In their most recent issue, Metro magazine came up with a 20 point plan to fix transport in Auckland.
Better for people, better for cars, better for bikes, better for freight. Easy? Well, it’s not as hard as you might think.
It’s getting good. Integrated ticketing is here and it works. Electric trains were due to start the week this issue went on sale. A radically reinvented bus network will soon be introduced. And even before the impact of all that, train patronage jumped from 2.5 million trips in 2003 to 11 million trips last year.
Something’s up, for sure. Transforming the culture of how we move around this city is not an end in itself, but a means to the end of making the city a better place in which to live. The job’s not done, but the platform on which to do it is getting stronger.
The job’s not done, because there’s so much more to do.
Is it too hard? Is it not what Aucklanders want anyway? The model is New York. The city of yellow cabs has spent much of the past decade becoming a city of people — and if New York can become a great modern city, why would it be too hard here?
New York’s immensely influential former Commissioner of Transportation Janette Sadik-Khan visits this month. Here are 20 ideas for our city, inspired by what she did for hers.
The list is fantastic and pics up on many of the same themes we often talk about. Head over for the full list but this one in particular is worth of a mention.
18 / Adopt the other plan
As Auckland Council, Auckland Transport (AT), the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) and the government all wrestle with the mind-numbing costs of transport development, let’s not forget that a substantially cheaper plan for Auckland already exists.
The Congestion Free Network sets out a 15-year programme to enable Aucklanders from Silverdale to Botany, Kumeu to Pukekohe to “move across the city at speed”, using rail, bus and ferry services that run at least every 10 minutes. And it will be 27 per cent cheaper than the official Integrated Transport Plan, even according to published AT and NZTA figures — and that plan will achieve far less over the same period.
What’s the catch? There isn’t one, unless you believe that anything dreamed up by the public transport lobbyists at Auckland Transport Blog and Generation Zero must be inherently flawed. But there’s no reason to think that.
That would be this plan.
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Carpe Diem, Auckland Transport and Auckland Council. Adhere to the sense of urgency now placed upon you by your shareholders – the people of Auckland, to implement the CFN in full, starting 2014.
Congratulations to TransportBlog and well done to Metro for taking this on. The list makes for interested reading.
My only criticism is the lighthanded discussion of parking policy: Minimum parking requirements are a far, far greater barrier to better transport/land use outcomes than management of offstreet parking facilities. The Council’s own Unitary Plan effectively regulates the oversupply of underpriced parking.
It’s delusional to aspire for mode shift and more compact urban form in the presence of such pernicious parking regulations.
Yup I blame the engineers.
Blame is a wasted emotion … most of the engineers responsible are now sitting in rest homes.
Sadly a bunch of them have ‘retired’ to the Auckland School of Engineering where they are passing on the wisdom of the last century un updated, by many accounts.
Like they say; ‘Science moves on one death at a time’.
Let’s drop the notion that what went on last century was “wisdom”, even when judged by the outlook back in the day. Wrong decisions made by arrogant leaders were as shortsighted and reprehensible then as they are now. Not-having-the-benefit-of-hindsight was no excuse as there were plenty of voices at the time urging caution and warning that policies creating gross car-dependency were wrong.
Invisible irony I guess. I don’t consider the autistic shoving of vehicles down a road like sewerage to be wise. But the real cause of this the narrowing of the task: Somehow transportation planning was entirely given over to a group only charged with speeding machines, not with understanding the whole purpose of movement or connection. Hence the whole LOS nonsense; reductivist.
No we honestly focused on travel time, safety and convenience just to annoy residents. They all wanted a rail system instead- there were marches and petitions and barricades in the streets…
Too right, all I every hear from residents is how fast and convenient driving is in Auckland! 😉
This plan, the CONGESTION FREE NETWORK should be adopted in its entirety by both Council and Government. It is a very reasonable plan, much cheaper than the Government’s ‘Integrated Plan’ for the Auckland area and has the real benefit of providing transport options for Aucklanders to reduce the single mode auto-dependence which pervades at present. With the mature roading network already in existance in Auckland good options are required especially when crashes block the whole system. And forever widening existing motorways is not the answer.
Great list! Nice images too…
Yep. Photos definitely top class… Who took them? 😉
Some guy in a hat apparently…
Probably riding a bike. Slightly scruffy…
Seriously though, I do love your photos Mr Reynolds. And your passion for the city.
Particularly good photos! Does anyone know the source of the idea that you can’t use the sale of surplus land as a cost saving for CRL? We have never used that approach with roads. We price using resource costs which can only be the land actually used up by the project plus transaction costs.
Verbal to me from CRL team. All property purchases in cost of CRL but not net. In other words later sale never accounted. Especially relevant because this is of course an underground system so final land requirements extremely small, but also transit stations (unlike motorway off ramps) lift surrounding land value on completion. I guess the thinking is that later value can’t be certain so discount it? But it certainly means that gross number is higher than real cost. It’s a gross figure. Other transit systems fund their capex through land up-valuing. Hard not to see this as just another clever little obstacle from a system that doesn’t see value in anything other than driving amenity.
If the land sale is not accounted for, why don’t they just not sell the land, instead make it leasehold and account for the ground rent that they would theoretically get.
If they really did include the cost of the Downtown shopping centre without taking out the future value of the site then no wonder their B/C was so low. Talk about shoot yourself in the foot!
I have been wondering about this. The big table item 4.00 of this post suggests net values were used. http://greaterakl.wpengine.com/our-analysis/city-rail-link/
What are the plans for the “radically reinvented bus network” if not the CFN?
RPTP
CFN = more focused on delivery of rapid transit infrastructure and associated stations
RPTP = more focussed on services, specifically alignments, frequencies, and spans
But there’s naturally a blurring of the two, insofar as you tend to run dedicated RTN services (frequently and for a long span) where you have RTN style infrastructure.
There’s also a difference in timing insofar as the RPTP covers from now for the next 10 years (I think?) whereas the CFN is (from my reading) more of a “what could we build and by when” sort of analysis.
To repeat myself, to pay for all of this, take a huge parcel of land, like the Kumeu/Woodhill Valley, develop it for home sites, run an electric train line to it across the upper harbour, and sell off the sections. Or is this too simple. You would pay off the transport costs of Auckland and solve Auckland’s housing problems at the same time.
That is exactly what London did in the 1930’s.
And Wellington in the 1940s – and the whole of Northern Europe now.
And that Metroland model was precisely the one that was envisaged in the 1928 Auckland electrification proposal. Henderson was going to be the Auckland equivalent of Uxbridge (albeit without the history and the Grand Union Canal), i.e. the terminus of a a intensively built around metro line. Farmers’ hated the idea, so it was canned, time after time. And they’re still doing it.
and the US railway companies of the 19th century.
Barney, the CFN is comprised of projects already Auckland Transports own funding programme, it’s really a case of leaving out useless expensive projects (i.e. dumb duplicate motorway tunnels). In other words it’s cheaper than the current plan, being a subset of that plan, and therefore entirely fundable under existing revenue streams.
Amazing what you can afford when you leave out the foolishly poor value projects and focus on the cheap and effective ones!
Just a thought. It takes me an hour to get from my home to Constellation Station by bus (55mins) and 3 minutes by car.
And probably 15 minutes’ walk?
Wow that is crazy – you must be a massive supporter of improvements to PT.
Have you actually tried this or is it just theoritical? I just find that hard to believe. Three mins by car (I assume at 50km/hr) is roughly 2.5kms. So that means the bus is either circumnavigating the city or is driving at 3km/hr.
According to google maps, it takes 4 minutes by car to get to greville rd, so you must live somewhere south, west or east of constellation.
3 minutes by car takes you to:
– Paul Matthews Rd
– Barbados Drive
– Carribean Dr
– Most of Sunset Rd
– Most of Constellation
– Some of Salamanca
– Some of Juniper.
Constellation to Long Bay takes 31 minutes,
Silverdale via Dairy Flat Highway takes 54 minutes.
So you live further away than silverdale. Hmmmm…
Three minutes by car barely gets you through the lights and into the carpark.
I call rubbish here too. Anywhere within 3 minutes drive is within 10 minutes walk.
Point 9 is interesting, but there’s zero chance that this government will do away with Fringe Benefit Tax on public transport passes. Until that happens, and with the back-down on bringing in FBT on parking (which would have at least levelled the playing field), there’s no way that employers are going to do a thing to support HOP. The best that could be hoped for is that they’ll move to transport allowances instead of parking spaces, and then let employees make the decision on how to travel; 2degrees does this, except for a handful of very senior managers.
That’d be point 8, not point 9.
Can this be done in Christchurch too. We have congestion and housing affordability problems that needs a comprehensive solution….
No, not with you know who in charge it can’t 🙁