A conference by the Traffic Institute – a group primarily made up of councillors and officers from a number of local authorities around the country to represent views on road safety and traffic management – held its annual conference earlier this week. There have been a few articles emerge from the conference and the one I’m going to focus on today is one titled Metro Rail won’t fix congestion which relates to a talk at the conference by Dr Dinesh Mohan from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi.
Metro rail systems such as Auckland’s proposed $2.4 billion link from Britomart to Mt Eden do nothing to reduce congestion in the long run, says a visiting international transport expert.
“With metro, all you do is create extra capacity,” Dr Dinesh Mohan told the Traffic Institute at its annual conference in Auckland today.
“Then, after two years, all the roads are congested again – and the metro is full.
“You just increase transport, you don’t reduce congestion.”
More total travel with the same amount of congestion/car use is exactly the point and primary purpose of the City Rail Link. The CRL network will move a lot more people around the region regardless of traffic. It’s also why we need greater investment in bus infrastructure both in the city centre and across the region as it allows us to get more use out of our road networks. The table below shows this, it comes from the City Centre Future Access Study released at the end of 2012. Regardless of the solution investigated (the integrated CRL and surface bus option was chosen as the best) vehicle traffic didn’t decline – although I think this is in part due to poor transport modelling.
Of course it also means that if projects that don’t reduce congestion long term are not worth building then you can say goodbye to any future road widening programmes. Instead we’d look at getting a better outcome from the existing road resource, which leads us to this point.
“The only way to reduce carbon dioxide is to reduce road area, there is no other way.”
One way to do that was to allocate a lane along every road for buses, and another for cyclists and pedestrians.
Great we agree again, so when do we start? I look forward to a network of bus and cycle lanes made from reclaimed traffic lanes. Projects like painting new bus and cycle lanes often have very high economic returns due to being comparatively cheap to construct (often just some paint is needed) and benefiting a lot of passengers.
He also addresses climate change
Only 25 per cent of the “life-cycle” energy costs of underground passenger trains went on running them, but that left the production of concrete, steel and other infrastructure components contributing the remaining 75 per cent.
“Putting anything underground increases carbon dioxide,” he said.
I guess it’s a good thing then that the vast majority of the other ~90km of the Auckland Rail network ins’t underground. As mentioned the point of the CRL is to unlock the latent capacity in the existing network so we can use it better. If we were building a full underground metro from scratch then he might have a point. But the City Rail Link is a mere 3km of tunnel turns that whole 90km legacy rail network into a highly efficient regional rapid transit system. To achieve the equivalent outcome with buses would similarly require a bus tunnel of some 3km, given that all the surface corridors are busy carrying hundreds of buses already. But that’s not the end of it, a bus solution would also require the construction of three or four new busways, in addition to those already planned, to do the same job as the rail network with the CRL.
I’m pretty sure that a bus tunnel and three brand new suburban busways will result in a lot more emissions that a rail tunnel alone.
Also from this article he talks about his figures for carbon emissions being based on coal fired power plants which is something we have very little of.
So, he reasons, if you have a transport system that operates underground or is elevated there are huge amounts in investments in tunnels, bridges and so on. Much more cement, concrete, electricity (for air-conditioning, lighting and so on) gets used, all of which is related to life-cycle costs in which “anything that uses more infrastructure comes off worse”.
Therefore, since most of energy in India is from coal, the carbon emission and energy consumption per passenger in the metro is higher than a bus
He then suggests that deep down everyone wants to drive.
“You must have congestion for the public to use public transport – if you don’t have congestion, you would be very stupid to use public transport, because you could get there faster by car.”
I guess someone better tell the thousands of people who catch PT off peak when the roads are flowing that they are stupid. The reality is that many people will happily use PT if it’s fast, frequent and reliable (not necessarily in that order). Increasingly people are just fed up of driving, parking and congestion, whatever the time of day. Classic examples of this are on the Northern Busway where there are often queues to get on even after hours as this tweet from the other day highlights:
Queue for the NEX @ 8pm! Send more buses @AklTransport @TransportBlog ! pic.twitter.com/OpDbHQwugI
— Louise (@digital_TP) September 17, 2014
And lastly
Told about Auckland Transport’s goal of making trains circulate through the central business district rather than having to back out of Britomart, he wondered whether the planners had considered running buses in a circuit instead.
Asked where London would be without its Underground, he said that was an unfair question as the system was built in the 19th Century when there were no buses, which did not become efficient people-carriers until the 1950s.
Well yes buses have been considered in depth, in fact buses featured strongly in the 46 different options considered as part of the CCFAS and enhanced bus operations are part of the preferred option together with the CRL. Bus options included the options below and multiple variations of each one:
- Best use of existing infrastructure
- Enhanced Bus operation – this builds on the previous options with additional bus priority through things like double bus lanes, bus priority at intersections etc.
- Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) – both surface BRT options and ones elevated through the city.
- Underground Bus – various tunnel alignments and operating patterns.
Overall it seems like his quoted comments are a case of him making a judgement about solutions for Auckland without having looked at any of the details. On the positive side it seems the Herald are finally calling the CRL a Metro Rail system rather than a just a rail loop.
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What I love about the Congestion Free Network is that time has been taken to look at the best solution for each corridor for a given period.
The pontification of experts, without discussing how long they’ve spent looking at the issues in a situation is often as bad as an uninformed opinion.
He didn’t say anything incorrect per se, just out of context with Auckland. Even with the CRL, the rail network will get full, even if it is 50 years from now. He didn’t say everyone wants to drive, he said people tend not to use PT if you can get to work faster or easier by car. This is true, this is a fact. Many, many people using the northern busway do so because it saves them time and it is easier than taking a car. If buses all had to use the same roads as the cars the whole way, then of course people will just stick in their cars which is what happens already. He probably didn’t understand the purpose of the CRL and was just answering a random question from someone.
Yes he did say things that were incorrect, e.g. “You must have congestion for the public to use public transport – if you don’t have congestion, you would be very stupid to use public transport, because you could get there faster by car.”
That is obviously incorrect. There are many factors that influence people’s mode choices and congestion (more specifically in-vehicle time and reliability) is but one. He even indirectly contradicts himself by going on to note that you could encourage PT mode choice through parking policies.
In my professional opinion the previously quoted statement is astoundingly “stupid”, especially coming from a transport researcher.
I feel that the arguments here are at odds with the reality. The function of heavy rail is to carry large amounts of passengers literally from Point A to Point B in some degree of comfort and in the fastest time possible. Buses (or trams) are for inner city commuting and shuttle services to the trains. What we are getting is a train service using large trams and doing exactly the same thing that the buses do. That is trundling around the inner & outer suburbs at a snails pace. The only benefit trains have over buses is they don’t get caught up in traffic jams and they are a lot more comfortable.
The perfect rail situation would be standard gauge express trains to say Albany, Henderson, Manukau and Howick and then the buses take over. Even to Hamilton and Whangarei.
If Auckland wants to be a “Big boy” city it needs to remember that the days of local town council thinking and the “What’s in it for me” town Councillors thinking is long past.
Matt – May I suggest that you send a copy of this post to each of the 17 people listed as being on the Executive Committee of the New Zealand Traffic Institute plus the detail of the CFN. I would do it myself except that I am rather a computer illiterate.
As an additional observation, I find when I have questioned the odd candidate for Parliament what they think of the CFN, that mostly they don’t know what it is especially if they are on the right of the spectrum. Whether we like or not a fantastic and considered proposal takes a long time to get traction.
“Only 25 per cent of the “life-cycle” energy costs of underground passenger trains went on running them, but that left the production of concrete, steel and other infrastructure components contributing the remaining 75 per cent.
“Putting anything underground increases carbon dioxide,” he said.”
Well D’uh, state the obvious.
But how much more CO2 do a city load of buses generate (especially when running tunnels, that need expensive 24 hour a day lighting and ventilation to keep those nasty exhaust fumes at bay and make the tunnel liveable for the bus-bound humans to pass through)? A lot, a huge amount in fact. Way more than a fleet of EMUs, but certainly less than if those buses were all replaced with cars.
I’d bet that any fossil fueled (or Natural Gas) powered 40 seater bus on the planet would use way more than “25” percent of its life-cycle energy costs in running i aroundt, but (more to the point) each bus will generate way way more CO2 doing that in its shorter life time of useful operation, than any 6 car EMU will – even though the EMU has 8-10 times the people carrying capacity and yet can be much cheaper to run than a bus – even when the EMU is empty of paying passengers.
Yes certainly there is a lot of embedded energy in an EMU and in building the tunnels, and rails they will run in, but so does the mega-tonnes of concrete, asphalt and steel used to build endless motorways, viaducts and roads. And we have way more of those roads and other CO2 causing strucutures in the open air than we have train tunnels or EMUs.
““Then, after two years, all the roads are congested again – and the metro is full”
Well that might be the case in India, certainly won’t happen here in 2 years, maybe in 20 or 30.
But in any case having a full metro is a “problem”?
In that vein is having a full bus a problem? No? because it displaces 40 cars off the road.
But if the trade off in India was 40 cycling people on the bus or trains (or worse, cars), then yes, that will cause more congestion – buts that a India specific issue of no relevance to NZ util we get 10 million people living in Auckland.
And if reducing congestion is the end goal or reducing CO2 is another foal, then building more roads for any reason is not the way to do it.
No one has ever managed to outbuild congestion using roads.
Does anyone know if the City Centre Future Access Study examined the average speed of non-motorised commuters as well as motorised commuters?
Presumably pedestrians and cyclists aren’t hugely affected by how congested the roads are.
“More total travel with the same amount of congestion/car use is exactly the point”
Indeed, but the council is trying to sell the idea to the public as a congestion-reducing project.
I think the subtlety of the CRL’s transport/land use impacts is actually quite hard for AT/AC to communicate effectively.
I think of it this way: The primary transport benefit of the CRL is to reduce the population’s *exposure* to congestion. While road traffic congestion will remain broadly constant (especially in the long run), the number of people who are disaffected by this congestion is reduced – because more people are travelling on the rail network.
So I actually do not agree the simple statement that the CRL will not reduce congestion, because it actually when congestion is defined for the population as a whole – even if people who drive will still incur the same delays.
What it really comes down to the perspective from which you define/measure congestion, i.e. the average person versus the average driver. The latter is of course just one segment of the travelling public and thus it seems incomplete to define the impacts of congestion from their perspective alone.
I read that NZ Herald article and cringed at so many of the really quite simple, dare I say stupid comments from an ‘expert’.
Definitely sounded textbook / doctrinal – like “yeah I give these talks all over the world and I can just spout the generic theory – it’ll work everywhere”.
Not sure what was worse though, the speaker or the reporting? Why move on to the London Underground?Someone should have just said
“Are you familiar with the context in Auckland? Oh you’re not?
Have you read any of the investigative literature around Auckland’s future PT? Oh you haven’t?
Do you think you should be making statements?”
“Are you aware of how ‘road-pro’ this country and government is?
That ‘giving a lane’ to bus / cycling on most major highways is a complete pipe dream?”
“Have you seen or heard about the CFN? Do you know this is a central city LINK that will unlock a whole rail system using modern trains capable of bringing in c750 people per train… at 15 to 20 trains per hour… free of congestion on a completely separate ROW..?”
“Do you still think a 3km link in a 90km+ network is that ‘fancy’ a project?”
(Thanks for your time now … off)
+1
Bus with dedicated buslane still need to wait for traffic lights, and bus also have slower aveage speed. Hong kong has both bus and metro. People always choose metro over bus when they can because of speed and convience.
The only exception is if the bus is running on motoway with very few stations. But that certainly wont apply in cbd
Singapore is the same. We went to visit friends and they told us to take the bus “because it stopped outside the house.” It took 55 min and much of the journey was in bus lanes. Previously we had used the train which takes about 30 min including a 10 min walk from station to house.
So the Traffic Institute pays some random a performance fee and travel expenses to make a speech about a city he doesn’t know anything about, a topic he is completely ignorant of, without having done any research, and which consists entirely of falsehoods and mistaken suppositions. Hope they have requested a refund.
Time to roll this graphic from Sydney out again: