 1930, based on a design accounting for the first version of the City Rail Link with new underground stations in the CBD. Initially deferred during the way, once the motorway building picked up in the 50s the second part of the plan to build underground stations was cancelled outright, leaving us with a lame duck rail terminus outside the CBD core. That is what stopped heavy rail becoming a significant mode in Auckland (until current initiatives that is).
Meanwhile we were actually a tram city, with one of the most intensive and well used systems in the world. When the tram lines were removed so was their priority, as trams legally had right of way over all other vehicles. Buses never had such a legal priviledge, and were simply stuck in the same lanes and traffic as all vehicles. They certainly didn’t replace like with like. Trams were seen at the time as an expensive to operate obstacle to motoring, and were removed to allow everyone to drive. That was the official policy and the goal at the time, a transit system based around universal automobility, abundant roads and parking and affordable cars with cheap fuel. It worked for a short while through the late sixties and seventies until the full shift really started to bed in. Unfortunately they didn’t foresee the problems of having everyone drive for every trip and sixty years later we’re barely started to recover from that policy shift.
The Northwestern motorway first opened in 1952 and the Southern in 1953. The Harbour bridge was 1959 which included the first part of the Northern Motorway, and all three have been continually expanded ever since (albeit in stop-start fashion). The 1960s saw the start of the CMJ, completed in the 70s, with small additions in the 80s and major expansion in the 00s. The Southwest Motorway first opened in 1983, and was extended through the 90s up until today. The Upper Harbour motorway is a recent addition obviously, as are the ongoing extensions of the southwestern and northwestern.
Sixty years from the early fifties is about right.
To state the PT system is good here is just not justifiable if you look at the figures. 70 million passenger trips including all modes in one year? Other cities of the size of Auckland (Munich, Vienna, Frankfurt, etc.) have number too, within one week.
You will see that most of the actual motorway sections, back then, didn’t get built till in the 60s. The southern and western sections made in the 50s were more like sections of the waikato expressway back then, as in very far out from the city with low volumes.
snow flake, the effect of the closure of the tram lines and creation of the “more extensive bus network” can be seen very closely in the patronage figures.
They dropped like a stone with a rocket assist. And that curve below is total trips – not per person – and was while the city was growing!
http://cyclingauckland.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/transport-counts-going-back-to-1920-640×399.jpg
Which begs the question when reading this, why does the National Party in 2013 still think roads, roads and a few buses, is in any way a sensible progressive way forward for Auckland?
Thanks for the graph Max, it’s very interesting. From what it shows there was a post war PT frenzy until the harbour bridge got built.
The removal of the tram lines made some movement but even without that the post war spike seems well out of place and so you could expect quite a bit of volatility.
What I find interesting is that once the inner motorway was built PT use shot up again.
The mid 90s seemed to be some dark years. Possibly influenced by the jump in car sales a fre years before. However the car numbers seemed to have normalized on their own come 2000.
So now that we have this graph from Max. Does anyone else agree that the two biggest impacts on PT usage here in Auckland were the opening of the harbour bridge and the arrival of cheap imported cars?
I’d still say no, the absolute lions share of the decline happened between 1956 and 1959 from well over 100m trips p.a to less than 60 million trips p.a – so before the harbour bridge opened. That can almost all be put down to the removal of the trams.
That graph shows that the year the bridge opened PT usage dropped from 90 million to 60 million.
The process of removal of the tram lines saw it increase from 100 million to 105 million. After the tram lines were gone but before the bridge opened PT usage dropped from 105 to 90 which is about the time the southern motorway opened..
Snowflake – I have the data behind those graphs. The main drop in patronage occurred from before the bridge opened. That graph mixes in all modes which includes ferries which were extremely hardly hit. If you look at just Tram, Trolly Bus and Bus figures you can see that patronage across those three modes combined dropped from 92m in 1950 to 54m in 1957. From there the fall stopped for a few years before dropping away again in the 60’s till it reached 38m in 1972. I’m guessing this was from the effect of the motorways and car centric development. There then was a recovery, most likely due to the fuel crisis which saw patronage climb back the 50m mark till 1990 when it plummeted again, most likely a combination of the PT planning reforms which saw private bus companies get more say in the running of PT and the relaxed vehicle import laws which saw much cheaper vehicles flood into the country.
Do you have any idea why the volumes went up by so much during the war when the population hardly changed?
Two reasons: Fuel rationing and material shortages to start. Even those that had cars at the time couldn’t afford to fuel or run them. Apparently if a tyre blew out you simply couldn’t get another one (unless you were a high ranking official with clout), as the japs had taken over most of the rubber plantations by then.
Second reason was a high increase in labour force participation and other economic activity by women. Formerly wives stayed at home most of the time, shopped up the corner street and popped into town on the trolley once a week. With men off fighting and doing important war business women started doing things like going to work every day (and the certainly didn’t drive there). My grandmother for example started worked daily at the allied command headquarters (old jean batten building) as a communications dispatcher, taking a bus and ferry every day to get there. She wouldn’t have been working in an office if it weren’t for the war.
Fom what I have read, fuel rationing and the extra women working to replace the soldiers overseas. Those women mostly wouldnt have worked pre-war.
While it saw record ridership, it was also the war period that kind of dealt a death blow to the tram network. They had sweat the infrastructure as they didn’t have the money, materials or men to really keep it maintained. By the time the war had ended things started to get back to normal the network was in a bad shape and facing expensive maintenance.
Lookin at the graph and the numbers you posted Matt. From 1950 to 1957 PT usage dropped from 100 million to 90 million. So when you say there was a drop of 40 million 30 million of those still remained on a form of PT.
If one was to try and normalise the graph for the war it would seem patronage would have been more in the range of 80-90 million before the bridge was opened.
I never said it dropped from 100 to 90. The numbers show that combined tram/trolly bus/bus patronage dropped from 90m in 1950 to 54m in 1957. Total numbers show that patronage dropped from about 100m to 66m. Post war patronage had already declined and then stabilised by 1950 until the trams started being ripped out.
One thing I find of interest is that while the CMJ got built PT started to make a return even though there was a steep rise in car sales. I suspect this was due to heavy congestion on the road network.
Once the 80s came and there was little investment in the inner road network however it’s seems what was built in the 70s had the capacity to keep sucking away at the PT usage.
I know you didn’t say there was a 10 million reduction, that’s what the graph shows during the period where you said there was a 40 million reduction.
The strange this is, after the post war peak PT usage increased by about 5 million whilst the tram lines were being removed.
Snowflake, I agree with your point on cheap cars and the harbour bridge, but there is a lag between changes in infrastructure and policy and the resulting change of travel patterns. The bridge opening did have a fairly large immediate effect, because they shut down about 3/4 of ferry services and their feeder buses within the first two months, but in other cases its a bit slower. Until that point every bus on the shore was pulsed to the ferries (even the ones out to Torbay), basically overnight they truncated the North Shore PT network to a fraction of it’s former self, so not surprising there was a big drop at that point.
The early fifties to early sixties saw on the PT side the removal of the trams and the shutdown of most ferries. On the road investment side it saw the harbour bridge and the northern motorway opened, plus the northwestern and southern opened and extended. On the policy side they opened the floodgate to cheap cars accessible to the working class.
So yes, that decade was the point where we dismantled the old PT based transport system and invested heavily in a new road based one. Like it says on the chart there was an average of 44,000 new cars added to the fleet every year until 1975.
Nick, when something like a new bridge opens the changes happen pretty much overnight, as shown in the graph.
During the 60s the southern motorway was extended into the actual city bypassing great north road which was both slow and heavily congested. In this case a reduction in PT use could be expected since a much better option had been provided.
The policy for cheap cars didn’t come into play till 1998 and it’s influence was over by 2000.
1988 I was meant to say.
Snow Flake, May I ask,.. Where do you work and from what suburb do you commute in from?
I work in Newmarket, and have lived in Epsom south, Avondale, St Heliers, Mt Eden and Ponsonby.
Try commuting in to Highbrook / East Tamaki Industrial (e.g around Neales Road) from anywhere but the immediate surround suburbs. Then you will almost certainly realize what Car dependency and lack of travel choice is all about.
I guess you’re pretty keen for the CRL then given it will do nothing to help you but it will suck away a large chunk of cash to slow down any plans that would help.
I disagree Snowflake, the CRL could to wonders for his commute to Highbrook.
The RPTP bus network gives excellent bus connections through highbrook from nodes at Panmure, Otahuhu, and Botany. But given Tian said “from anywhere but the immediate surrounding suburbs” he’s obviously concerned about getting to the area, rather than around within it. The CRL would result in a large increase in train frequency to those two big nodes at Panmure and Otahuhu. Furthermore it would include through routed train lines. as an example someone could ride a frequent metro-style train service direct from New Lynn to Panmure to connect to the revised frequent shuttles to Neales Rd.
Now I don’t know where he lives, but as an example the combination of the CRL frequency and direct routing plus the bus speed and reliability afforded by AMETI would give quite a quick trip across the region from west to east and back.
Ok so what your saying nick is that the new bus network will be running through that industrial zone? Well that is good to know. I agree there will be a small benefit from the CRL provided said person is taking the train as well as part of a multi-mode trip.
What about the savings gained by putting larger numbers of people on trains instead of buses, and therefore being able to aford more buses?
That is exactly what the network redesign involves. By moving masses of people quickly along core corridors by train instead of bus, it frees up huge amounts of bus resources to be reinvested in very high frequency local collectors with long span of service.
To use the same example, one bus and driver could do the 30km return trip from the city to Highbrook once every 90 minutes or so. The same bus and driver could do the 11km Panmure Interchange to Highbrook return three times in the same time. Triple the frequency out of the same resource by pooling the common sections on core corridors.
Hope you realised I was saying that?
Love the point where Wallace challenges on man from the AA on his use (or lack) of the bus – “I live near the Link bus”
“But Aucklanders love their cars!”
Hell, if I had a dollar…
Simon Lambourne has considerable anti-PT form. His anti CRL stance while ill-informed and ill thought through is all-pervasive. He’s one of those car advocates who claims more buses on the streets will solve all the the city’s congestion problems, satisfy his membership’s desire for congestion-free streets (contrary to what the results of a poll of AA members actually stated) and probably leave the air crystal clear and populated with little singing birds. He is, essentially, an ideological shrill.
I am sure you are right but maybe he toned it down for the interview becuae I was quite suprised how even handed he was. All the speakers said that investment in PT was needed including the AA guy. They didnt drill down into specific CRL support.
Great to hear Kim Campbell so emphatically in support. This must make it hard to argue that it isnt a good business investment.
Simon Lambourne’s opening line would have you think that ferries are the solution to Auckland’s transport problems.
Well, a quick internet search suggests Sydney’s ferries carry ~13 million passengers p.a. That is compared to ~250 million p.a. on City Rail and ~200 million p.a. on buses (that last number sounds too low, but let’s just take it at face value). The fact that ferries carry approximately 2% of Sydney’s PT patronage confirms what I’ve always suspected: Simon Lambourne is not an informed transport commentator. Ferries definitely are not the solution to Auckland’s transport needs, regardless of what Simon would have you believe.
The role of ferries is a small one that is already largely being fulfilled by the existing high patronage routes. Hobsonville could succeed, but after that their potential is extremely limited.
How are the streets going to be congestion-free if they’re full of buses? Has he never stood on Lambton Quay in Wellington at 5:30 pm? It’s pretty much a bus parking lot.
Or Albert or Symonds Street, or Fanshawe”?
So using this exact same logic – how is the Waterview project/additional harbour crossing/CMJ upgrades/Upper Harbour Motorway/SW motorway/Duplication of the Manukau Harbour crossing/Victoria Tunnel and especially the Holiday Highway going a help you but it will suck away a STUPENDOUS chunk of the cash to slow down any plans that would help.
The waterview tunnel will reduce the volume of traffic on my road by 30-40% making it safer to cross and my bus ride faster. I’m quite looking forward to it.
Yes but how will it benefit people in South/East/North Auckland – as apparently that is your criteria for a transport project. And dont say it will improve the network and increase its capacity because you have alreadsy said that isnt a valid reason for the CRL.
I think you will find that I said I find Aucklands PT network pretty good. Someone contended this saying it’s hard to catch a but to an industrial zone for which the CRL does nothing to help.
In regards to your south/east/north Auckland people. I need more details in order to provide a response. I.e. What project?
Sorry snow flake to disagree on how good PT in Auckland is. I was riding PT on 5 different continents and only in North Africa (Egypt) it was worse than here. Let some numbers tell us how good it is: 70 million trips a year in Auckland in total. Munich: around 690 million trips (without the suburban train network), or Vienna: 905 million trips (without suburban trains) . Even in the last city i was living in (size like Hamilton about 115.000 people in the metro area, very high grade of sprawl) the PT counted for the bus network 21 million passengers a year.
I was talking about the Waterview tunnel, as you mentioned in your post above.
Well all I can say is that if you think Auckland’s PT network is pretty good, you cant have used PT almost anywhere outside NZ. I have lived in a lot of cities and countries and travelled in countless others. Without a doubt Auckland’s PT network is the worst I have ever seen in a developed country. I am sure there are some in SW USA that are worse (although even the unholy love child of Wendell Cox and Randall O’Toole, Houston, is now building light rail).
I never said Aucklands PT network was the best in the world, I just said that it was pretty good as it does what I want and does it pretty fast at a cheap price.
Snow flake – I only hope that reduction on your local street a) happens, and b) stays around. It won’t, unless we reduce traffic lanes and add in cycle and bus lanes. But we won’t have the money for enough of that, because we are spending it all on motorway projects.
Motorways induce extra traffic, by making it more convenient to drive. As good as Waterview is compared to other so-called projects of national (in)significance, it still is a project aimed to make car driving easier in a city already inundated by cars.
Max I agree with you there, they could slap in some bus lanes for pocket change down my road once the tunnel is open.
Based on the posts I have seen here over the past 5 years or so we wont really need to woryy about induced demand as folk are moving away from cars anyway.
Nice point Max. I call it the the false promises of motordom. We’ve been hearing this for how many years? At least since the late 1960’s.
What is congestion – Lewis Mumford
“Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity”
The reality of Auckland’s “pretty good” (quote Snow flake) public transport system is that for 60 years traffic congestion has become worse and worse, to the extent that traffic has long been considered the chief problem for the region and the thing that most lets Auckland down. Auckland’s population is small by world city standards, and yet the size and intractability of its traffic problem finds it much higher up the world list of transport-disadvantaged cities. 60 years of Motorway focus and patchy, mediocre bus-based public transport are what have got Auckland into this mess. A step-change is necessary to break out of it. Pretending that public transport is fine just as it is will simply continues with the wrong prescription.
Actually Dave someone made a post a while back which sort of highlighted how we got into this situation.
What happened was that the local councils and particularly Auckland decided to not invest in the transport network. Rather than doing some good planning and making a solid layer of arterial roads to move traffic round the city they went on a campaign of sweating the system trying to squeeze out capacity with band-aid projects.
This put Auckland into a hole for which the government keeps coming back and building motorways to try and dig us out of, however our 2 tier system just doesn’t work.
If you look to almost any other big city that has less congestion than us you will note they have a 3-4 tier transport system unlike us we we go straight from motorway to little local road.
Maybe the “pretty good” is by developing nations standards – although places like Panama are spending billions on bus and metro rail so even using that measure Auckland is being left behind!
I just listened to the interview and heard something amassing. Apparently if we don’t spend a cent more on roads but spend $4 billion on some PT projects we will have a fantastic network and be congestion free.
Given the first $3 billion of that will be the CRL I’m interested to know what this other $1 billion will be spent on and how give the entire city a fantastic transport network?
Care to elaborate Patrick?
Exciting huh! But all in good time, working on some visuals… and try not to exaggerate too much, of course there will still be investment in roads just not 97% of our spending in new transport infrastructure as is currently the case, pretty clear we can pare that back quite a way before having to actually stop.
And the investment in new Transit in Ak will be over a number of years as it can’t all happen tomorrow as I’m sure you know even better than me, so hardly a great fortune, quite modest really….
Oh yes it is exciting. Regarding that 97%, given we have spent about $2 billion on motorways in Auckland since 2000 I find it rather hard to believe we have only spent $60 million on PT. Here I was thinking the northern busway cost $300 million on its own.
I think he means the spending that’s budgeted for the future, from posts like this: http://greaterakl.wpengine.com/2013/02/26/why-arent-we-getting-what-we-want/
I agree, looking at those numbers it looks pretty bad. But once you read the text behind it that says on-road PT spending as been put into local road and state highway spending, and the fact that over $1 billion of PT rail funding for Auckland alone come straight from the government and not the NLTF you relies that the chart is completely unless for telling you the alliance of PT spending in the country as a whole let alone in Auckland.
Useless for telling you the ballance I was meant to say.
Darn phone.
That photo makes me think of an awesome quote. “You’re not stuck in traffic. You are the traffic.”