Phil Hickling: Where are the ferries in parties' plans?

Ferries are very reliable and can take some of the strain from other public transport modes with much lower maintenance costs. Photo / Greg Bowker

Opinion

Both National and Labour have made sweeping announcements for more road and rail development in Auckland at a cost of many billions of dollars to - hopefully - ease traffic problems, but they do not mention ferries.

Ferries are an integral element of any public transport system and have been ignored in recent years, which is a serious planning failure and a genuine worry.

A study recently released in the United States confirmed, once again, that more roads offer only temporary relief from traffic congestion because the more roads that are built the more people will use them.

The case for ferry service development is very strong. Most major global cities with extensive waterways have well developed services - San Francisco, Hong Kong, New York, Sydney, London - and their patronage is enormous.

In New York the Staten Island service alone carries 22 million passengers a year (and they have been fare-free since the 1980s). Star Ferries in Hong Kong carry a similar number and Sydney ferries more than 15 million.

In Auckland last year ferries carried only five million passengers, representing 7 per cent of the total carried by all transport services, but their overall reliability and punctuality were 99.7 per cent, higher than road or rail.

A prime example of effective ferries is the 30-minute trip from Pine Harbour to downtown Auckland, a relaxing commute compared with the road journey which at peak times can be up to two hours of stress and frustration, not to mention environmental pollution.

Before the opening of the harbour bridge, ferry services up the east coast of the North Shore were quite common, and even earlier, before the Great South Road was built, the service from Waiuku to Onehunga carried most passengers and cargo from the Waikato.

Waiuku was a thriving township of 20,000 people, with the planned future growth for the area it might well be again.

Auckland and its environs sit on a narrow, snaky isthmus and it is a well-established fact internationally that this has always been the most problematic and expensive geography for designing land based transport services.

The planners currently twisting themselves into knots over the type of transport and best route to the airport is a classic example of the difficulties faced.

The limited focus on more roads, more rail, more roads and yet more rail to the exclusion of better utilisation of Auckland's extensive harbour waterways, both north and south of the city, is incomprehensible.

The infrastructure costs for ferries are likely to be in the millions of dollars, not billions as proposed by National and Labour.

Bulldozers, graders, bitumen, steel rails and disruption are not needed, nor do ferry services take even more precious land desperately needed for housing. And with water there is no ever-escalating maintenance cost.

An added bonus is the scope to make much more provision for cycling, either with parking facilities at ferry departure points requiring far less space than ever-expanding carparks, or provision for the carriage of cycles on ferries as is done on the Staten Island service.

It has to be accepted that better developed ferry services will not be, nor can they ever be, the panacea that meets all of Auckland's transport requirements, but they can certainly make a major contribution and fully deserve to be not only seriously considered but be part of our transport planning.

If other cities can do it successfully there is absolutely no reason Auckland cannot.

Doubling the present patronage would make a colossal difference to relieving the pressure on other public transport modes. It may well be that Public Private Partnership agreements can be made with the present operators to assist them with the capital costs of terminal development and new vessels, but at the very least let there be serious and meaningful discussion between all parties on what is possible.

- Phil Hickling manages Microwise, a not-for-profit microfinance fund for small businesses unable to obtain funding from the usual commercial sources. He was a voluntary business mentoring for 13 years and has been a trustee of the Manukau Community Foundation, the Auckland Fashion Incubator, a councillor of the Photographic Society of New Zealand and a director of several companies.