Published Independent News Paper 29th
September
Joel Cayford – September 9th 2004
Despite the huge amount of government money thrown at Auckland’s transport systems, traffic and transport is still the top issue across the Auckland region for the coming Council elections. All of Auckland City’s main mayoral aspirants want more motorway and rail spending. Even the Automobile Association talks about an “integrated transport system” amid demands for completion of Auckland’s motorway network.
In this article, I put on my physicist’s cap to analyse transport assumptions behind Auckland’s campaign rhetoric.
According to the AA, 250 more cars join the traffic jams in Auckland every week, and that the number of cars on Auckland’s roads will double by 2020. So, it argues, more roads must be built for more cars.
My father was a second-hand car salesman in Oamaru. In 1968 he sold me a 1952 Morris Oxford. It was very tidy, one lady owner, and it cost me 135 pounds. A lot of money in those days, and worth $3,500 today according to the Reserve Bank’s CPI inflation calculator. I could buy five warrantable cars for that tomorrow, and they’d each run better, go faster, and be safer than my old Morris. Check Trade and Exchange.
In fact it has never been cheaper to buy a car in New Zealand. It is also very cheap to run one. Petrol is a third the price paid in most European countries, registration is cheap, Jap imports go forever, and owners don’t even require insurance. So it comes as no surprise that Auckland has close to the highest car ownership/capita in the world, and huge suppressed demand for uncongested road space.
Hundreds of thousands of these cars stay parked at home during Auckland’s rush-hour, mostly because their owners want to avoid congestion, and because they have other ways of getting to their destinations. Some take public transport. Some share with another driver, some travel off-peak and some work at home. However, as soon as road capacity is increased, the option of taking the car becomes more attractive.
Transport planners the world over know about this effect. In New Zealand we use the words: “latent demand”. In the US they call it: “deferred trips”. Whatever words are used, it is commonsense. Build a new road in a congested city with high car ownership, and it will fill up almost overnight, and congestion delays rapidly become as bad as before.
Economic theorists advocate road pricing as the solution. Make people pay to use the roads. Sounds good in theory. Like paying for electricity, water and the phone. But it’s not easy in practice. A very few, very large cities, have made a dent in congestion through road pricing. Usually at enormous cost. For example London’s inner city charging system cost over 100 million pounds, demanded specialist know-how, and required unblinking political support. Here in Auckland we have trouble implementing integrated ticketing and getting buses to run to timetable.
The painful truth is Auckland’s roads will remain congested for the foreseeable future, whether the roading network is completed or not. The AA is wrong to suggest we can build our way out of congestion.
Pro-road lobbyists have estimated Auckland’s economic losses due to the cost of congestion at $1 billion per annum – due to delays, extra fuel consumed and so on. But how meaningful is this figure if the nirvana of free running roads, and zero congestion is not achievable?
I believe it is dishonest to attribute a figure to the cost of congestion in Auckland, without acknowledging that it is not practically possible to eliminate congestion. It is equally dishonest to ignore the other costs of roading, such as social costs incurred through people dying from exhaust fume related respiratory diseases. More Aucklanders die from sickness caused by breathing exhaust pollution, than from car accidents. And no mention is made of the environmental costs due to contamination from brake linings, tyres, greases, oils and other emissions.
If the cost of existing transport systems is used to justify transport investment in Auckland, then I believe every transport stakeholder owes it to the public to be comprehensive in their cost analysis, rather than selective.
Even California does better. Despite being the most auto-friendly place on earth, the law there stipulates that if planned city growth and transportation strategies will not meet air emission standards, then proposed motorway projects don’t get funded. This is draconian stuff. California’s rules can be met if more people travel by bus or other high efficiency transport, or through development that enables people to work near where they live.
The Benefit-Cost ratio is another figure used in a misleading way to justify roading projects. The AA’s much quoted study from Australia’s Allen Consulting is a good example. It advocates for a massive Government loan-funded road-building program, arguing that the economic benefit of the new roads would significantly exceed construction costs.
Apart from claiming that accident related costs would reduce, the study makes no mention of social and environmental costs. It should be noted that the Benefit-Cost ratio is widely regarded internationally as an unreliable measure, primarily because it does not take account of the fact that new roads fill up so quickly with traffic, the claimed long-term benefits are an illusion.
Auckland has much to learn from international experience, but it is sensible to seek advice from well-regarded independent sources that have a wide measure of support.
For example I am advised that one of the accepted golden rules of urban transport is that the quality of peak-hour car travel tends to equal that of public transport. Measurements show that where a person’s decision to use private or public transport is a free choice for a particular trip, an equilibrium will be reached. This rule describes common sense. If one mode is faster, cheaper and more agreeable than the other, more people will choose it, making it more crowded, while the other becomes less so, until no-one thinks there is any benefit changing their travel arrangements.
Another golden rule of transport is that cars require more space per person than public transport, both moving and parked. Public transport is more economically efficient than cars, and as more and more people use public transport, operators can supply more services at lower cost per person. Public transport offers economies of scale. That might sound like theory, but it works in practice on heavily travelled routes.
What is less often appreciated is the implication of these two golden rules taken together. That is: to improve the quality of peak-hour travel by car, it is first necessary to improve the quality of peak-hour public transport.
North Shore City’s Onewa Road is practical proof. This road links Western North Shore City with Auckland City. Before implementing a dedicated public transport lane, the peak-hour travel time along this arterial road was half an hour for both cars and buses, providing a carrying capacity of 3,300 people per hour. After the improvement, buses took just seven minutes for the same trip, cars took eighteen minutes, and the road’s carrying capacity increased to 3,800 people per hour. Improving public transport drove improvements in private car transport.
All things being equal, this improvement could be extended across Auckland’s arterial road network, providing huge benefit to both public transport and car traffic. But things are not equal. In the past few weeks, bus fares have sharply increased. So have ferry fares. These increases occurred despite buses and ferries being packed on many commuter trips. Loyal public transport users will be tempted back to their cars by unreasonable price hikes, which amount to profiteering by monopoly service providers.
Auckland Regional Council negotiated the increases with bus and ferry operators after they complained their costs were going up. Operators partially opened their books during negotiations, but did not reveal how much they’ve profited with increasing patronage over the past 10 years because operators are not required to fully disclose their accounts. However, the public has the right to know it is not being ripped off. It is time for better regulation. A cost-plus approach to profit is reasonable, but commonsense says fares should be coming down now, not going up.
And buses should go where people are going. Not the opposite direction, as has been found to be the case on the North Shore, during this year’s review of bus services. The latest ARC statistics show that 76 percent of all morning peak trips starting on the North Shore, end North of the Harbour Bridge. However, of the 13 Express Bus services proposed for the city by the ARC, all go South to Auckland over the bridge. None service the major employment centres at Albany and Rosedale. I expect Auckland’s new Transport Authority will give top priority to fixing such service design inadequacies.
Which brings me to capacity. Physicists love capacity, like electricity in a circuit, water in a pipeline, and traffic on a road network. Each traffic lane over the Harbour Bridge carries 2,400 people per hour, in 2,000 cars, during the morning peak. The single traffic lane that has been allocated to the Northern Busway, will carry 11,400 people per hour. More than four times the capacity of each general traffic lane.
In Curitiba, Brazil, through the use of better ticketing systems, better boarding, and better buses, each priority bus lane carries over 20,000 people per hour. In contrast Auckland’s entire rail system carries less than 4,000 people per hour. The carrying capacity is small because of a combination of factors: short train platforms at Britomart, New Zealand’s small-gauge rail system, and safety delays required between trains.
Before building more roads, at least some of Auckland’s public transport corridors need to be designed to carry much greater capacity than now. We need to be designing today for the carrying capacity that will be needed fifty years from now. A careful balance needs to be struck between spending on buses and spending on rail.
In all this, it is essential that transport stakeholders seek genuinely integrated solutions, based on comprehensive analysis. The time for partial thinking and rhetoric has passed.
ENDS