Auckland transport: bright lights, big mess

Esther Harward - Sunday Star Times

EVERY TIME you fill your car with petrol, wherever you live in New Zealand, you'll be doing your bit for Auckland's traffic problems whether you like it or not.

Auckland's legendary snarl-ups are driving the locals crazier than ever. Time-wasting traffic jams and hour-long commutes are the reason many people quit the city, and why others choose not live there. And for most Aucklanders who don't have a reliable train or bus going their way there's no way they can get out of their car any time soon.

Auckland's transport mess has now become everyone's problem. Two weeks ago, Transport Minister Stephen Joyce scrapped the regional tax that would have paid for $710 million of rail, bus and ferry improvements, then announced that instead $500m for electric trains would come from smaller increases in national fuel taxes.

It's become a case of too little, too late, the critics say. The changes have been slammed by the Auckland Regional Council, Labour and the Greens who last week revealed that even cabinet thinks Auckland will lose financially if the planned transport improvements don't go ahead. A report from its business committee shows if you leave in $110m of "niceties" station upgrades, integrated ticketing, real time information you get $3-$4 back over 25 years. Remove them and get $1 back per $1 spent over 40 years as fewer people use public transport, resulting in money lost from fares and workers sitting in traffic.

But now that rescuing the commercial capital from an infrastructure disaster is a national issue, the Sunday Star-Times has asked three leading international transport gurus and an Auckland expert to identify where the city needs to go and quickly. One of the more controversial solutions is to take away free parking and to charge developers who build car parks.

 

Investing in the future

A cabinet paper, released to the Green Party under the Official Information Act, shows Auckland would have got back $3-$4 for each $1 spent on a $110 million package of public transport "extras". By comparison, spending $500m on rail electrification alone the only public transport funding the government pledged after scrapping the regional fuel tax means Auckland will get back just $1 for each $1 spent. This is because without the "extras" ferry wharf upgrades, smart card integrated ticketing, and real time information for buses and ferries fewer people will want to use public transport, which means higher congestion costs and loss of fares. Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimmons accused the government of "penny pinching". "We could have the worst of all possible worlds where we spend most of the money, but only get a small part of the benefit because we didn't spend the rest," she said. The total $860m public transport rollout planned by the Auckland Regional Council would have cut 18,000 car journeys during morning and afternoon peaks, and reduced congestion costs to motorists by $200m a year. If rail isn't upgraded, 130km of roads would be needed at a cost of $3.8 billion to cope with anticipated demand. Transport Minister Stephen Joyce said the ARC could ask the New Zealand Transport Agency to help plug the funding gap, or raise the money itself.

AUSTRALIA: Paul Mees

Senior lecturer in transport planning at RMIT University, Melbourne. Activist academic, author and past president of Melbourne's Public Transport Users Association

Auckland has spent more on roads, per head, than any Australian city and look at the results, Mees says.

"There's nothing remotely comparable to Spaghetti Junction in any Australian city nothing on the scale of that. Auckland has that, and yet it has worse traffic congestion than larger cities that don't have it."

He recommends a halt on new or extended motorways until a proper rail system is in place, and high-quality buses as feeders to rail stations. Putting bikes and buses in the same lanes is crazy, says Mees. It slows down the buses and puts cyclists' lives at risk so give cyclists their own paths.

Auckland has 1.4 million people; the same population as the city and suburbs of Zurich, in Switzerland. Aucklanders made 52 million trips last year; Zurich residents made 542 million. Around 6% of Aucklanders take public transport to work; 42% of Zurich residents do.

"Auckland's population density is a little over half of Zurich's, so maybe you shouldn't aim quite this high, but 1.3 million people is more than enough to support a viable public transport system," Mees says.

"If you live in Auckland you don't appreciate what an extreme case it is, but it's had the most unbalanced transport policies of just about anyone in the world. Even in Los Angeles they put a bit into public transport eventually. There's been very little road building going on in LA for the past 20-30 years. They've stopped, but in Auckland you'd think it was the 1950s, from the way the road lobby and the government carry on.

"I actually use Auckland in some of my books on the basis that it's one of the most extreme cases in the world of a city that's spent 50 years putting all of its eggs in the motorway basket. It isn't reasonable for someone to say Auckland should have invested more in motorways, because there's no one who's invested more in motorways, relative to its populaton in income, more than Auckland."

CANADA: Paul Bedford

Former chief city planner of Toronto, Canada. Influential in developing a $C90 billion transport plan for greater Toronto.

Bedford says Auckland should stop spending on roads and vastly improve public transport. When he visited in August he hardly saw a bus outside of the central city.

"One person per car clogging up the roads doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense in terms of how you allocate limited road space. A bus holds 40-50 people so you're taking 40-50 cars off the road."

He would put on more buses; have more suburban trains connecting to Britomart; and bring back trams to the central city and to nearby shopping and eating main streets such as Ponsonby and Parnell roads.

Auckland's central business district doesn't have the population density to justify subways, but trams would be great. "They're quiet, they go through the heart of the city, they're clean." Where trams ran, they would take priority ahead of motorists "a very tough political decision".

There's no point spending money on expensive trains if you don't concentrate development around key transport points, so he would have taller buildings clustered around rail stations in suburban centres, resulting in more people travelling to homes or offices on public transport.

He says there is no magic bullet as long as politicians and drivers have expectations that traffic gridlock can be solved by playing around with road capacity.

"The reality of expressways is that they fill up and there is generally no more room to widen the road. Even if you did, it fills up almost immediately. In Toronto we have an 18 lane-wide expressway running through the top of the city, and it's in gridlock for much of the day, even though it carries about 300,000 cars per day."

SCOTLAND: Professor George Hazel

Chairman of transport consultancy company MRC McLean Hazel, Edinburgh. Former director of development in Edinbugh, awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2005 for services to transport, wrote Making Cities Work (published 2004).

Start with a backbone of good public transport whether it's busways, light rail, heavy rail, or a combination of the three, supplemented by feeder buses. In rural or more remote suburban areas, public bodies could subsidise taxis off-peak, when they're sitting empty. People would pay the equivalent of a bus fare to get a taxi. What it cost to subsidise taxis, transport authorities would save by not running buses.

Fast-forward to the future where there is one electronic transport card, like the Oyster card in London or Octopus card in Hong Kong, or phone device, that does everything pays for petrol, parking, taxis, tolls, transit, bike hire, food at shops next to stations. People store money on it, paying a percentage on each transaction which they don't mind because they don't have to queue.

The device could give loyalty points for using public transport off-peak.

"That's much more deliverable than road pricing [congestion charging], which is extremely difficult politically. [The device] is very sellable politically because everybody will like the concept of this joined-up transport, because people want the one ticket that will do everything. Suddenly you've opened up a device that generates a lot of money," says Hazel.

IT companies are developing the technology and see it as a big business opportunity, he says. "So a business model for the future might well be to say to the Siemens or IBMs of this world, you handle this device for us, we'll give you a franchise for the value-added services, and you pay for the infrastructure to put it all in."

AUCKLAND: Stuart Donovan

Transport engineer at MRC's Auckland branch. Advises the New Zealand Transport Agency, Auckland Regional Council and Auckland Regional Transport Agency.

Donovan says parking is transport's silver bullet. "If you provide a whole lot of free parking, it's very likely that people won't catch public transport."

More people on public transport means more revenue, which can be spent improving services. He says free parking in suburban shopping areas should be abolished, and meters installed. Already, developers don't have to provide free parking in parts of Auckland's central business district, which is where public transport works.

Developers and businesses should not be forced by local councils to provide parking spaces when building homes and offices. Instead, they should pay a levy for each parking space, with revenue spent on local roads. Perth already does this.

Donovan says companies would probably provide as many parking spaces as they could afford, but fewer than they do now.

Who would pay the biggest levy? "Big box" retailers, which generate a lot of traffic. Companies might find it cheaper to develop land for retail or other business activity. They might give staff a bus pass instead of a free car park.

He would also lower fuel taxes and make up the difference in "road pricing" (also known as congestion charging). He likes Stockholm's system where drivers buy "smart sensors" which sit in their cars and pick up signals as they enter the central city. Instead of a flat fee, as in London, people pay more to drive in the height of the peak hour, and less earlier or later.

He'd replace flat fees for toll roads with on- and off-peak fees meaning cheaper travel for holidaymakers and commercial vehicles, and more expensive trips for commuters.

"If you look at congestion, it's caused by commuters, and they're best suited to public transport."

 

 

Correction

This story incorrectly states that $500 million for Auckland’s electric trains will come from increases in national fuel taxes. In fact, the funding will come from the government via Kiwirail. All New Zealanders will nevertheless now pay for Auckland’s rail electrification, rather than just Aucklanders via regional fuel taxes.