Yesterday the Auckland Business Forum sponsored four pages of op-eds in the business section of the Herald about the need to improve transport for businesses. Unfortunately it ended up being a bit of a case of who left the gates to Jurassic Park open and let the Roadasaurs out.
You can see all four pages below.
Perhaps the most hilarious of the pieces comes from the head of the National Road Carriers – a trucking lobby group – who effectively suggests that a Mad Max style apocalypse is imminent unless we take quick action to speed up the movement of trucks.
When trucks gridlock, Auckland stops. Virtually everything manufactured, imported, bought or consumed in Auckland is at some point transported by truck.
If truck movement stopped in Auckland, within the first 24 hours service stations would begin to run out of petrol, supermarkets and restaurants would have no fresh food, building sites and assembly companies using just-in-time suppliers would experience materials and parts shortages, and mail and other package deliveries would cease.
After a couple of days, food shortages would develop, motor vehicle fuel availability would dwindle, exports and imports of goods by sea and air would cease, as would operations of many wholesale and retail businesses. Thousands of Aucklanders would soon be out of work.
This demonstrates the critical importance of freight and goods delivery within Auckland’s transport system — when trucks can’t move, Auckland stops.
Freight is the backbone of the Auckland economy. It figures that if we are serious about improving our economy, we must get serious about tackling Auckland’s worsening traffic congestion and improving our productivity and efficiency.
As Auckland’s population grows, it is critical that we stop congestion spreading through the whole of the working day as it is starting to do in some areas of the city.
His other article suggests some of the ways trucks can be avoided where he suggests that trucks should be able to use the busway and bus lanes.
His big priority is the east-west link which he wants the government to take over and build as a RoNS – because you know it’s not like the NZTA is sitting around doing nothing. He suggests that a route along the waterfront on the Northern edge of the Mangere Inlet is good because it will “avoid community severance” and encourage the repair of the “environmentally damaged reclaimed land”. I know some Onehunga Foreshore groups support this option because they think they will get a new foreshore – like what is being done now next to the motorway – on the northern side of the inlet. Of course not that anyone will be able to easily access it due to the severance the motorway they want causes.
Seeing as this route is claimed to be so vitally important for truckies, I wonder how much they’re prepared to pay to use it – or are they expecting this to be a massive subsidy from the public towards their operations.
Also pushing to keep the trucks moving is a representative of the construction firms. In this case he’s primarily talking about trucks involved in construction. A case of the trucks must get through to be able to build more roads that will also end up congested. It’s a bit like groundhog day. He also calls for trucks to be able to use busways. He is of course correct when he says:
At the heart of an Auckland-Wellington strategy must be an accelerated effort to improve the city’s public transport system. Getting single-occupancy commuter vehicles off Auckland roads during the day would free up the capacity for contractors, transport operators and other essential trades.
However a few paragraphs later he then undoes that by stating that PT should only be funded if it doesn’t get in the way of building new stuff.
Meanwhile, increased public transport funding is only viable if it does not impact on the activities of the people who build the city.
One area I do agree with him on is in his other piece where he suggests there might be some advantages to merging the local aspects of the NZTA and Auckland Transport. I’d go further and suggest the rail network should also be included. A single agency managing the entire transport network could be useful if it also coincided with more autonomy in how the money is spent rather than the rigid Government Policy Status. That could mean motorway, PT and local road and even rail freight projects could be treated equally but there is little chance the government would allow this.
Stephen Selwood from the NZCID has also written a few pieces. In one notes that the current plans for an Additional Waitemata Harbour Crossing add no new connectivity and that it wastes the transport budget. His solution to this is to make the tunnel longer and instead connect up to the eastern side of the CBD. However not content with that he also wants to revive the Eastern Motorway and suggests it be built as a tunnel so it “protects the views and amenity of the eastern suburbs”. It would then presumably link up with a larger AMETI project.
If the AWHC is estimated at $5 billion then how much is an approximately 14km tunnel from Glen Innes to the North Shore going to be?
Lastly both Selwood and Chamber of Commerce CEO Michael Barnett separately talk about and support the governments push for a transport accord. While I don’t necessarily disagree it seems that are taking the stance that Auckland’s current plans are fundamentally wrong. In my view we’ve seen a huge improvement in the work AT has done in it’s planning for the future and it’s starting to show that the plans of the past aren’t necessarily right or worth pursuing. This has been shown in examples like how they’re thinking of deferring the Reeves Rd flyover which would have just shifted congestion one intersection down the road and to invest the money in bringing forward PT improvements. Another is them looking at light rail as way of addressing looming bus congestion.
Of course there’s also the irony that the business groups are supporting the government in creating another year of delay and debate while also calling for urgent action to speed things up. Perhaps it’s time to stop having a bet each way and pick a position. To me it also shows why it’s so vital that we don’t just leave the conversation about Auckland’s future to these influential and well connected groups.
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The transport dinosaurs are indeed getting angry. I think they’ve only just twigged onto the fact that they’ve lost the public debate. Their incoherent and shrill cries of an impending transport apocalypse are quite sad.
My take on this advertorial is that it represents the convergence of a couple of issues:
– The road lobby is getting desperate. Once Waterview is complete they have few new projects to roll into. Talk about crony corporate capitalism. If their business prosperity was premised on continued government hand-outs then my level of sympathy for their predicament is less than zero.
– Central government is antsy at Auckland Council and Auckland Transport’s investments in PT and walking/cycling. Council’s transport levy was a masterstroke that Central Government didn’t see coming, and now feels threatened by because it reduces their power over the purse strings.
The road lobby and central government, possibly in conjunction with the AA, seem to be launching a concerted assault on Auckland Council and Auckland Transport’s strategic land use and transport plans. I can only hope the latter two organisations stand their ground.
In my view, rather than crying out for further subsidies – NZTA’s funds are largely committed, FFS – they should put their labour and capital to work on constructing new housing. Auckland’s got plenty of roads, but it could do with some more apartment buildings.
I suspect there are dwellings going unbuilt because the government is pumping money into infrastructure like there’s no tomorrow.
agreed, the Government’s highway binge seems likely to be diverting economic resources which would be better used for constructing housing. Another economic own goal from the NZ Government.
Aside from the actual contractors, I would have thought trucking companies would be very keen for road pricing. If all their trips are of such high value, they will benefit more than anyone.
Agreed.
Except I bet, they’d argue that their trips are **so** valuable to “society” at large that they should be exempt from any such charges, as you know, they’d go broke if they had to pay more for all those trips they make.
And then where would Aucklander’s be?
Umm…and who do you think ends up paying those charges? You and I. Freight companies aren’t a charity. Most of what the trucking industry pointed out is true. If you can’t deliver goods efficiently the city dies. Cut off a supply route and things die. Warfare 101. Simple. Not sure why you guys are so keen to put your heads in the sand over that.
Actually the net effect is that no one would pay them. The efficiency gains in labour and fuel consumption would more than offset any decongestion charges. Freight would get faster and cheaper.
Go ask any truckie, any working in logistics, how much they would pay per vehicle per day if it meant they could drive on the highways and motorways without congestion. They’d do the sums and it would probably come back in the hundreds. $20 a day in fees to avoid congestion would make trucking more efficient and save us all money.
This line of argument by Ricardo is absurd. We are talking about degrees of delay from imagined ideal in a largely uncongested city. No one is proposing to take all the existing m’ways away, just about how much value there is in building more. If your only argument to keep wasting money and destroying land value on more of these things is that we all face imminent starvation from logistics collapse then clearly the game is up. That is simply bullshit; the road lobby are out of arguments.
“If you can’t deliver goods efficiently the city dies.”
What is your metric for delivery efficiency?
What is this metric for Auckland at the moment?
What is the threshold value of this metric beyond which Auckland “dies”?
Are there any case studies of cities dying due to inefficient deliveries?
This issue here (for me) is massive public subsidy for private commercial (trucker) benefit. The truckers appear to not see that getting more cars off the roads directly addresses their problem.
LOL at the apocalyptic picture painted by the road lobby guy.
Guys, if the earth suddenly disintegrated we’d be floating in the vacuum of space! WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO TO AVERT THIS HIDEOUS CATASTROPHE???
Build the eastern Motorway tunnel with vacuum proof doors.
The key metric for freight and tradies is that 77% of vehicles on our roads are private cars. The key to decongestion is to reduce this volume of low value journeys. This cannot be done by building more roads because does the reverse; it stimulates more driving, because it subsidises and incentivises private vehicle use. The only way is to offer alternative alternatives to the use of the private car for every kind of journey:
-This means building more mixed use intensive centres so people can reach the employment, education, and services where they live -by foot and bike.
-Building fewer distant dormitory suburbs that result in long commutes.
-And connecting these centres together with fast, frequent, and attractive Rapid Transit, and access to the stations and centres with safe Active routes.
-Then every motorway can have freight lanes completely clear of the blocking private driver
-And all of the above should be priced by time of day and mode, so the valuable in encouraged and the costly priced right [but not banned].
Reduce that 77% by 10% or so and we’ll have freeflow on our existing network.
Instead the moar roadz model they are calling for above is so dumb and unaffordable it’s amazing they have the temerity to put it in the business section! I am embarrassed for the Auckland Business Forum.
And if I’m a tradie, higher density housing benefits me:
Instead of travelling 100km, waste 2 hours on the road, and pay $50 in fuel, booking in 4 plumbing* jobs per day,
higher density allows me to travel only 10km per day, spend 20 mins on the road and pay $5 in fuel and book in 6 jobs per day**
*Not an actual plumber
**Pulled stats out of thin air, but the basic model is plausible
Steve, theories are wonderful things, realities somewhat different. Can tell you have never run a tradie business. Customers not home when they say they will be, jobs turn out to take longer, hidden issues make changes to simple fits, customer changes mind on equipment to install, etc. The list goes on. No tradie’s day runs to schedule.
Those types of issues aren’t unique to tradies, and actually just reinforce my point…
In a high density model:
– You haven’t just travelled 30 km across town to find the customer is not home. Instead the next client on the list is 5 mins away, and ecstatic you can get to them earlier.
– You can choose how much contingency you leave between jobs to allow for overruns, but any variations is controllable by the skills and experience of the tradie, versus an unexpected accident blocking the motorway at Mt Wellington.
Agreed. In a neighbourhood of apartment buildings with 20,000 people living in them a plumber or electrician could walk to many jobs in less time than it takes to drive to them. The only issue is how to carry their gear. Those vans they drive tend to be full of stuff they need. But smaller electric vans (glorified golf carts) could do just as well in a more dense context.
Get developments big enough and they have full time tradies on site. I witnessed this when staying at the wonderful Barbican in London last year. They knew the quirks, had the gear there, even had master keys so sorted the problem while we were out; seamlessly.
Exactly. It should be so obvious by now, after years of evidence here, and decades of evidence from overseas.
Do they run their businesses by ignoring data? (No wonder NZ business productivity is so dismal, and keeps dropping.)
Btw, has anyone noticed that the scale on the Herald graphic is wrong by two orders of magnitude? Surely the bar is 500m, not 50km. (A sub-editor might have picked this up … unless the whole feature is a prank, and that glaring error is the give-away clue.)
Where is the scale bar? I saved the paper but still cannot find it?
David Aitken’s mention of “High Productivity Motor Vehicles” raised me blood pressure. They were not meant to have access to all streets. You are no doubt aware of the amount of chip they screw out of the seal in our local streets with close radius turning of the 4 closely spaced non stearing axles. These HPMV’s are a menace in the city and lot of the delivery vehicles are of inappropriate size. It seems that if you pay the road user charge you can drive it anywhere there is a public road.
Ok found that scale bar, need my specs. But what is the speed side scale on the speed graph (joined up planning article). I am convinced that if we lowered the speed on the inner city motorways we would move more vehicles. If the scale is 10kph per line then I feel that is an acceptable speed at 30kph. It keeps moving and will allow for greater numbers of vehicles.
PatrIck please quit those tree hugging lefty comments. The only way to fix aucklands excessive road use is to build more roads. I’ve heard it worked for LA (not that I’ve ever travelled anywhere myself but that’s what Gerry Brownlie told me and he must be honest because he is a national MP). I don’t want my rates money building a train that loops in circles, especially because it makes people have dirty affairs. When I was young everyone wanted a car and a quarter acre section in suburbia as far from that awful city as possible and I can’t see any evidence that that has changed (not that I have looked but everyone at the bowls club agrees).
We can fix aucklands housing crisis by demolishing a heap of houses and building a 12 lane motorway to Hamilton. No one wants to live in apartment, I know that because I don’t want to.
It’s common sense!
Who actually is the Auckland Business Forum? Is it just a self-appointed group who felt it would be a more palatable name than “Backward Thinking Industry Lobbyists with a Huge Vested Interest”?
You’ve got to realise that ‘business’ in New Zealand is a belief system, not an economic or social activity. It doesn’t require data or facts just an unwavering sense of self-rightness, articulated through a little light rhetoric, a chummy jape or two and a little contribution from the right quarters (usually the taxpayer). Get that right and Bob’s your uncle. RoNS, the current government’s major growth initiative, are predicated on New Zealand ‘business’ so it’s hardly surprising that the Auckland Business Forum is pushing for more of the same.
Thanks Christopher T. So it seems. (I had to look up the definition of jape, and on reading it thought immediately of Steven Joyce as being a current master of it.)
[I still don’t understand why Roger and Prebs sold us for a few chummy japes with their Business Round Table mates. Doesn’t seem like an even trade to me.]
I am really over the transport lobby and “business” Put them in the same category as any other baby boomer/gen X lobby groups (including investor housing) because they are kindred spirits with a strong sense of entitlement and a self serving righteousness always with their hands out!
It would be a very low odd bet that the transport lobby is a gold star donor to this government and have done bloody well out bludging off the taxpayers so far as a direct result. It’s all about profit and return to shareholders, nothing moire. But the more trucks that clog up our city the worse it gets. 50+ tonne truck and trailer units damaging and blocking our roads whilst being subsidised hugely and fulfilling the mantra that commuting in Auckland is only as quick as its slowest truck.
“nothing moire”
…so not just a fringe element then…
Doh. And why do you think trucks drive on roads? To supply all the services you survive on daily. From hospital deliveries, schools, businesses, chemists, all sorts of freight, even delivering bicycle tyres, etc. Contributors to this blog would complain loudly if those services were impacted I am sure. Which services would you happily give up? And if that worked for you would it work for anyone else? Where is the commonsense in these blog comments?
“Which services would you happily give up?”
Binary BS. Either new multi-lane roads are built or truck deliveries cease. Doesn’t seem plausible, does it?
Yes if we leave the roads as they are then obviously no deliveries can be made. The current roads are incapable of supporting deliveries
I had to check back with the print edition, and indeed it is there:- a 50 km scale bar at the bottom of the map indicating that about 600 km of superhighway is needed. No wonder that the dinosaurs are gathering.
One Michael Barnett comment was “Remove parking from major arterial routes”. APPLAUSE needed for this!
+1
Yes, it’s ridiculous how one parked vehicle in off-peak and weekends on Constellation Drive (where business premises have their own parking anyway) reduces that arterial from 2-lanes each way to 1-lane each way, with both lanes being congested because of 2 lanes trying to merge into 1 lane to get around the parked vehicle – this ends up in making the congestion as bad or sometimes even worse in off-peak and weekends than in peak times. Make the T2 clearway permanent.
absolute yes for both ways both peaks, it should be the default for any new bus lanes
but on Constellation, often that single parked vehicle is carrying advertising for one of the businesses!
That East-West motorway is a huge over-kill. Instead remove the on-street parking from Neilson St and the eastern 2km which is still one lane each way could easily become two lanes. Make the outside lane truck/bus only or something like that. That should solve the “need” for a motorway extension at a fraction of the cost.
Exactly. Matt L has suggested this a number of times in a number of posts on this subject on this blog, and it makes obvious sense (except to NZTA, obviously).
Trucks in bus lanes with the bikes? I like the idea of trucks pulling up when buses do.
If I was a cyclist anywhere near Neilson St I’d avoid it altogether and take the foreshore path or a less busy (quieter and less toxic) parallel street.
I think there are some streets that are too unsafe and too unpleasant for cycling, and Neilson St would probably be top of the list.
Which is all well and good unless you are cycling to work, on Neilson Street.
Interestingly Sydney is full of roads where they’ve taken out the parking and changed a road into a 60 or 70k zone. They also usually cram another lane in as well, Sydney lanes tend to be pretty narrow.
Before the Eastern Distributor Sydney had no cross city motorway. Arterial routes had parking banned 24 x 7 and two lanes were marked in each direction on suburban streets. This was to allow flow and ease gridlock issues (2 lanes flow more than 2x the traffic of 1 lane). This needs to happen across Auckland too. All types of road users would benefit.
As a pedestrian in USA I found their 6 lane streets hard to deal with and 4 lanes with controlled intersections better although there was just enough time on the light for me to walk across. Lights with pedestrians crossing with the traffic works better although they end up in a lot of streets with the six lanes at intersections to cope with the turn on red options.
Still no mention of increasing parking costs. That is one thing that could empty the streets of parked cars if the charges were high enough. Can’t we do that without Central Government intervention? Increase costs on all AC carparks and the rest will follow. If AC wanted to leave some on street parking then make sure the charges after the first hour leap enough to keep those parked vehicles moving.
If life is so tough for the truckies and the sky is about to fall on our heads, maybe we should invest more in freight going by rail.
That should make them happier right?
We need to make sure that the East West Corridor has a rail gap in it to link the airport to Onehunga Station.
It would be a travesty to block the potential future airport rail link (light or heavy) with a motorway.
I believe NZTA and the gov have no interest in doing this which is why the minister has been attacking the Council over it’s ‘unrealistic’ plans for future rail to the airport. Cutting off options for people to make different decisions in the future is the worst aspect of this government’s transport policy. Not funding rail to airport now is their prerogative, but to make it all but impossible for a future gov or generation to do so is shortsighted, spiteful, and arrogant.
The “Union to Pearson” (UPExpress) train from Toronto CBD to Pearson Int’l Airport is now up and running.
https://www.upexpress.com/
During the consultation on the Onehunga foreshore options, last year, every single person present made it 100% clear to NZTA and AT minions that the rail link options to the port and to the airport had to be preserved at all costs.
We were all told multiple times and it was minuted more than once that every option (A through F) discussed and consulted on preserved those two options even if they weren’t being built anytime soon.
Of course, if NZTA now chooses to pursue an option not discussed or consulted on – then all previous consultation is blind sided and discarded.
But that leaves them wide open to legal “bait and switch” challenges as to what they consulted on versus what they end up building are not related.
And building a motorway on the foreshore might make the truckies happy (for a bit – till it fills up with trucks), but won’t appease anyone else.
This leaves me confused as to Michael Barnett’s suitability as a future Mayor of Auckland. He usually talks sense but to be associated with this roadsfest piece takes some points off.