This is a guest post by Peter Nunns, an economist working in Auckland with an interest in transport past, present, and future. (Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are his personal views and do not reflect upon the position of any organisation with which he is associated or constitute professional advice.)
Readers of this blog will be familiar with the notion of the benefit cost ratio (BCR), a figure that compares the forecasted benefits of a project with the financial cost of building it. It’s often used as a shorthand for the quality of a project: If the BCR is high (i.e. substantially above 1) it is seen as a good use of public money; if not, it can be criticised as a boondoggle.
Everyone plays this game. Opposition politicians often criticise motorway projects such as Puhoi-Wellsford and the Kapiti Expressway on the basis of BCRs that fall below 1, while the Minister of Transport has in the past expressed scepticism about the City Rail Link on the same grounds.
However, there is relatively little public discussion of the hows and whys of these seemingly consequential numbers. How, exactly, does one calculate a BCR?
The procedures for conducting an economic evaluation of a transport project are set out in excruciating detail in the Economic Evaluation Manual (EEM) published by the New Zealand Transport Agency. This manual defines the exact procedures that need to be followed when evaluating any transport project and specifies the values that should be used in the evaluation.
Read it at your leisure (or peril). Here’s the summary version.
The traditional method of estimating the economic benefits of a transport project involves three main steps.
First, you need to define the project carefully – that is, you need to figure out what you are planning to build, when you will build it, and the new service patterns that you’ll introduce as a result. Take, for example, the case of the Avondale-Southdown rail line, which is in the Auckland Plan but hasn’t been defined carefully enough to enable us to figure out what it will do. We can’t evaluate that until we know exactly what we’re building and when.
Second, you need to forecast the effects that the project will have on travel behaviour. Let’s stick with the example of Avondale-Southdown. In the short term, we might expect adding a new rail line to encourage some people to switch from buses or cars, thereby reducing congestion, and to encourage some people to take trips when they wouldn’t otherwise have travelled. In the longer term, it might change the patterns of population and employment location, by making it easier for people to live and work in certain places.
This forecasting is typically done by regional transport models, which estimate (on the basis of existing travel patterns and forecast changes to land use in a region) how people will get around in the future and how much time it will take them.
Third, you need to quantify the benefits of changes to travel behaviour. This is where the EEM comes in. It summarises the types of benefits that you should expect from transport projects, and defines values that allow you to monetise those benefits. Broadly speaking, the benefits considered in the EEM fall into four main categories:
· Reduced travel time
· Reduced vehicle operating costs
· Reductions in accidents and health costs
· Reduced vehicle emissions.
(There are obviously a whole bunch of important things that are not assigned any value under this framework. We might, for example, want a transport system that provides us with a choice of multiple modes, or increases our resilience to shocks such as tectonic plate activity or sudden oil price increases. These benefits are often considered in other stages of the evaluation but not quantified.)
NZTA considers travel time savings to be the most consequential economic benefit. Forecast travel time savings make up the largest share of quantified benefits from most large transport projects in and around Auckland. This is based on the idea that the time we spent in transit could be spent more productively on other activities. If we weren’t stuck on congested road and PT networks, we would be working more, or doing things that we found at least as satisfying or remunerative as work. For many projects, the time savings on an individual trip might be small – but they can add up quite rapidly over large numbers of trips.
Take the case of the CRL. Removing the Britomart bottleneck is expected to increase capacity and hence frequency across the whole network. This will make it quicker for PT riders to get into the city centre. The effects are larger on the Western Line but still significant from the South and East, as this table released by Auckland Transport indicates:
In short, reductions in travel time are an important topic! So how, exactly, do we place a monetary value on them?
The answer is buried in the appendices to the EEM – Tables A4.1 and A4.2 to be exact. I’ve summarised some of the key features in two handy charts. Unfortunately, the figures themselves present some logical conundrums.
The first chart compares the value of time assigned to trips on urban arterial routes and in rural areas. Urban travel during the weekend is considered to be less valuable than weekday travel – which is fair enough, as most people work during the week. But – perplexingly – urban commuter travel is considered much less valuable than rural travel of any type.
In plain English, the EEM places a much higher value on the average JAFA’s time when s/he is on holiday in the Bay of Islands than commuting across the Harbour Bridge to get to work.
Is this logical? It’s hard to say, because the EEM contains no attribution or explanation for these figures. They are apparently derived from willingness-to-pay surveys , in which people are asked what value they place on their own time. But they don’t seem to bear any relation to differences in productivity, which is another important measure of the value of time.
The econometric research suggests that urban areas in New Zealand, and in particular the Auckland city centre, have a large productivity premium over other areas. Take, for example, the findings of a 2008 paper by David Mare (“Labour productivity in Auckland firms” ). Based on this, one would expect Aucklander’s time to be counted as relatively more valuable, not less:
So far, so strange. Now look at the second chart, which compares the additional value of time assigned to commuter trips on different modes. The EEM places a much lower value on trips that aren’t taken in single-occupant cars. If you’re walking or cycling rather than driving, your time is worth $1 an hour less; if you’re taking the bus or train, it’s worth $3 an hour less.
Once again, it’s impossible to say whether or not these values make any sense, because no source or attribution is provided. In theory, there might be some logic to these differences. For example, time spent in a bus might be less onerous as it enables one to multitask while travelling. And people might not object to time spent walking or cycling due to the health benefits. But counter-arguments could also be raised – many people enjoy driving cars and don’t mind spending a bit more time on the road.
What can be said is that the values of time defined in the EEM have consequences. They allow the transport outcomes from different projects to be quantified and compared with each other. Decisions about what to build and not to build are then based on those comparisons. So it’s tremendously important to know that we are evaluating projects using a method that undervalues the time of urban travellers relative to rural travellers, and undervalues the time of PT users, cyclists, and car-poolers relative to drivers.
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How on earth can a car passengers time be more highly valued than a transit passenger? It defies all logic. As for a driver vs transit, if the transit passenger is sitting on a train, bus or ferry doing work (tablet, writing etc) then there time is obviously more valuable. A driver can do none of these (well, not legally anyway). The value of time on transit today, as opposed to just 5 years ago, must have changed with the introduction of connected devices.
These aren’t values, they are costs. It makes perfect sense that car travel is costed higher – it’s less useful time. Walking gives you exercise and PT lets you multi-task, so the cost is lower. So if anything, the “value” (really, the cost) of PT time should go down. If anything, walking and cycling (while you’re actually moving) should be zero or close to it – not walking doesn’t save you any time. You’ll either have to exercise later to make up for it, or die earlier.
Think of it this way, using these figures – a one hour drive costs $7.80 worth of your time. If you switch to the bus and it takes an hour as well, the cost is only $4.70, so you’ve saved $3.10 worth of time. If it cost a dollar to make you do it, the BCR from time savings is 3.1.
I don’t think NZTA use the figures this way, though.
What about the value of walking and cycling while you’re not moving. How do you price that it takes 5 1/2 minutes to cross Fanshawe St if you are walking along the west side of Beaumont St?
How do I price it, or how does NZTA? Either way, we’re both pulling numbers out of our arses.
Well like Bryce this feels counterintuitive to me. My time in a bus or train (or taxi) is more valuable than in a car because I’m not constrained by having to drive the vehicle. So travel by PT is more valuable than by car. But the analysis isn’t about the relative worth of travel modes, it concerns time saving within each mode, in which case, it’s logically correct. It kinds of works for me if I think about the cost of my time spent in each mode.. i.e. car is more costly to me than PT.
But each travel mode doesn’t exist in isolation from one another.. if the CRL increases rail patronage by 10’s of millions of journeys per year some of those will switch from other modes.
Take a single commuter driving half an hour each way which is valued here at $ 16.83 ..say that person switches post CRL because the trip that used to take 45 mins now takes 30 mins. Say 20 mins train + 10 mins walk / wait each way.. that works out at $ 5.33. So the benefit is $ 11.50. That’s more than $ 2,500 over a work year.
If on the other hand the same commuter didn’t switch to rail, but just continued driving because the road was (relatively) emptier of traffic, there’s still a benefit. If they saved 5 mins each way when the CRL opened that equates to about $ 300 / work year.
Does the CBR for a project like the CRL take these kinds of benefits into account? Or just the PT user’s reduced “costs”?
One would hope so.
I suggest that this why: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-19572583
It is just that car drivers in NZ have to be sneakier about it because of the culture!
That’s gold! I especially liked “You cannot keep a commander-in-chief waiting in traffic while his army is waiting for his orders. How does it matter if a peon reaches office five minute before time?” (Peon = boy-Friday sort of role)
The Indians have got the value of time worked out: we need HNW (High net worth) lanes so company CEOs, COOs and CFOs aren’t late to rally the troops, say what!
That is exactly the same argument as here. Could the rich not also catch the bus? They are choosing to sit in traffic.
I think you have misunderstood the reasoning, Bryce. The idea is that driver’s time is more valuable because they cannot do anything but drive while they are travelling, whilst a person on transit can do some productive work. So the opportunity costs of time spent travelling are higher for drivers.
Note that I’m not necessarily in favour of this logic, just that you seem to be misunderstanding it.
Whether he misinterprets the logic or not, Bryce makes a good point in that a PT trip might be of more value than a car trip.
Yes, but it still doesn’t effect the above.
If you are in a car then every minute saved is a productive minute gained. Assuming that you can be productive half the time that you are on a bus, every minute saved only gives you 30 seconds extra productivity. Hence the costs of someone sat in traffic are higher than those sat on a bus.
Not that this means we should reduce driving times. We should simply increase PT mode share.
Except of course what it really means is that people just live further out and travel for the same time or start work later because they no longer have congestion to avoid.
At least that is what has happened up to now.
I mean car drivers. As grade separated PT isnt subject to congestion it doesnt really apply.
Yes, this is my reasoning as well. After all, many people go to work early in order to get free parking and go to the gym or café or what have you. Then when they get to work they spend 30 minutes catching up on FB, twitter or ATB :-). Driving to work early doesn’t necessarily make you more productive (or efficient).
I wish it was only 30mins! 🙂
It’s weird that, if cars are so unproductive, that people are effectively encouraged into using them by the building of infrastructure that is designed to allow cars to make slightly shorter trips, isn’t it? I think that an overly-narrow focus on the value of time leads to some fairly absurd conclusions, especially once we start saying that a tourist’s time in the Bay of Islands is more valuable than an Auckland commuter’s is. Guess we’d better build that holiday highway, then.
Even if we do accept the idea that time spent in cars is unproductive, I’m not sure that time spent in PT is any more productive, especially at peak hour when there might be crush loading at some points on the journey and nobody can really move (eg. Britomart to Orakei in the evenings). In all my time as a PT user, I haven’t seen many people work productively while taking the train or bus. I also doubt that people look at projects like the Victoria Park tunnel as a way of spending a few more minutes at work.
It also seems silly to me not to consider the ways in which PT trips are valuable – particulary in terms of lowering congestion, greenhouse gas emissions, and space taken up by cars needing to park, etc.
You don’t have to be working productively. Leisure time is not a waste.
I’ve never known that these dollar amounts considered as a *cost* saving. But if cars are deemed to be so expensive to operate, why do we build infrastructure for more cars to run? Surely the chart implies that any new project we add should be for seated bus or train passengers.
But there is so much wrong with this logic it is hard to know where to start. If that chart truly is cost, then why is walking so expensive?
There is also a disconnect between the travel savings and the volumes of traffic. It is almost as if the formula assumes traffic volumes are constant, but the speed of the vehicles increases and never slows down. For instance emissions benefits are calculated on the assumption that a car travelling faster produces less emissions. But for how long would that continue before congestion slows the car again? Also if a new motorway is put in to replace an arterial road, far more traffic will use the motorway so the net volume of emissions must increase. Yet the EEM will tell you that there is an emissions benefit from the higher volume motorway. Same principle for vehicle operating costs.
Also there is no focus on absolute capacity of the project, surely that should have a value? For ten years I’ve struggled with the logic behind the EEM, and I still don’t understand it. Wasn’t it reviewed at some point not so long ago?
I think you’re missing the point of the travel time savings – they’re not an estimate of the amount of money it costs you to travel for an hour. They’re an estimate of the actual cost of that hour, the time itself. The value you place on doing what you would do if you weren’t travelling.
It doesn’t need to make any sense outside the context it’s designed for – deciding which of several projects to do. What do we value more – saving an minute of someone’s travel time, eliminating a kg of carbon emissions, or lowering the noise to one house by a decibel? The EEM is a tool to make these sorts of tradeoffs, and that means that all costs and benefits need to be expressed in dollars, so they can be added up.
I definitely agree that the actual choices in the EEM are bizarre, though. They minutely calculate the change in running costs of a car going up hills at different grades, but completely ignore the savings you can get from not owning a car at all. There’s no cost or benefit attached to any sort of mode shift, or how transport affects development patterns.
In reality, most road projects are built to increase the capacity of the road, but the EEM only considers that a benefit very indirectly through measuring congestion, rather than there being a value from people being able to make trips they previously wouldn’t have.
If you’re in a bus or a train, isn’t every minute saved still a productive minute gained as well? Like you say, increase PT share, but also decrease PT travel times. That way you decrease wasted minutes in the car, and maximize productive minutes. Double whammy.
Yes this is the justification, but really it’s just a sly way of saying car drivers are more valuable people and we want more of them. It just reflects the dominant culture of those designing these technicalities. Technicalities that have huge outcomes for how we spend our money.
Of course it’s nonsense; for example thinking, that most valuable of activities, can happen equally on any mode. Driver, cyclists, walkers, and PT users all have the same ability to listen to podcasts for example.
Really we ought to be costing in order to help us get things we want more of, or is that, subtly, what NZTA are already doing here? This looks like it was written from the heart of motordom after all.
I’m finding this confusing.
To me, cost and value of my time are two different things – cost is a negative, value is a positive. As an example:
If I drive to a client on the Shore it may take me 45 minutes – this is 45 mins of time lost, as I am unable to do anything during this time but safely operate the vehicle (ie drive). That’s 45 mins of time-cost.
If I go by public transport (at least two buses, or a train and at least one bus, involving transfers) to this client, it may take me 1.5 hours. That’s twice the time lost but, taking Sailor Boy’s assumption of being able to be productive half the time on the bus/train, I also complete 45 mins of work (tablet out on the bus) or light exercise (walking to and between services). That’s 90 minutes of time-cost travelling, offset by 45 minutes of time-value gained by working while travelling, which balances to a net time-cost 45 mins.
So actually, if the work I need to catch up on can be done on my tablet, taking the bus to this particular client rather than driving becomes time-cost neutral in my case.
Under the New Network, the bus time would be less – about 1hr 10min time-cost offset by 35mins time-value – balancing to a net time-cost of 35 minutes – better than driving.
That’s my take on it anyway.
It’s just the word “value” that’s confusing. It should be “the cost of time”, or even “the cost in time”.
Exactly. Readers should stop thinking about “value” of time. Think of these figures as representing the average amount travellers would be “willing to pay to avoid”.
Eg I would be willing to pay $5 to avoid 10 mins extra of driving time in my commute because it sucks being stuck in traffic, but I would only be willing to pay $1 to avoid 10 mins on the train because I can spend those mins on the train reading the Auckland Transport Blog on my generic smart phone device
This is true but different people are rich in different ways, some prefer to pay in time to avoid paying in money, for example, or the other way round. Although it would be better for both society [less unequal] and individually if we could all pay less in both. Improving Transit can bring down the current high time cost in Andrew’s example for much less than we can lower driving times by spending even more, according to the ITP. Lowering both time and money cost for everyone.
The travel time thing is a bit tricky to get your head around, but I think I’ve got it now… let me try to explain.
Steve D’s got it right, I think. Say you spend an hour sitting in traffic. This is a “cost”, in the sense that you’re missing out on doing other things. If you’re in a bus or train, the cost is reduced, because at least you can read a book, draft a blog post, etc. That’s the basis of the different costs for different modes above.
This means that if a person transfers from car to bus, there’s an immediate benefit – even if we pretend there isn’t any effect on congestion. As Steve points out, the cost of sitting in traffic is reduced from $7.80 to $4.70, and society (well, the person who transfers) is $3.10 better off as a result.
Then there are more benefits when you consider the reduction in congestion.
If I understand this correctly, this method of evaluation should make it easier to justify spending on PT, not harder.
Hmm, except they note that:
“Lower travel time values are not used when evaluating the benefits of activities that encourage a change from car or motorcycle driver to shared or active modes.
The travel time values pertaining to the original mode (where these values are higher) should be adopted for proposals that have a high proportion of mode switching. This includes activities which have the primary objective of changing modes or maintaining mode share.”
No John this bit of sophistry to lower the ‘value’ the transit user’s time, or the urban driver versus the country driver’s time, is used to spend more on driving amenity in general and country driving in particular. Because it builds a higher BCR every time they guess they can save a driver some time over someone else, especially a country driver.
In short it’s a tool to inflate the justification for the road lobby and the government’s policy.
So when I cycle to the ferry my time is valued at $6.60 but when I get on the ferry (assuming a ferry is the same as a bus/train) my time is valued at $4.70. Yeah, thats logical.
Tune in next week when NZTA will confirm just how many angels you can fit on the head of a pin.
But if you are driving in your car it is valued at $7.80, and if only your drive home was in a nice provincial electorate then it would be even higher…. regardless of what is going on in your head….
Sophistry I say. And remember these numbers are the most important issues in a BCR, things like health, injury and pollution benefits or disbenefits are there but are nowhere as important. Crappy place outcomes aren’t there at all, Nor are changes in land value.
I’m trying to get to grips with the concepts outlined above by Peter but I still don’t get why travelling time should be viewed in monetary terms. Consider:
I have to be at work at 7:00am and the time it takes me to get there is irrelevant to the company I work for. It costs them nothing as they only have to pay me from 7:00 onwards. There is no loss of production because even if I arrived earlier and did some work the company has no obligation to pay me for it so there’s no point in me bothering to do any prior to 7:00am. Production can only be lost if I am late for work.
Similarly, the time I spend commuting has no monetary value to me since even if I could do something productive I won’t earn anything for it.
So I’m confused as to why my commuting time should be considered to have either a value or a cost for the purposes of calculating a BCR.
It takes up time that you might prefer to spend on sleep, relaxation, chores, socialising, a second job, being with your family, or anything else you might do in your free time. I agree that commuting time doesn’t have a cost because of “loss of productivity”, so people’s time shouldn’t be valued higher by NZTA because they have a higher-paying job. But saving time on travel is a real benefit worth measuring.
There are lots of benefits that can’t be measured directly in dollars, but to add different benefits together we need some sort of exchange rate between them. Picking the exchange rates is an piece of politically motivated guesswork, but it still needs to be done somehow.
The problem with using “time savings” as a justification for road projects is not that idea is wrong, but that it usually doesn’t work. Widening roads increases road capacity, but they’ll just fill up with more cars and keep being just as congested. It would be more honest if we measured the benefits of transport projects in terms of the number of people who can travel who couldn’t before.
The model I’m tending towards is “How many people are within a 30 minute radius of the destination of the project?” For instance you could build a motorway from the North Shore to the CBD or a railway line. You could compare the two by calculating how many people are within 30 minutes of the destination, then factor in the personal costs of travel (rail fare vs car operating / depreciation / parking / tolls) and see which one comes out best.
That just seems like a less sophisticated version of the same thing? It’s still counting time savings, but now we count the 1st to 29th minutes as free, and likewise with everything past minute 31. Whereas the 30th minute is worth a fortune.
I can see the benefits of a sliding scale though, especially for cycling. The first hour a day is practically free, because you’ll need to exercise (or die earlier) anyway, but the cost rapidly goes up after that. Same for most modes, really. It would also be good to count waiting time as worse than moving time, especially for walking and cycling.
The hard part of either method is that it’s generally hard to figure out how long the overall journeys really are, except on PT.
According to this, cost of cycling doesn’t go up at all:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/06/13/bicycling-the-safest-form-of-transportation/
It attempts to address the capacity issue though. You could model the “catchment” at different times of day, for different time values – 10,20,30 mins.
Re cycling: You only say that because in NZ we think of cyclists as the lycra clad extreme sport guys trying to go as fast as possible and travelling 10’s of kms.
But what me trundling along at 25km/hr on my electric bike for 10 mins to the ferry? I am not doing much more exercise than walking to the bus stop. I then go and exercise.
No it’s all bollocks.
You don’t actually have to do massive exercise to extend your life, just some moderately vigorous aerobic activity. Even a brisk walk is pretty good – like the one I do every day as I cut it fine getting to the train station. Lower intensity exercise is equivalent to higher intensity for a shorter period of time.
Have a look at this:
And therein lies the real problem with monetizing travel time savings. If you and I or any other wage slave gets to work 10 minutes quicker it makes no actual difference to our personal income or national productivity. We just get 10 minutes more time in bed in the morning, or get a cheaper house 10 minutes further away from work.
However the economic benefits are real for commercial vehicles. A tradesman that spends less time in traffic can spend the time on jobs that earn money. Likewise taxis, trucking companies and couriers benefit directly from travel time savings. But what proportion of total traffic volume are they? Are there more targeted solutions that could help commercial traffic without the huge cost of trying to speed up general traffic which doesn’t add any real value to the economy?
I always liked the joke made by the former admin that if it’s so valuableto give people more spare time why doesn’t the govt go round buying everyone dishwashers?
Plenty of people do value the time savings of a dishwasher, and buy them themselves. But that logic doesn’t work for roads, because there’s nothing you can buy individually that makes your commute faster (except perhaps a helicopter). We all have to decide collectively whether it’s worth buying the metaphorical dishwasher or not. And we make collective decisions through the government, in the form of NZTA.
Unless you get home from work then spend some time circling around for the hell of it, you obviously do value time savings from a shorter commute, at least a tiny bit.
You could buy a motorcycle to make your commute faster. Or in my case some lycra shorts some flashy lights and a few hundred dollars worth of second hand carbon fibre and aluminium.
Agree with all that except the lycra. You can keep the lycra. 🙂
David Metz is good on this stuff: http://greaterakl.wpengine.com/2010/06/18/are-we-really-saving-time-when-investing-in-transport/
Yes. The takeaway from it is that on average in the UK, people spend about 1/2 an hour each day commuting each way. Unchanged since the 1970’s. Of course the distances might have increased with faster rail and higher capacity motorways, but on the whole the amount of time travelling is unchanged.
This is why the EEM having regard to vehicle operating cost savings over the area covered by the project is so bogus. On the whole, I’d guess the average mileage driven per person doesn’t change dramatically after a project is implemented. (Of course there might be a societal change to driving, but it isn’t caused by the project).
But this one is funnier: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/04/22/curing-your-clown-like-car-habit/
And this one should be given to every person on buying a car:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/04/22/curing-your-clown-like-car-habit/
Angry, angry young man but so much wisdom!
They use stated preference to work out travel time benefits? Ridiculous. And why do they decide to differentiate between urban and rural? There are all manner of categories they could choose to split people up on. I will have to remember to tell the NZTA I would be willing to give a kidney if only they built the sky path.
Arbitrary evaluation of benefits. Chalk this up as reason 267 why we need road pricing.
Regardless of whether road pricing is or isn’t a good idea generally, it doesn’t solve this problem. You’ve just changed to the equally difficult problem of predicting “how much money will this road make”. And you still need to have arbitrary evaluation for the externalities the EEM takes into account, like noise, accidents, carbon emissions, and so on.
It will be far easier to predict when we have data from a road pricing system. Eg we could say “once the price for a typical commute in this area gets to $8, it makes sense to invest in project x. Then sit back and observe. It also becomes far more equitable – with the current system it’s about what someone might be willing to pay. In a road pricing world, they are actually paying it.
Agreed it wont help with determining the right price to put on externalities. But at least externalities can be priced in as well. So for example driving in urban areas might attract a higher charge associated with air pollution etc. This cost will then be accounted for in people’s behaviour implicitly when we are observing demand vs price.
You can’t magically extract from each individual person the exact amount everyone they are willing to pay. The price you charge doesn’t tell you that, it just tells you how many people have a willingness-to-pay higher than the price you set. If the price on one road is $8 and I pay that, you don’t know how much I value that trip at, whether it’s $9 or $50. You just know it’s over $8. So how do you calculate the consumer surplus? You can’t, you just make it up, same as the EEM.
Assuming that your road pricing system sets the prices in some sort of automatic fashion to limit congestion to a certain level, you’ll still have the same basic system for choosing projects – instead of calculating which projects we predict will reduce congestion the most, we’ll pick projects that we predict will reduce the price the most. We’d have the price information, but no longer have the congestion information (since every road will be at either the minimum price, or the maximum capacity).
Why do we need to calculate the consumer surplus? Like the rest of the economy, we know consumer surplus exists and that its a good thing.
With pricing you are right, you don’t know the consumer surplus and hence the average benefit from those using the road. But what you do know is the marginal benefit (which equals the price). You also know the marginal cost of producing additional supply (the cost of your potential project). If the price is sufficiently greater than the marginal benefit, you know it is worth building. Obviously it is not this simple, you really need to know the benefit to the marginal user once the scheme is built (increases in supply are necessarily lumpy). But a little extrapolation is a hang of a lot of a better option than what we have now with stated preferences (based on what study? – evidently the EEM doesnt even state its sources), and with no feedback loop – we dont know if the new project is really worth what we think it is to its users.
Now you might ask – why do we only want to supply new infrastructure up to the point where the marginal cost equals the marginal benefit? The reason is because the next guy who is just priced out of using the service doesnt value the service as much as you need to spend on it to make it available. It would therefore be inneficient to do so – you might as well just give them the cash. And the person who has a willingness to pay of $50 is still getting what the would willingly pay $50 for – uncongested roads. There is no additional utility that can be realised.
Hopefully that also answers your second paragraph. We dont want to lower the price the most (transport is not a maximand) we just want to know when it is worth producing additional supply.
Roads and urban PT are not like the rest of the economy, because they are provided by the government as a public service. The aim (in principle) is to provide the greatest benefit to the nation, not to make the greatest revenue. This is why the EEM attempts to calculate the private benefit to end users, and the private cost to people negatively affected by the project.
At the moment people get far more value from the transport system than they pay for it, and people are happy to deal with a little congestion. If you make the value judgement that we must have all roads be congestion free, you’re putting us in a position where prices keep rising until we’ve “built our way out”. It’s that approach that treats transport as a maximand. It’s great for people who value congestion-free travel at any price, but not so good for people (probably the large majority of the country) who’d rather pay less and wait a little longer to get where they’re going. They have all their private benefit soaked up in high tolls.
Of course, you can do road pricing without assuming that eliminating congestion is all-important. But then you need to estimate how much people really benefit from congestion-free travel, which is the exact problem we started with.
Steve D,
“At the moment people get far more value from the transport system than they pay for it, and people are happy to deal with a little congestion.”
Your point raises a few interesting issues. What level of service should the govt be providing? It is true that if we had a target level of service, it would need to be the same for everyone. Arguably you could have different lanes giving different levels of service but I personally think that would be unworkable. So if we are to provide something approaching congestion free,
I think you are implying that this would be more expensive to provide for the same quantity. So the question is how much more expensive, or, conversely, how much less quantity would we supply for the same price? If it was the case that providing congestion free travel was, say 3 times as expensive as providing congested travel, this might give us pause for thought. It would be the equivalent of Air NZ decking out all its planes as first class only. The good news however is that there is very little difference in cost to supplying congested vs uncongested travel. Indeed congested roads are actually less efficient at moving vehicles than uncongested roads! So it is congested roads that are more like first class only planes rather than uncongested roads. However, in reality it could be argued that we may need to run the roads with slightly less throughput than currently in order to provide a degree of resilience against moving to congested flow. I dont think it would be reasonable to attempt to guarantee uncongested flow all the time – accidents etc will inevitably lead to congestion, but maybe we need to run the roads at 90% capacity to provide that resilience. But in any case, we are really reducing the “supply” of road based travel.
Your other concern seems to be that we are “extracting the surplus” from the marginal users. Well that again is a very interesting idea that leads to other thoughts. The first is – yes we are taking the surplus from the marginal user, but conversely we are NOT taking the surplus from the marginal user plus one. In the current state of the world, we are taking cash from everyone to produce supply. OK we arent taking it from people who dont drive at all, but we are taking it from people who choose to drive off peak, for example. So whether the cross subsidisation of the marginal peak user from the off peak user is justified is a value judgement but nonetheless it is a transfer. Also, the point I have just made assumes the same expenditure on supply in either scenario. In fact, we would almost definitely spend less on physical infrastructure in the road pricing world. Instead of providing supply to the point where it equals the average benefit, we only supply up to the point where it equals the marginal benefit. Insofar as there will be heterogeneity of benefits (something we are both agreeing there is), supply to meet the marginal benefit will always be less than the average benefit. So it is not just a transfer, there is also less expended in total which means it is a positive sum game.
The other discussion worth having around “extracting the surplus” is – where does the money go? We have already discussed the points around reducing the transfer from off-peak to peak users. But it may be the case that the system generates a surplus. In fact this is likely as the marginal cost of providing additional supply is likely to be upwards sloping. So what happens to that money? Well for starters we would scrap RUC/petrol tax, to make the system as close to cost neutral as possible (this would be the mechanism for giving the transfer back to off-peak users). Also the costs associated with externalities should logically stay with the govt. What happens to any additional surplus is political, but it definitely wont go down a black hole. If politics dictates, maybe every car user will get a cheque, or perhaps there will be negative petrol tax to offset the surplus. Or else it can go into the consolidated fund and offset consumption and income taxes. Either way it doesnt get lost and everyone benefits.
So in summary I think it is a fairly tough ask to justify the current system in favour of the marginal peak user which a) hurts the off peak user, and b) hurts everyone by over-supplying. And certainly I dont agree that the current system benefits the majority compared to a road pricing system. And I think it is not a major issue choosing between some congestion and no (or very little) congestion, because, unlike first class airline travel, the cost of supplying them is the same! In which case, to answer your final paragraph, yes we should target something approaching congestion free, so we dont have to make any guesses about the average level of consumer surplus.
Hopefully that answers your points.
^^^ Sorry should have proof read:
” But in any case, we are NOT really reducing the “supply” of road based travel.”
You obviously need to read more Steve Keen. A profitable business doesn’t run on the margins – if they did they’d be losing money. Also, profit is a dead-weight loss.
Thanks Draco ill google him. If I am to be perfectly honest, I am not sure what that has to do with the topic at hand, but there you go.
What these values show is peoples acceptance of time delays in their journeys and the lower value for PT trips makes perfect sense to me.
When you catch a bus or a train the time speed of the trip is not your primary concern, you have already decided that you are happy to stand on the side of the road for 5 or 10 mins and potentially make a transfer.
Similar to a car passenger, if you are really in such a rush you would either get in your own car, hope on your bike or start walking.
The last 3 modes I mentioned are were people are wanting to spend the least time standing still or traveling and often take elaborate measures putting themselves at risk of personal harm just to achieve what the see is a valuable time saving.
There is no evil bias or assumptions that people traveling on certain modes are more or less important than others.
This assumes that taking a bus or train is the slowest option. Of course, in Auckland due to the historical crappy level of PT service, this was often the case. However, a well designed PT system has every chance of being faster than a person driving, which is what we should have in a few years.
Are you sure about that? Are you saying that right now at 10:30 pm and assuming buses and trains are still running and at 10 min intervals you would be able to catch a bus or a train from Sylvia park to new Lynn faster than you could drive?
SFL – let’s take a rather more realistic example: you appear to be saying that the thousands of people using park & ride car parks every day are doing so because they want to change to a slower mode. Really?
Mike, I’m trying to compare apples with apples here, not bananas with bricks.
By completely distorting the playing field like what your doing it’s like saying everyone wants to give me $10 becauset other option I gave them was death.
So going to your park and ride, do you really think someone driving down from Onewa right now at 11pm would choose to park at Albany and then catch they bus to sunnynock to visit their friend? Assuming the buses are still running.
SFL – I can’t see how I’m “distorting the playing field”, but I can see how your late-night examples will produce the answer you appear to want. Why don’t we talk about periods when most people travel, when car travel is often not the fastest mode?
And as you say elsewhere, bikes can be fast – but they do have their limitations for some people/places.
Well mike, as I’m sure you know peak hour does not encompass 24 hours of the day, and as such most of the day buses and trains are not the fastest mode for the majority of the day.
The point of my late night examples was that it was the current time, the fact is I could have done pretty much any hour of the day and it would have still held true. I even gave the benefit of assuming buses and trains were running at 5-10min intervals at that hour of the might which obviously the don’t.
SFL – “When you catch a bus or a train the time speed of the trip is not your primary concern, you have already decided that you are happy to stand on the side of the road for 5 or 10 mins and potentially make a transfer.”
Or, alternatively:
When you catch a train or ferry or a bus on the busway, speed is your primary concern because you are unaffected by road congestion. When you drive you have already decided that you are happy to sit in a traffic jam for 5 or 10 mins and potentially have to find a park.
The bulk of people who put themselves at risk of personal harm are those in cars: they could reduce this risk by 90% (Greater Wellington Regional Council figures) bu using public transport instead.
If said person is in such a rush why don’t they cycle? It’s one of the fastest modes here in Auckland. Even walking is faster than PT sometimes.
Yes, why not cycle 55km from Pukekohe to Britomart, instead of 70 minutes on the train. Why not cycle from Devonport to Mt Eden, 45km, instead of a 10 minute ferry trip, an average 5 minute wait for a bus, and an average 10 minute bus or train ride.
Yes I was quite certain someone would make a trolling comment like that, good work on being first in.
So proving you to be completely wrong is now trolling?
I would say that it is trolling to make a deliberately inflammatory comment, solely to incite a response.
Actually sailor boy you didn’t prove me wrong, all you did was select two extremely rare trips with the sole intention of making PT look good and cycling bad.
If you refer to the NZTA travel statistics you will note that 1/6th of household trips are less than 2km and nearly half are less than 6km.
So clearly your 55km trip was not all an attempt to reflect am average trip but a deliberate inflammatory comment.
Actually SF, the journey from Mt Eden to Devenport to Mt Eden is less than 5km.
But I did disprove your point. You stated that ALL PT users had already made a decision to take longer. I found a single user and thereby proved that wrong.
Actually sailor boy, the only person to write that statement was you just there. I certainly never made that claim.
In any event I’ve found the discussion redundant as if I do quote in facts or figures or even prove my case Patrick will just delete my post.
He’s done it about 20 times so far so I doubt he will stop now.
“When you catch a bus or a train the time speed of the trip is not your primary concern, you have already decided that you are happy to stand on the side of the road for 5 or 10 mins and potentially make a transfer.”
Yes you did.
I fail to see how facts and figures could help you defend the 12 different arguments you have made in the last 11 comments on this thread.
Very good sailor boy, now that you have quoted what I said try reading it for what it says.
Although creative writing is a worthwhile talent creative reading is not really of much use so just read it for what it says.
What are these 11 other arguments I have apparently made? I thought I was only talking about why people traveling in different modes value time savings by different amounts while using them.
I catch the bus because it is faster than driving to uni.
If I have a 9am lecture, I can leave at 8.01 and be in the lecture on time. If I drove at that time of day I would need to leave at approximately 740. I take PT because it is faster in the peak. Attempting to get to a lecture anywhere between 8am and 6pm is either quicker or comparable by PT for me. So no, some of us who catch PT do so because it is faster.
If I choose PT at 11pm, then it is either because I don’t want to drive (alcohol or cost), or I cannot (not me personally but for many others, this means not having access to a car). Your claim that people who choose PT have already decided to take a hit in time is absolutely ludicrous. The vast majority of PT trips from the North Shore would be faster than driving because our traffic is so peaked. There are thousands of reasons to choose PT, so just because your car gets you hot and sticky don’t reappropriate the entire transport budget accordingly.
Yes so there you go again sailor boy, cmparing oranges with second hand toothbrushes.
Quite obviously from what you said you are travelling during a busy time of the day and you likely have the issue you can’t park that close to where your uni class is.
I can park close. I can park in OGGB, or on Princes Street, it just takes a lot longer than getting out of the bus right next to my class.
Also, if you actually read what I am saying, it is faster or comparable all day.
By your logic I can say that no trips can be compared because they are all slightly different, maybe the bus stop isn’t right outside the door, or maybe driving would be on a motorway, but PT would only be on a regular road with no priority. Then by your logic, you would be comparing oranges and a lump of feces.
How is it that different to compare any trip from 8am to 5pm, that is 15km long, with more than half of it on either PT, or driving only roads, depending on modes. With the bus stop at the destination and approximately 800m from the origin with parking at the origin, and parking 800m from the destination.
Quite frankly you couldn’t get a trip where it is more of a direct comparison. I choose PT because it is quicker. Therefore your comment that everyone who chooses PT has decided that their time isn’t an issue is DEMONSTRABLY false.
Please give me an example trip that is more relevant.
It’s really quite simple sailor boy, you just need to look at the two trips and compare the different aspects to see if they are being compared on a level playing field.
So the first thing to look at is what is slowing down the various options and see if that is the ideal condition. So if you are driving are you being slowed down by congestion? If so then that is not the ideal condition. Anything thing is where you park, do you have to park 5 mins away? If so that isn’t ideal and so another artificial constraint to distort the comparison. When you catch a bus, do you have to wait 10mins? If so is that normal for the route or should you really only wait 5 mins? How many times do you stop for other passengers?
Ok, so by that logic the PT is slowed down by the mode, and the location of stops. Obviously the best would be to have a bullet train stopping at my house and the uni and noweher else. That would take approximately 8 minutes. The best for driving is an empty autobahn with a junction right next to my house, and the uni, a carpark next to the lecture theatre and a Ferrari to drive with, also around 8 minutes. They are exactly the same.
What a load of shit though. Seriously, if you are comparing the choice all you need to do is state a trip that someone does and figure outm the quickest way to do it, then decide whether they are taking the quickest route. For me that isn’t true, I take the quickest choice, a bus from my house, or a cycle to the bus station and then the bus.
Sailor boy, rather than soiling your undies in anger, slow down, take a breath, and tell me where you are traveling from and to. Then I’ll help you through the rest of the process.
I’m assuming you are going to uni in the CBD somewhere but what area did you start?
Torbay (by Long Bay college) to UoA city campus.
Well that is somewhat perplexing as driving from there should only take you some 25mins whereas the bus is quoted at 50 to 60 mins.
What is it that they do in the car to make it take 3 times longer than normal? If this is a common occurrence I can certainly understand you speed preferential for buses.
I’ll share my story of when I lived on Avondale. Back then it took me 40 mind to get to work by train packing in with all these school kids, reas i could drive into eorwork in 20mins, 30 mins on a bad day and that was just by using localrroads. None of these fancy motorways.
So you are dismissing my real world experiences of this trip in favour of a theoretical solution instead of analysing what is wrong with my suggestion like promised?
I’m not dismissing your real life experiences at all sailor boy, you will see I actually asked you what you were doing to make the trip almost 3 times longer than it should for most hours of the day.
I’m guessing that you must typically do this trip during the most congested hour of the day but then maybe you are taking the scenic route or stopping for icecream on the way. I don’t know and hence why I asked.
Ha that is some awesome logic there SF. So anything other than congestion free roads and carparks next to your desk is “artificial”, whereas slow PT is natural?
This would imply that car drivers get up every morning expecting free flowing traffic and abundant parking only to have their dreams crushed by these artificial constraints. That is funny.
Actually I said nothing of the sort, I certainly never said it was natural for PT to be slow nor did I ever make any claims about what people think when they get up in the morning.
My comments are bused on comparing each mode in its typical ideal condition. As soon as you add in congestion, the fact there is no train station within 20km of your house or you have a huge body of water in the way you are distorting the comparison so you no longer have a meaningful result.
SFLauren – So can I try and summarise?
You are saying that these numbers for time value are relevant if we ignore all the real world conditions that actually affect our transport choices – like congestion, availability of PT, availability of parking, natural obstacles etc? Because in that situation, a car drivers time is more valuable in that in those perfects conditions that driver would be able to travel faster while PT inherently involves delay anyway (like waiting times)? And that is why a cyclists time is also valued more highly?
So if we invest in infrastructure that brings us closer to that nirvana state of perfect travel conditions – driver time should be more valued.
Is that fair? I am not being facetious here, I really want to try and understand because I know that this is an area you know about.
Isnt that complete BS though? In terms I mean of assessing the value of a transport project? Because that nirvana state doesnt exist and has never existed – even when the first car rolled on to the road because it had to deal with horses, bicycles, trams and pedestrians.
I know you get frustrated on this blog (and you can obviously sense the frustration back) but I find engaging with you like wrestling an oiled up eel. Just as I think I have got hold of what you are trying to say, you wriggle around and I realise I dont get it.
I actually like having someone that challenges ideas and I wouldnt want to see this blog just be a fanboy fest – but it would be great if you could try and be more concrete in your points. They are really hard to understand and as a lawyer I deal with some pretty abstract and complicated concepts every day.
No not really goosoid. The value or importance of the person in the car or the bus is not what is being measured, it’d how that person values their time at the time of the trip.
So for example, if your at home watching TV and your wife goes into labour would you quickly go for a 10 min walk to the train station, race into the city, and then ride the link bus to the hospital? Or would you go jump in your car and drive there?
Now as to the real world, in the real world it is not always peak hour and so you aren’t always stuck in congestion, in addition to this not every bus runs on its own dedicated right of way, in fact most run on normal roads with normal traffic. It’s only once congestion gets really bad that buses get given their own row.
Lol about the oiled up eel comment, my original nick name was riggles you know.
Sorry SF, I forgot that you only wanted to do the common trips, like going to get milk and bread, popping to the beach, or your wife going into labour.
“Typical ideal condition” lemme stop ya right there. That’s not really a thing is it?
Oh it most certainly does. Let me give you an example.
In typical ideal conditions you can expect your bus to turn up at its normal interval rate. You will assume you can get a seat, on your own off peak. You would then assume that maybe every 3 stops there will be someone to pick up or drop off rather every stop. You will also assume the bus won’t break down of that you will get stuck in extreme congestion.
My reading of this thread is that there is no typical situation or typical commuter. Of course there is a median commuter and commute. But is given the heterogeneity amongst consumers, is this a particularly good way of informing desicion making on transport infrastructure. As others have pointed out – depending on the project your group of beneficiaries may be represented by the median, or not at all. In short, your criteria for apples and apples is not attainable. There is too much diversity amongst consumers. We should be looking for better desicion making tools.
This is a fundamentally important issue with $9bn of motorway expenditure on the horizon in Auckland. The EEM ignores this:
A recent NZTA survey found that 40% of people actually enjoyed their commute – and only 3% specified zero minutes as the ideal commute. Few respondents said they would use the time saved to do work or study. Common responses identified any time savings would be spent on non-work/non-study activities such as sleeping, more time getting ready for work, eating breakfast, family time, household chores and reading.
I find this fascinating. Great work Peter!
It is probably worth pointing out that the primary reason for BCRs is for the comparison of options within the same project. Typically this is for projects of the same modes (e.g 2 extra lanes or 3?) and so the cost value differences between modes don’t matter so much. But where the cost values become critical is for the comparison of different modes within the same project model.
And probably the most frustrating thing in all of this is that the promised economic benefits are never evaluated post implementation. Primarily that is because they can’t be measured. The only thing that is measurable is the average speed and volumes of the traffic, but you can’t tie that to the dollar value promised in the modelling.
There just has to be a better way of evaluating transport projects than this.
Speaking off speed it could be useful for people to time their routes for the next 3 weeks and then compare what happens when Auckland University starts again. The time from leaving Albany station to getting to Constellation lights (i.e a piece of the NEX which is soley driving time) has been 4 minutes 30 seconds this week compared to 7 minutes 30 seconds normally. 3/60 is 5% so 5% of $4.70 for each passenger. I find having the numbers for times is more representative than saying its heaps faster (which it is of course-Ah)
Sorry , but some of the comments in this thread are confused.
In cost benefit analysis, the value of time is shown by the answer to the question: ‘How much would you pay to enjoy such-and-such a reduction in your trip time?’, averaged over the population of interest. What people do with the saved time doesn’t matter.
It ‘s about the value of time *saved*, not time as such.
It’s quite understandable that the answer may differ between commuter trips (not enjoyable, so you’d pay more to reduce them), and recreational trips (maybe the travel itself is half the fun, so you don’t particularly want to reduce it).
It’s also quite understandable that the answer may differ among demographic groups. A rich person will give a higher number. A time-rich, money poor person (perhaps pensioner or unemployed) will give a low figure (they care more about keeping their money than saving time).
If car users tend to be richer than public transport users, this will mean that car users tend to give a higher number than PT users.
The figures should of course be based on proper research into people’s actual willingness to pay. It’s very poor that the manual doesn’t give its sources.
The difference between car driver and passenger could arise because car passengers are more likely to be children, who will value a time saving less. The difference between car and public transport is plausible if motorists, on average, are richer than PT users.
The fact that rural travel time saved is valued higher than urban is bizarre, and I’d like to see the justification for it. Intuitively you would expect it to be valued less, assuming that rural people tend to be poorer than city people, and rural travel is less stressful than urban travel.
Well said. Nonetheless I think there’s a couple of very interesting problems with the application of VOT that deserve more attention.
The first issue is the distinction between average and marginal VOT. Consider a possible PT improvement, which will benefit existing users while also attracting new ones. In the case of the latter, quite a high proportion are likely to have been diverted from other modes.
For that reason we should probably apply two different rates of VOT: 1) benefits to existing users should be valued at the modal average whereas 2) benefits to new users should be valued in some other way, perhaps as some form of weighted average.
The issue of average versus marginal VOT becomes important when evaluating major transport improvements, such as the CRL. In this case the bulk of the benefits are associated with new rather than existing users, so using a higher VOT the latter may make a difference.
The second issue is more fundamental and hints at the permanence of a given VOT saving, especially for road projects that induce additional traffic. I don’t have the answer on what to do there – but it needs to be discussed more. Are we using the right indicator?
Good points John and Stu. I note from the link above to the post on David Metz’s work that they calculated over 500million ‘congestion benefits’ on top of time saving benefits in the BCR for the Waterview project. While not being at all sure what this means or if this isn’t a form of double counting, my main concern here is that surely won’t this project, like any that adds road space and promises better driving, actually induce traffic onto Auckland’s roads and therefore make congestion worse? How can it actually have Congestion Benefits?
Congestion is, after all, simply too many vehicles on our roads and any investment that encourages vehicle use will make this worse, even if it supplies so much surplus road space at one point for it to flow freely there. These vehicles will all have to keep going on the rest of the network and park somewhere, incurring more cost and further disbenefit to a saturated network.
This looks very much like the result of hermetic thinking; only looking at one sealed area and not including all the consequences in these calculations. Another bias in the EEM that helps road building get a more favourable number, despite the actual outcomes.
Why would you assume car users are richer than PT users? If most people using Pt are coming into the CBD, they will tend to be the better paid workers than those driving to East Tamaki to work in a low skilled factory job.
That is just NZ mode bias as that is how we have traditionally seen PT – as for low income unsuccessful people as noone would use PT willingly.
We shouldn’t assume anything. IF car users tend to be richer than public transport users, certain implications follow. If not, different implications follow.
At risk of oversimplifying, think of PT users as –
– Peak period commuters to the central area, likely to be white collar workers with above average incomes; AND
– Every one else who uses PT. Given the poor services, many of these are likely to be captive users, that is non-car-owners, and this is likely to be correlated with below average incomes.
Whether PT users as a whole tend to be richer or poorer than motorists would arise from the balance between these two PT-using groups. Does anyone know the answer?
Perhaps you have the cart before the horse a little here, John. Only operate a low quality, poorly maintained, and slow transit service and you’ll probably only be left with the desperate using it. Oh look that’s exactly what we did in Auckland in the second half of the last century- and it successfully almost drove everyone away, especially from the most neglected system; rail. It seems to me any calculations that depend on assumptions that value of people differently [and face it that’s what valuing their time is doing], is getting very very dodgy indeed.
And more importantly this is circular. What we feed will grow; invest in improving Transit; it will attract more users of every sort. Don’t; and it won’t. In the end it comes down to what we want the city to be like. And it seems clear that this EEM perfectly expresses what its authors want more of. Motorways, especially rural ones. Even if not consciously that is the result of these weightings and assumptions.
Totally agree. Observing the present state of the world gets you only a small way to deciding a desired future. PT should be improved for many reasons; that will tend to attract better off people who now avoid it; and that will tend to narrow the gap between the value of time saved for PT users and motorists.
Observing that in the present state of world travel time saved has higher value for motorists than for PT users (on average) is definitely not an argument for giving higher priority to roads.
Different modes have different advantages, depending on route, service delivery and time of travel. Sylvia Park to New Lynn off peak by PT is currently a very slow trip, and a reletively fast one by car. However, Britomart to Glen Innes is a trip that is always likely to be faster by PT than by car.
Also, the relative speed of modes has a lot to do with historical investment in those modes- in Auckland off peak, it is generally faster to drive somewhere, as we have an incredibly comprehensive motorway system, and a poor PT system. In cities where a more balance approach has been taken, the differential is not as large.
Depending on my trip, I may drive, walk, cycle or take PT. Which option is best varies contantly based on a variety of factors. Driving is not always the fastest option.
That’s absolutely right Stephen, but these numbers are about answering the question what should we build next. For example With the CRL, then GI to New Lynn by train would become considerably quicker and therefore more desirable.
You are absolutely right also about historical investment. It is our view here that the over investment in one mode in Auckland has left us lopsided and poorer in many ways than a more balanced investment would have and that the time is overdue to correct that balance by investing much more strongly in the missing modes than not; ‘going forward’ as the politicians like to say.
Well this is all very well but what of the other side of the coin? How much is the time that the victims of these projects worth? By victims I mean those poor unfortunates who suddenly find that a government bureaucrat has decided to stick a motorway in front of their home, placed the road in such a manner that they don’t need to take the land, and then hold these people hostage for years while they work out whether or not they can bully these people into silence. Along the P2W route there are hundreds of people who have already unwillingly been held hostage now for over 2 years – how much is their time worth? How much money should be allowed for to compensate people for the fact that they can’t sell their properties, and if they can they lose a good 15-20% of the value of their property. NZTA just shrug their shoulders – not their problem the Public Works Act lets them get away with it. Who should actually be compensating these poor people – the motorists who will benefit or the government or should we just accept, as some NZTA people have inferred, that your one of the losers tough luck.
How much do we compensate people for years of stress dealing with an organisation that thinks its a game to be won at all costs – stick it to the homeowners and if all else fails just call them a NIMBY. The years of stress dealing with NZTA cost my husband his life – how much is a life worth? As far as I’m concerned the personal cost of this wretched road has been too high and I, for one, would like to see some better level of accountability from that unelected body with so much power over people’s lives.
In Wellington, everyone arriving by rail must get out of the train, regardless of their actual destination, because that is where the line stops. From there most journeys proceed on foot, adding say 5-20 min to the total commute, depending on distance from the station. Studies have shown the average walk to be 0.9Km. Much beyond that, people tend not to bother using the train.
Those arriving by car face no such obstacle. Everywhere in the city is easily accessible, with delays at peak times trivial by Auckland’s measure.
Why then is building more motorways at high cost to save a few minutes from already quick, easy journeys, prioritised so far ahead of extending the rail system along the same corridor-of-significance, thereby potentially saving thousands of commuters a significant chunk of time each, and opening up the rail option to many more who find the current station too far from their destination to consider. (Such an extension was seriously proposed in the 1960’s and 70’s but it got killed by the same political thinking that sunk Sir Dove Meyer Robinson’s scheme).
Can the value-of-time experts please shed some light on this conundrum?
Oh, that’s easy – you have the employers paying for the time. Do that and I’m sure that employers will be screaming for decent PT ASAP.