Most Saturdays we dig into the archives. This post by Matt was originally published back in March 2013.

Aside from the rather depressing patronage news, the most interesting report on the March agenda of the Auckland Transport Board is the Integrated Transport Programme (ITP). We saw some snippets of this document at last month’s Board meeting, but this is the first time we’ve seen a document that seems fairly critical in filling in the details of giving effect to the transport section of the Auckland Plan. The whole document is a fairly lengthy 100+ pages, excluding the Appendices (which aren’t on the AT website anyway for some odd reason), so it might take a few posts to get our heads around it completely.

A useful place to start is what’s called the “ITP approach” – which lays out the two major strategies which sit behind the ITP, as well as a kind of “where to from here” discussion:itp-approachSo it seems like the document is likely to pretty much always remain “live” and a work in progress. This is probably a very good thing, as the gaps in it become increasingly obvious as we read on.

One of the key initiatives appears to be what’s referred to as the “four stage intervention process” – which really just highlights that we should do everything we can to use what we have better before we go and build new stuff. Given the Auckland Plan approach of “just build everything and do it as quickly as possible”, this is a welcome breath of sanity and – if applied properly – should lead to things like more bus lanes (to optimise the use of existing road space for people throughput) and hopefully fewer expensive and stupid motorways.

However, all this talk about optimising existing networks seems to get flung out the window when it comes to the ITP’s investment profile over the next 30 years, which lumps a huge amount of spend into the first decade:

decade-by-decade-spendBy way of comparison, the ITP notes that since 2000 there has been around $7 billion of total spending on transport in Auckland – which means that this plan is based around the assumption that spending in the next 10 years on transport will be more than triple what we’ve spent in the last 10 (or so) years. Even given inflation that seems rather optimistic.

So what results do we get from this massive spend-up? Well, pretty rubbish to be honest if you use congestion as you key measurement of success. I can actually start to see why the government is sceptical of Auckland’s approach to transport if these really are the outcomes (although they’re solution of building more roads is just likely to make things even worse):congestion-levels-by-decadePresumably the weird result of inter-peak congestion ending up worse than peak congestion, which theoretically means we need to come up with new names for them, is just a bizarre quirk of the transport modelling as to my knowledge there’s nowhere else in the whole entire world that finds its roads busier off-peak than during the peak. Which does call into question the validity of all the modelling results in my opinion, but let’s set that issue aside for a minute.

Another way in which Auckland’s future transport investment seems to completely fail in terms of delivering the outcomes we want is in relation to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The table below is, quite frankly, pretty embarrassing reading:co2-growth
The obvious question from all of this is “why are the results so bad when we’re spending such a massive amount of cash on transport?” This leads to further questions about whether the mix of projects is right, whether we’re measuring the right things, what hasn’t yet been looked at in terms of policy initiatives (road pricing, stronger travel demand management, less urban sprawl) and what impact on these results individual proposed projects might have. For example, the amount of increased congestion in the CBD or the growth in CO2 emissions resulting from building another harbour crossing.

Turning to the project mix, the map that was in the version of the ITP presented in February – which seemed to be riddled with errors – has now disappeared to be replaced by something much vaguer in terms of projected costs. Here’s the roading map:

roading-programmeWhile it’s possible that some of the numbers in the February version were incorrect, it’s worth refreshing our memory to highlight the vast bulk of future spending on new infrastructure over the 30 year span of the ITP is proposed to be on new roads:

The final image to highlight is where and when the ITP thinks that growth will occur over the next 30 years – which seems to be the base ‘input’ to the transport modelling and is fairly alarming to anyone other than Nick Smith:

household-growth-2006-2041So now that we’ve confirmed a land-use growth pattern based largely on sprawl and a transport investment plan based largely on building more roads will deliver really bad outcomes can we please get around to doing what’s supposed to be the Auckland Plan vision: a quality compact city with a vastly improved public transport system?

Because, to be frankly honest, this plan is rubbish.

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5 comments

  1. Since, to the best of my knowledge, there is no other location in the entire world that sees its roads being busier outside of peak hours, it is reasonable to assume that the strange result of inter-peak congestion ending up being worse than peak congestion is just a bizarre quirk of the transport modeling. Theoretically, this means that we need to come up with new names for them.

  2. FNAF is a scary survival game with simple controls. In Five Nights at Freddy’s, the player takes on the part of a night-shift security guard.

  3. If traffic jams are the barometer of success, then the plan fails miserably. If this is the result of Auckland’s transport strategy, I can see why the government is sceptical about it.

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