Congestion Free Network - Part 3

This is part three of a series on the Congestion Free Network (CFN). 

For those not familiar with the plan, I go into some detail here about its origins however it is essentially of copy of Auckland Transport's (AT) "Regional Land Transport Plan" although it upgrades everything to fully grade separated busways or railways.

Given the CFN is broken down into '5 Year Plan' segments I have been looking at each one in turn. In my previous post I looked at the network as proposed by the year 2020 and found that the initial portion of the works would likely cost in the range of $7-8 billion, this is despite the plan having had only allocated some $1.3 billion for these works. I also excluded the Central Rail Link (CRL) and the additional rolling stock from the previous estimate and so we should really round off the total cost for the first 5 year CFN plan at $11 billion.

In today's post I am going to look at the works for the 2020 to 2025 plan and see how far over budget we get given the we spent all of the CFN's budget in the first 5 year plan..

CFN - 2025

CFN 2020 to 2025 Projects:

The 2020 to 2025 plan for the CFN appears to be mainly extensions to existing section of the Rapid Transit Network (RTN) rather than creating new lines and therefore we can expect this phase to be cheaper then the $11 billion spent in the fist 5 year plan.

To set the context, the CFN is a network of grade separated high speed and high frequency public transport (PT) routes similar to the northern busway or Vancouver's SkyTrain.

Vancouver Sky Train - 2015

During the previous 5 year plan the busway was extended 4km from Constellation Station up to the Albany Station to remove the segment where buses are required to drive on a congested section of the motorway network, during this 5 year plan the busway is further extended 12km north from Albany through to Silverdale. Given this section of motorway only has an AADT of 40,000 it does seem somewhat excessive do build a grade separated busway however I can only assume that the authors of the CFN are expecting large amounts of traffic growth on this route, potentially due to the Puhoi to Wellsford motorway extension. 

Another busway extension is planned to go from Westgate 7km along SH16 to Kumeu. This is another peculiar extension as currently the two-lane two-way SH16 only gets 20k vpd here, it also sits on the existing rail line and could easily be served by extending the existing rail service slightly further. Personally I can see there being some merit in extending a high quality bus serves out here as part of extending the motorway, however I would only do this once we get some more urban sprawl, something which the authors of this work are dead set against and so their justification for this route is unknown 

We get two more busway extensions as part of the plan, a 6km extension to Howick and another 6km extension to the airport. We also get the Onehunga Rail Line extended 9km to the airport. All 3 of these make perfect sense and would be quite useful if there were here today for us to use, in particular the busway to Howick which is one of the most deprived parts of the city when it comes to PT.

The plan also adds a ferry to Northcote, Birkenhead, Beachhaven and Hobsonville. I'm not too sure how they plan it implement a fast and frequent ferry service as ferries are generally slow and their high capacity inherently means low frequency. Ferries are also pretty poor when it comes to CO2 commissions being about the same as a car on a per km rate, they usually offset this by taking much shorter routes however the route shown is no shorter than travelling by road

CFN 2020 to 2025 Costing:

The CFN website has the following costings for these projects:

1. Northern Busway Extension = $300 million (12km)
2. Western Busway Extenstion = $150 million (7km)
3. Howick Busway Extention = $150 million (6km)
4. Airport Busway = $235 million (6km)
5. Airport Rail = $700 million (9km)
6. High Speed High Frequency Ferries = $30 million

From that last time I looked as this we had a unit rate for busways of $35 million per km, we also had a property cost of $20 million per km in urban areas.

So using those rates and taking account that some of the busways are out in the country side we get the following values.

1. Northern Busway Extension = $420 million (12km)
2. Western Busway Extenstion = $245 million (7km)
3. Howick Busway Extention = $330 million (6km)
4. Airport Busway = $330 million (6km)

Looking at the rail option, $50 million per km is about what I would expect however due to the reduced geometric flexibility the property costs are likely to go up. On a pure per km rate we are looking at $720 million however the tricky part here is the crossing over the Mangere Inlet. The current plan is to have a bridge weaving its way across the inlet between the existing two bridges, however I suspect such visual destruction is not likely to be approved, unless it follows the same grade as the existing motorway bridge, and so we are more likely to see a tunnel here if this route is to be approved. Once you take this into account the cost of the route is more likely to at least $1 billion.

Mangere Inlet - 2015

So if we put the various parts together, the total cost for the CFN 5 year plan from 2020 to 2025 comes out at $2.3 billion, comparing this to the CFN budget of $1.5 billion we have managed to come in much closer to budget than we did in the first 5 year plan.

The total cost to date for the CFN is now at $13.3 billion running at 136% of the total CNF budget of $9.8 billion.

Similar to last time, I have updated the 2025 CFN plan to show what we could build if we limited are funds to what the CFN has allocated.

Costed 2025 CFN - 2015

The next post will cover the years 2025 to 2030. 

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.