The (really good) Auckland Motorway Strategic Plan

Waka Kotahi/NZTA has released an important new document for our region: the Auckland Motorway Strategic Plan (AMSP), which is fully endorsed by the Minister of Transport Chris Bishop and Mayor of Auckland Wayne Brown.

It’s really very good; comprehensive and reality-based. As the Minister says in the official Beehive press release:

“Auckland’s motorway network carries around 1.5 million trips every day and is critical to keeping people and freight moving. As Auckland grows, we need to get more from the motorway network we’ve already built while continuing to invest where extra capacity is genuinely needed,” Mr Bishop says.

“In many parts of the network we’ve already widened motorways as much as is practical, so a shift towards a more balanced and strategic approach with targeted investment will play an increasingly important role.

“The Auckland Motorway Strategic Plan (AMSP) sets out how we will achieve that shift in approach over the next 30+ years as Auckland’s population grows beyond two million people. The plan focuses on three core outcomes:

• Optimising the existing network – making better use of the network we’ve already got through smarter traffic management, quicker responses to crashes and breakdowns, small-scale improvements, and delivering Time of Use Charging.
• Targeted increases in capacity – adding extra capacity where bottlenecks are impacting efficiency, progressively delivering rapid transit, closing critical gaps in active mode networks where they interact with motorways, prioritising projects to increase capacity and address resilience risks.
• Wider system improvements – improving the wider transport system, including public transport capacity, rail network improvements, and local roads/active modes, so fewer trips need to use the motorway network.

“This practical, long-term approach supports the Government’s focus on improving freight efficiency, building a more resilient transport network, and supporting economic growth.

“The motorway network is only one part of Auckland’s wider transport system. Keeping Auckland moving means making sure roads, public transport, walking and cycling connections all work well together,” Mr Bishop says.

It is hard to stress how much of a welcome departure this announcement is from the thinking and language of the previous Minister of Transport. For example, this sentence is nothing more than an anodyne statement of fact:

“The motorway network is only one part of Auckland’s wider transport system. Keeping Auckland moving means making sure roads, public transport, walking and cycling connections all work well together,” Mr Bishop says.

And yet what an enormous relief to hear it so robustly stated by the Minister, and to see the transport agency produce a comprehensive and well conceived unpacking of what this means for Auckland’s transport networks.

The plan, and the language around it, also represents official acknowledgement that we are done with the spread of the urban motorway network in Auckland, as conceived at the height of last century’s global motorway-mania.

Here it is:

This is the end of the post-World War II revolution in urban transport planning. Greater Auckland has long maintained that this vision is exhausted and no longer relevant for this century, so it is a great relief to at last have official policy and plans explicitly catch up to the reality.

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The History

The basis of the Auckland Motorway Network pattern was set by the De Leuw Cather plan of 1965, which refined and confirmed the all-in-on-motorways direction of the city’s 1955 Transport Master Plan.

And yet, right from the beginning the 1965 plan proved unachievable: significant parts of it were either pushed off into infinity or quietly dropped.

The Henderson motorway was probably the first to go. The project of transforming Dominion Rd into a full motorway was actually begun, but only insofar as the stranded (and loathed) flyover interchange of Dominion Rd/New North Rd, which still stands as a monument to foolish notions, awaiting creative redevelopment.

The horrendous proposal for a double-stacked elevated motorway along Quay St (which would echo some ghastly waterfront motorways seen in coastal cities of the United States) thankfully didn’t make it from the 1955 plan to the 1965 one. In that respect, De Leuw Cather were a humane advance on the extremity of 1950s highway engineering.

The Kauri Pt harbour crossing has never been pursued, except recently by one Aucklander, basically because a better location was found for the same idea: SH18 and the Upper Harbour Crossing, which is the only motorway Auckland has which is not on the 1965 map.

The South-eastern Motorway cost another Mayor, John Banks, his job. He was the last champion of that terrible route. Its western end, the ill fated East-West Link, has only recently been properly killed off, alhough one bit between SH1 and MetroPort may return?

The Labour-led government believed it had nixed the East-West Link, but NZTA ignored them and kept pushing it through the design and protection pipeline, and it has only recently had an oak stake driven though its costly and wasteful heart.

The only new full motorway in the Auckland urban area that is likely to ever be built is the SH16 alternative route. A route that already carries way more traffic than Warkworth to Te Hana is ever likely to. On the assumption that is to be a full motorway and not just an expressway?

Other than that, we are in a new era, with both the NZ Transport Agency and the government accepting that the future consists of maintaining and optimising the current network.

And, that the best way to keep it functional is by investing in the alternatives: Rapid and Active Transit. To this should be added real demand management – hopefully via road pricing – because carrots and sticks are both essential to deal with the scourge of traffic congestion.

Hopefully, this plan heralds a new world in which all these parts of our transport system are understood together – and explicitly treated as such by our transport agencies – as interdependent, complementary networks and actions.

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The way forward

This does not, of course mean the end of NZTA’s labours in the Auckland urban area – far from it. There’s still so much to do, but just not all on one mode, nor with one mindset. Per the NZTA project page, the-three part strategic approach is

• Optimising the existing motorway network (including time-of-use charging)
• Targeted increases in capacity (including rapid transit improvements, and fixing gaps in the active modes networks)
• Wider system improvements (including improvements to rail, bus, active modes, and local streets for local trips)

And here is the very busy plan in map form – see link here for full size:

That’s a very long list of often very big projects, including:

• Te Ara Hauāuru, the Northern Busway (12), as currently conceived, is costed at around 1x CRL ($4.9b).
• All three stages of Mill Rd (19) looks like it will be even more than the CRL (~$6b).
• And whatever we might end up getting across the Waitematā will dwarf both of these.

On the rail network, urgent fixes include level crossing removals, plus a fourth track to Wiri, and a third to at least Papakura (ideally a fourth there too). Hugely valuable, too, would be a third freight bypass on the eastern line, as would fly-overing the Westfield and Manukau junctions. Not cheap.

There are smaller more valuable things here, like the urgent and long overdue sorting out of access to the Ports of Auckland in lower Parnell (23).

Pretty comprehensive, but there are still gaps. Plus of course the critically important question of what on this long list actually gets funding, and in what order.

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What’s missing?

The most obvious glaring deficiency in rapid transit terms is the City-Centre to Mangere (CC2M) route, the site of the canceled Light Rail turned gargantuan Light Metro project of the previous government.

Canceling projects is every government’s prerogative. But to not replace it with anything and just leave that part of the map blank, is absurd. Although the southern part of the route does have a mysterious dashed green line titled: Wider Network Improvements. Which could mean anything.

But CC2M remains a key gap, long identified as such. For exmaple, here it is in the predecessor of the current work, the Strategic Public Transport map in the 2016 Auckland Transport Alignment Project (ATAP), as that grey line from Britomart – Mt Roskill – Onehunga – Airport.

The route demands light rail in the long run, of course. But what are the best options in the meantime? This is one of the city’s busiest bus routes, and will only get busier.

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Active transport: walking, cycling and micromobility

It’s great to see the rehabilitation of this important mode, which not only accounts for many a first and last mile of trips by car and by public transport, but as we know also provides an affordable and healthy alternative for the many short trips that make up around two thirds of travel in our cities.

Moreover, ranges have been extended by electrified mobility (e-bikes and e-scooters and other mobility options), and stretches of long-distance dedicated infrastructure, many of which parallel existing or once planned motorways. For example, the Northwestern path runs along SH16 from Westgate to the city centre, and to the east Te Ara ki Uta ki te Kai links Glen Innes to the city centre, via the route of the ghost eastern motorway.

Here is the official Auckland Strategic Cycleway Network map for comparison. The darkest lines – Regional routes – are the most relevant here:

Large sections of this network were delivered and ugraded during a busy golden age of building bike/walk paths (including some beautiful bridges) to heal severance and improve access, as part of major motorway works.

All credit to the advocates who made the case during the Waterview Board of Inquiry for kicking off that era of strategic construction, building on the tenacious efforts of a previous cohort, on SH16 and SH20. That powerful community-led work normalised the idea that to be truly strategic, citywide networks must make room for all modes of transport.

It is true that in recent times, the completion of the regional (and local) cycle network has slowed alarmingly. But at the same time, it is also really encouraging to note that (almost) all the critical water crossings on the high-level network – especially those that previously made the Isthmus into an island – have slowly been completed (including the soon to open Orākei Basin section).

Of course there’s still one obvious and glaring gap!

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Ranking

The full suite of projects indicated on the Auckland Motorway Strategic Plan can not be afforded anytime soon, even without politicians being politicians, so the real hard work ahead is prioritisation.

It’s great to see that Te Ara Hauāuru Northwest Busway has wide political support. However, it remains unfunded – and recent major party promises to freeze fuel taxes have cast a shadow over it getting under way any time soon, beyond minor improvements.

Road pricing, if done well, promises much – both in terms of network efficiency, and as a source of additional funding, especially for those complementary alternative mode projects. Given one of the immediate objections to time-of-use charging is “show us the alternatives”, completing the complementary networks should be an urgent priority.

Which projects would put at the top of your list? How would you spend any available budget? What are the quickest ways to achieve the desired outcomes, perhaps with interim designs ahead of more permanent ones?

Anyone up for building an Auckland Strategic Networks game, balancing the budget and the options?

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