Auckland's Transport History - Part 1

A few years back I came across a paper called
"The American Heresy: Half a century of transport planning in Auckland"
The paper is a rather interesting read however it came across as rather bias with the conclusions being what the author wanted them to be rather than using the evidence presented which generally implied the opposite.

For this post I'm going to generally use the same information which was used to write this paper and present it as I see it which should make for an interesting comparison for those who read both.

The Early Years

The following chart is quite good at showing how our transport mix has changed over the years with the fluctuating levels of PT usage.

TransportBlog - 2015

As you can see in the chart, back in 1920 there was hardly a car in the country and the total number of PT trips were similar to that of today even though the population was not even 200,000. Back in this time personal transport was extremely limited and most people relied on the tram network to move around and therefore Auckland was a very small and dense city.

Starting in the 1920's car manufacturing started moving into assembly lines and assembly factories started to be built in New Zealand, this resulted in cars becoming not only available for purchase but actually affordable for the average family. You can see this reflected in the chart where the number of vehicles in NZ starts to increase and the number of PT trips being made starts to reduce. This trend continues through to the 1930's where The Great Depression strikes and car sales flatten out and PT trips also take a dive. It's during this time when a few of New Zealands large public works programs went into action such as hydro dams on the Waikato River and the railway from Auckland to Tauranga (which was never completed), for this reason it is understandable that a large number of the men of Auckland would have left to work on these projects resulting in the big decline in trips.

After The Great Depression PT trips jumped back up to 70 million and car sales started to boom. You can see that by 1939 PT trips were flattening out and car volumes were increasing at a great rate, however in September 1939 Briton and therefore New Zealand declared war on Germany, it was at this time New Zealand became devoted to feeding the war machine and PT trips doubled in the space of 5 years to 120 million trips annually.

After the war PT trips went back to declining and the growing demand for automobiles that had started in the 1920's continued. This decline in PT trips and growth of automobile demand had started in the 1920's however it is most prominent from the years 1945 through to 1970 where the annual number of PT trips declined from 120 million to 40 million.

In the following image I have added two black lines for the way I think things may have gone if it were not for The Great Depression and WWII.

• The solid black line shows the change in mode share while Auckland transitioned from a small dense city that only existed around our current CBD into a sprawling city merging with the surrounding town.
• The dashed line is simple a smooth out vehicle purchase profile.

TransportBlog - 2015

There is another spike in PT usage through the years 1970 through to 1990, similar to the increase in PT usage from 1990 on wards, I will talk about both of these later.

So now that we have looked at what the numbers show from 1920 to 1970 in my next post I will look at the polices implemented through this time and see what impact have had. The paper I referred to at the start blames the decline in PT usage squarely on the 1955 Auckland Plan  and similar plans thereafter however looking at the chart we really see the decline in PT usage starting in the 1920's the exact time that automobiles started to make their way onto the market in mass. This pre-dates the Auckland Plan by 35 years which questions the impact this plan really had on the way people changed this choose of transport.