More buses: Is this the key to fast progress for transport in Auckland? Photo / Michael Craig
OPINION:
How are we going to fix transport in Auckland? It chews up half the council's budget and it's top of mind for most mayoral candidates. As it should be.
The problems of transport include congestion, climate emissions, road safety, public health, council spending, infrastructure renewal, relations between central and local government, relations between council and the "council-controlled organisations" (CCOs) and dysfunction in the central city. Where even to start?
Everybody wants a simple thing: to get to where they're going, safely and without being stuck in traffic. But for the transport authorities, which include the council-controlled Auckland Transport (AT) and the Government's transport agency Waka Kotahi, achieving it is extremely complex.
One key is the efficient use of roads. "The major part of Auckland's future growth in travel demand will need to be accommodated by existing transport corridors," says the Regional Land Transport Plan (RLTP). "To achieve this Auckland needs to make better use of its existing transport system, and increase the number of people and freight that can travel through key routes and corridors."
That is, packing more of us and more freight onto the roads, railways, ferries, cycleways, the works. The RLTP calls the goal "sweating our existing transport network harder". Most people would probably say they're not doing a very good job of it.
But putting more people on the roads doesn't mean putting more cars and trucks on the roads. That just leads to gridlock, builds emissions and makes all the other problems worse.
Instead, it means more people catching buses, more car-sharing, smarter technologies to manage traffic flow, more freight transported by rail, and better on-road cycling networks to join up home, school, shops and work.
All the mayoral candidates have railed about transport, but two of them – Efeso Collins and Viv Beck – have produced some genuinely good ideas.
Collins has launched a proposal for fares-free public transport, which he couples with "an expanded and more frequent network". That's essential: the policy makes little sense unless it reaches the poorer parts of Auckland not currently well served.
There's a growing clamour internationally for this.
Fares free has intrinsic value to anyone for whom transport costs are a barrier to holding down a job, or even going out. A report for the Helen Clark Foundation last year found that those on the lowest incomes pay an average 28 per cent of their household income on transport. Fares free, for many of them, could be a game-changer.
But it has much wider significance, too. Fares free is a very public signal that an old world is ending.
To slash emissions, to get more people on the roads without clogging them up, to make city life more functional, to improve road safety and public health, it calls time. Not on cars, but on car dependency.
If the city needs more people to catch trains and buses, it's hard to think of a better way to say it.
Ah yes, say the critics, but nothing's free. That's true. Collins says fares free "can be paid through our existing council budgets, but we also have other funding options like congestion charges, Crown subsidies, and the National Land Transport Fund".
Public transport, he says, should be free the way public hospitals are free. We pay for them with our taxes.
Earlier this year, First Union and the PSA commissioned an analysis of fares-free public transport from Jen McArthur, associate professor in urban infrastructure at University College London. She argues that public transport already requires heavy subsidies, so the increase to full subsidy would not be as large as some might fear.
It's hard to calculate, because it depends on the number of services and their popularity. But public transport currently costs about $500 million a year to run, according to AT, and at present only about 20 per cent of the cost comes from fares.
As Kirstie Hostetter of the Boston Transportation Department told a webinar on McArthur's work last month, "Fares free asserts that public transport is a public good." Boston has introduced the policy for part of its network.
Viv Beck is opposed to fares free. She says the priority should be to increase services, both in the number of routes and their frequency. But McArthur says doing that instead of making fares free would be to "knowingly shut people out until some future time". If it's the right thing to increase patronage, it's right to do it now.
There's evidence the mood has shifted on this. In a poll commissioned by First Union and the PSA, 73 per cent of Aucklanders said they support fares-free public transport. That included 62 per cent of National and Act voters.
Rival candidate Wayne Brown reckons the poll is nonsense, because people will always say they want free things. But is that true? If people didn't grasp the public-good argument, wouldn't they be more likely to say no, users should pay?
Candidate Leo Molloy supports fares-free public transport, but as a trial.
The problem with trials is that they don't signal anything. If your household has two cars, should you sell one of them and commit to catching the train or not?
Molloy also wants to pay for his trial with $300 million of unspent money from the regional fuel tax, which he would also scrap.
Several more problems there. The money isn't unallocated, it just hasn't been spent yet. And legally, it has to be spent on things the tax was introduced for. As for scrapping the tax, that will create a billion-dollar hole in the Auckland transport budget. Billion-dollar hole in the head, more like.
Viv Beck's overall transport plan is excellent. It features a "citywide rapid transit network" including "a fully separated busway alongside the Northwestern Motorway ($2.5 billion), rapid transit from the airport to Botany ($2 billion), $110 million in upgrades to the Northern Busway and ramping up bus lanes on the light-rail route from the CBD to the airport".
With the exception of bus lanes on the light-rail route, this is all included already in the 30-year plan for transport in Auckland. But Beck wants those key projects started and finished this decade and she would put the existing light-rail project on indefinite hold in order to get it done.
Her plans are more comprehensive, quicker to achieve, cheaper to build and more climate friendly than what we're getting now. Hooray. They're also provisional. Buses aren't the long-term solution for Auckland, but they'll allow rapid progress now. Beck has said as much herself.
But some things in her policy are not yet clear. Bus lanes on the light-rail route should mean removing car parks on parts of Dominion Rd or possibly Sandringham Rd. Is that what she wants?
She hasn't announced any policy on cycleways. But she told one campaign meeting recently, "I'm a recreational cyclist and I like a separated lane for safety. But far too much money is being spent on cycling and it's causing problems in the suburbs." She's a fan, but not a fan?
There's lots more to say about transport and the candidates between now and the October 8 election. Stand by.
One last thing for now. Wayne Brown has criticised transport officials in several meetings for not using technology "to get people moving around faster and more reliably". He means things like smart traffic lights that are better at keeping the traffic moving.
It's good thinking, although Brown is not alone. The Regional Land Transport Plan has about $170 million allocated to "intelligent transport systems" such as smart traffic lights. There's another $742 million for "optimisation and technology" in public transport.
I asked him if he knew the transport agencies have already budgeted to do the very things he's suggesting. He didn't.
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