Auckland victim of 'car extremism'

Auckland is being portrayed overseas as a transport basket-case, unable to overcome decades of strangulation by roads and vehicles.

Speakers at a Queensland conference of Australian and New Zealand planners have described Auckland as one of the world's most car-dependent cities, offering an "extreme case study" of how the public's preferences can be foiled by bureaucratic processes and mindsets.

Urban planning academics Paul Mees of the University of Melbourne and New Zealand-born Jago Dodson of Brisbane's Griffith University told the conference on the Gold Coast that Auckland public transport patronage was among the most dismal in the world.

"These trends were reflected in and, we argue, caused by, one of the most extreme automobile-oriented transport policies pursued by any major city between the 1950s and 1980s," they said.

The pair acknowledged in their paper to the joint congress of Australian and New Zealand planning institutes that elected officials had, since the late 1990s, tried to re-balance policies with documents promising a greater role for public transport.

They said a new rhetoric followed strong public support for a change in direction, highlighted in 2004 when local politicians including former Auckland City Mayor John Banks championing a $4 billion eastern highway were dumped from office.

A Herald-Digipoll survey at the time found just 22.4 per cent of 948 participants in favour of building more roads as the best solution to Auckland's traffic congestion, compared with 67.2 per wanting more public transport.

But the academics said despite the highway revolt, the new Auckland Regional Land Transport Strategy showed how regional councillors "appear to have been captured by their bureaucrats".

"The possibility of delaying some of the expensive road projects and shifting the projected funds into public transport improvements remains impossibly radical in Auckland," they said.

The pair noted that what the Regional Land Transport Committee deemed a "high public transport" option still involved spending twice as much on roads as on mass transit over the next decade, or $6.5 billion of $10.7 billion.

They argued that more money was needed for public transport than for roads if Auckland was to climb out of its congestion quagmire.

Drs Mees and Dodson said that in the 1950s, before roading engineers persuaded politicians to choose motorways over an upgrade of Auckland's rail system with feeder bus services, public transport accounted for 58 per cent of motorised trips in Auckland.

That share slumped to 15 per cent by 1986, and 7 per cent by 1991, one of the most dramatic declines ever recorded anywhere in the world.

Although patronage has since picked up, the new regional strategy aims at raising public transport's share of Aucklanders travelling in the morning traffic peak by 2016 to just 11.3 per cent.

Regional Land Transport Committee chairman Joel Cayford rejected the pair's criticism yesterday, saying the one-third of spending proposed for public transport was a big jump from the past, when up to 90 per cent of funding went to roads.


City Of Angels vs City Of Cars

* Los Angeles is commonly seen as the world's car capital, but a comparison of United States and New Zealand census results gives Auckland a higher ownership rate on a household basis.

* Auckland households had an average of 1.66 cars each in 2001, outstripping a figure of about 1.4 for LA households a year earlier.

* The new Auckland Regional Land Transport Strategy forecasts a growth in car numbers from about 655,000 now to more than 830,000 in 2016