This a guest post by Tim Kvingedal, a student at the School of Architecture, University of Auckland. Tim is from Norway.
I´ve been living in central Auckland for 11 months now, and you know what? I’m getting sick of waiting for cars. Every time I step out of my flat I feel like I’m wasting my time and this is why I did this research.
First a little backdrop of the situation in Auckland
This map shows all parking, which is run by the big companies like Wilson etc., in Auckland CBD. The ones marked with letters are all multi storey car parks and the red dots are “smaller” ones on the ground. You can also add all the parking that belongs to private offices, shops etc. There are so many parking spots but still not enough for the ridiculous amount of cars. So we need more car parks, you say? Well, if you want to dig your own grave, the answer is yes. If you’re more interested in making Auckland work as a well functioning city in the future public transport is the answer, and by public transport I first of all mean train.
Lets do a quick assessment of what kind of work cars and train are doing best. Well, one single railway has about twelve times more capacity than a single motorway lane. This means that you can ship a large amount of people in and out of the city centre ten times more efficient than a car would do.
On average there are 1.2 people in each car going in and out of Auckland CBD. This means that there is a lot of space wasted to get 1.2 people from A to B. The car is also running on fossil fuels and will pollute a whole lot more than an eco friendly electric train. What the train cannot do is to take you to rural places like your bach, which are miles away from the rail lines. So the car is good at transporting you out from urban places whereas the train is good at taking you in and out of the cities.
The Walk
For my research I decided to see how much time I wasted on a single trip from my apartment in Union Street to Countdown grocery store next to Queen Street. This should be a 10 minute walk with 7 intersections. Lets see what happened:
I only need to walk 20 meters before my first red man. I started the stopwatch. 30 seconds, 1 minute, still no sign of the green man. So what do you do? Call a friend? Well, with all that traffic noise there’s no point in calling anyone. Better do nothing. So finally, after 1 minute 45s I’m allowed to cross.
I walk up Hobson Street and I spot this gap between two buildings. This is not the only one I’ve seen, Auckland is filled with these gaps and most of them are used for ‘temporary’ car parks. In this gap it looks like it´s one lucky car that found this secret little spot with great view.
The thing about these gaps is that people don’t see them, except people that are in a cars looking for a car park. The street life desperately needs these gaps to be filled, because they’re puncturing the whole experience of walking down the street and being activated by the programmes in the surrounding buildings.
This particular spot would be great for a café or what about just putting a big cow there to activate people walking down the street and open their eyes for that gap and what kind of potential it has.
I start walking again and I see people running like crazy to cross the street before the green man disappears. They simply don’t want to waste their time waiting for cars to cross.
So after a couple of red men and one lucky green I’m standing next to Auckland’s biggest wound, the gap next to Elliot Street. Not surprisingly this is used for parking cars, and this is just devastating for the area. Again, why not do something to activate the area before they start building there? There is already one carousel so yeah let’s have a temporary mini amusement park. Think of all the joy this will spread out to the area. Kids laughing, music, the smell of popcorn. I mean anything is better for the city than another car park.
Another thing that fascinates me when I’m walking are all the cars popping out of buildings like Jack in the box.
As a pedestrian I almost constantly have to be aware of that there might be a car coming out of this slot. It’s not that it’s really dangerous but you still have to be aware of it all the time. On my way home I clocked how long time I’d spent on passing these car slots.
This picture sums up the feeling as a pedestrian with all this cars popping out. It’s a battle:
It’s not just the cars crossing the pedestrian lane that is annoying, but also that the pedestrian lane itself sometimes disappear! There is no marking and no lights telling you when you can cross. So I guess if I want to follow the traffic rules I better go back and try another way?
So after crossing 14 intersections in total I’m home again and these are the stats from the walk:
So thanks to the auto-dominant nature of Auckland I will have wasted 91 hours of my time this year just to buy groceries.
And I’m not sure it’s working out so well for all the drivers either…
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Great post Tim!! Totally agree about the waste of *valuable* space.. here’s some more visualisations of the problem (and the solution) http://www.3fidi.com/?p=2833
Yes, the potos are classic, but you forget the Auckland solution: 15 car lanes with 4 cars each…… 😉
What those photos don’t take account of is of those 60 people they likely have 60 completely different destinations and some will require a transfer and so it should really be showing 70 buses and not just one.
For the cyclist 5 should be in hospital 🙂
Hilarious!
Why would you have 70 buses on one corridor if they were making transfers? To get to completely different destinations? One bus only has one route!
That aside, interesting thing is that those pictures actually undersell the roadspace required. When moving the cars and bikes spread out quite a lot more, while buses also occupy a larger space in traffic than when they are still.
Lol, maybe the way you’re driving, they should be?
Counter-trolling /off
[But noteworthy that ACC has stats showing that cycling is less dangerous than amateur cricket in terms of ACC payouts / person occupied in each of these “sports”]
A few broken bones, sprained wrists and a few scratches don’t really cost ACC all that much. That doesn’t reduce the occurrence of injury however.
Nick, obviously if people are making 60 different trips they won’t be on the same corridor for the entire trip. The primary point however is that we are not all on some perpetual bus tour but go about doing our own things crossing paths on our way.
What a fantastic post. Its always great to have all facts and figures to win the bureaucratic battles but this is a great post to win the hearts and minds of citizens. It deserves exposure beyond this Blog.
Excellent post! You should put your views to Campbell Live.
I do not think looking at high rises is a great view. Are you saying you walk to the supermarket 5x/wk? You would save huge amounts of time going once per week.
How is one supposed to carry a full weeks worth of groceries on a *walking* trip to the supermarket? A once a week shop is fine in a car, not when you have to carry everything out yourself. Also, one of the small downsides about apartment dwelling – you don’t have unlimited storage space, so you’re limited in how much food you can store at any one time, especially if you share with others.
With a hand cart/trolley. You see little old ladies them, they must be cleverer than the youth of today 😉
In my experience, those only carry about the same amount as what you can carry in 2 or 3 bags anyway.
Further – maybe *you* don’t think high-rises are a great view, but others clearly do. Seems like you have no idea about what it’s like to live in the city and have no appreciation for others who do.
Lets play nice, kris_b. All Owen said is HE doesn’t like it, he didn’t say “high rises shouldn’t be allowed”.
Though I do kinda think, Owen, that you DO miss the point. Even if someone walked (or travelled in other fashion) to the supermarket only once a week, the point is that we all do several trips on average EACH DAY. Not one once a week. So the fact that walking in the CBD seems designed to slow you down at lots of steps (something I agree with, as a long-term CBD resident), is very relevant.
well said on all counts.
Thanks Tim, but your map has missed of several major parking buildings in the CBD. There is acutally much more than that.
Quick factoid, Auckland has slightly more CBD parking that Melbourne, despite the Melbourne region being three times the size of Auckland with a CBD about four times the size.
That is actually a truly shocking statistic.
Great post Tim. I think some people think you are joking because they dont understand how cities should work and assume that Auckland actually does work as a city – which IMHO is just not true. Coming from Norway I can only imagine your frustration. Northern Europe and particularly Scandinavia has the best cities in the world for people (not cars).
Though I am puzzled why you would come to NZ to study architecture. Have you seen the state of our architecture? It can be summarised as “How many ways can you construct a boring rectangular box”? I suppose if you wanted to learn how to build buildings and public spaces just for the benefit of motorists it would be a good place to come.
That is like me going to Norway to learn how to play Rugby!
Goosoid, the biggest clue that it’s a p!sstake is counting the time to cross vehicle crossings. The punch wall is a close second (is that a man or a woman?). By using humour right from the first photo Tim has actually created one of the more successful posts (80+ responses to date) including some valuable discussion, and all without a single mention of the biosphere (whatever that is).
Good post! I walk myself every day from Mt. Eden to CBD for work as it is ridiculously the fastest option in peak hour. And i encounter fairly everything mentioned.
You must be keen for the LRT onQueen st.
I had training in the city today. So took the ferry from Birkenhead, then a walk to Hobson st. What a wait at Albert st. Felt like 4 minutes at least and actually not too much vehicular traffic, they could have priaratised the ped movement much better.
This is somewhat contrived
Anyway, your closest supermarket is on Victoria St west, it’s only a 800m walk, and you only have to cross two streets, one of which is quiet and uncontrolled
https://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=Wellington+St&daddr=Victoria+St+West&hl=en&ll=-36.848633,174.753106&spn=0.005211,0.010568&sll=-36.848917,174.752923&sspn=0.002606,0.005284&geocode=FVSrzf0dHJJqCg%3BFaC9zf0dlH5qCg&dirflg=w&mra=ltm&t=m&z=17
Other than that, you could get a car like the rest of Auckland 🙂
This specific walk is not the point. The point is that this could be any walk from A to B in Auckland CBD. Anyway, to get to the supermarket in Victoria St west I´ll have to cross the streets six times one way, half of them without traffic lights.
The walk route is the point. You are going into the main traffic areas
A much quieter route with only six crossing, on a gentler slope, and only 100m longer is https://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=Union+St&daddr=-36.8536589,174.7597657+to:-36.8498007,174.7639644+to:Elliott+St&hl=en&ll=-36.852171,174.7595&spn=0.010422,0.021136&sll=-36.850436,174.759092&sspn=0.010423,0.021136&geocode=FVSrzf0dHJJqCg%3BFWaozf0dVZ9qCilFgH7d7kcNbTHBcRQHYe8AEw%3BFXi3zf0dvK9qCilb24hL5UcNbTHgwYkGYe8AEw%3BFWy7zf0djbFqCg&dirflg=w&mra=dpe&mrsp=2&sz=16&via=1,2&t=m&z=16
I can;t see six crossings going to Victoria st either!
The whole point is that the city should be the most ped. friendly place in the city, yet it clearly is not, which is saying something as the rest of the city is awful.
That’s daft. Most people do not live in the city. PT might work for 50% of people coming into the CBD, what about the other 50%?
How about allocating them 50% of the road space, crossing time, priority, funding, fringe benefit tax ememption… only?
Pete, I don’t really follow your logic here.
The first thing to note is that better pedestrian facilities benefit PT users as well as pedestrians, because all PT Users have to walk to/from their final destination (as do many car users, but for the sake of your argument let’s assume that everyone who drives can park directly beneath their building without having to walk anyway). So better pedestrian facilities benefits pedestrians and PT users.
The second thing to note is with respect to mode share. Motorised trips into the CBD are split 50:50 between car and PT. But the walking/cycling trips both within and into the city centre are additional to this again. At the last census, people living in central city area units had a walking JTW mode share of between 20-40%. And that does not include all the people walking/cycling in from places just outside the city centre. When you add it all up I suspect that car:PT:w/c is probably split something like 40:40:20 for travel into the city centre. So what’s being proposed here is improving the lot of the 60% (PT users plus pedestrians/cyclists) at the expense of the 40% of people who drive.
Right now, I’d guess that 80% of the space within our transport corridors and 80% of the time at intersections in the city centre is dedicated to meeting the needs of private vehicles. I think the author and Sailore Boy are (rightly) suggesting that we need to rebalance this allocation of space/time to better reflect the 60% of people who do not drive.
Basically, I agree with Sailor Boy: The city centre should be the most pedestrian friendly part of the city.
Most of those drivers still has to walk. I wonder what the proportion is that get a basement carpark in whatever building they are going to? 5% maybe? And those drivers, they drive to get their lunch, drive to eat it in the park, drive to pop Ito the shops? Unlikely, they probably walk around the city just as much as someone who arrives by bus.
I was up on Hobson St today at about 2pm as it happens, traffic was so light it could have been a one lane street quite happily. We need to stop trying to provide for peak use an provide for average use instead.
Agree this appears contrived. Knowing there is a supermarket much closer to the one you go to, it is now your decision to waste 91 hrs of your life every year. You can’t blame the traffic.
yes, pedestrians seem to waste immense amounts of time waiting for cars in Auckland’s city centre. I often see hundreds of people are waiting on Queen Street while a few cars dribble through.
I think the time has come for us to say “sorry cars, we ave to hold you up because there’s simply too many people around.” And of course that will induce more people to walk, which in turn will require more pedestrian priority. That’s the kind of positive feedback loop Auckland’s city centre needs.
An enjoyable read, thank you, albeit clearly tongue-in-cheek. I infer from the summary an average delay of 1 minute at each road crossing – not bad at all! It would be interesting to do the same exercise in a car; I suspect a similar result (maybe worse in a location with those double pedestrian phases). Sorry, but that’s the engineer in me saying OK, here’s a benchmark, now what if…?
My pet grizzle: pedestrians who push the button then either run across on red or cross at right angles instead because that buzzer went off first. Grizzle #2: those drivers in the left lane who don’t signal a left turn until the light goes green while the left-turn arrow remains red.
Your pet grizzle only exists because pedestrians are usually prevented from crossing diagonally. It’s an obvious strategy, wait on the corner and cross whichever side goes first. Is it their fault they have no way of telling where the signals will let them go first?
Agreed, a Barnes dance is preferable. But my point (and I’m sure you got it!) was that someone had already pushed the other button, so why not just go with that. Of course this is only an issue (a minor one) where the pedestrian count is way below the vehicle count, not in the reverse situation that others have raised.
PS I’m not bothered personally as I’m seldom in any rush, but it does adversely affect traffic flow generally.
Because it doesn’t actually matter. If you’ve already pushed the button and the other side goes first, there is zero difference for traffic whether you cross the other side or wait for the button. However for the pedestrian they obviously spend less time waiting, so there is a net benefit overall. The only benefit to ignoring one green man and waiting for the one you pushed would perhaps be to somehow reduce some drivers perceived frustration.
If pedestrians could know which phase would go first before they push the button you might have a point, then it would be an intentional and informed act that delays others unnecessarily.
Correct about the vehicular traffic Nick, but not about the pedestrian who is still on the wrong side of the cross street so has to wait for yet another phase. So a net dis-benefit all round methinks. My point was trivial, but intended to suggest that not all pedestrians are angels and not all drivers are devils. Recently a commenter claimed they deliberately walk down the centre of shared spaces to stick it to drivers. A charming attitude (maybe he was joking but if so it was too subtle for me).
Stu Donovan pointed out a key fact – your benchmark prioritises (or “balances” by giving equal delays to both) a traffic mode which is often actually much scarcer in numbers. And even where not, this mode shouldn’t get the priority anyway – not in the central city!
Also, I am surprised to find that this is a pet grizzle for you – go to a European country where they don’t even HAVE push buttons anywhere in the central city. You will be shocked: Pedestrian signals get greens even when no pedestrians are about / when no one has pushed any button. Kinda like what Auckland does for cars at most intersections, but, you know, for pedestrians 😉
Heh, I was (half) joking Starnius. I haven’t driven in Europe (too scared to) other than in the UK so hadn’t noticed, but that sounds like quite a good system – I presume you mean that the phases simply cycle round, so everyone knows what to expect. One thing that works well in the UK is the flashing amber light at pedestrian crossings (after the first few seconds) so vehicles don’t have to wait for the full cycle if there are no pedestrians.
Another great innovation is the timer as at Remuera Rd/Nuffield St, coupled with a Barnes dance. Everyone knows what’s going on.
Aka Central Europe: Most traffic lights now are related to traffic flows. What means they measure inbound traffic already at the major motorway entrances and exits, accordingly set are the phases on the arterial routes. Sometimes push buttons are there, particularly if there is no intersection of roads. These are typically on request only (what means you have through traffic). At intersections usually a green phase is always set for pedestrians. This green phase usually starts at the same timespot as for turning cars (some exceptions if there is a special turning signal). It works like that, e.g. you turn right on your green phase, then you have to wait until pedestrians have crossed, however therefore you are allowed to enter the intersection (so you are not waiting at the line you are waiting at the zebra crossing for pedestrians instead). The green phase for pedestrians is shorter. Thus in this little time gap the cars lined in the intersection waiting to get the pedestrians crossed are allowed to finish the turn, all cars behind the line of the intersection have to wait as they got red again.
And here is the trick: The passing phase for pedestrians is usually the same duration all the day long. Dependent on the size of the road but somewhere between 7 and 15 seconds, this gets calculated according to lower average walking speed and the distance. However cars have always to wait until the pedestrians finished crossing. The green phase for the cars is dependent on the traffic situation. What means the pedestrians can always cross in their time, but cars get, lets say 15 or 30 seconds more to make turns or pass through. While the traffic situation is at a low level this phase is quite short, so noone has to wait for ages.
To add to my comment about the timer at the Remuera Rd/Nuffield St intersection, one that I frequently use both as a pedestrian and as a driver, it somehow makes the wait more pleasurable. Maybe it’s due to the certainty, or perhaps just having something to look at (as a driver) as well as the wonderful diversity of the pedestrians themselves. And as a pedestrian you know exactly how long you have left, so if time is short you can choose to cross at right angles rather than diagonally, for example. It just works.
Something that annoys me deeply is arriving at a set of traffic lights on foot a nanosecond after the normal “green man” crossing phase would have started, but because nobody was there already, the button hasn’t been pushed and the green “cross now” signal doesn’t appear. So you push the button in a frantic manner, hoping to trigger the green cross now signal, but because you’re a moment too late all that you get is a red “don’t cross” signal. Despite this, traffic in all directions is stopped momentarily, suggesting that there might be a window in which to cross safely…but the crossing signal is red…so you have conflicting information upon which to make a decision. Depending on your bravery/recklessness or lack thereof, you have the choice of nipping across the road while the traffic isn’t moving, or standing around idly for 5 minutes or so until the traffic signals have been through their cycle again and pedestrians get their turn again. If the pedestrian crossing signal was on all the time and always had a “cross now” phase, this would be avoided. A prime example of this scenario is the crossing from the top of Ayr St across to the Domain side of Parnell Road.
Also, walking from the museum towards Ayr St, you are faced with the situation of having to get from the footpath on the museum side of Domain Dr across to the other side of Domain Dr, so you can access the pedestrian crossing from the corner of Domain Dr/Parnell Rd to Ayr St. There is often a long queue of cars waiting to turn from Domain Dr into Ayr St, and the traffic signals allow the cars to stream from the Domain into Ayr St immediately before the pedestrian crossing phase to Ayr St occurs. So at the very moment when you want to get to the corner because the pedestrian phase is about to happen, you can’t get there because Domain Dr has turned into a motorway as all the cars rush through the intersection to Ayr St. You’d think the domain – being a major park and recreational area – might be a little more convenient for pedestrians to get in and out of…
Am in Wellington, and the waiting at controlled crossings is insane, especially as there really aren’t many vehicles here (that just the Auckland conditioning at work?)… Beautiful day though, lovely city when it’s like this….
Also here is another view of Auckland by a Norwegian:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10880491
Is that guy serious?: “On my stroll there I had to cross Queen St, a four-lane expressway right through the centre of the CBD.” Has he never seen London’s embankment, the Champes Elysees, or Piazza Venezia in Rome? Those are all completely wild, and by comparison Queen St is a quiet little shopping street.
London, Paris, and Rome are perfect walking cites, and have perfect PT….yeah right. You can cross any road in Auckland CBD at any time, you don’t have to wait. Just make sure you are 20m from the controlled crossing point. The traffic is either nonexistent, or stationary, so no safety risk 🙂
You could just get your groceries delivered, or try one of the many other markets in the area.
The new world by Vic park is nice plus there is an Asian market about every 100m in that part of town.
You may have missed the point.
I thought the point was; that if you walk down the two main feeder roads into the CBD that connect directly to the motorway network you will find quite a few cars and the road primarily designed around collecting and distributing vehicle traffic.
It doesn’t really matter what city you are in, the main feeder roads is always designed around providing for vehicles.
The real question should be around how the side streets are designed.
No, SF Lauren – the main point was: The INNER CITY of large cities like Auckland should NOT be designed for cars. Discussing the details of design for things like side street is actually the secondary step. Who you give primacy is (literally) first. If we had more buses and trains, and more peds and cycles, coming into the CBD (and less cars with 1.2 passengers), we wouldn’t be having this discussion about how long it takes to get from AT to B.
If Auckland were to have no real provision for vehicles it would be about the only large CBD in the world like that.
If you look at international examples, you either get cities like London with a grid if main roads all over the CBD or places like Vancouver that have a few very large feeders.
Auckland is like Vancouver with the large feeders but we have then done a poor job of putting a pedestrian focus on the rest of the roads.
If we removed the likes of Hobson, Nelson and fanshawe st we would have effectively killed the CBD as it would become to inaccessible.
No it wouldn’t half of all people coming into the CBD are already on the bus or train.
SB, was is that statistic meant to imply?
SF Lauren: This is a warning for straw man arguments. Nowhere in Starnius’ comment do they suggest there should be “no real provision for vehicles” nor that we should “remove the likes of Hobson, Nelson, and Fanshawe”. What they did say was that “the inner city of Auckland should not be designed for cars.” Please ensure that you accurately represent the opinions of the person you are responding to.
Stu. A concern was raised about the way these roads function. If you can suggest means of fundamentally rectifying the concern that still retains the primary function of these roads then I could concede that the argument was strawman.
I however cannot see how this can be done and therefore my post did accurately represent the opinions the the costs incurred if the opinions is taken on-board.
How does this sound. We two-way the couplet, take them both down to two lanes each way, widen the footpaths, add cycle lanes, more trees, parking, whatever. We put in all the missing crosswalk legs and boost the pedestrian phases. For arguments sake we’ll assume this all halves the capacity of the two streets, so what does that mean?
Well almost nothing. For 20 hours a day it would still have far more capacity than is used, a trip to either of the streets interpeak clearly demonstrates that, as does the traffic count data.
So what about the other four hours a day on weekdays during peak time? Well according to NZTAs data the couplet brings in around 5,000 vehicles in the morning two hour peak and sends the same out in the afternoon two hour peak. At our occupancy rates that’s about 6,000 people. Lose half the peak capacity and maybe we lose 3,000 peak trips.
Approximately 200,000 people visit the CBD each weekday, so that represents around 1.5% of all trips into the city on a normal day. I’d hardly say that constitutes much of a risk, in fact the CBD wouldn’t even flinch let alone be killed.
3,000 peak trips is what the bus system can vary by month to month, it only represents a couple years growth on peak rail trips through Britomart. More people live on Hobson St than drive up it during peak hour.
The simple fact is the Hobson – Nelson couplet just doesn’t move nearly as many people as their bulk and impact would have us believe. They may be huge, busy, noisy defacto motorway ramps, but they don’t need to be because they’re not actually doing that much.
I say sort out the pedestrian environment and who cares if that comes at the expense of vehicle provision, we’ll barely even notice.
Hear hear, Nick R! The ability of single-occupancy vehicles by virtue of their sheer bulk to convince us that they are carrying more people than they really are is astonishing. See: http://blog.cellbikes.com.au/2012/09/australia-re-creates-world-famous-transport-photo/ (again!)
Nick, based on the NZTA data those two roads get about 60k vehicles a day from the two motorway ramps, so your looking at about 6k vehicles during the peak hour.
In order to provide for that many vehicles at normal signal controlled intersection you will be needing 4-5 lanes. Once you start boosting pedestrain phases you will need to start looking at 6-7 lanes.
If you did turn them into two way streets, not only would you need to make the CMJ even more complicated, you would need to start sticking in right turn bays and raised medians.
The end result would be that you roughly half the capacity.
Now I shouldn’t need to tell you this but not everyone and everything can be done via PT, and for most people in a perfect world it would likely not be first choice. So of course the CBD will very well exist if you make it twice has hard to get to, but what you would be doing is giving people and companies another reason not to be based in the CBD.
So what have you done in the end? well basically you would have made the CBD one step closer to being like waiheke island, a nice place but a mission to get to.
Oh I should add. If as you say 200k people visit the city each day. The 60k vehicles coming on those ramps equates to 72k people or 35% of the trips and not the 1.5% you suggested.
Add to that the fact that it’s actually 72k in and 72k out that’s 144k people on those two roads.
So nice try at misquoting figures to make it appear as those roads only accounted for 1.5% of the CBD trips, buty will need to be more cunning than that to fool me.
Read it again Richard. First of all it is 5,000 vehicles, about 6,000 people. That comes from the 2005 traffic count of the AM two hour weekday peak on Nelson St conducted by AT. A little
old but still more accurate than guesstimations from the AADT.
Secondly you are quoting figures for all day long. I was quoting the figure for the morning peak two hour period. Most trips on that road are not at peak times, because the morning peak is only two hours a day and everything else is twenty two hours a day.
If you half peak capacity on the couplet you halve the amount of commuters that can come in at peak times, I.e from 6,000 to 3,000. At all other times nobody is restricted because the roads aren’t even at half capacity anyway. A half sized road will still carry every single off peak trip as it does today. So by winding back peak capacity you only knock the top 3,000 off the peak two hour throughput. That’s three thousand less inbound in the morning and presumably the same
three thousand less outbound in the evening.
And erm, in any case 72k people in and 72k people out is just 72k people entering CBD and leaving again in the evening. Two trips, one person.
If you are going to accuse me of misquoting figures you might want to check your own assumptions first.
And please, must you really throw up another another strawman? Suggesting that I claimed those roads only accounted for 1.5% of
CBD trips is just wrong, I never said anything to that effect. What I said was that halving peak capacity would affect around 3,000 return peak-hour commuter trips a day (and not affect any interpeak or off peak trips). Those 3,000 return trips represent around 1.5% of all the 200,000 return trips to the city across the course of the day. Half the morning peak trips inbound on Nelson continue to occur, as do all the other inbound trips on Nelson at any other time of day.
Nick, read it again. Why are you comparing 200k (total trips to the CBD for the entire day) with what one road provides for 1 hour of the day?
What it seems I also need to point out to you is that these roads are one way and so they don’t include the reverse movement. So in effect the two roads carry 120k vehicles a day, quite a few ofwch may be the same ine making two trips but that is irrelevant.
Regarding the AADT, given the peak hour is so low in comparison to the we can conclude two things, first the road remains busy all day and second that it is not used by all that many commuters..
Nick’s numbers are way more convincing, but anyway you stubbornly miss the point, as is your want.
Here is the higher altitude view:
All of these numbers are elastic, that we have chosen to sacrifice the quality of this part of town in order to facilitate such quantities of usually single occupant cars at the peaks up till now in no way means we have to keep doing so. Traffic numbers, like PT numbers, are not set in stone and passed from some deity down to us and remain forever unchanging. The numbers of drivers to the CBD has been steadily falling this century as we have done three things that shape this behaviour:
1. Improved alternatives (transit and active modes)
2. Allowed supply of parking to shrink and /or cost to grow
3. Restricted road supply to make driving less attractive
Some or any of these actions may be against the core faiths of traffic engineering doctrines that have held sway in Auckland (and much of the western world for at least the last sixty years (and here I refer to the religion of traffic flow and speed), but I for one wish these to be questioned and believe the time is long overdue that they are. And in particular the costs to productivity, quality of place, liveability, environmental quality (local & global), and competing street uses need to be properly discussed and analysed.
Predict and provide is intellectually limited, and fails to take responsibility for the consequences of what we choose to build.
What Nick is showing with his detailed analysis is that the ‘car Armageddon’ that the road lobby always predict when any even slight restriction is suggested to their total ownership of this public asset is wildly overstated. As has been shown to be the case the world over.
And to achieve the agreed aims of higher liveability we have to reduce the quantities of inefficient low occupant vehicles in the city, and other parts of the wider city. Improving the quality of the Hobson Nelson couplet then is a win/win: improvement and vehicle restriction.
Patrick, what part of nicks numbers are convincing and convincing of what.
I’m using that average AADT provided by NZTA from 2008 to 2012. He is using an AT figure from 2005. He is also using a 200k figure that is yet to have a source or date.
As to how he is using the figure, he is comparing the 1 hour peak of one of those roads to the daily trips into the city to come up with a low number. What this number means? Well nothing really but it’s low so he has decided to use it to say that we can half the capacity of these roads without a care in the world.
Now what I pointed out, and you chose to ignore, is that these roads tend to not even be much of k cimcommuter roads but remain busy all day.
For a normal road the peak our is normally 10% of the AADT, on high commuter routes this gets up to 15%. On this road however the peak hour is less than 5% meaning it is not much of a commuter route but a busy all day arterial. The two roads combined taking 120k vehicles a day.
Now going from memory we get about 10k people coming into town by rail in the peak hour. I’m sure you have the numbers so you can compare that with the 6k who drove down that road in 2005.
Ok first of all I’m going to have to call bullshit on your traffic volumes Richard.
In 2012 the AADT for SH16 Neslon St offramp (telemetry site 01640004) was 9,501 vehicles per day. For the SH1 Nelson St off ramp (telemetry site 01N40427) it was 13,848. Combined the AADT coming off the motorway to Nelson Street is only 23,349 vehicles a day. In the outbound direction the AADT for the SH16 Hobson St onramps (telemetry site 01630004) was 11,529 vpd. For the SH1 Hobson St onramp (telemetry site :01N29427) it was 18,945. Combined the AADT heading to the motorway on Hobson is only 30,474 vehicles a day.
Source is here: http://www.nzta.govt.nz/resources/state-highway-traffic-volumes/docs/SHTV-2008-2012.pdf
I’m sorry but you are just making things up with 60k each way or 120k in total. It’s 23k inbound and 30k outbound (53k in total). It seems I need to point out to you that these are one way roads, people drive in on one road and out on the other!
So in other words at most thirty thousand people-trips accessing the CBD via the couplet. Compared to the two hundred thousand people who make a return trip to the CBD each day, those two roads carry about 15%.
Now if we compare the NZTA and AT data on Nelson St, we have just over 5,000 inbound vehicles during the morning two hour peak, out of a total of 23,349 all day. So the morning peak carries 21% of the traffic, meaning it is highly peaky (twice as peaky as normal road according to your post above) with very low utilisation of capacity across the day, afternoon and evening. Situation for Hobson St is much the same but in reverse with the afternoon peak, where it is a little less peaky.
Why am I comparing 200k (total trips to the CBD for the entire day) with what one road provides for 1 hour of the day? I’m not. I’m comparing the number of trips into the city each day with the number that would be lost if we halved the traffic inbound on Nelson at peak times. I was working out the actual impact of reducing some of the peak capacity of the road, not removing all of the capacity of the road entirely. Tough concept I know. The two hours of the two hour AM peak is the only time it hits it’s maximum capacity, If we reduce the peak capacity of the roadway we prevent about 3,000 trips coming in at peak times, nothing else is affected. Net result is only 3,000 less return trips at most into a city that sees 200,000 return trips. The marginal impact is about a 10% reduction in trips inbound on Nelson all day which translates to about 1.5% reduction in all trips to the CBD all day.
And by the way you’ll notice I am talking about trips to the CBD as an indicator of the number of people who come to the CBD each day. I’m not talking about trips to or from the CBD. If you are having a hard time with that concept then by all means think of it as a total of 400k one way trips to or from the CBD all day, the comparison remains the same.
Oh and the 200k figure is my own work combining inbound all day AADT from CBD screenline points, with PT screenline patronage and cycling and walking surveys. It doesn’t account for anyone who drives, catches PT, walks or cycles within the screeline so it probably underestimates the number of people who are in the CBD each day for work, study, entertainment or whatever.
Ah I see what I did wrong, I got the SH1 numbers by the ramp rather than the ramp itself.
Sorry about that.
So we are in agreement that we are getting about 30k vehicles on each road.
Using the AT figures from 2005 se 30k make their way down to cook st peaking at 2500 an hour I assume. So 12% getting on the high side.
To provide for 2.5k at signals we can look at 1k per lane with some turning bays so still in the range of 4 or three lanes a road.
So it would seem we could make each of these roads 4 lane bi-direction roads which would make them much nicer.
The question is though, would this address the authors issues. Well in effect no, the roads would have a much nicer appearance but other than that they would be just as hard to cross on foot as before.
All up I would be happy with such an approach as it would be retaining the function of these roads and so still providing the valuable vehicle access needed. But it would make that part of the city much nicer to be in regardless of mode.
Well it is even easier than that. At the moment it is 30k a day coming in on one road and going out on the other. Considering the current peak, that’s about 2500 vehicles per hour inbound on one road (Nelson), and at the end of the day it presumably peaks about the same going out on Hobson.
But if you split the couplet into two separate two way roads, the inbound peak flow would be similarly divided across the two. So in the morning Nelson St would only need to accomodate 1250 vph inbound, because Hobson is also carrying 1250vph inbound now that it is two-wayed, and both about the same in the evening (well in reality the southern motorway flows are higher and the NW lower, but for arguments sake lets assume they are even).
The crunch comes at the intersections down the line where you need to accommodate a bunch of extra turning movements for the two way road, but with only 1250vph in the peak direction (and presumably only 500 or so in the counterpeak direction) that should be very easy to accommodate. Plus those extra turning phases give opportunities to add in those extra pedestrian legs too.
An interesting question: Could shifting to two way streets actually drain cars off the motorways more efficiently? Right now you have the two separate motorway ramps feeding into one intersection, effectively they alternate with the lights clearing into Nelson St. If you had each ramp leading to a seperate arterial, they could clear the ramps in parallel. Two separate motorway ramps leading to two separate intersections and on to two separate arterials?
I’d say go for two 3 lane one-way streets. You get a number of efficienciesat the intersection by doing that and then you could make some massive sidewalks with all sorts of landscaping.
That still won’t help with the pedestrian delays crossing the road however.
It is quite expensive to get groceries delivered — about $15 unless you are buying hundreds of dollars worth. Also you need somewhere to leave them in case you are not at home.
It is a great line of reasoning you are on to here though — don’t walk to the shop you want to because it is too busy. And if you are walking, don’t walk on any main roads that are most direct and obvious because they are not for people but cars. Bravo, that’s why we all love cities eh?
I’m saying don’t walk down a motorway off-ramp and expect it to have one car an hour. It’s like buying a house next to an international airport and complaining about the noise.
One could have gone just one street over onto Vincent st which is nice and quite as well as lined with trees.
That’s what I did when I lived around there.
This is part of the point. Nelson and Hobson are not motorway off ramps but local roads and should be treated as such.
There aren’t “local” local roads however. They are connected directly to a state arterial highway and therefore are some very large and important feeder connections.
If you were to convert these into a shared space or started to double double phasing for pedestrians you would get traffic backing up on the motorway all the way back to Drury and Kumeu on a daily basis.
This would likely boost PT usage but also encourage a few companies to move some place else.
If you really think that the intersections on Hobson or Nelson are the capacity constraint for vehicles you obviously haven’t been on these roads in the peak.
To be honest no I haven’t, I’ve never had the need. So what is the capacity constraint and what are you suggesting Sailor Boy?
The capacity constraint for Hobson are the on ramp light on the motorway which need to stay. What I am suggesting is that we narrow the roads significantly and improve pedestrian amenity.
Yes I can see the on-ramp being an issue, given some 50k vehicles use the SH1 ramp a day but it only has the capacity for about 2k an hour it must really be cranking things through all day long.
For the rest of the road it still really needs to be 4 lanes each way to provide for both the volumes and all the movements.
You then still have the issue of all the highly used access points. You can’t really solve that issue without closing them.
I don’t see any issues with the cow however.
Gee, you really haven’t been to that road have you. I walked down it every day for a mnth in Feb and March. The bottom 2 blocks definitely only need 2 lanes (this is Hobson), the very top bit probably needs 4, just to get all the turning movements in individual lanes, There are 4 major access point, Wellesly, Victoria Fanshawe and Pitt, all the others are laneways. The road could easily be made no right turn except at lights, and not even at all lights. Once the dowtown flyover is removed an enormous amount of traffic will be removed as well.
Especially the bottom of Hobson is incredibly valuable land and should be treated as such.
Sailor Boy, note that I said the road would need to be 4 lanes and then compare that to the current 5. Obviously it is currently over capacity.
And again obviously, as you get away from the motorway the demand decreases like any other feeder road.
So really your just making strawman arguments and getting upset at me for no reason. Just looking at the post the guy never even went past Victoria st so why you assume I’m talking about the road all the way down to the viaduct I do not know.
I really like the cow idea – brilliant.
I really don’t know why Nelson street needs five lanes – three is enough. It just encourages drivers to speed off from the lights to change lanes. The point is that they should be slowing because they are leaving a motorway. Florence has many one way streets. We could follow their lead, keep one way and have three lanes for the main traffic flow. The two lanes on the eastern side of Nelson St could be made a slow speed lane with angle parking and separated with trees or a raised strip from the main flow to give the area more amenity.
People who want or need to come into the city will be able to go to a suburban station and catch a new train quickly and easily into the city as someone in Europe would do.
Well Nelson only carries around 2,500 vehicles an hour at peak times, that’s less than 500 an hour per lane. Not very efficient use of space.
It certainly doesn’t need five lanes all the way to Fanshawe St either.
How can Nelson St carry only 500 vehicles per lane hour, that’s a fifth of what should be possible with a green wave, which imho is the only real advantage of one-way streets. It also seems to be a fifth of the number of cars that would have to be entering the CBD by this route to get 100,000 car travellers into the city each day, assuming an approximately equal share with Wellesley, Symonds, Fanshaw and Tamaki entry points.
Nevertheless, isn’t it time that traffic light control technology was brought up to date to allow each light to operate on complete real time information so that no user has to wait for non existant traffic, beit cars or red light running cyclists or pedestrians, instead of what is little better then a Commodore 64 version of an egg timer?
Precisely, it appears to be a very inefficient use of the roadway, or in other words way over provision of traffic capacity. The figures come straight from NZTA by the way, feel free to check them yourself on their website.
Bear in mind that the road is only fed by two motorway lanes, one each from the two motorways. Those lanes would max out at 4,000 vph together, so 2,500 vph isn’t too far below the theoretical maximum as it is so talk of five times more is irrelevant.
There are a heap of roads leading into the CBD, not just four. Fanshawe st off ramp , college hill, Franklin, cook st offramp, Wellington st, Nelson st off ramps, Hopetoun bridge, karangahape rd, upper queen st, upper Symonds st including the off ramp, grafton bridge, Wellesley st and off ramps, grafton road, Alten rd and off ramps, beach rd and tamaki dr.
I count about 18 corridors. With an approximately equal share each would only carry about 5-6000 people in private vehicles all day. Obviously Nelson does more than average, but not that much.
Finding detailed info on the NZTA website is easier said than done. But the Wellington St onramp study does suggest that a surprisingly high proportion of traffic leaving the CBD is not using the motorways so traffic is much more dispersed than one would expect from such a motorway-centric transport strategy over the last 60 years.
It might have made sense to have four straight ahead lanes if the motorway offramps had passed under Union St and the majority of peak traffic was heading all the way to the waterfront. As it is, it could easily be given the same treatment as lower Broadway.
http://maps.google.co.nz/maps?q=broadway,+New+York&hl=en&ll=40.762271,-73.983406&spn=0.000506,0.001321&sll=-36.851741,174.759189&sspn=0.001512,0.002642&t=h&hnear=Broadway,+New+York,+United+States&z=20
Try this dataset from AT: http://www.aucklandtransport.govt.nz/improving-transport/maintenance/Road/Documents/traffic-count-central.xls
The traffic volumes on some of these major streets is surprisingly low. Inbound on Fanshawe St from the motorway was only 1732 vph in the AM peak. But as I’ve noted above that’s only one peak hour on one of many traffic corridors leading in to the CBD. The data suggests the interpeak flow on Fanshawe is around 700vph for example, so you might get 3,500 vehicles in during rush hour and three or four times that again across the rest of the day.
“As a pedestrian I almost constantly have to be aware of that there might be a car coming out of this slot. It’s not that it’s really dangerous but you still have to be aware of it all the time. On my way home I clocked how long time I’d spent on passing these car slots.”
I don’t see the relevance of timing how long it takes you to pass building vehicle entrances. It’s like timing how long it takes you to walk past power poles, since if you don’t pay attention you might walk in to one.
Ironically, it is oil wealth that has provided Norway the ability to implement infrastructure that isn’t affordable in NZ. Having two Norwegians (the guest poster and the one in Patrick R’s link) critique NZ’s transport choices is a bit like a couple of Kiwis traveling to Ethiopia and telling the locals they shouldn’t drink so much milk.
Agree it is quite ironic, although not just oil wealth e.g. http://www.statkraft.com/about-statkraft/facts-about-statkraft/
Also, low population growth and high incomes in most northern European cities make things a bit easier than the nightmare that is to change a relatively poor city like Auckland.
Ethipoia?! That would be very different. But on many levels NZ resembles Norway remarkably closely.. Geography, population, resources, development, politics.. we even both have fiords (or fjords?) though we have taniwhas not trolls, thankfully. If you think about it, especially as you say since Norway has all that oil, our contrasting transport choices are quite remarkable.
Power poles don’t come rushing out of driveways at you. I don’t thinks he’s concerned with walking into stationary cars (or poles), but rather being hit by moving ones.
Come on, you would see that infrastructure in any Northern or Central European city (not so much Southern Europe as it tends to be more auto dependent).
The city we have now is a result of how we have prioritised spending and in my opinion, the lack of a real urban culture in NZ. Most people in Auckland have only moved here in the last generation or so. This means we have a whole lot of culturally rural people living in what is now a real global city of 1.5m – they dont understand cities and think they are just a collection of small towns like the one they grew up in. Many of the comments to this post demonstrate that.
Until we face up to the fact that Auckland is a real city and we need to make it work like one, we will keep having the problems we have now and the city will become less and less liveable with even less civic spirit.
“Come on, you would see that infrastructure in any Northern or Central European city (not so much Southern Europe as it tends to be more auto dependent).”
I’m not too sure what infrastructure you’re referring to, but I followed Anthony McB’s link (below) and had a look around Bergen. It’s a city of about 300k people. It has impressive motorways. Longer and better constructed than Christchurch in terms of interchange layouts. The really cool thing is watching them duck in and out of lengthy tunnels every time they encounter a hill or want to avoid some buildings. One motorway seems to tunnel under the CBD. That’s the sort of infrastructure you can afford when you’re sitting on the $US700billion sovereign wealth fund that oil has given you. If we want to hide our ugly infrastructure (both motorways and railways) then we need to start drilling.
Obi, dont attack the messenger. You are making some valid points here – lots of money makes things easier to “balance”. Yet the fact remains that even in Germany and Netherlands and Denmark, not known for having large petrol fields, the motorways haven’t become the defining feature of most of their inner suburbs and CBDs!
The post wasn’t about motorways defining the inner city, but about cars on inner city non-motorway streets. There is merit in the views stated, but Auckland just doesn’t have any remnants of a medieval street pattern so the starting points aren’t the same.
“Yet the fact remains that even in Germany and Netherlands and Denmark, not known for having large petrol fields, the motorways haven’t become the defining feature of most of their inner suburbs and CBDs!”
Amsterdam has an inner city motorway ring in the A10. There is a partial ring to the south with the A9. The A7 and A8 lead north to Purmerend and Wormerveer. The A200 leads to Haarlem. The A4 heads south to Den Haag and Rotterdam and is an absolute monster of a motorway. It forks the A44 a little way south of the city. The A4 connects up with Belgium and French motorways and runs at least as far as Calais and Paris. The A2 leads south past Utrecht to Belgium and Germany. The A1 runs roughly east to Naarden, and eventually to Berlin and Poland. It forks the A6 which heads up to Friesland and eventually to northern Germany. These Dutch are happy with motorways that skirt their medieval centers, and also don’t buy the “holiday highway” concept.
And yet I bet you that the Dutch can still travel from suburbs one side of the motorway to suburbs on the other side by bike without having to detour to Belgium first.
Also, I think you should not digress by using the Holiday Highway as an example for why NZ has crap inner cities for walking. the HH might well be a useful project on the car’s face of it – it is wasteful not because it is a motorway, but because it is (or should be) so low in comparative priority for funding, when we can’t even get our cities to work right, and when Operation Lifesaver is a perfectly functional alternative to the Holiday Highway for much less money spent.
The Dutch also have 18m people in an area the size of Canterbury. Of course they can afford all those motorways, it is called critical mass.
However, we are talking about a city and its infrastructure – what the Dutch do is give priority to cyclists and PT users and that is why their cities work so well. Interurban motorways are a completely different matter from intraurban.
Again, we have a choice. There is nothing inherent in New World cities that have forced us to build huge motorways through the middle of them. That was a choice and we can choose to stop making that choice – lets do it now ebfore it gets any worse.
Yes, Norway is able to implement amazing infrastructure because of its oil wealth. There are massive tunnels for rail and road constructed for even quite small cities. Even other Scandinavians are amazed at what the Norwegians can afford to build.
However, the point I was trying to make is that good transport infrastructure is present in almost all Northern European cities (basically from Switzerland to the Arctic circle) – especially good rail based PT and cycling. Not many of those countries have massive income from oil like Norway and some built great infrastructure while under a Communist government (Prague is the one I know best and it is a good comparison to Auckland on population). That is because choices were made by governments in those countries to give equal priority to PT and in some (after big public campaigns against auto dependence) to cycling.
It is about priorities in spending and saying that NZ cant afford good PT/cycling infrastructure because we dont have massive oil receipts is not an argument that stands up to scrutiny. We just have to spend less on roads. If you dont want that to happen then fine, but dont try and pretend we dont have a choice.
Also, NZ couldn’t afford to build this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_route_E6
“The road E 6 is a 2+2 lane motorway from outside Trelleborg to north of Uddevalla. It is also at least an 2+2 lane motorway from Strömstad to Minnesund, 70 km north of Oslo. Some stretches further north also has four lanes or motorway standard. According to plans it will be motorway all the way from Trelleborg to Kolomoen south of Hamar in 2013, about 700 km.”
No “holiday highway” nonsense for Norwegians. This is like building a motorway from Whangarei to Wellington.
So what you are saying is that if we had the money, we should build ourselves some MORE motorways, rather than the sorry lot we have? Sorry, but that’s the song I hear playing in the background when I read your posts, obi.
Shucks to that! if we had more money, we should spend even more on PT, cycling and walking. This constant “fix the roads first” has been around for the last 50 years, and what has it gotten us? If we can’t afford luxury motorways that tunnel under everything – fine*. But the correct response to that is to stop building more of the damn things if we can’t afford to build them in a fashion that remains human!
*Though with Waterview we are trying damn hard, and spending money like water for it!
It is true that the Norwegians are now building motorways. As a net oil exporter they at least have more reason to do this than us. But also they built and have sustained their intra, and inter, city transit first. Especially electric rail. We abandoned our previous mode to go all in on the driving fashion. That was and is still dumb.
Of course not the Norwegians are being that smart, here is the decline curve for their oil resource. The North Sea, like Alaska, Mexico, Australia, Indonesia, Egypt, Syria, a bunch of the ‘Stans and more reserves are now past maturity and heading south. There is much speculation that Saudi Arabia’s massive fields are too, and the export rate there is only being help up a little longer with desperate technological efforts to eek out every last drop [which in turn will make the decline slope steeper when it is hit] but of course that is all a big secret. Same with Russia.
Well….When you look at the centre of a typical Norwegian city, it is no surprise that Auckland’s car ridden centre is a shock to the Norwegians. http://goo.gl/maps/xxyBs
Love the cow. The idea reminds me of this a little, worth a chuckle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superlambanana
wow, lots of replies. interesting discussion.
one question. which is better: a 3 lane Nelson St or a 4 lane Nelson St? assuming same lane widths and same existing road widths and all remaining space dedicated to pedestrian space.
It depends on what the lanes were doing and how three were arranged. I would prefer a boulevard of two lanes each way with a median of trees to three lanes one way, although I would probably prefer three lanes one way to a four lane road with no median, although the latter is still preferable for cycling on. Riding the wrong way against three lanes of traffic can’t be fun.