Auckland's Transport History - Part 3

In the previous two posts we have looked at what was happening with transport in Auckland and the first policy put in place being the 1955 Auckland Plan.

In this post I will look at the implementation of the 1955 plan and how this influenced the next next plan created in 1965.

Prologue - 1920 to 1955:

To summarise the first two posts; we found that as far back as 1920 the transport mode of choice in Auckland started to change from walking and public transport to the private auto-mobile, this resulted in Auckland rapidly branching out from what was a small dense city. So whereas in the existing city people needed to live within easy walking distance of public transport resulting in small houses on small sections, residents started to take advantage of the freedom offered to them by the auto-mobile living on larger sections further from the city.

Continuing a trend that started in the late 20's the annual growth in PT trips plateaued  and then started to fall with there being approximately 65 million annual PT trips by 1955. At this time the 90% of all passenger and freight movement occurred on the road network with the PT component being on buses and trams, the rail network at this stage accounted for less than 3% of all passenger trips. 

Something else that happened over this period was the conversion of the tram network to buses. One of the driving factors behind this conversion was that the tram network had been heavily overtaxed during the WWII PT surge and was in need of repair, however the main reason for the conversion was that buses were faster, cheaper to operate, more flexible and less disruptive.

1955 to 1965:

By 1959 Auckland had exploded in size, one example of this is by the eastern bays of such as St Heliers as shown in the following images. In 1930 this area was mostly grassland until Tamaki Drive was built in 1930, the resultant growth can be seen between 1940 and 1959. Many more examples can be seen using the Auckland Council GIS Viewer.

Eastern Bays - 1940

Eastern Bays - 1959

The Ministry of Works(MoW) had developed a regional transport plan in 1946 and a slimmed down version of this was included in the 1956 plan, by 1959 the easier "green fields" sections had been completed however pretty much nothing had been done inside Auckland City itself.

In 1965 a new plan was developed which built on the previous work that had been done, similar to the two previous plans this one looked at the region as a whole and proposed an extensive motorway network along with a large Rapid Transit Network (RTN) roughly double the size of today's railway network.

1965 Motorway Plan:

Based on a review of the historical aerial images one of the more interesting things I have found is that of the 1955 plan very little was actually built; all of the sections of motorway built by 1959 were part of the 1945 MoW Plan with the one section shown as being under construction in 1959 at Westgate not even being part of the 1955 plan, to a similar extent all of the planning and design for the harbour bridge occurred during the late 40's.

When the 1965 plan was released Auckland had gone through a period of some 30 years of not making any improvements to its inner road network. Although the rural motorway network had been largely been put in place 10 years prior Auckland city itself had gone through a process of infilling with little strategic direction.

The 1965 Regional Plan was based on extensive surveys, such as origin destination surveys, traffic counts and developed a programme looking forward to 1985. The plan was very extensive, and somewhat excessive with its liberal application of motorways, however it had vision as to where the main traffic corridors would be and these corridors hold true to today.

1965 - Motorway Plan

With the plan in place land could be set aside so that as Auckland grew around the locations for these planned transport links, in true Auckland fashion however the amount of land reserved was hardly adequate for the intended purpose and quite often developments were allowed to occur within this corridors forming a road block.

Blocked Eastern Highway

Quite a few sections of the 1965 plan are actually on the ground today, although many have been implemented on the cheap as arterial roads rather than motorways, in addition pockets of land can been seen around that form part of a route but have been rendered redundant by other sections of the route being sold off.

Pakuranga Motorway

1965 RTN Plan:

The 1965 Plan realised that Auckland was spreading out from the old city centre at a great pace and therefore the existing network wasn't going to be sufficient for the growing city. To this extent some rather large upgrades were proposed heading to the Northshore, the Airport and east Auckland.

Similar to the motorway plan, the RTN links shown in the plan would be extremely effective if they were part of the city today. Sadly the only part of the RTN network to get implemented has been the Northern Busway as far as Albany, this has the eastern and western sides of south Auckland without any RTN. East Auckland by Botany and Howick have been hit particular hard with neither the planned rapid transit or motorway network.

Of the various routes shown its extremely hard to find much evidence of there being any more than token provisions of land for these routes which is likely to be one of the main reasons why these routes are yet to be implemented.

1965 - Rapid Transit Plan

1965 to 1996:

The following plan shows the parts of the Auckland motorway network that were built both prior to 1965 (blue) and then after 1965 (red). As can be seen, much of the outer motorways where built prior to 1965 when these areas were rural farm land making them very similar to the Waikato Expressway or the Northern Motorway past Albany. In the years after 1965 the rural motorway sections were further extended to both the north and the south, the inner section of the motorway was built and construction started had started on Western Ring Route to let traffic bypass the CBD. 

1996 - Auckland Motorway Network

Referring to the above map it can be seen that although the 1965 plan had roughly 145km of motorways planned, and 37km of this had been built in the 15 years between 1950 and 1965, over the next next 30 years Auckland only managed to add another 43km to the motorway network with 40% of this being extensions to the rural motorway network.

Although only 30% of the planned motorway network got built over the 30 years between 1965 and 1996 this is more progress than what was seen on the RTN plan. All up 120km of RTN was planned for the city however no progress was made on this, although the existing rail network did provide for approximately 65km (45%) of the network a service was never run to satisfy the definition or rapid transit.

Lost Opportunity:

The current going rate for building a rural expressway is $20 M/km and therefore the total cost of the 1965 motorway network in today's money would be $2.7 billion, excluding the CMJ and Harbour Bridge and the Southern Motorway between Ellerslie and the CBD which would all have a much more expensive unit rate.

The cost of not building these routes or planning for them adequately has come at a huge cost to Auckland, one such example is the Waterview Connection which had it been built or had land set aside 50 years ago when first planned would have cost $80 million rather than the $1.4 billion we are spending today equating to a 6% annual construction cost increase.

To a similar extent Auckland's poor implementation of its plans has left it with than half of its planned Rapid Transit Network. Similar to the planned motorway network much of the planned RTN was in rural farmland and therefore would have been very cheap to build, however this would have also required electrification of the network, a new harbour crossing and two new undergound rail lines in the CBD.

Shaping the City

In my next post I will look at how the implementation of these plans have shaped our city.

Auckland's Transport History - Part 2

Following is Part 2 of Auckland Transport History.

In Part 1 we looked at the years 1920 through to 1970 noting decline in PT usage as the automobile started to feature in New Zealands transport spectrum.

This post looks at the polices put in place over this period to see what impact they had on Auckland in terms of the way Auckland grew and how we chose to move around it.

Again, this post is using the evidence presented in the paper
"The American Heresy: Half a Century of Transport Planning in Auckland"

1945 to 1955

Before getting into the various plans of the time its important to fist know what Auckland was like back in this time, one good way to do this is to use the Auckland Council GIS Viewer that has historical aerial photos dating back to 1940.

Auckland - 1940

As you can see in the above image Auckland was very densely populated in a grid system which is pretty typical of a time when people relied on walking as their main form of transport. The development of the city generally spread along the tram lines which ran on arterial roads that were no wider than the average side street. Unlike most planned cities Auckland seemed to adopt a philosophy that space was hard to come by and therefore no effort at all was made to plan for future demand.

Looking at the transport network of 1940 it appears that even back then not much in the way of development had occurred along the rail network suggesting that it was being used more as a regional passenger system rather than a metropolitan system. It's noted that 10 years previously in 1930 a grand new train station had been built in the CBD that was integrated with the tram network. This station was built as the base of Grafton Gully between the CBD and Parnell.

Auckland Train Station - 1930

Based on the 1955 Plan over 90% of passenger and good trips occurred on the road, with rail contributing not a too dissimilar portion to that of today. At this point in time it is likely that a large potion of these passenger trips were occurring either on buses or trams.

1946 Plan

The first transport plan for Auckland you normally hear about is the 1955 Plan, however in 1946 the Ministry of Works developed a regional transport plan comprising of both motorways and railways. This plan looked at the region rather than what was Auckland city at the time as can be seen in the image below.

Regional Plan - 1946

With this plan being developed directly after WWII there is a good chance that the this plan was not just looking at providing improved transport around the region but also had a focus on defence as evident by the various air bases being shown. Interesting to note in this plan is that although quite a few large motorways are planed various railway projects are also included such as the Morningside Deviation and the Southdown rail-line.

The 1946 plan actually should take quite a bit of credit for creating some of the most important transport corridors in the city, even if it was somewhat incomplete in terms of its vision. By 1959 the southern motorway had been built from Ellerslie to Manukau, the Northwestern extended from Waterview to Lincoln road and the Lincoln Road to westgate section was under construction.

1955 Auckland Plan

The most popular plan to be blamed for Auckland's transport issues is the 1955 Plan, however this ignores the fact that in the years preceding the implementation of this plan PT volumes had already halved from 120 million to 60 million annual passengers. As mentioned in my previous post however this 120 million number was an inflation due to WWII and 60 million passengers was in-line with long term trends.

Auckland Plan - 1955

Looking at the way Auckland was growing at this time it is pretty clear that the city is growing out and people are choosing to live further from the city in larger sections and driving to where they want to go, one good example of this is the eastern bays such as St Heliers which experienced very little growth until Tamiki Dr was built in 1930, we saw this again in the 60's when the harbour bridge opened.

So when you look at the way Auckland was growing and they way people were choosing to travel, despite there being no motorways or large arterial roads, it is understandable as to why a heavy focus was placed on roads. This is pretty clear when you look at the expected mode share of the various schemes.

Morningside Deviation - 5% of regional traffic @ £11,710,000
Victoria St Spur Line - 3% of regional traffic @ £2,000,000
Motorway network - 75-80% of regional traffic @ £12,000,000

At first glance it doesn't quite seem right that the rail option cost almost the same price as the motorway network, however with further investigation most of the motorway network is being built in open farmland whereas the Morningside Deviation goes through built up areas and is approximately twice the length of the current CRL proposal. To a similar extent however the motorway system requires the construction of the central motorway junction and so really we could expect the motorway network to cost 2 or 3 times as much as what the plan quotes and this seems to be a rather large oversight.

Auckland Plan - 1955

1955 Plan and PT

The 1955 plan understandably discounts the Morningside Deviation as a practicable solution both providing little improvement in transport conditions and costing a fortune to do so, however the 1955 plan does not discount PT and actually promotes what would actually work quite well if implemented today.

With the newly built motorway network the 1955 plan proposes that park and ride and standard bus interchanges be built at most interchanges effectively converting the motorway network into a Rapid Transit Network (RTN) at the same time. With appropriate treatments buses running on motorway shoulders can actually deliver a level of service similar to that of a dedicated busway. Sadly however it seems that the PT part of the 1955 plan failed, I suspect the failure came through poor implementation and low initial patronage due to population density and travel preferences at the time. To make matters worse it seems we never left any space for such facilities to be built in the future.

Auckland Plan - 1955

For my next post I will continue to look at the polices since 1955 and just what was actually implemented.

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.

Road Type Fuel Economy

A few months back I got myself a new car and one of the features it has is a nifty fuel economy meter.

In my previous car the fuel economy meter gave you an average fuel consumption rating since the last time you rest the meter which could have been up to 6 months ago. The new one does this as well which is good for getting a lifetime average however this isn't the feature I was looking at. As well as the lifetime average car also lets you know your fuel consumption at current moment of driving as well as over the past 30mins with averages shown at 1min intervals. To this extent I was able to test out what sort of consumption I was getting as I was travelling round the country during the break.

For reference, I was using a 2015 Suburu WRX which uses Suburu's new FA20F engine. The engine is a 2.0-litre turbo and puts out 197kW which is about the same as 4.0-litre Ford Falcon. In addition, I was also using 98 octane fuel.

2015 - WRX

Motorway driving

What first made me want to do this testing was when I noticed how low the fuel consumption was on the motorway. 

Note that the lifetime average fuel consumption is the red line through the middle which is also the 8.8l/100km noted at the top. A yellow bars show fuel consumption higher than average and green bars lower than average, each of these bars is the average is taken over a 1min period.

Following are the results from the first test which were taken on the southern motorway. 

The initial yellow spike you can see is from climbing up the Bombay Hills from the Waikato which is a rather steep 8% grade, from there it was a smooth trip all the way through to Ellerslie where there was a night time lane closure in place where I then tuned off the motorway at Greenlane. This trip was finished at 7:03pm and the motorway wasn't all that busy at this time.

Motorway Test - 1

The next image shows a journey from Sylvia Park to the Bombay Service Centre. The two big spikes at the start from the traffic signals along Mt Wellington Highway but from there on its a smooth trip, interestingly the southbound climb up the Bombay hills sits just under the life time average of 8.8 l/100km unlike when heading northbound where the consumption was 15 l/100km. What should be noted on this trip is that it was made in the middle of the day and the motorway was actually really busy yet it was flowing smoothing between 80 & 100 km/h.

Motorway Test 2

Looking at the two trips you could say the average fuel consumption on the motorway is about 6 l/100km which seems like a pretty good rate, amazing given the type of car. I was able to drive the above two trips in a pretty smooth manner, however if there was total flow breakdown on the motorway this value would likely take a beating.

Local Roads

The next obvious thing to test is our local roads given these are the only other option we have within the city. Given it was the summer break it wasn't really the best time to test these as people tend to leave Auckland over summer and the only places you find any traffic is either at the beach or at shopping centres. In any event the following image shows a journey from Mt Eden over to St Heliers, this is a good trip as it goes through a mix of traffic signals and roundabouts.

Referring to the image, the first 4 large spikes are signal controlled intersections with two of them going off the scale. The remaining spikes come from either roundabouts or priority controlled intersections. Generally where you see a green bar this is where I am either going down a hill or slowing down in advance of a red traffic signal.

Local Road Test

As you can see, when driving on local roads the fuel consumption is much more varied then on the motorway with intersections being the killer. From this particular trip you could say the local road fuel consumption was about 8 l/100km however, despite this trip being made in the middle of the day I was almost the only person on the road which made for easy driving and few stops. From previous driving before the summer break my lifetime average was 10 l/100km which was mainly based from city driving and so I think that's a more realistic value when you take account of other users.

Rural Road

The next two images show the fuel consumption on rural roads that aren't expressways or motorways. I've classed the rural roads as two types, 'easy' and 'moderate'. For 'Eesy' you can think of roads such as State Highway 2 heading to Tauranga whereas 'moderate' would be State Highway 1 after the Northern Gateway. 

Easy Rural Road

On the 'easy' rural road we would be looking at an average fuel consumption rating of about 8.5 l/100km,

On the 'moderate' rural road we can see that it really spikes up through the middle which could have been reduced if I eased of the throttle a little. All up however you are probably looking at about 10 l/100km for a moderate section.

Moderate Rural Road

Summary

So in conclusion, using my unscientific but real world test we get the following values for different road types.

• Motorway  =  6.0 l/100km
• Local Road  =  10.0 l/100km
• Rural Road (easy)  =  8.5 l/100km
• Rural Road (moderate)  =  10.0 l/100km

So what does this all mean, well if we were to drive the 655km trip from Auckland to Wellington on an easy rural road we would use 56 litres of fuel, however if this was to be an expressway we would only use 39 litres. That's a grand saving of about $37.4 assuming $2.20 / l.

For a more relevant example we can take the 35km Puhoi to Wellsford project, currently this would use about 3.5l, however as an expressway this would reduce to 2.1l saving you about $3.10 in fuel. If that were the case a $4 toll wouldn't seem like too bad of a deal.

When it comes to fuel efficiency one of the main influencing factors is the way you drive, my little test doesn't go into this however for the most part this test is based on calm and smooth driving with gentle braking and acceleration. The 'moderate' rural road results reflect more aggressive driving however I'd argue the different road types induce different driving behaviours and is therefore still somewhat reflective.