Traffic in Auckland. Photo: Getty Images
By Simon Wilson, The SpinOff, March 29, 2017
Overflowing buses, long delays to the airport and chaos
downtown: Transport planning is a complete bloody mess and most of the big
things needed to fix the problems are delayed or are being ignored altogether.
And meanwhile, a battle is growing between different parts of council over what
to do. Why are we putting up with this?
In the last five years pedestrian numbers on Queen St have
doubled, to 60,000 a day. No other city in the world has seen such growth on
its main street. There are now 45,000 people living in the central city: that’s
the number the planners said we’d reach in 2032. There are 22 percent more
people working in the CBD and the number of commuters arriving on public
transport has risen from 13,000 to 40,000.
There are now more people living in the city centre than
drive in by car. In fact, the number of cars in the central city hasn’t grown
at all.
Walk down Queen St these days and you’ll find the pavements
stuffed with people. Drive down, and you could well have a clear run – who,
apart from service vehicles and taxis, takes a car into Queen St anymore? Yet
it is still a four-lane road from top to bottom.
As for High St, there are now so many people there it’s
almost impossible to walk its length – it should be a shoppers’ haven and yet
cars, and carparks on both sides, continue to get priority! Why?
The inner city is not what we thought it was going to be
when the council adopted the City Centre Masterplan (CCMP) in 2012. Change has
been faster and far larger than anyone predicted.
Now it’s time to revise the plan. But guess what? Although
car numbers are static and bus and walker numbers are way up, the planners are
not going to change tack. To the dismay of many councillors, no big rethink is
on the cards. Auckland Transport appears to believe all we should do is delay
some plans and rejig some others. The government, which controls most of the
money, thinks much the same.
Meanwhile, further afield, things are arguably even worse.
Did you know more than half the peak-time commuters on the harbour bridge now
ride to work on a rapid transit bus on the dedicated busway? That’s great.
These are North Shore people, who supposedly would never get
out of their cars, and yet somehow they have.
That’s rapid transit in action, proving its worth. So why,
if we look west, did the widening of the northwest motorway not include a
dedicated busway? That one’s on NZTA, the government’s transport funding and
planning agency. The word for that decision is: incompetent.
Around the suburbs, many commuters complain on social media
about the number of full buses driving past them. Regular train commuters to
Britomart know all about stopping to wait for a rail line into the terminal to
come free, because there are only two. In the east, where public transport is
worse than anywhere else in the city, they wait in vain for better service of
any kind.
And in the south, on highway 20A leading to the airport?
Those roadworks cause havoc now, but things will hardly be better when they’re
done. Demand grows at a furious pace: more than 20,000 people work in and
around the airport, there are 18 million airline passengers a year and both
those numbers are rising fast.
So the government has confirmed there will be no rail line
to the airport for another 30 years. And it dressed up this announcement to
pretend it was progress. What?
Transport planning in Auckland is laughable.
At least it would be, if you weren’t stuck every day in
traffic on the motorway, or taking your life in your hands on a bike, or just
trying to walk along High St. And the reason for all this is both simple and
appalling. It’s not just that the politicians and transport agencies have
consistently underestimated how we might grow. They have neglected to future
proof their plans by allowing for growth. They have not just refused to believe
we might change our behaviour and get out of our cars. They have refused to
change their plans even when confronted with the irrefutable evidence that we
will do that.
The reason our transport planning is a mess is that the
people responsible for it are profoundly out of touch with the way the world
now works. Worse, they lack the wit or imagination to conceive that things
might be different in the future. They can’t plan, usefully, because they can’t
look ahead. Instead, they focus on solutions that might tidy up the past.
Who is it doing this? First and principally, it’s the
government, because when it comes to transport they control most of the money
and most of the decision-making power. The government has badly underfunded
public transport in Auckland and, adding insult to injury, has refused to allow
the council to raise money for transport by other means. And it is the
government that believes most strongly that the key to solving congestion on
the roads is to build more roads.
Actually, favouring private vehicles by building more roads
is the key to making things worse – nobody in transport planning anywhere in
the world now seriously disputes that. Certainly the evidence for it is very
clear in Auckland. Yet more roads is the foundation of the government’s
transport planning.
Next, NZTA, the enablers and in many cases the drivers of
that government myopia.
And there is Auckland Transport itself. Wretched, befuddled
and blind. A thousand people work at AT, and a great many of them are there
because they dare to hope. They’re encouraged in that by the chair of their own
board, Lester Levy, who talks a good game about the future of transport in the
city. But the hopes and skills of the staff are betrayed by the reality: their
bosses are out of their depth. They cannot see what’s wrong and they cannot see
how to fix it.
AT is a council-controlled organisation, although it also
answers to government. So what’s Auckland Council itself doing? It shares some
of the blame for the mess we’re in, not for wrong-headedness, because its own
future planning on transport is pretty good, but for timidity.
Why isn’t it reading the riot act to the board of Auckland
Transport? AT can’t build better public transport capacity without government
support, but why doesn’t the council insist that it make fast and fundamental
changes to fix the mess in the central city?
Auckland’s transport list of incompetence and shame
Ten things the planning agencies need to face up to now:
1. The City Rail Link will not be big enough.
At a council Planning Committee meeting this week, Cr Mike
Lee noted the build-up of buses arriving from the northwest and clogging the
inner city, and asked, shouldn’t they terminate at Karangahape Road, where
passengers who want to go further could catch the City Rail Link (the
underground railway now being built)?
The officials’ answer was that the CRL will be at capacity
and not able to take more passengers at that point. That means this $3.4
billion transport project is being built with no capacity for growth. What?
Not surprisingly, Mike Lee seemed pretty angry.
2. Streams of buses are subverting plans for the inner city.
Following an agreement signed last week by Auckland
Transport and NZTA, we’re going to see 140-160 buses an hour in Queen St, many
of them articulated or double-decker. Possibly for the next 30 years.
For this single reason, the plans set out in the 2012 City
Centre Masterplan to pedestrianise parts of Queen St and to create a “linear
park” along Victoria Street have been, and are still, on hold. Despite both
proposals being extremely popular when the CCMP went through public
consultation in 2012.
At the Planning Committee, mayor Phil Goff asked, did the
delay mean there would be “more traffic lanes and less green space”?
Daniel Newcombe from AT said no, it wasn’t about cars, just
buses.
Goff: “But it still compromises the vision for greening the
area?” He was clearly pissed off too.
“It’s a matter of timing,” said Newcombe.
Timing? He meant that the City Rail Link is so disruptive,
nothing else will be done until it’s built. For downtown, that’s a couple of
years off. But he also meant something else: long-term rail planning has
stuffed up shorter term plans for the central city. See the next point.
3. The airport railway plan is wrecking downtown Auckland.
Not the fact of it, but the timing. Under AT’s own plans,
the way to get the overload of buses out of downtown Auckland is to build a
light rail system: modern trams. It would run up Queen St and then, initially,
head off down Dominion Rd. AT used to say work would start in 2016.
AT also wants light rail to the airport, and that’s would
probably be the same line, extended from the bottom of Dominion Rd. But there’s
the problem: the government has confirmed rail to the airport won’t be built
for another 30 years and the whole light rail proposal is on hold. They’re
going to secure the route, but they’re not going to build it.
Take a moment with that. If the government gets its way,
there will be people living on Mars before we have a railway line to the
airport. It would get built more quickly if we employed a couple of guys and
asked them to dig out the route with a pick and shovel.
In the meantime, our inner city streets will become
nose-to-tail bus yards. And it doesn’t end there. Rail to the north shore is
also on a slow track, so the Northern Busway will also continue to spill buses
into the central city for decades to come.
When the reality of all this became clear at that Planning
Committee meeting this week, Cr Chris Darby, chairing the committee, made a
speech. “That is not my vision of Queen Street,” he said. “The decisions of AT
are problematic and are at odds with the City Centre Masterplan. Completely at
odds.” He was furious.
“Hear hear,” said Mike Lee.
Ludo Campbell-Reid, the city’s “design champion” and head of
the council’s design office, sat there with shoulders hunched. Pedestrianising
Queen Street was “the number one project with the public,” he said, referring
to the consultations they did over the CCMP in 2012. “But,” he muttered, “doing
that has not been achievable for various reasons. It’s frustrating.” He seemed
to be in despair.
“We need to address that,” said Darby. But will they? How
will they?
4. The airport rail options are complicated by the future of
the port.
The government and AT want light rail to be the long-term
solution for connecting to the airport. But others favour heavy rail – the
electric trains we have on our suburban lines now. The council does not yet
have a position.
Heavy rail will cost more, but would be less disruptive to
build because it requires merely an extension of the existing line from
Onehunga or Manukau. You don’t have to start laying a line up Queen St.
Heavy rail will also make sense if the container port
shifts, as was proposed last year by the Port Future Study, a consensus working
group involving all major stakeholders. The two options are Manukau and the
Firth of Thames, and both would involve new heavy rail links from port to
airport and the port’s inland storage facility at Wiri.
5. The chaos caused by the CRL is absurd.
Building an underground railway under a city is disruptive.
We all get that. But does it have to be as negatively disruptive as the CRL is
right now? Essentially, AT is acting on the principle of let’s pretend it isn’t
happening.
Buses and private vehicles still flow everywhere they can,
but the crosstown traffic gets held up because the flow is restricted to single
lanes. Shops still open when they can, even though pedestrians can’t easily see
them and foot traffic along the edge of the construction sites is badly eroded.
Retailers are in despair.
For heaven’s sake, why has AT not taken the chance to
rethink inner-city traffic? Why aren’t they trialling all sorts of things,
building on the ones that work and scrapping those that don’t? They could:
Roll out a
programme of street closures, aiming to leave open only those needed by buses
and commercial vehicles, and some designated arterial routes.
Convert some of
the closed streets into markets for the nearby retailers. Every shop hidden
behind a construction hoarding should get a new, easy-to-access market stall
site to do business from.
Closed streets
could also become city gardens, malls, entertainment stages and food stall
sites.
Whip up some
peripheral park-and-rides around the inner city, so people could drive only so
close and then, if they don’t want to walk or hire a commuter bike, catch a bus
the rest of the way. A free bus, that is.
Convert
substantial parts of the roadways to cycling use, and mount a really big
campaign to encourage walking and cycling.
Incentivise
businesses to close their carparks and provide employees with HOP cards. Or
penalise those that don’t?
Exclude general
traffic from many of the “shared space” streets like Fort St, O’Connell St,
Elliott St and part of Federal St. Almost none of the cars using them now has
any good reason to be there: they’re just looking for a short cut and
undermining the potential of the streets.
Reduce Queen St
traffic to one lane each way. Effectively, turn it into bus lanes, but allow
the few cars left after all the other changes above to share it. Do it with
temporary barriers first to see if it works.
Concept drawing for the proposed East West link, June 2016.
6. There’s no good reason to build the East/West link.
The proposed new road linking SH20 with the industrial zones
of Penrose and Otahuhu has no good business case. The last publicly available
assessment, which was done in 2015, suggested the economic case was weak, and
that was when the route was different and the costs were much lower.
This is extraordinary. The only reason to build this road is
economic: it’s for freight trucks. But the economics aren’t good enough. The
government is avoiding this by calling it a “road of national significance” –
weasel words designed merely to disguise the fact it is pandering to sections
of the construction and freight industries.
7. Parnell station: you can leave but you can’t arrive.
There’s a new station on the rail line from Newmarket to
Britomart, at Parnell. Hallelujah. But like a bizarre bad-joke, some trains
stop there in the evening but not the morning, or is it vice versa? You can get
home from work, but you have to make your own way in.
It’s on account of “efficiency” of the overall line, but
really? Is it a service or just a tease?
8. Will the new board members be any better than the old?
While all this manifest absurdity is going on, Auckland
Transport is getting three new directors. It will also, a bit later this year,
say goodbye to its retiring CEO, David Warburton. And in two years’ time the
board chair, Lester Levy, will also step down.
That’s all a bit exciting, right? A chance for some new
talent, new ideas, new skills? They need it. The current board members (five
men, one woman) all have a traditional business background, several of them in
the vehicle-focused transport industry.
In an interview late last Lester Levy said the new
appointments would be strong in digital systems and urban transformation. Will
it happen? The recruitment process is being handled by Sheffield Consulting,
which has a long tradition of putting predictable people onto boards.
But it’s not their call, or Levy’s. The council makes the
decision. For councillors concerned about transport in this city, these
appointments are among the most important decisions they will make.
As for a new CEO, these days there are some exciting
transport sector leaders in many cities, many of them mentored by the famous
former New York Commissioner of Transportation, Janette Sadik-Khan. Can we
please, please, please have one of them?
Bike lane on Beach Road, Auckland. Photo: nzta.govt.nz
9. Despite the green paint, cycling is not prioritised.
There’s some good work happening for cycling in Auckland.
More dedicated cycle lanes, more protected routes to schools, some campaigning
to get people onto bikes. But it’s far too little. Here are some things they
could try:
- On all the wide roads (many of which used to be tram lines) put out cones and create temporary cycle lanes.
- At every primary and intermediate school, establish cycle routes and set up programmes with parent and whanau support for kids to use them. Start with the intermediates.
- Work with schools to establish car-free safe zones.
- Incentivise companies to promote cycling among their staff.
10. Last but not least, will they ever make the bus stops
better?
Every caught a bus at the Midtown stop, or on Wellesley St,
or at any of the other big mid-city stops? At peak times the pavements get
crowded, at some there’s not enough shelter when it rains, at none of them are
there enough seats. Big bus stops are merely little bus stops, designed for
three people to sit down in, with everyone else hanging about and getting in
the way of people walking past. That’s even true at the newly renovated stops
like Customs St heading east.
Why is this? Why, especially at night, don’t they make
customers feel both safer and more comfortable? Why aren’t the stops a bit of
fun, with entertaining material on the walls?
If we’re meant to be using public transport instead of
driving into town, why do so many bus stops carry this very clear message: if
you have money or brains you are not supposed to be here.
At that Planning Committee meeting, Cr Richard Hills shared
the dismay of Goff, Darby and Lee. “We can’t keep doing this,” he said,
“cutting bits off and hoping for the best and then going crap, what are we
going to do now?” True that.
Hills reminded his colleagues that in New York, there were
4.5 million people living either side of the Brooklyn Bridge and yet somehow
they managed to have “miles and miles of parks”. More people doesn’t equal less
quality of life – unless you give up and don’t plan for it.
Mike Lee said, “Transport should serve the city not the
other way round. We want to preserve a city that is not damaged by transport.”
True that too.
Design champion Ludo Campbell-Reid was asked what they
should do. He said, “You’re right to be worried. It’s about getting into a room
with AT and working it out.”
Sadly, it’s about a great deal more than that. They’ve got a
battle on their hands.
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