Our transport planning system is fundamentally broken

Ever since Wayne Brown became mayor (nearly two years ago now) he’s been wanting to progress an “integrated transport plan” with the government – which sounded a lot like the previous Auckland Transport Alignment Project (ATAP) with just a different name. It seems like a fair bit of work progressed early last year, but then Michael Wood forgot to declare his airport shares, David Parker wasn’t very interested, and then the government changed. The new government generally seems more interested in slamming local government, rather than working constructively with them, but there was mention in the final version of the Government Policy Statement that an integrated transport plan might finally be on the horizon – in the section on Ministerial expectations of Waka Kotahi:

The Government is considering how regional deals between central and local government can provide an opportunity to integrate long-term strategy and planning, across the transport system. The Government will also work with Auckland Council on an integrated transport plan setting out an aligned strategic approach to planning and funding transport in Auckland. I expect that the Ministry of Transport and the NZTA will engage with relevant entities to support this work and, once established, deliver on these deals.

Last week Council staff brought an update to the newly renamed Transport, Resilience and Infrastructure Committee on some of the work they’ve been doing to prepare for this integrated transport plan. This seems to have been quite a detailed piece of work: you can see it in the agenda starting at page 101 here.

Updated 24 September 2024: thanks to Auckland Council for sharing a properly formatted PDF: Auckland Council’s AITP Preparatory Work

Importantly this is not an integrated transport plan itself, but rather the result of work in four key areas:

• Identification and collation of the key challenges Auckland’s transport system faces over the next 30 years, and consideration of interfaces with relevant policies and strategies.
• An overview of the key aspects of the transport planning, governance and funding system which may need to evolve to better respond to the needs of Auckland.
• An outline of the role of non-infrastructural solutions in addressing Auckland’s transport challenges, which will support and complement future investments in infrastructure.
• A stocktake of the major transport projects proposed within Auckland over the next 30 years and a high-level assessment of each project against strategic transport outcomes.

There are some interesting conclusions in all four areas, but it was the second one – a critical look at the transport planning, governance and funding systems – which had some of the most interesting insights. Starting off with a reminder of just how damn complicated the existing system is:

Unsurprisingly this system is not working for anyone. The council report makes this point well:

…decision-making is fragmented and dispersed across central government, local government and a range of entities with varying degrees of autonomy. This creates an environment conducive to inefficient and unintegrated planning, misaligned strategies, and duplicative processes which do not adequately serve the region’s needs. Compounding this, Auckland Council does not always have clear and consistent oversight of the planning of transport infrastructure projects that will shape the city for generations to come and will have a direct impact on a wide range of critical regional outcomes.

Planning is particularly poor when it comes to major projects – which we have sadly seen the result of in recent years with several major initiatives like light-rail and Waitemata Harbour Connections getting completely out of control, spending huge amounts of public money for no result whatsoever. The report explains this further:

The processes through which major projects are initially conceptualised, scoped and proposed by various agencies are often opaque, both to elected decision-makers and the general public. This reduces the public’s trust in the transport planning process and makes it difficult to reach an enduring long-term consensus on major investment proposals. The volatile funding and planning context leads to situations where major projects are sometimes abruptly cancelled, leaving behind a range of sunk and opportunity costs, damaging trust in the transport planning system and creating a planning void where the underlying problems the project sought to solve are left unaddressed indefinitely.

The approach to developing major transport projects in New Zealand lacks long-term planning and coordination, which can result in periodic seismic shifts in transport infrastructure priorities. Given the long lead times for project delivery, this can also induce stasis as projects fail to make tangible progress before political priorities change. More broadly, the uncertainty this generates further hinders the development of a stable long-term pipeline of infrastructure projects, which is needed to give certainty to the sector, support statutory urban planning processes and potentially reduce the costs of delivering major projects.

The reasons why certain projects are (or are not) being pursued should be made clearer to Aucklanders, and there is an urgent need to end the cycle of multiple different agencies undertaking public consultation and engagement in duplicative and sometimes contradictory ways. Repeated, duplicative or confusing public consultations lead to wasted money, missed opportunities and a loss of public confidence in the transport planning system.

Politicians often bemoan the lack of a stable infrastructure pipeline, while in the next breath happily cancelling the priorities of previous governments – sometimes it seems for little reason other than spite (i.e. banning the funding of speed bumps). Without a stronger and more influential overall plan – agreed by both the government and the council and with real legislative weight that can’t be ignored by delivery agencies like ATAP was – this churn will almost certainly continue.

The report sets out some pretty good requirements of what’s needed from the integrated plan – importantly talking not only about what the plan needs to cover, but also wider changes to the planning system so that it doesn’t end up being further added complexity to the existing long list of plans that are typically ignored by decision-makers.

We will cover off other parts of the report in future posts, but there are some pretty good maps in there that identify where current transport challenges in the city are.

Also included is an almost dizzying array of projects that have been proposed at various points over time. This includes many overlapping or duplicative projects, which just seems bizarre and reinforces the disconnected current system.

It’s not super clear what the next step will be on an integrated transport plan. Presumably some sort of Terms of Reference will be agreed (much like the 2015/16 ATAP perhaps) that will guide the more detailed work. We will obviously keep a close eye on this if/when anything happens.

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