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.

Myths & Reality #1

I'm going to start a little series on "Myths & Reality"

It's quite common to see these from a pro-PT anti-road point of view but I'm going to try and make this series cover both sides.

So to start things off here is Number 1.

"Roads are Designed to Eliminate Peak Hour Congestion and are Empty for the Rest of the Day"

This is a common one from the anti-road brigade and is generally used as an argument against road improvements and motorways as it is claimed they are significantly under utilised for most of the time.

The reality is we can't afford to design roads to eliminate the peak hour traffic congestion, what road designers do is design roads to "manage" peak hour congestion. This may very well mean that the average speed is reduced from 100km/h down to 70km/h but the aim is to keep traffic flowing smoothly and safely.

It is the inter-peak hours that we try and keep traffic flowing at optimal conditions.

The following photo shows the Northern Motorway on a Saturday afternoon. You can see here that there are quite a few cars and if it were a video you would note the traffic was flowing smoothly. It is however in a bit of a fragile state in that one crash could cause some real issues, and when you have 160,000 vehicles a day driving along a given section of road the chance of there being is crash is quite high. Given there are wide shoulders here the traffic impacts of a minor crash would be much less than what we have been seeing on the North-Western Motorway (SH1) where a single crash would bring this level of traffic to a stand still.

Northern Motorway (SH1) Weekend Traffic

The next photo shows the South-Eastern Motorway (SH20) on a Sunday afternoon. You can see here that the road is rather quiet and flowing completely smoothly. A minor crash here would be of little consequence in terms of the of traffic flows. This section of road gets about 70,000 vehicles a day and potentially you could question as to why it was recently upgraded from 2-lanes each way to 3-lanes each way. The simple answer to that is forward planning as in 2017 the Waterview Tunnel is expected to open which will result in another 60,000 vehicles driving this route every day.

South-Western Motorway (SH20) Weekend Traffic

So what does any of this have to do with designing roads to handle peak hour congestion?

Well basically these photos are showing the motorway operating in near optimal conditions. The Northern Motorway is a little too close to capacity and the South-Western is a quite a bit under.

When it comes to peak hour when there is two or three times more traffic however, the northern motorway will be in stop start condition and the south-western will be close to flow breakdown. In both cases one minor crash would result in significant delays.

Fixing Auckland's Transport - The "Essential" Transport Network

As many of you will be aware, Auckland is the the middle of sorting out it's 10 year budget and as part of this they are trying to encourage the people of Auckland to take a bold step and pay a little better so that we can start to improve transport in Auckland.

Being the councils transport body, Auckland Transport (AT) has a fair idea of what Auckland transport issues are and they also have a good idea as to how the city is going to grow in the future and hence what new transport issues arise.

This is why we are presented with two separate transport plans as follows.

• Basic Transport Network @ $6.9 billion
• Advanced Transport Programme @ $10.3 billion

Although AT and the Auckland Council have been working away on these plans for some time, the anti-road brigade over at GenerationZero have noted that some improvements to the road network have been proposed and so the next campaign has started to stop improving Auckland's road transport in the name of the "Essential Transport Budget" (ETB).

As an overview, the ETB is the Basic Transport Network with a few key road upgrades being removed, they then and in a bunch of new bus/rail interchanges which are all part of the new bus network. It also includes about $100 million for improved walking and cycling.

Background:

Based on the ETB Report, the Basic Transport Network will result in "serious delays to major transport projects", but other than that they don't identify any issues and are not at all concerned with increasing congestion or allowing Auckland to grow.

The ETB is said to "priorities the desired step change in transport choice in Auckland" which I assume means making the roads so congested people have little choice but the take a train.

The rational is that apparently for the past 50 years Auckland has invested in nothing but motorways. However if you read through my Auckland's Transport History series you will note that Auckland actually has a long history of investing in nothing. It was back in the 50 & 60's that the New Zealand government built some rural expressways outside of Auckland, the only real urban motorways that were built in Auckland were again built by the government with that being the CMJ which was built very slowly over a 40 year period. Most of the urban motorways you know of today are due to Auckland growing and engulfing the rural expressways.

In terms of what Auckland has done for itself, it has only built residential streets and a few 4 lane arterial roads. In reality, Auckland is where it is today due to the council doing nothing but the bare minimum for the past 70 years, waiting for the government to step in and do something. It has only been in the last decade that Auckland Council has started to do something with their first steps being turning the rail network into an effect Rapid Transit Network (RTN).

The repeated trend of Auckland in the past of doing as little as possible is what has resulted in a congested and unpleasant road network. Roads that were meant to be arterial were built as residential streets meaning they had very little capacity and no space to be upgraded. This in turn made them progressively less desirable to walk or cycle along as additional space for traffic was squeezed in.

One of the repeated chants from the anti-road brigade is that traffic volumes aren't growing and more people are using PT, which although true it is due to a simple and obvious reason. If the roads are congested people are going to look for other ways to perform their trip. In addition to this, rail usage has shot up due to the bus network being revised so that existing bus users are now required to transfer to a train.

To show the level of trust you can put in their document, they make the claim that passenger volumes on the Auckland rail network have been increasing by 20% per annum. However if you view the following image you can see that this is not the case; although its very clear that rail patronage has been increasing, it actually declined sharply only 2 years ago and has generally been growing at just over 10% per annum.

Transportblog - 2015

On a similar tune, GenerationZero have made the claim that we reached peak traffic in mid 2000's and will never reach such levels again, this is despite the fact we have reached those levels again, passed them, and have been continuing to grow at around 2.5% per annum when you look places like the southern, northern, northwestern and upper harbour motorways.

Pro PT

In terms of the projects that are in the ETB, I don't actually have an issue with any of them however I don't see them as going far enough.

In true to anti-road campaigner fashion, GenerationZero has removed a number of road projects where the primary benefactors are bus users. This is similar case to a previous post I did where the blind hatred of roads can lead folks to campaigning against projects not knowing that the main benefactors are the PT users.

An example of this is the Lincoln Road Upgrade, currently this road has two lanes each way with no cycling and poor walking provisions. The planned upgrade leaves the same number of general traffic lanes but adds a buslane each way along with new cycle lanes, and footpaths with improved safety along the route.

Similar targets are:

• Te Atatu Road upgrade, which is being done to improve buses, walking and cycling along Te Atatu Road.
• Local road Upgrades for the East West Connections Project, which is essentially bus improvements.
• Long Bay Southern Corridor, which provides benefits for all users.
• Dominion Road Upgrade

Growing Auckland:

The other obvious assumption in the ETB is that Auckland is only going to grow upwards and not outwards with their scrapping of the Mill Road upgrade.

Although this area is expected to have an additional:

• 22,000 homes
• 6,000 jobs
• 80,000 more people

The ETB assumes these people will be more than happy to take the bus along a narrow and congested two-lane road to the nearest train station regardless of where they want to go.

Effects of the Essential Transport Budget:

The aim of the ETB is clear in that they want to improve public transport along with walking and cycling. Unfortunately they have fallen for the all to common mistake of assuming anything with the word "road" in the title is bad and therefore must be stopped.

To this extent the ETB will roll out a suite of new train station and bus interchanges however, these buses will be stuck driving along congested local roads as they have removed all of the projects that were going to upgrade these roads to provide the fast and frequent bus services. The end result of the ETB is that we get to spend more money but have a slower and more congested transport network for everyone.

Funding:

I always enjoy reading the funding cases from anyone who is anti-road as they are always campaigning to stop road projects yet they insist that the people who are on the road should pay for their pet project.

We pretty much have the same situation here where they are pretty content with fuel tax but in a rare case of generosity they have actually supported increasing rates. Normally rates are completely off the cards as this means they will need to pay some money but they seem happy in this case as they have reduced the amount they would need to be to $15.73 per annum.

Fuel Levy:

We are told the fuel levy "affects everyone relatively fairly", well I guess this would be the case if we all drove relatively similar vehicles, relatively the same distance at relatively the same number of times a year. However in reality the person it effects the most is the person who needs to travel for work who doesn't have a company car. With a 7c/l tax that somewhat average person pays about $140 a year on tax towards the new transport network, however another equally average person who takes the train (that the guy driving paid for) to work pays nothing what so ever. And so this levy is in no way shape or form fair unless the person paying the $140 in tax is getting some sort of a benefit out of this additional money they are paying, which in the case of the ETB they get less than what they would get in the Basic Transport Network package.

A case of pay more and get less for road users.

Motorway Toll:

Strangely the motorway toll doesn't get the biggest round of applause because there is some concern that some parts of the city have poor PT provision. We are told places like Te Atatu and Messey, the ones who are getting brand new bus lanes built as we speak, have no choice but to take the motorway despite their express bus services. It is only once these places have greatly improved PT that we can toll them.

Without having to read too hard between the lines it's rather clear that a few of the contributors to the ETB live in these places and are probably not to impressed with their current PT service which is required to mix with motorway traffic due to the upgrades that are being built for them. It will be for this simple reason that they currently drive along here that they don't want a motorway toll, as it does add up to a bit at the end the year.

Similar to the fuel levy, if you make 2 trips a day you are looking at spending about $450 a year on motorway tolls, which once the motorway upgrade is finished in 2017 will reduce to nothing as you can start taking the bus again.

The interesting part for these folk is that the ETB does nothing for them. Once the motorway upgrade is complete buses will be able to drive along the motorway should free of congestion, however the ETB has cancelled the local road upgrades and so once they get off the motorway they will be stuck in congestion rather then using the nice bus lanes they were going to get in the Basic Transport Network.

Government Cash:

By far the most preferred source of funding for any project is from the central government. The general call is that PT projects should be funded in the same way as motorways are, from a big pot of money the government has.

The issue here is that the big pot of money gets its money from fuel tax and various other charges paid my motorists. So if you say you want PT to be funded in the same way motorways are then you are really saying you want to remove all subsidies from PT and have it entirely run as a users pays system.

Of course this isn't what they want, but rather they want road users to pay for PT. Currently about 57c in the litre gets paid towards the land transport fund and so for the average driver that's about $800 a year. The preference from the anti-road campaigner is that this $800 should be directed towards the train user and the road user should be rewarded with more congestion for their efforts.

Conclusion:

In the end of the day, the Essential Transport Budget is trying to push the Congestion Free Network into the 10 year plan. Although it's all well and good to campaign for better public transport, in this case it seems they have picked a battle that isn't really needed.

In it's goal of being cheaper the ETB has shot itself in the foot and removed many of the essential roading projects that are needed to support the public transport network along with many of the walking and cycling upgrades. Roading projects have never been just about cars, and even motorway projects these days are doing more for walking and cycling than many most other projects.

The way I see it, if you want one or more of the following:

• Better Public Transport
• Better Walking Provisions
• Better Cycling Provisions
• Greater Choice
• Great Flexibility
• Reduced Congestion

Then the only option you need to chose is the Advanced Transport Programme.

Auckland Transport History - Part 4

Following is Part 4 of my series on Auckland's Transport History.

As before, this series is sort of in response to a paper I read:
"The American Heresy: Half a century of transport planning in Auckland"

Recap:

To recap from the previous posts there have been 3 main transport plans developed for transport in Auckland, these are:

• 1946 Regional Transport Plan
• 1956 Auckland Plan
• 1965 Auckland Regional Transport Plan

Of these plans, the 1946 plan presented a regional road network that was outside of the Auckland urban area.

The 1956 Auckland Plan reduced the regional extent of the previous plan but envisaged an extensive series of motorways wrapping around all 4 sides of the CBD. Of the 35km of inner city motorways that were planned in the 1955 plan only 4km (10%) of these were built during the years 1955 to 1965.

The 1965 plan was the most extensive of all the plans and included both an extensive motorway network and rapid transit network. Approximately 65km of additional motorway was marked out over the urban area of Auckland, however in the 50 years since this plan was put in place only extra 20km (30%) of these urban motorways have been built. Of the RTN component roughly 75km was marked out to cover existing urban areas, the existing rail lines made up 50km (65%) of this network however nothing was added to this until 2008 when the Northern Busway was opened.

When you look at Auckland today it may appear that Auckland has an extensive urban motorway network, however this network is actually a result of Auckland growing and following the regional motorways into the country (similar to the Waikato Expresssway) rather than these motorways being planned as urban links.

In terms of what was planned inside the urban area it has taken 50 years to complete roughly 40% of what was planned to be delivered over 20 years. In terms of the rapid transit network; 65% of the urban area was was already covered by the existing rail network, however slow and unreliable service meant it was never operated as a rapid transit network.

Auckland Councils Part:

As we have seen, the various plans were all regional plans and were mainly in relation to the surrounding areas of Auckland rather than the urban area itself. Of the routes that went through the urban area, the ones that were built were intended to connect the northern, southern and western areas of Auckland but also provided access to the CBD.

The above regional connections were all delivered by the government as building and maintaining regional connections is managed and delivered at a national level. When it comes to local transport needs such as local arterial roads, bus services and metropolitan rail the local council generally manages the delivery. So while the government built their regional state highways what did the Auckland Council get up to?

Well it turns out, they didn't do much of anything.

One thing the council did do is remove the tram network and replace it with buses, this was done with the intention of making PT faster and more flexible. It's not overly clear how well thought through this plan was as the bus terminal in the city was built in 1937 when most PT users took trams yet no upgrades were made when the tram network was replaced with buses.

The other thing the council did between creating the various transport plans was sell off land and approve construction of housing and industrial developments where these planned transport links were intended to go.

The councils worst contribution however was to prevent these future routes being built  by building local roads along the planned alignment with property access for the full length. For any transport link to be effective at moving freight or people is to reduce side friction, being property access and intersections, however the council maximised side friction meaning these links become trapped as low speed urban roads.

One example of this is Ti Rakau Drive, this road was planned to be "expressway standard" meaning no side access but some high standard at grade intersections. Although for a time this road would have been rather nice with little traffic and wide grass berms, as the city has grown it has become a constraint on the area and not the most ideal street to live next to.

Ti Rakau Drive - 2015

Slightly better is Te Irirangi Dr which does have some level of access control but rather than being an expressway is a partial boulevard. With this section being posted at 80km/h with various major signal controlled intersections its not a very safe route to drive. Adding to this are poorly design entrances and exists from side lanes along with trees in the median which makes it understandable that there have been some serious crashes here in the past.

One of the merits of this route is that they did try to future proof for rapid transit with the wide grass median, however this is appears to not have been thought through all that well as there is no logical place to have stations in the middle of the road and every intersection would need to be grade separated.

Te Irirangi Drive - 2015

Robbie's Rail:

One of the things the Auckland council did do back in the day was try and stop the CMJ. Although first planned in 1956 and scheduled to be completed by 1976 by 1970 the only connection that had been built was a now removed bi-directional link to Wellesley St.

Although quite a bit of rural motorway had been built with few issues over the previous 20 years the work on the highly destructive inner city section was only just starting. It is estimated that as part of building both the CMJ and the southern motorway from Ellerslie that some 15,000 homes were destroyed forcing the relocation of some 50,000 people and so it it understandable that it was not very popular at the time.

Wellesley Ramp - 1996

Adding to the disruption that was going on as part of the building the CMJ, congestion levels were growing as the city had grown along the rural motorways letting users quickly drive into the city but then being left to use the existing local roads through the most congested parts of the city.

In the lead up to this when the full costs of the CMJ were starting to be appreciated the Mayor at the time (1968) Sir Dove-Myer Robinson championed the scrapping of the CMJ and building an inner city loop, similar to the CRL of today, as the way forward out of Auckland's congestion. The design presented was pretty much the RTN design from the 1965 Regional Transport Plan and the idea was to build the rail link first rather than scrap the CMJ altogether.

Given the size of the proposed inner city loop and the technology at the time this rail link would have been similar in terms of extent of destruction as the CMJ was and would have likely resulted in the loss of a number of historical buildings in the CBD. In the end the rail scheme was put on the back burner and plans for the CMJ continued.

Not long after this the world experienced the biggest and longest spike in world oil prices with oil prices increasing by up to 600% and taking 13 years to return to normal prices. This oil price increase resulted in a large increase in PT usage which would have meant many of the public would have seen the continued progress on the CMJ as a waste of money when PT funding was needed, however as soon as the oil prices when back to normal PT usage also declined to the lowest annual usage in Auckland's history.

Between 1970 and 1978 the southern and northern motorway's where connected at the CMJ and in 1983 the northwestern motorway was connected. However it took till 2006, 30 years late, to complete the various ramps and Dominion Road was removed from the scope. 

Conclusion:

In general, Auckland's transport History seems to be one were we make pretty good plans but then fail completely to deliver them.

For the Rapid Transit Network, we had 65% of it in place however didn't actually start running an effective service until recently, and even then we still limit ourselves to trains every 30mins off-peak.

For our motorway network, we only managed to build 40% of it yet we have taken more than twice as long as planned to do that.

For the sections of both motorway and RTN that we haven't built, little has been done to future proof these and so we are left with significant expenses and disruption if and when we actually try to implement them.

This all comes at a rather convenient time as the Auckland Council is looking for feedback on their new 10 year plan.

It's very clear that the reason Auckland's Transport is in the shape it's in now is from under investment in the past along with inadequate vision to invest in the future. If your at all passionate about Auckland's transport I suggest you provide feedback to the council which they are engaging the public.

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.