Yesterday Peter asked if the Auckland’s motorway network built on “strategic misrepresentations”?. In it he briefly mentioned engineer Joseph Wright who questioned how much the motorways would cost. In response I put this image in the comments however it probably justifies it’s own post (we’ve posted it before many years ago). It was from July 1962.
One of the things I find very frustrating about Auckland’s transport history is that even when we were repeatedly told by many different sources that the motorway system alone wouldn’t solve our problems (and make many of them worse) that we failed to listen. Even worse is despite the outstanding success of the high quality rapid transit investments we’ve still acting like an addict and telling ourselves that just one more motorway will solve our problems and then we’ll stop.
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I love how in NZ, lots of mention of cities of other countries for this article – but failed to mention the electric railway at the other end of Te Ika a Maui that was already up and running and well proven with its population. The late 50s would have been the heyday of the English Electric services to Paekakariki and Upper Hutt.
Anyway, everything he says stands. Opportunities missed in the 50s, in the 20s, in the 70s, unnecessary delay in the late 2000s, on it goes. Thankfully the plan, aside the CRL, is well underway now.
“Thankfully the plan, aside the CRL, is well underway now.”
Is it though? This might be true if we had a “PT First” approach to all future development in this city, but the Orakei Point’s ( read, on top of train station) are far outweighed by the Millwaters, Long Bays or Kumeu’s it seems.
it still amazes me that Auckland built the Northern Busway, but it’s unsurprising that we’ve failed to make full use of it.
Where is the plan to “Congest the NEX”? Why aren’t we connecting all developments North directly into it? Why aren’t we expanding it right across the Shore, funding it through intensified housing or commercial development, with a view to future rail corridors?
As much as there are great things happening in Auckland, there appear to be multiple plans and the better ones remain unfunded.
No mystery what the answer to your questions are:
“Why aren’t we connecting all developments North directly into it? Why aren’t we expanding it right across the Shore” as the National Party and NZTA why the funding has been delayed for the extension.
“funding it through intensified housing or commercial development, with a view to future rail corridors?” – ask the people of Auckland (especially the older ones) why the opposed all intensification on the Shore. Groups like Auckland 2040 and people like George Wood, Dick Quax and Cameron Brewer have been so effective at scaremongering about the horrors of dense living that no informed debate happened.
NZers have signed up to a neoliberal, anti-urban agenda which will ensure NZ makes no progress and the younger generations are increasingly disenfranchised from all the privileges the Baby Boomers were given as of right. Free medical, free education, full employment and affordable housing.
But don’t worry. Corporate profits are increasing.
“NZers have signed up to a neoliberal, anti-urban agenda which will ensure NZ makes no progress and the younger generations are increasingly disenfranchised from all the privileges the Baby Boomers were given as of right. Free medical, free education, full employment and affordable housing.”
Gosh here you go again: not this tired old meme please.
Let’s squabble over generational differences while your neo-liberals rub their hands at the successful divide and rule tactics.
Free medical? Nothing too much has changed in the last 30/40 years so maybe you could enlighten us?
Free education? I assume you mean tertiary. From 1900 to 1960 under 10 per 1,000 of the working age population were involved in tertiary education but the ratio had reached around 90 per 1,000 at the turn of the century (2000). It was in fact “free” only if your parents could afford to let you go. 1964 was the year I left school to go to work. My school wanted me to go to university but my parents simply could not afford it.
Full employment: well we need a change of government to rectify that. But we were not “given” it; we took it by having strong unions
Affordable housing? You do know that around 45% of over 65s do not own their own home? Also if you call 24% interest rates affordable.
But please continue to air your prejudices and continue to be a “useful idiot” to the neo-liberal elite.
If you seriously believe that:
1. The baby boomer generation didn’t grow up in a time when there was a lot more equality and opportunity and when the state looked after its citizens more; and
2. That same generation has and continues to screw their children’s’/grand-children’s generations out of those same things based on signing up wholesale to the neoliberal agenda that took over in the late 80’s,
then you and I are living in very different countries. This includes the approach to transport and urban planning in this country.
The railway system development in the Halcrow-Thomas Report was much more far-reaching than anything being planned now, let alone well underway now. It included electric suburban (heavy) railway lines to form links and loops all around greater Auckland: central, north, east, west and south – ahead of suburban development in many areas (like the Hutt Valley and Porirua were provided with, before they were developed – why did Wellington get it, but Auckland didn’t?).
Had the ideas in the Halcrow-Thomas Report been implemented, Auckland would be a very different place now, and Robie’s plan of the late ’60s/early ’70s could have easily been added on to it. Of course, it could all still be done now, but it would have been a lot easier to do it in the 1950s and 1960s.
Great find. Very telling that Mr Wright made his “opinions” public as he prepared for retirement. I guess revealing them would have been as career-limiting and income-limiting then as it is today.
Very true: a similar thing happens with the drug laws. Politicians are suddenly for de-criminalisation when they retire.
You only need to read to story of Auckland Airport to understand how the governments of the day just played one small borough off against another. Auckland was splintered into a huge number of very small parochial units of local government. NZ Railways was also very powerful and quite capable of blocking anything that interfered with the movement of freight.
You only need to follow the money to understand why Auckland is riddled with motorways as opposed to having an effective, efficient (and I’ll use Patrick’s favoured expression here) transit network. It’s why we were established in the first place; why we fought the indigenous owners; why we built slums in paradise; why we sprawled; why we destroyed a workable and popular tram network; why we continue to trash our environment. For the greater part we’ve been governed by speculative cowboys, more interested in what’s in their investment portfolio than what’s to be done in the interests of the country and its people. Sad.
+1000
“. . . telling ourselves that just one more motorway will solve our problems and then we’ll stop.”
I’m not so sure about this. I think there are still a good many people out there who still think we should keep on building motorways and not stop!
What I noticed though, was a significant change in public attitude to this after National ousted Labour and announced the RoNS. During the last term of Labour (2005-2008) there was effectively a moratorium on major new road projects as concern over peak-oil and climate change started to bite. Instead, the emphasis went on rescuing rail and funding the DART and WARP rail projects. In this regard we have a lot to thank the Clarke-Cullen govt for! But interestingly, there seemed to be reasonable public support for this state of affairs, and many people were prepared to accept that the likes of Transmission Gully would never happen and could be lived without.
Then along came National and turned the ship 180º. Overnight, massive road spending was announced and rail became seriously unloved. But worst of all, the public that had previously aquiesced to a less-road-dominated future, suddenly swung in behind Joyce and his wRoNgS.
What this showed me is how malleable public opinion can be to the direction in which it is led. Fair to say that most people have only a superficial understanding of most issues and seem ready to respond to confident-sounding, spin-embellished leadership, whichever way it may be taking us. And politicians know this and exploit it shamelessly for their own ends, ears wide shut to any sensible debate.
There has been no change in public opinion. There has been a change in government policy – and fair enough; the government changed! However, Aucklanders still say they want the same thing they wanted in the 1950s: more and better public transport.
Matt’s summarised some relevant polling data here: http://greaterakl.wpengine.com/tag/poll/
Auckland’s transport system does not look like it does because Aucklanders asked for it to be that way, but because successive governments spent a lot of money trying to reshape the market and create a demand for roads. We can have a debate over whether that was a good idea or not, but let’s not pretend that it happened without a lot of government intervention.
Regarding public opinion in Auckland, yes you are right. In spite of the change of Govt, a majority of Aucklanders still support the CRL (and presumambly reduced priority for roading projects?). However in Wellington this is not the case. Most people appear to support $2.4 billion going on the Levin-Airport RoNS and $0.00 on extending rail. Prior to National taking office, the general view seemed quite different. The talk back then was all about light rail, not M’ways.
Where would Wellington rail be extended to? Were you thinking of extending electrification to Otaki (and eventually Palmerston North to make the Capital Connection a realistic option), or running a rail line though the city centre? I don’t really know that much about the Hutt lines but I guess the could be extended a bit.
Celia Wade Brown ran on a ticket of light rail to the airport which people liked the idea of, but I think after all the costings were done everyone (including her) decided the busway was the best solution for now.
There are two possibilities for rail extension that I can think of for Wellington:
– Central to the airport via the hospital, similar to what people talking about with Bus and light rail.
– Upper Hutt to Porirua, this would provide a service between different centres within the region and also provide a catchment for places that don’t have easy access to rail currently.
Neither of these are probable and both would probably require some tunnelling, so fairly unlikely in the current climate of PT under-investment.
Thmslcn, Celia Wade-Brown changed her support to bus ways for political reasons, as you say, because of the costings. It has become pretty clear since then though, that the report she got was heavily biased, and basically, pretty much factually wrong. It has some howlers – that Light Rail would need a whole new tunnel drilled through Mt Victoria, costing $300m on its own, whereas Bus Rapid Transit would just share the existing road tunnel – or would share the proposed new road tunnel being proposed by NZTA (and therefore at no cost). But somehow, despite the Buses sharing the road tunnel with the cars causing the congestion, the buses would be faster than the cars. Go figure. Report: biased and unreliable.
“Where would Wellington rail be extended to”
Maybe extending the Wairarapa Connection to Woodville then eventually having a regular service around the circuit in both directions via Palmerston North and Ashurst?
I know the first objection will be about the cost but, as always, my personal feeling is that rail provides a service, with strong emphasis on the concept of service rather than profit.
I would also note that the last time I tried to get a bus from Masterton to Wellington I was told that the buses no longer run – because the train service was so popular.
Wellington has a very-successful rail spine which connects most of the region, but stops dead at the present Wellington Railway Station. Plans to extend beyond here, to serve more of the CBD and southern/eastern suburbs have been tossed about since the 1950’s but have always been squashed by a preference for road-building. The story is similar to that of Auckland’s ‘rapid rail’, except of course that Wellington did not allow its legacy rail service to run down the way Auckland did. Back in the 1960’s studies in both cities showed that without a rail extension, traffic congestion would become endemic and would cost even more to deal with. And nothing has changed since then. The need is as great now, if not greater. And the rub is that the $2.4 billion proposed to upgrade the road from Levin to the Airport would provide a handsome extension to rail, with a far better outcome for ‘joining up Wellington’. High costs of tunnelling are often bandied around as a scare-off tactic, but a range of cheaper alternatives exist. These have not been investigated, because the current crop of leaders have no interest in considering rail. As things stand, Wellington is set to receive an unnecessary motorway (Traffic is apparently declining anyway), and some sort of vague ‘bus rapid transit’ system which will do little to improve connectivity from the areas that matter such as the Hutt Valley, Porirua Basin and Kapiti Coast. These are where much of the city’s traffic congestion originates, and which through trains over an extended rail network would significantly benefit. But it appears that the rail spine is to remain forever broken. Not for nothing is the Kiwi a modern symbol for New Zealanders. It is sightless and without vision.
Mr Joseph Wright hit almost all the nails on the head in the 1962 newspaper article above, and showed impressive prescience. That someone in his senior position of bureaucratic authority and professional expertise couldn’t make headway from inside the Ministry of Works seems to indicate that some very powerful, well-connected and well-organanised forces were at work to stop rail and start motorways. Has anyone researched this enough to really got to the bottom of the who, how and why – and is there a traceable lineage to the rail-blocking of more recent times; a “dynasty” that has profited from Auckland’s collective loss?
Have mentioned this before elsewhere – did a bit of digging a while ago and one person who could really answer the question of how we ended up in this mess is a chap called FWO Jones – appointed Regional Planning Officer for Auckland in 1946 then became Director of Planning for the Auckland Regional Planning Authority right through until the 1970s. He’s lauded for his work on the parks of AKL – rightly so – but there are some strange u-turns (no pun intended) in his thinking and policy on AKL’s transport system over the years. For example, as early as 1949 he gave a passionate speech gravely warning against the rise of urban sprawl and advocating that AKL should add higher density to the areas closest to the CBD along with the more compact non-road infrastructure to service those areas – yet a few short years later he had seemingly ditched all his progressive thinking and led the motorway charge – becoming one of the prime architect of AKL’s notorious system. You do have to wonder what forces were at work to change his views so dramatically – did the big oil lobby of that era get up to the same dirty tricks they got up to in the US (as detailed in the movie Taken For A Ride which is on Ytube)…?
Thanks for the lead Ben, very interesting, yes, I think I do recall FWO Jones being mentioned here before, I will have to research it more some time. And thanks for the tip about Taken For A Ride, I will have to watch that as well (my favourite kind of research = watching a video :-)).
I can remember FWO [Fro] Jones, just, I met him when I was a kid as he was part of the design and planning world that included my parents [Think 1960s cocktail parties; very provincial and suburban versions of scenes from Madmen, me feasting on the treats while playing waiter: preztels and ginger-ale, later sneaking a few nips too]. If I recall correctly he was a sophisticated and well travelled man, seemed a bit older than the others, more experienced. Like my father, who was a Wellingtonian, he most certainly supported a Wellington-style rail based development pattern for Auckland, but this came unstuck because of politics and certain realities around funding.
My guess is that his thinking underwent a big change because it had to. One was the National government changing its tune on taking office 1950 and refusing to fund the Halcrow recommendations for electric rail in Auckland. My understanding is that this had much more to do with supporting private land speculators than some sort of oil company conspiracy. Although this was indeed the beginning of the victory of the Highway-Sprawl complex which is still the tail that wags the policy dog today.
Several things did conspire to cause this move away from planned development co-ordinated with Transit provision, like in the Hutt Valley. First the country came out of the war with no money, especially little foreign exchange. The Railways were top dog but over-stretched and over-confident about their preeminent position. The road-sprawl option offered an apparent version of self-funding for growth in a housing supply crisis -sound familiar?- the fact that we are still trying to retro fit those sprawl-burbs with amenity now shows that this was a false economy for the taxpayer [AMETI for instance], but it did make the fortunes of key players.
Anyway petrol tax promised to fund the roads, and oil price fell every year from 1946-1970, cars got cheaper and more available. It was the zeigeist….
Didn’t the “Korean Police Action” aka the Korean War, solve our balance of payments “crisis” in the early ’50s?
As while the wool and dairy prices had languished post WWII, once the Yanks got to Korea and found it well, really, really cold, in the Winters, Uncle Sam took all the wool NZ could supply and then some, making the ’50s a boom time for our Foreign Exchange Reserves.
And this also helped align us more closely with the US as the UK was “still on rations” (literally).
[Think todays Dairy Boom, but with sheep instead of Cows, US instead of China].
Of course didn’t last, but lasted long enough for all those involved to become convinced that the golden future of cars and trucks was here to stay…
So it was good night to Trams, Trains and Rail freight.
Of course what the country spent all that foreign exchange on was a different matter.
How much total money has been spent on road/motorway projects since the 60s? I imagine it would take a lot of work to be able to compile the data, but it would certainly be eye opening. Even if we could see how much has been spent in the last 10 years, the last 20 years, etc.
I’ve heard estimates that the motorway network alone would be pushing thirty billion in today’s money.
I’ve fine the figures for the last decade or so but can’t find them while searching from my phone. From memory it is around $4 billion just for motorways and that doesn’t include maintenance or renewal costs either.
I imagine just a fraction of that amount has been spent on PT in the same amount of time… It’s sad really, I seriously hope things will change.
Or that at least Christchurch will be looked at with eyes open to the possibilities of this era, making that an international precedent of multi-modal transportation.
oh, it’s good to dream isn’t it.