The Campaign For Better Transport

Gordon Campbell has an excellent analysis of this idealogical burp in the Herald from Deloitte coporate finance partner Paul Carrow.

PPPs just have to cost more because of:

• the increased up front legal costs of contracting the risk of failure
• the costs of private firms having to borrow funds instead of the government borrowing at the cheapest interest rates available
• the costs of ensuring a profit for the private partner
• etc

And the risk still ultimately falls back on the taxpayer if essential services collapse because the contracts weren’t drafted with enough profit for the private operator. Its all a crock designed to make money for the extra layer of PPP consultants, banks and lawyers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Brian Rudman writes in the Herald, suggesting electric buses for Downtown Auckland:

The talk of removing the red fence also distracts from the real barrier separating the city from the surf, and that’s the bus station that has occupied lower Queen St since July 2003, when Mayor John Banks drove down Queen St in a horse-drawn carriage to open the new transport complex…

On a fine summer’s day it could be jam-packed with people and pigeons. On a bleak winter’s day it was forbidding. But at least it was a pedestrian-friendly link between the city and the water. Not any more.. Now, from morning until late at night, this one-time people place is dominated by the throbbing of bus engines and the choking stink of diesel fumes. Up the side alleys it’s the same. Along Customs St and up Albert St and beyond the pattern is repeated.

For waiting passengers and passers-by alike, the noise and fume pollution are infuriating.

There seems no quick solution, but until we reclaim this bottom portion of Queen St for the people, all the grand talk of a continuous link between the wharf and Auckland’s main street is just bunkum.

One answer would be to insist that only electric buses be allowed in the inner-city canyons. That would eliminate noise and pollution problems.

He’s right about the noise and pollution, but it isn’t clear if his referring to trolley buses, some new fangled battery powered buses or hybrids which so far have proven to be expensive to operate and somewhat unreliable.  And a number of the buses arriving at downtown Auckland have travelled long distances, which may be unachievable for electric buses.  Of course there are other options that could be looked at – electric trams for inner city services being the most obvious.  Also natural gas powered buses are used extensively in Brisbane – I’m not sure why they aren’t in use here either.

There’s a fantastically interesting post over at Human Transit on comparing the benefits of buses and streetcars (trams), and how it is easy to get blinded by the romance of streetcars rather than looking at the transit problem we are trying to solve and then going about the best way to fix it. Jarrett Walker, a well respected transport consultant who writes this excellent blog, outlines his observation (after making a seriously large number of disclaimers):

Streetcars that replace bus lines are not a mobility improvement. If you replace a bus with a streetcar on the same route, nobody will be able to get anywhere any faster than they could before. This makes streetcars quite different from most of the other transit investments being discussed today. Where a streetcar is faster or more reliable than the bus route it replaced, this is because other improvements were made at the same time — improvements that could just as well have been made for the bus route. These improvements may have been politically packaged as part of the streetcar project, but they were logically independent, so their benefits are not really benefits of the streetcar as compared to the bus. Read the rest of this entry »

It appears to be generally accepted that auto-dependent sprawl is bad from an environmental perspective, and also from a social perspective. However, one of the biggest arguments that public transport advocates seem to come up against is that roading projects come across as having better cost-benefit ratios. Furthermore, land-use policies continue to generally promote single-use sprawl instead of intensified mixed-use developments – despite the recognition that auto-dependent sprawl leads to higher CO2 emissions and other environmental nasties. Pages 29-44 of my thesis detail the adverse effects of auto-dependent sprawl quite exhaustively.

So let’s have a look at the economic effects of auto-dependent sprawl a bit more, using my favourite book of late: Resilient Cities. OK I admit it, the main purpose of this post is to allow me to quote good bits of this book – but seriously they are too good not to share! For a start, the book outlines the way in which many of the actual costs of auto-dependent sprawl are somewhat “hidden” from us:

One of the main characteristics of our modern society is that so many of the direct and indirect consequences of our consumption and other personal (and collective) decisions are hidden from us. We tend to judge our investments in renewable energy in terms of artificially truncated incomplete pricing systems that fail to adequately account for the full and true costs of our overuse of fossil fuels.

This is particularly true for private vehicle focused transportation policies in my opinion. We don’t offset the CO2 emissions produced by our cars, or the particulate matter emissions that kill hundreds of people in Auckland a year, or the effects of requiring masses of the city being set aside for parking, or many many other hidden costs of our auto-dependency. This is further detailed: Read the rest of this entry »

There is a rather strange article in the New Zealand Herald today, entitled “Aucklanders stick with cars as best way to travel”. I’m not quite sure how most popular equates to “best”, but that’s not really the issue here. The article is based around a media release by Statistics NZ on the ways in which people get to and from work:

A new analysis of commuting patterns, published yesterday by Statistics NZ, shows that the proportion taking the car to work in the Auckland region rose from 78.4 per cent in 1996 to 78.6 per cent in 2001 and 78.8 per cent in the last Census, in 2006.

Public transport’s share rose in the same period from 6.1 per cent to 6.3 per cent and then 6.4 per cent.

There were slight reductions in the numbers riding bikes and motorbikes, and the number walking to work fell and then rose slightly to end the decade slightly below where they started.

Auckland’s public transport share was puny compared with 13.4 per cent in Wellington, although still slightly better than Christchurch’s 4 per cent.

Well, so what do we really have here? Some three year old statistics that someone at Stats NZ has randomly decided to release to the media gets thrown in as  something new. Of course, this kind of data is pretty depressing from the perspective of a public transport advocate, although it’s not really surprising as Auckland’s public transport rennaisance has been particularly significant in the three years since 2006. Read the rest of this entry »

Even the motoring fraternity are slowly waking up to the Government’s poor decision making of late.  Alistair Sloane writes in the motoring section of today’s Herald:

High-speed trains in Europe generate between four and 40 times less CO2 per passenger than other modes of transport, says the European Union. It says high-speed rail lines take up half as much space as a motorway, and rail travel uses two to three times less energy than journeys by road. On the other side of the Atlantic, the US Government is looking into the use of diesel hybrid train engines and improved freight and passenger railway networks to ease oil imports and the country’s carbon footprint. Rail, it says, “could be reinvented with a ‘green’ image”. Across the Ditch, natural gas suppliers are upgrading distribution networks so that trucking companies can make more use of the cleaner-burning fuel. The truckies say they want to cut their exposure to volatile diesel prices and make a contribution to Australia’s carbon reduction effort. What do we do in New Zealand? We allow governments and road transport lobbyists to dumb down rail and boost the load-capacity of big diesel trucks. It comes under Kiwi ingenuity.

Well at long last construction of the Manukau Rail Link has begun. This will be the first new stretch of railway to be built in Auckland in around 70 years (no wonder we’re so auto-dependent), and is a fairly short link between the existing Southern Line and Manukau City Centre. It will fix a bit of an annoying situation where the centre of South Auckland is completely cut off from the railway line that services much of the area – largely due to fairly silly thinking in the 1970s when Manukau City Council decided to build their council headquarters in the middle of a farm, miles from anywhere.

But anyway, today sees the start of work on this important rail link, that will hopefully result in the new Manukau City station becoming on the busier on Auckland’s railway network. This project has had a bit of a chequered history, and certainly what we’re getting (see image above) could be better. For a start, the train station should ideally be a few hundred metres further to the east – so it could be within easier walking distance of Rainbow’s End and the Westfield Shopping Centre. Secondly, it should have a link to the south – so that people can catch trains from Manurewa, Papakura and so forth to Manukau City. Hopefully the southern link will eventually happen. Furthermore, there are plans for a tertiary campus to be developed on part of Hayman Park – so that should be a pretty big patronage generator for the station and should also mean that it’s not quite so “in the middle of nowhere” as it current is.

But for now I guess I can’t be too grumpy, we are at least seeing some investment in the rail network (although the current government certainly cannot take any credit for this, as it’s been planned and funded for many years). It should be a pretty popular link and will hopefully lead to more people using the rail system (and therefore more pressure on government and local councils to further improve it).

Once again, the big question is “when will it be done?” Seems like by the end of next year:

Ontrack project manager Paul Crawford says the rail link is a real milestone for the network.”"This is the first new rail route to be built in Auckland in nearly 80 years. It’s also exciting because we’re extending the reach of the network into a community that hasn’t yet experienced the benefits of rail transport.”Mr Crawford says the main construction is scheduled to start in August and trains are expected start rolling by the end of 2010.

2010 is shaping up to be a pretty exciting year for Auckland’s railway system – with Newmarket station opening, the Onehunga Line opening, the New Lynn station project being finished off and now this. It should also be the year we see a lot of the electrification works take place.