Cycling Auckland

The other day I saw another post which showed the cycling provision in Auckland.

The post provided a couple of pictures showing roads on one side and dedicated cycling facilities on the other.

Cycling vs Cars - TransportBlog

So with this image the following claim was made.

"Its no wonder that only 1% of commuters are cycling to work in Auckland if less than 1% of our road have safe cycling infrastructure"

What we have here is another case of Myth & Reality where we are told that 99% of streets aren't safe for cyclists. The reality is that the vast majority of roads in Auckland are quiet residential side streets brought about by the sprawled non-grid nature of the city. If you actually created a plan of all the quite and safe roads for cyclists in the city, and then included the various parks, off-road cycleways and pedestrian plazas that cyclists freely use you will find cyclists actually have a larger and more connected network than what cars do and so the image above is not only misleading but straight out wrong.

The following image shows the school of thought that went into making the above image.

Average Auckland Road

So seeing what the streets are like in Auckland, what are they like in Copenhagen where they get 20-30% of people cycling.

Copenhagen St

Well looking at that typical Copenhagen side street the carriageway is narrower and therefore needs to be one way, there is no berm but there is a narrow concrete footpath between the parked cars and the edge of the road reserve that I believe cyclists also use. In all cases the Copenhagen St seems less safe for cyclists with one exception, that being that there are no driveways. If the road above had driveways on it with the expectation that cyclists bike right next to the boundary I would say the road above was downright dangerous.

To that extent I suspect there are two big reasons why cycling is so popular in Copenhagen. One reason will be that Copenhagen is near totally flat and therefore its very easy to make the 5km average trip, the next reason will be that driving in Copenhagen isn't really much of an option. As you can see in the image, in Copenhagen you are pretty much required to park on the street both at home and at your destination, given the various one way streets and that many are closed off to everyone except for residents driving would be both slow and inconvenient and vehicle damage would be a common occurrence.

Myths & Reality #2

Today we have Part II of the "Myths @ Reality" series

You can locate Part I here.

For today we are going to look at what is quite possibly the most popular anti-road argument being.

"Building Roads Doesn't Reduce Congestion"

This one comes in multiple forms but the general idea is that when you build a new road or widen an existing road the reduction in congestion is only temporary and you quickly end up back where you were before. This implies that the work done to improve the road was a waste of time as congestion has not reduced and therefore there has been no benefit.

Background:

Like all myths and legends there is actual an element of truth to this claim; It is true that when you add more capacity to something that has unreleased demand that usage will go up, but the conclusions that there has been no benefit is completely misplaced.

In a previous post I elaborated on what congestion is and based on what was discussed there we can expect that when we upgrade a busy road to have more capacity more people will come start using that road.

What about Public Transport:

Although I have started off mentioning roads this same induced demand effect also effects Public Transport (PT), in fact you could argue that one of the main driving factors of PT usage is the inadequacy of capacity in other modes. For example, since the extensive and disruptive roadworks have been occurring on the Northwest Motorway there has been a notable uptake in rail usage on the western line.

However if you look at PT in isolation; If you had a given bus route that's operating one bus every 15mins, and each of these buses tends to be approaching its limits in terms of capacity you will find some potential users are being turned away. To increase the capacity you can start running buses every 10mins which will make life more comfortable for the existing users until the customers who were previously being turned away come back making the buses just as busy as before.

PT supporters will claim that it is cheaper to increase the capacity on PT routes as you have already done the hard part of building the road, however the issue here is that the costs of running a bus, rail or ferry service is directly related to the capacity you are operating.

The Myth and the Reality:

To test this claim, that when you build a new road you simply attract more users and leave things just as congested as before, we are going to look at the SH18 Upper Harbour Motorway here in Auckland.

This section of motorway was built during the mid to late 2000's and bypasses Hobsonville Road and Upper Harbour Drive. The way this road bypasses the old State Highway is actually very similar to when the Southern Motorway was built between 1950 and 1970 and how it bypassed Great South Road.

So this section of motorway was built in two sections:

1) Hobsonville Section - Bypassing Hobsonville Road 

2) Greenhithe Section - Bypassing Upper harbour Drive

Hobsonville Section:

Hobsonville Road 2010 = 37,000 vpd

Hobsonville Road 2014 = 6,700 vpd

SH18 Motorway 2014 = 35,000 vpd

Greenhithe Section:

Upper Harbvour Drive 2006 = 31,000 vpd

Upper Harbvour Drive 2012 = 4,500 vpd

SH18 Motorway 2014 = 43,700 vpd

So as you can see from the numbers above there has been a significant reduction, >80%, in traffic on the existing route. For those of you that are not familiar with this section of road, the existing road alignment was a two-lane two-way road which that was at its absolute limits of capacity presenting a hazardous environment for cyclists and locals and a very low Level of Service (LoS) for all users.

Biking along this road now is both quiet and pleasant with there being very few cars, nice views and an open environment.

Upper Harbour Drive - Google Maps

Here Comes the Induced Demand:

So the above Upper Harbour Drive section has had 8 years for the induced demand to come and fill up the released capacity, however it seems here we are with 85% traffic less traffic than before. The motorway meanwhile as been growing as can be expected due to the demand that was being held back by the existing route that was at capacity, this will also be driven by cross harbour traffic which is unable to cross the main harbour bridge which is also at capacity.

2010 = 31,100

2011 = 33,700 +8.3%

2012 = 38,900 +15.4%

2013 = 40,900 +5.1%

2014 = 43.700 +6.8%

So yes we can see that motorway is attracting more traffic, but what about the existing roads that have had their traffic flows reduced by over 80%. Well if Auckland stopped changing, the city stopped growing and new business stopped establishing quite possibly these traffic volumes would stay down, however this is not the case.

One of the reasons for building the new motorway through this section was that the existing roads were at capacity and therefore development was on hold. Now that all this new capacity has been opened up the area can now handle more people and business.

The planned growth is shown in the following image of the Northern Strategic Growth Area (NorSGA).

NorSGA - AT

Busted:

In terms of the short term, ie 5 years we can safely say this myth is busted, however one issue we have is that the people who make this claim never actually quantify any of their claims. If their talking about 20-50 year time frames I guess they are correct in that any arterial roads we built in a growing city have a good chance of getting congested, but it makes you wonder what they are arguing against.

Are they arguing against roads or are they arguing against growth?

In most cases the people who make this claim live in large metropolitans and their greatest joys come as by-products of large number of people and the concentrations of wealth found in a growing city yet it seems they don't appreciate that this growth comes with increased travel and therefore congestion for all modes of transport.