Our good friend Sudhvir had a great op-ed published in the Herald this morning about the Congestion Free Network.

Auckland’s transport plan provides us with a once-in-a-generation choice between two competing visions: to keep pursuing the failed model of motorway-driven sprawl, or to develop a quality, compact city with a balanced transport system.

Generation Zero, with the respected authors of Auckland Transport Blog, have developed a fully costed, visionary alternative to the current $60 billion transport plan: the Congestion Free Network.

We propose the staged investment in public transport corridors all over the region, with high frequency all-day services. These corridors would include electrified rail to Mt Roskill and Pukekohe, busways to Silverdale, Kumeu and Botany, rail to the airport, light rail along Dominion Rd, an extensive ferry network and even rail to the North Shore. And all of this at only 40 per cent of the cost of the current transport plan.

A full regional cycling network would complement this system, as well as focused upgrades on specific local roads. This would provide Aucklanders with genuine transport choice.

By contrast, the council’s current plan to deal with Auckland’s growth over the next 30 years is set out in its Integrated Transport Programme (ITP).

This plan calls for the vast majority of funds to be spent on costly new motorways. As such, it is based on the same flawed thinking that has given us the heavily congested, sprawling city we see today.

In fact, our transport agency predicts that despite this multibillion-dollar tarmac bonanza, congestion will only get worse.

Instead of discussing whether we use new roading charges, petrol taxes, or higher rates to pay for this roading binge, we should be questioning the overall direction of the transport spend, and our Congestion Free Network offers the transformational change our city deserves.

Drivers appreciate the choice of frequent and affordable public transport when it is provided, and the reduced road congestion that a multimodal system provides.

The current school holiday-related reduction in traffic demonstrates our roading network works well when we take cars off the road. And our recent modest investments in public transport are already paying off: rail patronage has increased by a factor of five over the past decade. The Northern Busway has been a spectacular success with 40 per cent of people coming into city from the North Shore in the mornings now travelling by bus.

The smart solution to our transport woes is to invest in the “missing modes”: rail, buses, ferries, cycling and walking.

The council’s current transport plan is not only counterproductive, it’s irresponsible. It locks us into a future of more carbon pollution, more financial debt, and will offer no solution to the obesity epidemic that our city is confronting.

The council admits that the ITP will dramatically increase carbon emissions and break our city’s commitments to dealing with climate change, at a time when Auckland needs to urgently move away from fossil fuels.

The effects of pollution are real: a study titled Health and Air Pollution in New Zealand has found that over 100 Aucklanders are dying prematurely from car emissions every year. But it doesn’t need to be this way; another study, by the University of Auckland, has demonstrated that moving just one out of 20 short car trips to cycling would not only reduce carbon emissions, but prevent over 100 premature deaths through increased activity, generating net savings of about $200 million per year.

No city has navigated a path out of congestion through simply widening roads. Build a new motorway and it will fill up, producing more traffic, more carbon pollution, and more urban sprawl. Our Congestion Free Network will provide Auckland with the world class public transport system we deserve within 17 years, and provide us all with genuine transport choices every day, at a far cheaper price than the current plan.

The local government elections this year provide us with the opportunity to make this vision a reality.

We’re asking candidates to commit to the vision of the Congestion Free Network and question our expensive motorway obsession.

Remember to enrol to vote, and head to Generationzero.org.nz/auckland to help make this a reality.

Good work Suds. I think one area of the transport debate we haven’t really covered in much detail (if at all) has been the relationship between public transport and health. There is certainly a strong connection which tends to stem from the fact that most people walk to a station or bus stop at either end rather than just walking to their garage to hop in their car. It is something that I think would be good to get some more information on so if you, or anyone else out there, wants to do a guest post on it then please let me know.

Generally I try to avoid reading the comments section on the herald, especially those about transport issues as I find myself quickly frustrated with the quality of many of them however I have read them today and surprisingly they aren’t too bad. Perhaps that is another sign that we are on the right track with the CFN. One comment did stand out though

NorthShoreGuy

The approach need coordination. More of what works. The park + ride fills up earlier and earlier. Build more, build up.How about an off-ramp getting people straight into a park+ ride multi-story carpark actually subtracting people from the motorway instead of feeding more onto it.

T3 lanes in Melbourne go right into the centre instead of saving a couple of minutes at an on-ramp. That would provide a real incentive to take another two cars off the road out of every three.

The building and ongoing maintenance of practical solutions that work would cost a fraction of the grand plan of infrequent trains with all the engineering challenges in this hilly and winding city. Rip the train tracks up and convert it to a busway. Build a few under and over road passes to get rid of the congestion creating pinch points that train tracks cause.

If politicians and train spotters didn’t have tunnel vision then Auckland could actually get moving. Take all the money from trains and put it into decent transport initiatives suitable for this amazing beautiful city on the hills.

We could even save billions more by not burdening a second harbour crossing with future train proofing.

Wow, I don’t even know what to say and can only hope this person wrote the comment was just taking the piss. There hopefully can’t be too many people left who still advocate ripping up the tracks, especially after we have just invested ~$1.6 billion in upgrading them

CFN 2030A

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38 comments

  1. @ NorthShoreGuy “Take all the money from trains and put it into decent transport initiatives suitable for this amazing beautiful city on the hills.”

    No. Take all the money from uneconomic, car-dependency worsening, congestion-not-solving motorway schemes and put it into decent electrified rail transport initiatives suitable for this amazing beautiful city on the hills.,

  2. “There hopefully can’t be too many people left who still advocate ripping up the tracks, especially after we have just invested ~$1.6 billion in upgrading them”

    Sunk costs – dont be economically irrational – what is spent is spent!

    1. I think you missed the word ‘upgrading’ there swan. The tracks are all fixed up now and will be working beautifully once the new trains start hitting the decks. Regardless of the sunk costs, why spend more money to rip out something that will work very well, and even more money to replace it with something that would be no better?

      1. A sunk cost is a sunk cost.. IF there’s a better use for the trackbed then go for your life, don’t wait for a minute!

        I don’t think there’s much point debating NorthShoreGuy’s strange ideas… “Never argue with an idiot; he will bring you down to his level and win from experience.” Surely he’s taking the mickey..

        1. Yes a sunk cost is a sunk cost, I’m not debating that. But those sunk costs haven’t just been thrown away, they’ve achieved very efficient operation with low operating costs. An operating cost is an operating cost. Why rip out what will shortly be a very efficient railway to replace it with buses that have ten times the opex?

        2. I suspect he’s serious. I know someone (probably not NSG, given that this person lives in Clevedon) who adheres to the same school of thought: rip up the tracks, put in bus lanes.

        3. We all know that guy. We have to wonder how large a rock they have crawled out from.

        4. Well this guy is also a climate change denier (not just AGW, but that there’s a long-term change trend at all), so it’s probably quite a large boulder.

        5. That is economical nonsense – even if use B is slightly better than use A, that is not a valid reason to rip up A, even if the cost is already sunk. After all, use B doesn’t magically appear. It ALSO has a cost associated with it. So you need to look at the cost of B and the benefit of B compared to A as well as the cost of A.

          Just concentrating on B and ignoring the sunk costs and the benefits of A is like comparing apples to an empty basket not holding ANY oranges.

  3. To rip up a rail line and replace it with buses in a city requires either a spectacular mode bias, or probably more likely, a foolishly short term evaluation method.

    Rail right of ways are gold for a city, the throughput for the footprint is unrivalled, Auckland is extremely fortunate the our strange little network survived the bad years of auto-mania and are now about to grow into a fantastic resource. #CRL

  4. Wouldn’t be too hard on NorthShoreGuy. In his first two paragraphs he makes interesting suggestions based on issues people on the Shore clearly face right now and are looking for solutions on. Maybe bigger and better accessed park ‘n rides and T3s all the way to town are part of their solution?

    Car dependency on the North Shore wasn’t entirely self inflicted and while NEX is running well, feeder bus services still need to be developed and they won’t suit everyone. The more cars that spend the day parked on the Shore (or whatever outlying area) rather than coming to town the better.

    1. I think the point is that people on the Shore don’t experience the benefits of rail directly (most of the time) and thus are yet to understand what it means to the rest of the city. After the upgrades are complete, this will become clearer.

      1. They do, however, understand the benefits of a rapid transport network. Such things are sinking in.

        Which is why things like suspending the Northwestern Motorway bus access are so disappointing. We take a few steps forward, and then coming crashing down again.

      2. I work on the Shore (admittedly with schools, whose staff are generally, although not exclusively more left-leaning politically) and I am yet to meet anyone there who steadfastly opposes PT development or rail and the CRL. There have been a few who had based on misunderstandings (mostly the “loop” misconception), but once I cleared those up with them during the course of the conversation (CRL needed for a good Shore rail link, and before that free up CBD roadspace for Shore buses etc), they come out in support. The most often heard gripe is why rail can’t come to the Shore sooner.

    2. Park’n’ride facilities are money sinks. Thousands and thousands of dollars to provide a place for a car to sit, unused, for the day. $10k/space for the last Albany P’n’R extension, if I recall correctly, and that’s for surface parking. Parking buildings double that, at best, and if they’re to be attractive against the cost of driving to and parking at the final destination they cannot possibly be priced so as to recover their costs in a realistic timeframe.
      There’s very little about NSG’s post that’s worthy of consideration. The T3 lane suggestion could be worth looking at, but the rest of it is about blowing more and more money in support of cars and their drivers.

      1. Yep, the land occupied by the Albany Station and its park-and-ride (in terms of land area, mostly its park-and-ride) is worth a rather cool $15 million. Locked in car storage.

        On the side I had reason to go to an address near there so used the NEX and walked out the new northern exit onto Oteha Valley Rd through the PnR. At a brisk pace, it takes a full 3min 50sec to cross the carpark to get to the exit.

        1. What’s the land value of AIAL? 3 minutes 50 would only get you across part of one of the parking lots in that place, though I guess when there’s almost no effective public transport for the majority of the city it’s not hard to understand why they have so much tarmac. It’s no surprise that AIAL is supportive of the airport rail link, when one considers how much more value they could extract from their real estate if it wasn’t dedicated to cars.

        2. Even if they could remove 100 carparks they could build a huge hotel, looking surely at a much higher rate of income?

        3. They’ve already got one hotel in the parking lot, and I imagine Novatel have some kind of exclusivity deal which would prevent the letting of another hotel unless it was perhaps right down the far end next to the current regional domestic carriers.
          To get much more they would need to start building over large parts of the parking area, and as much as it pains me there are certainly times where there doesn’t appear to be a massive oversupply of parking. If anything, there’s insufficient supply for domestic.

  5. Ripping up Auckland’s train tracks and putting in buslanes would also create problems for freight movements.
    Would this be
    1) Stopping the train lines at Helensville and Pukekohe and trucking from there OR

    2) Ripping up all NZ lines and trucking everywhere- ( part of which would be importing Millions of dollars worth of trucks and filling up roads around NZ OR

    3)I cannot think of anything else!!

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