Solving traffic congestion with Richard Prebble

The business section of the NZ Herald is full of opinion. Among the more opinionated of all is the ex-Minister of Transport, ex-Minister of Railways, ex MP for Auckland Central (1975-93, Labour), Wellington Central (1996-99, ACT, then list-2005), ex-leader of the ACT Party, uncle to actor Antonia, the veritable granddaddy of reckons himself: Richard Prebble CBE.

Of course, with that lifetime of achievement behind him, he can claim to have had considerable influence on the state of our cities and transport networks over the decades. So it was with excitement that I started reading his opinion piece yesterday (paywalled), with the compelling and accurate title:

Traffic congestion is not inevitable – it is a choice

Huzzah! I thought – at last, some sense about traffic congestion.

The op-ed begins by hailing the new government’s self-ordained and sweeping powers to override the planning process, by saying, and I quote “Governments are poor at picking winners”. Ummm, okay?

But quickly, we come to the matter at hand. “The impact of having planning laws that can be used to block needed infrastructure.” he writes, “is enormous.”

In my experience Auckland’s traffic congestion is worse than New York’s. Auckland’s gridlock is not an accident. The city’s planners planned it.

Ignoring the New York thing for a moment: so this is why in all those powerful roles he failed to achieve anything much? Dastardly city planners! If only there were, say, a well-funded central government transport agency with sweeping powers to build transport systems through our cities, to override these pesky planners. Or even, heaven forfend, a railway system, with indeed its own minister?

There comes some confusion about dates, with Prebble recalling a meeting with planners from the Auckland Regional Council before that organisation existed, at which they reportedly laid out their sneaky plan to prevent anyone getting to the airport. Fair enough, could happen to anyone.

Things then get even more confusing, as Prebble claims that despite his 30 years of trying: “There is still no road connecting the east to the airport.” You sure about that now?

Suddenly it becomes clear that all this airport reminiscence is in aid of the new government’s promised resurrection of the world’s most expensive and lowest value road: the proposed East-West Link between Mt Wellington and Onehunga (arguably sort of in the airport-ish area, at a stretch). Prebble does concede that this highway has a poor cost-benefit ratio, but moves on by incanting: “Using assets more efficiently is a no brainer.” (Ed to Richard: You’re not really selling it).

Thankfully, then we get a flash of clarity:

“It is nuts to spend over $5b on the central (sic) rail link tunnel and then not remove [level] rail crossings…”

I fully agree with this point – as does Mayor Wayne Brown, who has argued that the opportunity cost of funding the East-West Link is too high, when we could improve both road and rail networks through level crossing removal with that money instead.

We’re on a roll now, as Prebble turns out to also be in alignment with the Mayor on the question of an additional harbour crossing, and says so explicitly:

“And the Mayor is right. A second Harbour Bridge is far cheaper than a tunnel”

Ah, but sadly we’re soon wandering off piste again, where our august author returns to the matter of cost-benefit analysis. He praises the idea of economic evaluation to ‘take the politics out of decision making’, except when it come to buses, because:

“You cannot take freight on a bus”

Alrighty. Let’s just leave that insight and move on. Because now we come to the peak reckon, the nub of the piece, and the source of the headline:

The problem with this bit of touristic anecdata is really too obvious to bother unpacking, but here we are.

Interestingly, I had a similar experience in Copenhagen, where a friend insisted on picking me up from my hotel in the very centre of the city in his car, despite my certainty that this would be hopeless given how the streets were all given over to bike riders and pedestrians, and anyway, the Copenhagen train system is so good that shouldn’t i just jump on one to get to his place?

Exactly, he said, that’s why the drive will be easy, no one much is doing it. And so it proved. Nothing, as the theory tells us, improves the efficacy of urban driving more than heavily investing in all the alternatives, so the roads are more free for those who need or want to drive.

(And as any Aucklander knows, driving somewhere is easiest when fewer people are trying to do it at the same time as you.)

I delivered Prebble’s Tokyo-related gem on Twitter, where the hive mind did its thing, as expected. Russell Brown chimed in, with facts:

and, via Leigh Hunt:

Indeed. We call it “mode share”, and the fewer cars relative to other modes, the easier one generally finds it to drive. It’s not rocket science. See, Richard, if you can spot the difference between Tokyo and Auckland on the chart.

“Traffic congestion is not inevitable – it is a choice”. This is indisputable. What we feed grows. If we build new or expanded roads we get more driving, and more congestion. When we have a wildly imbalanced urban transport mix – as we do in Auckland and other cities in Aotearoa – the only way to reduce congestion is to reduce driving, because too much driving is literally what congestion is.

To reduce driving, we really have few options. First the sticks.

We can make driving more expensive, in terms of money (aka demand management), or in terms of time (oooops, well, this is congestion, we already do this, and then we also wonder why it eases somewhat during school holidays).

Or we can improve the alternatives to driving, the carrots, so that some people will choose them by preference, for some trips, some of the time.

Or… we can do both – surely the best choice, as we want to retain accessibility even as we improve road efficiency.

Be like Tokyo, or Copenhagen.

There is also the key role of urban form; allow and enable a more compact city: there is literally no faster and more efficient mode of transport than none at all; being there already. Proximity trumps mobility every time.

Again; be like those cities with mixed use dense urban forms with all transport modes strongly supported.

The quiet and productive streets of central Copenhagen

At this point in the op-ed (stay with me here), we see the return of Based Prebble. Yass! “We need road user changes and congestion charges.” he says.

Quite right. The thing is that although none of us (least of all me) believes it personally, the driving system is subsidised, very hard to feel that’s case when you’re buying, insuring, repairing, parking, or fuelling a vehicle. But the construction and maintenance of our road and streets are subsidised from other than direct transport taxes.

Yes, the driving system is funded partly through direct taxes, fuel tax and road user charges – but it’s also subsidised, and increasingly so, via property taxes, and general taxation (at the expense of more funding for funding hospitals and schools).

And then there are the harder-to-see compounding costs that driving dumps on society and the environment, through ongoing harms – the toll of deaths and injuries, the impacts of air pollution, the increasingly alarming effects of microplastics (most of which come from tyre dust), and the generational health impacts of foregone activity, and the existential challenge of climate change.

The reality is that drivers are not so much burdened, as we often feel ourselves to be, and as our new transport minister often likes to claim, but pampered. Other parts of the economy fund us daily to go brrrrroom brrrroom. And sit in gridlock.

Our op-ed champion, the decorated and many-partied ex-minister Prebble, has our back on this. Well, sort of.

While he is fully tika in supporting road pricing, Prebble also seems to have fallen into the great road pricing trap, which is thinking of it as simply another way to raise funds. Yes, it can be that. But first and foremost, road pricing is a demand management tool.

If a “good” (and connection and access is indeed good) is under-priced, then Economics 101 tells it will be over-subscribed. And so it is with urban driving. People will drive 400m for a latte, and make all sorts of other low-value and/or easily walkable or bikeable journeys by car, because it feels “free”, and because the alternatives are underdeveloped.

It isn’t “free”, of course, for all the reasons outlined above. But that’s the vibe, because the real costs of driving – both financial and social – are largely buried and hidden from us, as we gaze through the windscreen and trundle down the road.

So, the first great and positive impact of almost any form of road pricing is to help people decide, for some of the time and for some journeys, to not drive: to use an alternative way to get there, or to Zoom instead, or to save up their errands for one trip, or to time-shift their travel, or some or all of the above.

Thus, as a demand management tool, road pricing actually reduces the pressure to spend ever greater sums on building and widening roads. It brings driving back from the brink, especially at the peak of the peak. Mostly we already have a lavish supply of roads and lanes, and it’s only at peak times that the system breaks down into infarction. Road pricing, especially targeted at times and places that rich in alternatives (like the city centre), means we can have a more efficient and productive driving experience, at a lower ongoing cost on roading.

To be really effective, of course, pricing needs to be rolled out in parallel with improvements to the alternatives to driving.

The good news is that some of that is happening. We’ve improved things a lot for public transport this century, and for bike riders, a little – the happiest and most efficient commuters of them all.

The new government says it will complete a good number of rapid transit projects begun under its predecessors: CRL, the Eastern Busway, Airport to Botany (on that non-existent road), and the Northwestern Busway. Great. However, it also says it will also reduce the funding to operate the very services on these networks, weirdly, because it must instead build many more massive highways. This it says is because public transport is subsidised, and subsidies are bad. Well all transport modes are subsidised, especially driving. Subsidises are really financial transfers used to unlock economic value. The question should be of where is better economic value rather than claims of one mode being subsidised and another not.

To truly serve the city of Auckland, and especially its drivers, it would be better if the new government didn’t spend billions on the two expensive and invasive urban motorways it has chosen, without any up-to-date cost-benefit or alternatives analysis, that will induce more driving and make traffic congestion worse. Instead, it should improve those areas more subtly at lower cost, while funding public transport services well, and speedily help complete the (currently fragmented) bike network, to really make the promised road pricing work brilliantly.

After all, the new government, according to its leader, is wisely focused on emulating countries with much more balanced transport networks:

“The two things are not mutually exclusive, right?” Luxon said. “I mean, if you look at the top five countries with the highest-quality roads, they’ve seen a fall in their emissions over a number of decades now.

If you’re looking about Netherlands or Switzerland or Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, you know, those kinds of places, they can have both and, you know, we are totally committed to net zero 2050 goals – no doubt about it.”

Want better driving, and less traffic congestion? Invest wildly in the alternatives, especially in cities, and also between them. And price driving properly. This is exactly what those top five climate action countries with the highest-quality roads have done.

On this, we can all agree with the venerable Richard Prebble CBE:

“Solve traffic, and Auckland is the best city in the world.”

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