Driving us crazy - slow motion to no motion

By GEOFF CUMMING

Four in the afternoon on the Southern Motorway, heading north. Motorists cruising at 100 km/h around Tip Top corner suddenly hit the brakes.

In front of them is a 10km tailback. The rest of their journey will be a bumper-to-bumper, stop-start affair, until they have negotiated the Harbour Bridge, or got off along the way.

The full crawl over the bridge might take half an hour ... if all goes well. These conditions will continue for three hours (the term "rush hour" has long been a misnomer).

All over Auckland, drivers experience varying, and worsening, degrees of frustration in peak-time delays. But on the Penrose-to-Nelson St section of the Southern Motorway, in both directions, congestion is at LA freeway levels.

Transit New Zealand's regional transportation engineer, John Hughes, says that from before 7 am until after 7 pm, traffic rarely recovers to "freeflow" conditions of 100 km/h on this stretch of motorway.

The morning peak starts before 7 am and lasts until 9.30 am. The afternoon peak is from 4 pm to 7 pm. In between, traffic can still be at a standstill.

"That translates to a lot of delay, a lot of wastage."

Mr Hughes says motorway lanes are designed to handle up to 2000 vehicles an hour. The loading is now regularly exceeded between Ellerslie and Khyber Pass Rd, especially southbound in the morning peak. This is congestion on an international scale.

All the indicators are that things will get worse, with annual traffic growth of 5 per cent outpacing any resurgence in public transport.

The artery is one long bottleneck because Auckland is too dependent on it.

"The roading network has only one backbone," says Northern Road Transport Association head Barry Lunny.

From the early 1970s until very recently, investment in alternative routes and public transport to avert the crisis languished.

In a city of 1.1 million, 600,000 cars and 95,000 heavy vehicles are choking a fragile road network. While public transport use is on the rise after plummeting in the early 1990s, it remains low at around 8 per cent of trips to work.

Car ownership per household is increasing and, distressingly for planners, most cars have just one occupant.

The Gillies Ave-Khyber Pass Rd stretch of motorway handles 194,000 vehicles a day - nearly 100,000 each way. The daily total is nearly a third of the city's vehicle fleet.

And the number using this section swelled by 30,000 in the six years to 1998. Over that time, the average speed of northbound traffic between Penrose and Hobson St dropped by 20 km/h to 50 km/h. Traffic going the other way experienced a similar slowdown. Between Gillies and Khyber, the average speed is down to 25 km/h.

Peak-time drivers on this and other sections of the motorway network near the central city can expect to spend long minutes at a standstill. While sections of the southern are the closest to gridlock, other motorways and arterials are just a few years behind.

Yet, on every working day, Aucklanders rejoin this rat race. They argue they have no reasonable alternative. North-south traffic must pass through Spaghetti Junction. The Southern Motorway is also the only direct link between the west and industrial southeast.

Most motorway users allow for delays; many try to beat the rush by starting work early and finishing late. A desperate few still weave in and out of lanes, risking collisions.

Luckily, driver behaviour on the motorways is such that the collision rate is about half that of urban arterials and much lower than on rural roads. But three times late last year, relatively minor accidents brought much of the city to a halt, costing millions.

"The motorway is like a living animal because it is very reactive," says Murray Parker, manager of the Northcote motorway control centre.

While much of the motorway network can still be widened to take more cars, few options are left for the Penrose-Hobson St section, where Newmarket Viaduct is the weak link. A little farther north, Spaghetti Junction and the Harbour Bridge approaches allow little room for manoeuvre.

Steps needed to ease the pressure are identified in the 1999 regional land transport plan. They involve huge investment to complete the motorway network, build rapid-transit corridors and introduce advanced traffic-management systems.

But after 30 years of planning, debate continues over which should happen first. While civic leaders and planners are pushing for public transport, commercial road users and manufacturers say the Southern Motorway needs an urgent bypass.

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By e-mail: Geoff Cumming, Jason Collie

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