In less than a month New Zealand's biggest ever (by money spent) roading project will be opened, and Auckland will get its first toll road since tolls were taken off the Harbour Bridge in 1984. The last section of the Albany-Puhoi motorway (which began construction in the mid 90s I think) will be a pretty damn interesting road to go on, with a series of viaducts, the Johnson Hill tunnels and some other pretty amazing engineering feats.

A few days ago Leila and I went up to Tawharanui for the day, to meet up with her family who are camping up there for the whole week. On the way we passed by the last construction works of ALPURT B2, and got the chance to take some photos of it.

I will hopefully being going up to Mangawhai Heads on anniversary weekend, which is when the road is meant to open. It will certainly be an interesting trip.

So I'm on holiday. Well I have been on holiday since about midday on Christmas Eve, but it seemed to finally sink in today - with the insanity of Christmas finally out of the way and put safely into the memory bank. It was a pretty good Christmas I think - somewhat similar to last year, although it was good to finally have Ella in New Zealand on Christmas Day, for the first time since 2005. It hasn't really sunk in that I'm actually on holiday quite yet. I suppose that it's only now been three days, which my sub-conscious could think of as just a long weekend, rather than the start of a couple of weeks, but I'm sure I'll eventually click that heading back to work isn't something that's just around the corner. Today was a pretty quiet day, as Leila, Amalia and myself just hung around the house - generally taking a bit of time to chill out and enjoy all the new Christmas toys. I remember when I was younger always having mixed feelings about the time straight after Christmas - as on the up-side you had all this new stuff to play with, and also often you had money for about the only time of the year; but on the down side it meant that Christmas Day was pretty close to a whole year away. I think the up-side always won, as the time between Christmas and New Year's is generally my favourite time of year.

Yesterday evening I went to the Twenty20 cricket match at Eden Park, with Leila, my Dad and a few friends. It was a quite exciting match in the end - finishing as a tie. Oddly enough, last time New Zealand played against the West Indies at Eden Park in a Twenty20 match (in early 2006) the match also ended in a tie. That time the tie-breaker was a bowl-off, and New Zealand won. However, this time the rules had changed, and the game was decided by a 1 over hit-out (termed an Eliminator or something). Unsurprisingly we lost that, as Chris Gayle was impossibly powerful, whacking Vettori for a fair number of sixes well into the crowd. It was still quite a pleasant evening though, and I took a few photos of the match, the first of which gives a pretty good idea of the progress of Eden Park's reconstruction:

Wow it's been a busy couple of days. I will write more soon, but for now just a few photos of the upgrades happening at Avondale and New Lynn. Photos taken today:

Avondale

The works at Avondale are to lower the track and relocate the station. The current station is located at the top of a bit of a hill, and is also on a bend, but worst of all is utterly uselessly located for people actually at the Avondale shops. Although the eventual new station will be located at Crayford Street (pretty much straight down the tracks as seen from the last photo) a temporary station (away from the bulk of the works) has been built a long way away to the left of all the photos I took today. I'll try to get a few shots of the temporary station in the next while.

New Lynn

As you can see there are some pretty major works going on at New Lynn, largely to help with the process of constructing the large New Lynn trench. Eventually the railway tracks will drop about 6m down below street level, so the horrific roundabout will be eliminated and the two sides of New Lynn joined much more effectively. It's a pretty huge project, but it does seem like good progress is being made.

After taking those photos, Leila and I continued out to Titirangi Beach, where I don't actually think I've ever been before. It turned out to be a very pleasant little beach indeed - and we spend a few hours just lazing around reading books. After that we headed off to the cricket match, which I think I'll write about tomorrow.

I found myself in a really interesting debate on Frog Blog yesterday, on a topic that I know a fair bit about - and debating it with probably the one person in New Zealand who I would most want to have the debate with: Owen McShane. The original post was by Russell Norman, co-leader of the Greens, about the unsustainability of our debt levels - something that is clearly starting to bite and will continue to do so throughout the next year or so.

But anyway, Mr McShane - who is well known for being one of NZ's best climate change deniers and also for his constant campaigns to denounce Auckland's metropolitan urban limits, dragged the argument towards blaming those urban limits (and the whole idea of Smart Growth) for bumping up house prices and thereby allowing debt to get out of hand. His original comment:

About three years ago I worked with a bank economist to figure out how much in foreign exchange the Councils were costing us by inflating the value of land in New Zealand. We calculated the inflated portion of house prices for New Zealand as a whole using the Demographia affordability index. (we had already shown that one could “manufacture” a section outside Christchurch for $30,000 at reasonable profit but that section then was selling for $135,000.
Anyhow it turned out the total overseas debt equate almost exactly to the inflated portion of the value of the real estate market. I then found we needed the export receipts from the wine, fishing, horticulture, and film industry (and I think forestry) to pay that interest. So had we not inflated our real estate market those industries would have been real earners rather than paying interest on overseas borrowings.
I predicted these outcomes in my report to the Reserve bank of 1995. So when you look for who to blame - look at the planning schools.

Now first of all, I want to say that I'm not in total disagreement with what he's saying here. Clearly, house prices going nuts throughout the last few years has been a massive factor is allowing debt to get out of hand. And I'm also in partial agreement that the stifling of land supply has been a factor in making house prices increase so much.

However, I absolutely do not agree that removing urban limits and allowing sprawl to happen is the cure for this problem. While someone living in an urban fringe house may indeed be able to purchase that house at a cheaper price if the urban limits were relaxed, it has been shown again and again that people living on the edge of cities end up having to spend a massive amount more of their time and income on transportation than those living in the inner-city. Furthermore, the cost to local authorities of providing these additional roads, water connections, sewerage systems and so forth ends up being horrifically unaffordable. In recent years councils have tried to get the developers to pay more of their fair share in providing these services, and you would not believe the fuss that has been kicked up.

So I suggest to Mr McShane an alternative way to improve housing affordability without adding to sprawl:

Surely allowing higher density developments would effectively increase land supply (ie. I can build 2 or 3 units on my 600 sq m site, rather that just one McMansion) in the same way, but without all the environmental effects of sprawl?

At 35% site coverage and 8m height limit you can get 400 sq m of floor space on my property. That’s 3 reasonably sized units, and hey you’ve improved affordability without creating a false economy of sprawl where people spend any money they save on rent/mortgage on getting to work each day.

He comes back with some reasonable points, but for some reason believes that someone living on the edge of the city would actually have the shortest commutes. I can't quite see how that makes sense, as even if a lot of their trips were from suburb to suburb, that other suburb seems to end up on the opposite side of town as often as not.

That was the theory but the theory is disproven by real world experience.

Actually there are some efficiency gains in inner cities on expensive land from moving to single family homes to Town Houses (which is why I invented the word Town House as part of my work to free up housing markets and improve choice in the mid sixties) but forcing whole urban populations to live behind Urban Limits simply generates the cascade of increased costs experienced by Dave S and anyone else unfortunate enough to find themselves in a Smart Growth market.
In NZ especially going above two storeys adds dramatically to building costs because of our high earthquake and wind loads and of course the large amount of space allocated to public space such as stairs and lifts and parking etc.
Why do you think people on the urban periphery take longer to get to work each day? In the real world they have the shortest and least congested trips because they normally drive from suburb to suburb rather than to downtown.

I clarify for him:

I’m not suggesting going above two levels, although obviously in the inner-city that makes perfect sense.

What I’m suggesting is re-looking at how density is controlled in places like Auckland City. If you take the current Residential 6a zone and apply is to a 600 m2 section (I use that size as I live on such a section at the moment), then you are encouraged to build a 400 m2 (200 m2 x 2 levels) monstrosity in order to maximise the value of your land. If you keep the maximum building coverage and building height the same, but stop controlling units-per-site you immediately allow potentially three times the number of units to be built on that same piece of land.

Clearly that would help housing affordability, and in a REAL way as you would have sufficient densities to make public transport viable, to make walking to the local shops viable, and with mixed-use developments you would also make it much easier for people to live closer to where they work and so forth.

The model you propose sees reducing land prices as the end point, rather than as the means to improving affordability as a whole. Plenty of research has shown that people living on the urban fringe spend masses more of their lives and masses more of their money on transportation than those living in inner-cities. Surely that’s unsustainable?

While I agree with you that planning regulations have driven up land prices, as Dr Kerry James Grundy states in the latest Planning Quarterly, that’s a pretty small-fry reason when compared with speculative investment. I think the main adverse effect of planning regulations on house prices is this obsession with units-per-site, which forces the under-development of inner-city sites that should most definitely intensify.

The idea of getting away from units-per-site is one that makes a lot of sense to me, and one that I have thought about quite a lot in recent times. When Auckland City Council gets around to notifying their Second Generation District Plan (which I think is meant to happen in about April 2010) I intend to submit on it (unless I'm working for them at the time, in which case hopefully I can make a difference from the inside) along these lines. As far as I know, Wellington City Council does not impose a density limit on development in its inner-city suburbs - but instead just looks at what the actual effects are (ie. height and building coverage). That same approach should absolutely be applied to Auckland City. The current rules, when applied to the property I live in (not that I own it, it's just a good reference point) will only ever allow one house on that site. By law I actually couldn't even internally split the house into two units, even though I reckon it's definitely big enough for that to be realistic. Most large houses throughout Auckland City that have a granny flat underneath or indeed are split into two smaller units would not comply with the current rules.

But anyway, bringing this back to housing affordability and how my suggestions would reduce the necessity for sprawl, I think it's pretty obvious that providing for much greater flexibility in the development of a site would allow a developer to still make money while at the same time provide a much greater number of affordable units within the Auckland isthmus. In fact, it has actually already happened in the past, although I often try to avoid bringing up exactly how it has worked. Throughout Auckland City there are a surprising number of 'sausage flats' - you know the ones: units built as a long slab perpendicular to the road. Not exactly a great design model from an architectural point of view, but I think it's pretty difficult to comprehend how unaffordable Auckland City would be without sausage flats. I'm not suggesting a return to the days of sausage flats being built everywhere, but I don't actually think that would happen. These days councils are much more aware of ideas such as urban design, and I'm pretty damn sure the rules could be written in such a way to ensure the greater number of units are built in an architecturally pleasing manner.

His response is quite interesting actually. He makes a couple of good points, but throws in a heck of a lot of rubbish too:

IT’s the scarcity that drives the speculation. Grundy has it hopelessly back to front. But he is no economist.
Have you tried designing the layout of the six units on your site?
Have you included car parking and manoevering, and some room for some planting etc. And what about kerb parking and so on. High densities increase traffic congestion rather than decrease. Trips per household decrease slightly but the added households generate far more trips.
Residential density does not make public transport viable - employment density does. That is why Manhattan has a high use of public transport.
The whole purpose of a large city is to enlarge the employment catchment. There is no city in the world where people walk to work unless they work in a takeaway, a TAB, a dairy, or a brothel.
The”plenty of research” you refer to is hopelessly wrong in that people optimise location on total costs and families in particular have multiple destinations. this is why people on the peri urban areas consumption of fossil fuel is much lower than people in inner city areas. It relates to household income.
And if the MUL was relaxed and land prices fell then developers could afford to build low cost housing like they did in Auckland pre Smart Growth. It’s high land prices which make McMansions necessary.
I am afraid you have been reading Smart Growth propaganda rather than real research by urban economists.

Yes I can see how the scarcity of land forces developers on the urban fringe to build McMansions. If they've had to buy the section for $300,000 alone, and are only allowed to build one unit on it, of course they're going to build the biggest house possible so they can sell it for $700,000. I can see how employment density is a big factor in making public transport viable: after all that's why trips to CBDs around the world generally have a far higher public transport share than trips to employment centres sprinkled around the rest of the city.

However, there's also a whole heap of rubbish he's saying. Firstly, I'm not suggested 6 units for my site (although, a very nice 6 unit development on a site very similar to mine is located just down the road from us). Parking, planting and so forth can be accommodated fine, as I'm not actually suggesting increasing the building footprint. I would certainly not require each unit to have 2 parking spaces , as 1 each would be fine, and would not obsessively encourage car use like existing rules do. I can't comprehend how he just writes off the effect of residential densities on making public transport viable. Pedestrian-sheds (number of people within walking distance of a service) are the foundation of developing a public transport system - as obviously running a metro at 3 minute frequencies is utter stupidity through areas of single-unit sprawl, but works brilliantly in the high-density cities of Europe. I do accept though, that often it's the quality of the public transport service that will lead to an improved share of trips, rather than simply the residential density. His assertion that hardly anyone in any city around the world walks to work is simply hilarious - I guess he's never been to a mixed-use high-density European city.

And finally, most hilariously, he tries to state that fossil fuel usage of someone living on the edge of a city (or whatever peri-urban actually means) is likely to use less fossil fuels than someone living in the inner-city. Surely this is a joke, as a person on the edge of the sort of city Mr McShane seems to be promoting would never have the opportunity to walk, cycle or catch public transport anywhere. By constrast, someone living towards the centre of a higher-density, mixed-use city with good provision of public transport might rarely have the need to use their car.

I have to say I'm a bit disappointed in him really. He makes a few decent points, but some of the things he comes up with appear simply laughable. As I said above, I do accept that relaxing the MUL would probably have a positive effect on land prices - however that would come at an enormous cost. Unfettered sprawl is what has got Auckland into the huge problems that it faces now, with horrible traffic congestion, crazy automobile dependency, bland and boring suburbs and increasing environmental pressures on our surrounding farmland. I agree that to make housing more affordable in the future - even though that problem is kind of solving itself now as the real estate bubble has burst - the supply of sites needs to be increased. However, I think that supply can be increased within the current urban boundaries by getting away from our obsession with 'units per site' controls. By allowing more development within the city, we'll be able to avoid all the negative effects of sprawl, we'll be able to increase our urban densities and make public transport, walking and cycling more realistic travel options - all while achieving the same affordability benefits as sprawling would.

Surely it's a no-brainer.

After briefly mentioning the upcoming rail network upgrades that will be happening in the holidays, I thought it would make some sense to expand a bit upon what they will be. ARTA has a useful summary of them:

Newmarket - major work to build the new track layout through the new station and junction area.  The works in the junction area will take the full three weeks to complete, as this involves the pouring of a large amount of cement to enable the continued construction of the new station.

Boston Rd - construction of two new temporary platforms. Work to lower and widen land around tracks to prepare for electrification, double tracking and the new re-located station.

Avondale - construction of two new temporary platforms. Earthworks to prepare for double tracking, the future re-located station and electrification.

New Lynn - building new interim roundabout. Trench wall construction will continue.

Quay Park - works to reconfigure the tracks, in preparation for future signalling works which will allow for the continued improvement of rail services into Britomart.

Eastern Line - new drainage installed at the Glen Innes Tunnel.

Helensville area - replacing two bridges with culverts.

Regionwide - maintenance and renewal works on the tracks and at level crossings (pedestrian and vehicle). Some works in advance of electrification.

The first 5 are most interseting, as the drainage near Glen Innes, the culverts near Helensville and a bit of routine maintenance around the network aren't particularly exciting.

The Newmarket station redevelopment seems to have progressed pretty damn well over the past few months. There's a fair bit of information availabe on the redevelopment of the station here, and a really awesome looking render included below:

A few photos of how the construction is going can be found here: http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpost.php?p=29181156&postcount=2069

So hopefully once Newmarket is finished (and the holiday shut down should aid in speeding up its construction) we'll have two proper railway stations in Auckland (with Britomart being the other, of course). The success of Britomart in growing rail patronage suggests to me that the quality of a station really does impact upon the likeliness of people to use it. Newmarket's a strong growth area: both commercially and residentially, so I certainly hope that the railway station helps increase patronage over the next few years once it's complete.

The Boston Road/Khyber Pass Road project is essentially finishing off one of the last two spots where the Western Line is a single-track. ONTRACK left the trickiest little bits to last, as two overhead road-bridges need to be reconstructed as part of this fairly small project. Importantly, the project also includes the slight relocation of the Boston Road station, out from underneath the motorway and closer to the hospital. Hopefully that also helps grow patronage to what could be a pretty busy station in the future.

The Avondale project is just down the road from where I work, so it should be pretty easy for me to take a number of photos throughout the next few weeks showing how progress is going. The lowering of the track through Avondale appears to be an important first step in the electrification project (as the track needs to be lower so the wires can fit underneath Blockhouse Bay Road. It's also a step towards finally relocating Avondale's train station to a spot that is actually sensical. The current station is located quite near the town centre, but involves a stupidly long round-about walk in order to get there from the station. The new station will be located properly, and Avondale has the potential to become a pretty busy station in the future (especially if Auckland City Council has some guts for once and lets intensification take place there).

At New Lynn, work on the trench that will take the train line underneath the roads, and allow for double-tracking, seems like it will continue. I had lunch at New Lynn today and the whole railway area has changed vastly in the past few months. Apparently it'll be another year before they really start digging out the trench, as at the moment all the piles are being driven to form the edges of it, but this is one project that will be very interesting to watch evolve. Anything will be better than the current Clark Street roundabout, so I'm curious how this temporary roundabout will work.

And finally, the Quay Park works are interseting, mainly because I haven't really heard much about this project. I assume it's largely signal and points upgrades that will eventually help both of the tracks that lead into Britomart to become bi-directional (therefore increasing the capacity of the tunnel and Britomart station). Of course the only real solutions to improving the capacity of this obvious bottleneck in the network is to 4-track the tunnel, or even more ideally build the CBD loop. But both are massive projects that will take a long time to be implemented (although planning for them should continue as quickly as possible) so hopefully the Quay Park work will help ease pressure in the meanwhile.

So, overall it will be interesting to see what happens in the next while. 2009 looks like it'll be another pretty busy year for rail developments in Auckland.

It had only really partially sunk in that Xmas was getting near before the weekend. Obviously I haven't been living in a box completely unaware of the date, but as I'd been avoiding shopping centres like the plague and we hadn't got around to putting up our Xmas tree - it still seemed like something that was 'coming soon' rather than 'next week'. But at the weekend things did start to kick into action: we got our Xmas tree, we started really getting into buying Xmas presents and it all of a sudden really did feel like the holiday season was upon us.

Which really did make going back to work rather suck. Having Xmas day on a Thursday is pretty annoying really, as it leaves this half-week which I was never sure whether I should attach to my holiday period (and therefore come back on Jan 5th) or whether I should work it, and having another half-week of holidays in early January to make up for it. I ended up going for the latter, which has turned out to make a lot more sense as those final three days Leila and I will be spending in Wellington (and getting there!). I know that having three days of holidays this week would have just been a waste, as they would have been spent trying to madly finish Xmas shopping and everything else, which I am managing to do anyway. It is exciting to be on the verge of a decent length of time off work (even if it is ONLY two weeks). My last break, back in June, really does feel like a long time ago now.

I have a few plans for this blog over the next couple of weeks. There is to be a huge construction surge over the holiday period for transport projects around Auckland, particularly when it comes to rail projects. I should have some good opportunities to go check these developments out in person and take a number of photos to keep people interested over the holiday season.

Yes, I got my Coldplay tickets. Can't wait for March 18th (I think) now....

I had another annoying experience with the 224 bus route today. I had a meeting at 10.30am in town, but needed to head to work in Avondale first to ensure that I was able to get myself Coldplay tickets. Mission accomplished, at a rather expensive rate, I then worked out my bus options to get into the city.

In the recent past I have tried to avoid the 224 route buses. The bus starts all the way out in Henderson for some absolutely unknown reason, which means that by the time it winds its way to Avondale it's just about always 15 minutes late. Generally the only times I find myself catching it is when I'm actually waiting for the NEXT bus and find the 224 arriving a couple of minutes before it. So, I worked out the timetabling for the bus and looked to avoid it by instead catching the 9.40am 211 bus. The 211 route is far more sensible, and always runs on time pretty much. However, frustratingly today it ran a bit too well, and I must have missed it - even though I did get to the bus stop a couple of minutes before it was due. Of course, I didn't realise this error until about 10 minutes later - always hoping that it was just around the corner. This meant that my next bus - at 9.55am - would be the 224.

And I just knew it would be late. As I said before, this bus never shows up on time and it consistently 15 minutes late. It's pretty unbelievable that such a situation can occur, that a bus route is just accepted as OK when it ends up being 15 minutes late each and every time it operates. The main purpose of the inter-peak New North Road services is to provide a 15 minute frequency along New North Road, put together by 211 & 212 buses from the Rosebank peninsula, and 224 buses from New Lynn, and stupidly, Henderson. During the middle of the day the buses generally alternative, a 211 or 212 and then a 224. The problem is that the 224 buses take so long to complete their Henderson to New Lynn and then to Avondale section, that we actually end up with the 224s always being 15 minutes late, so therefore they actually come at the same time as the 211 or 212 route bus. So what should be a 15 minute frequency service effectively becomes a 30 minute frequency service, but stupidly with twice the number of buses that you actually need for that (pathetically low to be honest) level of service.

OK, well that's my rant. I eventually got on the next 212 bus at 10.10am, so who knows when the 224 did actually show up. I was late for my meeting (although not too badly). Ugh, stupid stupid buses.

 Time to annoy ARTA about it I think. They're going to start to get to know me pretty well.

I am reading a rather interesting book at the moment: The Last Oil Shock. Last year I read another book about impending peak oil, The End of Oil, and found it really interesting - although at the same time somewhat annoying as it was published in 2003. Clearly, so much has happened with oil prices, oil security and peak oil theory since then that this was like reading a book about Adolf Hitler that was published in 1939. That's no disrespect to "The End of Oil" at all, as it's a damn interesting book and really taught me a lot about why peak oil will happen, what we can possibly do about it and how this all tied in with climate change issues as well. So I was pretty happy to find another book about a fairly similar subject, but one that was published as recently as 2007. While it still misses the insane fluctuations of oil prices since then, the trends were definitely emerging enough by the time this book was published to provide more insight into the whole issue of peak oil.

I'm only just over halfway through "The Last Oil Shock" so far, so I cannot really comment on the book as a whole quite yet. However, what I have read so far is, indeed, incredibly interesting. It avoids being repetitive, even though being repetitive about peak oil is very easy to do. The first chapter sets out in no uncertain terms (and with very difficult to argue logic) that the Iraq War was most definitely about oil. Although most of us suspected that to be the case anyway, it's pretty scary when all the dots are joined together. Subsequent chapters have looked at how the theory of peak oil came about, and how it has been proved over and over again, through a huge variety of different models. Interestingly, the guy who originally came up with the idea of peak oil, M. King Hubbert, was clever enough to prove that US oil production would peak around 1970 that he used three different methods to come up with the same figure. Indeed, 1970 was the year when oil production in the US peaked, and it's been going backwards pretty much ever since.

I think the most interesting part of the book so far is what I'm reading at the moment, which relates to how inter-connected cheap oil is with the functioning of developed-world economies. Although less oil per GDP dollar is used these days than back in the 1970s, the more I read the more obvious it seems that a huge chunk of economic growth has occurred pretty much simply because we have got better and better at using more energy more efficiently. I guess that makes most sense when one looks at what around them makes their work more efficient: computers, machinery, better transportation technologies and so forth. All of it is dependent upon utilising energy, effectively making it possible for us to chip in less of the energy ourselves per unit of activity created. So in short, we're enormously dependent upon energy - and crap loads of it. Throughout the last 100 odd years most of that energy has come from burning stuff such as oil (though also coal and natural gas, which will peak themselves, if later in the piece). Of course we don't have to make energy out of oil, gas and coal. Renewables such as solar, wind, geothermal, tidal and wave power clearly are the ultimate solution. Hydrogen is NOT a realistic option, until we figure out how to make it from something other than natural gas effectively and cheaply.

Nothing particularly new there I guess. But it is interesting to note that energy has been somewhat ignored as a major factor of economic growth by many economists around the world. Perhaps we don't quite realise how utterly dependent we are on the supply of adundant, and cheap, energy? So the question sits there about what will happen once a major source of cheap and abundant energy runs out? I should be majorly worried. There's a reasonable argument that exceptionally high oil prices were the catalyst for the "current economic crisis" that's taking place around the world - as more money going to the sheikhs of the middle east meant less for everyone else, which coupled with all the other mistakes being made, ended up being a straw that broke the camels back (as the saying goes).

However, interestingly enough I'm not worried about it. Well, perhaps not as worried as I should be. First, to talk about the aspects of peak oil that are worrying. It is very worrying that so many of our fertilisers are dependent upon oil for their creation and transportation. Lowering food output, especially in the third world, is a recipe for disaster in the longer-term. The obsession with biofuels is also problematic, potentially taking land away from productive food output to be used for biofuel creation. The amount of grain that goes into one tank of petrol could, apparently, feed someone for a year. I know where I'd rather that amount of grain went, and it certainly isn't into someone's SUV. I'm also worried that it will become much more difficult to make important stuff, like plastics. However, as peak oil doesn't necessarily say that oil will simply run out, but rather that after a certain point it will just get really expensive, I imagine that plastics will be around for a good long while yet, they'll probably just be more expensive. The other main way that peak oil worries me is its effect on air travel. This is largely because I live in New Zealand, a heck of a long way away from most other people on the planet. Peak oil could be incredibly isolating for us, making NZ very inaccessible for tourists (a hugely important part of our economy) and also making it damn hard for me to visit other parts of the world. Biofuel doesn't work in aeroplanes because it gets too cold, and I can't exactly see how a solar or wind-powered plane is going to work. In the shorter-term, I can see our government having to subsidise air travel in the future to protect the tourist industry - though that certainly can't last forever.

However, regarding most other aspects of peak oil, I say bring it on! While the advent of cheap oil over the past 100 odd years has enabled unprecedented economic growth, it has also enabled unprecedented environmental destruction and unprecedented horrible urban outcomes. In a car-obsessed country like New Zealand, I believe that impossibly high petrol prices is the only way we'll ever be able to curb sprawl and create more sustainable cities. Once it becomes impossible to simply drive everywhere, our cities will have to become more compact, public transport will have to be improved and the blight of sprawl will have to be eliminated. Perhaps it is the blight of urban sprawl, and my annoyance at our automobile dependency that makes me almost look forward to the days of unaffordable petrol. If it happens too quickly though, we'll definitely be stuffed, but if the increase happens over a period of 10-20 years as seems most likely, hopefully planners and policymakers out there will realise what is happening, and we'll see a huge rethink about the way our cities operate. In some respects that was starting to happen, before the economic crisis hammered oil prices down.

I think the other main reason I find myself almost looking forward to peak oil, is that there's a reasonable chance it will be the only way to actually stop climate change from REALLY destroying the planet. Of course there's the huge worry that people will switch from using oil to using coal (which is more environmentally destructive, but probably has bigger reserves), but putting that aside peak oil is potentially a huge ally in the battle against climate change. Hopefully it happens first, to really force people to change their ways, as has seemed almost impossible by just telling them how bad climate change will be when it really kicks in. As I mentioned to my mum a few weeks back, the problem with the climate change issue is that nobody's really suffered yet, and people just simply aren't willing to give up anything because they don't see the point. Effectively they don't see that there's a problem because they haven't suffered yet. Peak oil could be that kick in the guts that forces people to change, with reducing the extent of climate change being a nice little side-effect.

So yeah, it's an interesting book which hasn't really changed my viewpoint on much, but has helped me understand the issue in far more detail. I may blog again once I've finished it.

After a bit of a drought in transport news coming out of anywhere, it is almost something of a relief to see the Herald running a couple of articles today, on ticket-gates and the Manukau Harbour Crossing Project.

Regarding the ticket gates, surely they must be an inevitability. Auckland's train system currently operates on a highly antiquated system of fare collectors wandering around the trains working out who got on where, who has paid and who hasn't paid, who has over-ridden and so forth. Apparently trains are often so full that the fare collectors can't even get around them. Then people end up with "free" rides, although of course those who choose to buy monthly passes get no such luxury. So therefore, of course having ticket barriers and being able to largely (I say largely because it's surely going to be a long time before all stations are gated) do away with the current system, is a good idea.

I suppose that the main problem is that operating an effective "barrier" system is quite a lot more complex than you'd think. It means that people need to be able to buy their tickets from somewhere other than the train. While this may be easy enough at Britomart - where surely a few automatic ticket machines could be installed (and the current ticket booth actually staffed!) - it's going to be damn difficult to make it possible for people to buy train tickets at other stations. I would guess that a minimum of one automated ticket machine at each station would be necessary, and considering the current state of many railway stations vandalism and so forth is going to be rather problematic I would think. Another issue, when one thinks about it, is where on earth will the gates go at Britomart? The only place I can think of with anywhere near enough room is all the way down at train level. There are other entrances to Britomart as well.... so you are going to need a pretty significant number of gates for the project to be worth it. Perhaps people will realise it might be a heck of a lot cheaper just to have more staff on board - although clearly that would be a shame as a gate system is pretty essential eventually if we want to drag our train system out of the 1950s.

Regarding the Manukau Harbour Crossing story, it is good to see the project progressing well. As I've mentioned in earlier posts, I have various issues with this project, in that it's pretty much designed to induce traffic and only provides a half-hearted attempt to help public transport in the form of bus lanes. It's also interesting that seemingly half the bridge has been built, while at the same time Auckland City Council haven't actually finalised how the part of the project through Onehunga Bay is going to work. There are a few "dreamers" out there hoping for trenches and the like, but to me it seems pretty unlikely there will be much change - considering a large chunk of the project is already being built!

I have been fairly busy for the last couple of days, hence the lack of updates. There also hasn't been particularly much news, although I have read through the somewhat interesting briefs to the incoming Minister of Transport from the Ministry and also NZTA. Interestingly there is a reasonable amount of reference to public transport, with the Ministry of Transport being particularly conscious of issues such as climate change and peak oil (although peak oil seems to have fallen off the radar with the most recent plummet of oil prices). I know it's a bit more political that I usually blog about, but central government affects a LOT, so it's good to get some idea of what the central agencies are up to.

Bringing things back to Auckland, I emailed ARTA about integrated ticketing the other day, mainly out of worry that we hadn't heard anything about the issue for a bit too long. My email kept things fairly straightforward:

Hi there,

I have been reading about your Integrated Fares project, and specifically that the Smartcard Contractor is to be announced in the 4th quarter of this year. I am curious to know when this announcement will actually be made, as it will be the first clear step towards having integrated ticketing for Auckland's public transport, a project that ARTA describes as being "...far from simple and has been the centre of substantial national and regional discussions for more than 10 years."

I certainly hope that everything is still on track and that we won't be waiting another 10 years for integrated ticketing to be implemented.

I have thought about how Auckland 's transport fare structure could be reorganised myself. You may find my thoughts interesting: http://www.jarbury.net/index.blog/1347101/ticketing/

Kind Regards,

Joshua Arbury

I did, eventually, get a response. Well, I guess it could be called that:

Dear Joshua

 Many thanks for your interest in ARTA’s Auckland Integrated Fares and Smartcard ticketing project and for the feedback that you have provided both in your email and on your website. ARTA seeks to deliver a world-class public transport system that makes Auckland an even better place to live, work and play. Integrated fares and ticketing will assist ARTA in delivering equitable and quality access to our public transport networks.

Auckland Regional Transport Authority

Gah! I mean what kind of rubbish response is that? They are thanking me for my interest? Integrated ticketing and fares will assist them in delivering a quality public transport network? Yeah no shit, a 5 year old would know that. They could have at least let me know when we might find out a bit more news on the issue, considering we're getting very close to the end of the 4th quarter of 2008 (the time when we should know something definite about integrated ticketing).

So I sent back a (very polite in my opinion) reply:

Hi there,
Thank you for your reply to my email. However, you haven't really addressed any of the questions that I was asking about. Maybe I should clarify:
1) Do you have any further information that it is possible to share about the progress of integrated ticketing? I have recently seen a few shops around Auckland being able to use "Snapper Cards", a smart-card technology that is used on Wellington buses (although owned by Infratil). Is this perhaps what might end up being used in Auckland too? I guess it's useful to have similar systems in Auckland and Wellington, although obviously you wouldn't want NZ Bus using Snapper Cards but nobody else, as that would totally undermine the point of integrated ticketing.
2) Do you know if ARTA is likely to look at completely revamping the fare/stage/zone system? I assume you read my website post about the issues that I have with the current system and how a more simplified zoning system could encouraging greater use of public transport. Or are we likely to keep the current system where each route specifies its own stage boundaries?
3) On a somewhat related topic, I was curious when we might find out what type of electric trains the ARC/ARTA is likely to be purchasing. I assume that will need to be confirmed in the fairly near future right?

Thanks for your time,
Joshua

I do await with somewhat great interest to see what response I get this time. Perhaps they find me annoying?

For the last couple of days I had been reading a fairly interesting book, despite the fact that I'm probably not quite in the expected demographic (ie. teenage girl). The basic premise of the story is that the main character falls down some stairs, whacks her head and when she wakes up has no memory of the last four years. I won't go too much further into details, in case anyone wants to end up reading it, which I would probably recommend actually.

But anyway, it got me thinking about how I sometimes feel as though a somewhat similar level of amnesia has happened to me over the years as various point. Whilst I definitely haven't fallen down any stairs and whacked my head hard enough to actually have proper amnesia, the various occasions throughout the past few years when my life has ended up changing in fairly significant ways seems to have led to big 'disconnects' between the various stages that seems like it has made it difficult for me to easily remember details of those previous stages as well as I used to. If this all sounds rather confusing, don't worry, I will explain further. I suppose that in many ways this blog has turned into a useful linking tool across the large number of different stages my life seems to have had in the almost eight (yikes) years that I've been writing in it. I think that is why I want to continue writing the occasion personal post on here - so that a record of what I was up to and what I was thinking at a certain point of time - does remain. It may end up feeling somewhat incongruous with the rest of the posts I make, but I imagine that in 10 years time I will be just as interested in what I was doing back in December 2008 as I am in the sorry state of Auckland's transport system at the same time.

So, back to memories. On Monday night Leila and I had an interesting discussion about how we felt memories operated, and in particular how I felt that they almost seemed like plants to me, requiring a bit of looking after in order for them to stay alive. At least for them to stay alive in an easily accessible way. I know for sure that my sub-conscious holds a huge number of memories somewhere in my head, but unfortunately they seem impossible to access. In a similar way to how it becomes so easy to recall past dreams whilst you're asleep - even if they occurred years ago - but at the same time so difficult to remember even last night's dream once you're awake. It is the disconnect that breaks the memory link I feel, and it seems as though that carries beyond the disconnect between dreams and reality to the disconnect that big changes in one's life can bring.

I first noticed this probably a year or so after first leaving home. The disconnect between that time and my previous home-life felt really significant, and (added to the earlier disconnect created by leaving school and going to university) it just felt harder to hang on to all the memories that I had seemed to be able to look after fairly easily whilst still living at home. This is not to say that I have a huge blank at any point of my life really, and I know that if I look back to certain "easily accessible" memories often others start to pop up as well that I hadn't necessarily found myself thinking about for many years. In later times there ended up being further strong-disconnects between various stages of my life - generally the result of living in different places and spending my time with different people. Oddly enough, in the past couple of years - particularly throughout the time I was living at my parents' house in 2006 and 2007, it almost felt like I was making some sort of re-connection with the past-self that I was, pre-2001 say. And that all the time in the middle became more of the 'other', particularly later on stages where there was very little remaining link to that time of my life.

I think that this feeling of partial amnesia is probably pretty common among people, particularly in their earlyish twenties when a lot of change is going on in their lives. Perhaps it is just constrasting Leila's seemingly amazing memory for strange details that makes me feel like somehow I remember much less than I should. For example, somehow she remembers a time when I helped her and Ella with their maths homework for a fairly significant length of time back when I was either in 7th form or in my first year of university. Whilst I certainly do remember her coming over to our house at that time (I had my eye on her way back then LOL) I just draw a complete blank when it comes to this particular time. Maybe the memory just got lost in all the other times I helped Ella out with her Maths homework? I guess it's just a tad frustrating as it's something that obviously happened, and something that I do kind of wish I had a memory of.

Maybe I do need to take care of my memories a bit better. I think that keeping up a certain number of useful personal posts on this blog is a good way of achieving that. Hopefully it might also be interesting reading for people who visit the place generally to find out about Auckland's transport.

I had resisted getting a bus-card for my Urban Express trips from work to home, largely out of protest more than anything else. I already have a "GoRider" pass from NZ Bus, which I can use for trips from home to the city or from work to the city and back. In fact, probably 90% of the routes that I would ever end up catching a bus along are operated by NZ Bus (in one of its confusingly large number of colours). However, frustratingly the 008 route from my home directly to my work isn't operated by NZ Bus, but rather by Urban Express. Urban Express is, in all honesty, a stupidly tiny bus company that doesn't really achieve any purpose in life other than annoy me by not being NZ Bus. Actually perhaps that's a little harsh, as the drivers always seem reasonably friendly.

In a half-decent city, the fact that the bus I catch between home and work is operated by a different company to the one that operates most other buses wouldn't really matter. Any sensible, half-decent city would have a ticketing system that allowed by pass to be used on any of the bus companies, and also on the trains and ferries, should I choose to do so. However, of course this is not the case in Auckland. Along with the fact that our public transport is slow, unreliable and infrequent (geez it's a wonder anyone bothers to use it when I put it that way), as I have mentioned before the lack of integrated ticketing is a serious problem and definitely contributes to Auckland's enormous car-dependency.

So, in order to avoid the need to forever carry change around with me for the bus, Urban Express charged me $10 for the privilege of being issued a standard card-sized piece of plastic. Hilariously enough, the "Conditions of Use" on the back of the bus pass categorically stated both "This card may only be used by the original recipient and is not transferable" (so don't even think about paying for two fares at once with it or lending it to your friend) and "This card remains the property of Urban Express". So effectively I've just paid $10 but not actually bought myself a bus card. Helpfully, point 6 on the back of the card notes that "The payment made at the time of issue, (comma there?) is a Card Issue Fee, (another comma?) and is not refundable. So basically I have paid $10 not for the card itself, but only for issuing me the card? Which furthermore I'm not actually supposed to lend anyone, and it's not refundable either. I guess fortunately the drivers don't seem to have read the stupid conditions of use themselves (whoever does apart from me when I'm bored) as every single morning I catch a 008 bus there are two kids who both use the same card to pay for their fares. I think the lawyers at Urban Express need to take a chill-pill.

On the bright-side I get 20c off each trip, if I top up my card in 10 ride chunks. So it'll (only????) take 50 trips for me to get my money back. I suppose that I'll manage that eventually. Plus it will mean I don't have to buy quite so many Cookie Times from the dairy to get cash out for my trip.

So, a lack of integrated ticketing in Auckland totally sucks. The question remains what is being done about it. Which means we get back to ARTA, who inevitably always seem to end up with the blame for everything that's possibly wrong with Auckland's public transport system. A search of their website for "Integrated Ticketing" turns up the aptly named Auckland Integrated Fares System (AIFS) Programme. This provides some information on where we're at with implementing integrated ticketing in Auckland, but also clearly outlines the frustrating lack of progress that has happened over the past decade on this issue. The page clearly outlines what the problem is:

Currently, each public transport operator has their own multi-trip and concession tickets and smartcards, which can't be used on another operator's service.

There are some minor exceptions to this rule, with Discovery and Get About passes able to be used on all public transport operators. But generally these passes are so supremely expensive that only about 30 monthly Discovery Passes ever sell (or something along those lines). The next bit drives me insane though:

Developing an integrated ticketing solution for the Auckland region is far from simple and has been the centre of substantial national and regional discussions for more than 10 years.

More than 10 years???? MORE THAN TEN BLOODY YEARS!!!!!!! How the hell can you "discuss" integrated ticketing for more than ten years and get absolutely nowhere? This shows utter incompetence on behalf of everyone in my opinion, and simply putting this incompetence aside by stating that "developing an integrated ticketing solution for the Auckland region is far from simple...." is utter rubbish. OK, well to be fair I am being a tad harsh on ARTA. For a start ARTA has only been around for around four years now. Secondly, up until very recently (with the passing of the Public Transport Management Amendement Act, or something along those lines) councils could 'discuss' integrated ticketing as much as they liked with the various bus companies, but they had absolutely no power to ensure the companies actually went with it. Each company was stupidly selfish about their own ticketing systems (without realising that they should try to grow the pie rather than just trying to keep their piece of the tiny pie) and refused to co-operate. Fortunately, with the passing of the aforementioned legislation, over the next year or so every single public transport route operated will come under the direct control of ARTA, so they will be able to make sure integrated ticketing does actually happen. But still, more than 10 years? It really does make you bang your head against a wall in frustration.

Now it seems like ARTA wishes to accomplish everything with this Integrated Fares System Programme. It will implement a new (presumably integrated) fare system for Auckland (hopefully somewhat along the lines of what I've suggested in previous posts on this blog) and will also introduce a "smart-card" system that uses a simple "touch-on, touch-off" technology to speed up the boarding of buses in particular. Well as long as it is properly done, this is definitely good news all round. Smart-card systems are the way of the future, and I very much enjoyed using an Oyster Card when in London. Although the technology is considered "cutting edge" in some respects, Hong Kong has now been operating its "Octopus Card" for around a decade, so it has certainly been well tested. I just do wonder how "smart" these new card will be. Will I be able to top it up online? Will I be able to use the card to buy other stuff like people do everywhere in Hong Kong? How expensive will this all be, and will it be worth it?

In some ways I wish that ARTA would just focus on implementing an integrated system using the simplest technology available (paper?) first. The smart-card system should definitely still happen, but the shift to integrated ticketing has already taken so long that I wouldn't want that aspect of it to be held up by the costs associated with a smart-card system (such as gate-barriers at large train stations). Fortunately, it seems like something along these lines is being planned by ARTA, as the project is to be implemented in stages:

1. System procurement – the smartcard Contractor to be appointed in the 4th quarter of 2008 (still waiting for the announcement though?)
2. ARTA fares policy implementation – using existing technologies and systems where possible - in the 3rd quarter of 2009. (An excellent first step to make.)
3. Smartcard development and implementation – the core smartcard system in operation in the 3rd quarter of 2010 (Less than 2 years away, a lot of work to be done by then I would think).
4. Smartcard system enhancement – enhancements to the system completed by the end of 2011 (well... hopefully before the World Cup).

Now as long as things are still progressing as planned I'm fairly happy with this timeline. I do worry, largely because it has taken so long for this project to get where it is (which is basically nowhere) that we will just see more and more delays.

Now, if ARTA were clever they'd send every household in Auckland a free smart-card when the system is implemented. Maybe I'll ceremoniously burn all my existing bus cards when that day comes.

The Auckland Regional Transportation Authority (ARTA) have some interesting transportation policy documents on their website if you look hard enough. In particular, the Passenger Transport Network Pland etails how our public transport system is likely to look in 2016 and beyond. The plan cleverly looks to develop a hierarchy of transport options, crucially linked by integrated ticketing, which will hopefully happen some time before the end of the world (although judging by how it has progressed so far I wouldn't be too hopeful). But anyway, I'm not going to moan constantly about the lack of integrated ticketing, as I've already done that a million times before.

So looking at the positive side of our transportation future, ARTA has divided how public transport will operate into four categories. The fourth, Targeted Services, is not particularly relevant to most of us, as it focused on the (very necessary I might add) need to provide on-call services for those who are unable to utilise normal public transport. It also includes school buses, which hopefully will be used in greater numbers in the future, rather than parents driving their kiddies to school all the time. But anyway, leaving Targeted Services aside, we are left with three levels of public transport provision: The Rapid Transit Network, the Quality Transit Network and the Local Connector Network. Instead of having all our bus, train and ferry services competing against each other to provide one-size-fits-all long-haul services, the idea of a transport hierarchy is to maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of our future public transport network. My focus for today's post is not the Rapid Transit Network (RTN), which is the train system and the Northern Busway, or the Local Connector Network (LCN), which is probably feeder buses and so forth, but rather that important one that fits between the two - the Quality Transit Network (QTN).

The QTN is defined by ARTA as follows:

Well maybe it appears as though my idea for reintroducing trams to central Auckland is catching on. My previous post, which I wrote back on November 12th, was that Auckland should take a look at the success of heritage tram operations in cities such as San Francisco, and perhaps consider one for here. The most obvious route to me would be Queen Street and Tamaki Drive, but also potentially turning west at the bottom of Queen Street to service the new Wynyard Quarter (Tank Farm) development.

And what do you know, today's Herald includes an article on that very same topic. I don't think I'm quite naive enough to truly believe that the idea is completely mine, which other people have come across and then taken onwards, but it is remarkably similar to what I came up with a few weeks ago. Some parts of the article are particularly interesting:

Consulting engineer Colin Zeff, who manages Motat's 2km of heritage tram lines at Western Springs, confirmed his organisation's willingness to support the proposal from its background of running an operation carrying 130,000 passengers a year.

Well that satisfies my worry that MOTAT wouldn't be too keen on the idea. Hopefully they would have a good number of trams to get the idea up and running, with the heritage trams being complemented by more modern ones. Also:

The city council's proposed Te Wero bridge across Viaduct Harbour would be capable of carrying power supply for the trams, and the scheme could eventually be extended along Tamaki Drive or up Queen St.

Well this is really really interesting that council seems to be having a reasonably positive response to it as well.

Cameron Pitches, from the Campaign for Better Transport has done wonders in promoting better public transportation for Auckland - and has actually had some significant wins (such as reopening the Onehunga Branch railway line... which will happen eventually). With him leading the push for the trams idea to at least be considered, it does seem like there's a fairly decent chance that this idea will go somewhere. Eventually, I definitely agree with the herald article that the scheme could (and should) be extended up Queen Street and along Tamaki Drive. As I explained in my earlier post, trams are a far more attractive option for tourists and also people taking recreational trips. Heck, apparently 130,000 people a year ride the MOTAT tram, which doesn't serve a purpose beyond being a tourist attraction at all. If the trams were made quick enough there is also potential for the system to be extended down Dominion Road, offering a higher-capacity public transport alternative to buses along this important route. For routes primarily designed for commuting I think a greater reliance on modern trams would be necessary though, as the older ones simply can't carry enough people for it to be justified.

It's certainly an interesting development, and I'll be curious to see what more comes of this.

It sounds like a circus doesn't it? Roll up! Roll up! To the motorway building bonanza! I do generally find myself losing count when I try to put together all the motorway building projects that are going on around Auckland at the moment. Well, let's give it a go anyway:

1. ALPURT B2: This is the final stage of a motorway that's been under construction in stages for about the past 13 years. In my opinion it's probably the most justified motorway project in Auckland at the moment, as it should help relieve (or at least, shift) one of the nastiest holiday traffic bottlenecks in the country, from Orewa to Puhoi. It's a pretty spectacular road with viaducts and tunnels, and I think should be finished and open in just a few months.
2. Mt Roksill SH20 extension: This motorway extension will probably end up being fairly useful for me, as it will bring SH20 much much closer to me, which is good if I want to get to the airport or to the south. However, it is still a motorway to nowhere in that instead of dumping all its traffic onto Hillsborough Road, it'll dump all its traffic onto Sandringham, Maioro and Dominion roads. Plus it's along a route that is totally un-useful for public transport so will play its part in continuing the dominance of private vehicle transport in Auckland. To open in February or April next year I think.
3. Manukau Harbour Crossing Project: This is essentially the widening of SH20 from Queenstown Road to Walmsley Road. The most critical aspect of the project is the duplication of the Mangere Bridge. For some reason this project became 'essential' to complete before the Rugby World Cup in 2011 so the contractors are going balls out to get it done in time. Another 'widening of the belt to allow yourself to get fatter' project that (I know for a fact) is designed to induce private vehicle travel. Due for opening some time in early 2011 I think.
4. SH20-SH1 Manukau Link. This is a relatively short extension of motorway that will link up the southern end of SH20 with the Southern Motorway. I can see a pretty good logic in this project, in that it will get the through traffic off Wiri Station Road and hopefully allow Manukau City Centre to prosper more as a result of far fewer trucks chugging through it all the time. This is a pretty expensive project for its length, as there are an enormous number of bridges and other spans to be built. All this money for the motorway but nothing to ensure the Manukau Rail Spur is built properly.... typical. I think this project is due for completion in 2010 some time.
5. SH18 Hobsonville Deviation. This project has just started in the last few months, and will be a continuation of the Upper Harbour Motorway that was recently built bypassing Greenhithe. It will allow through traffic to bypass Hobsonville Road - which is one heck of an annoying arterial route. However, once again this is a project that hasn't seemed to consider public transport at all. Perhaps a future busway from Albany to Westage could benefit from it, but I doubt the foresight is there to actually provide for this. Another auto-focused project designed to encourage car-use.

Add to this list projects that are due to be started in the near(ish) future:

1. Newmarket Viaduct Replacement. This is a pretty expensive project to replace the (not particularly old) Newmarket Viaduct, a pretty damn crucial link in Auckland's roading network. Apparently when the viaduct was built, the technology was pretty new and as a result it's fairly sub-optimal by international standards. The replacement will add one lane for southbound traffic, but (oddly) nothing for northbound traffic. Considering how sub-standard the rail network is, this project does seem to be just another example of how easy it is to get money for motorway projects in Auckland.
2. Victoria Park Tunnel. Now if there is one motorway project I do whole-heartedly support in Auckland it is this one. When the Central Motorway Junction Improvements were completed a couple of years they didn't really fix any bottlenecks, but only shifted them - most particularly onto the 4 lane Victoria Park viaduct. The tunnel will provide three completely new lanes for northbound traffic, while all four lanes of the existing viaduct will be used for southbound vehicles. While there isn't an immediately obvious benefit to public transport from this project, the mess the current situation creates for traffic on the Harbour Bridge does probably hold up buses to some extent. Furthermore, in the long run the Victoria Park Viaduct will eventually be completely replaced by a tunnel, and the park will finally be returned to its former glory by not having a bloody motorway cut across the middle of it.
3. Waterview Connection. Ha! Now here's the biggie. All the other projects probably have a total cost of around $2 billion. This pretty much equals the cost of the Waterview Connection by itself. While it's great that the only option left on the table for this link is a tunnel, the cost is simply astronomical for a roading project. I will leave my analysis of what that kind of money could do for Auckland's train network to another post, but needless to say the scale and cost of the Waterview Connection - the last link in the western ring route hooking up the end of the Mt Roskill extension with SH16 - is unprecedented for this country.

So yes, as we can see there is a motorway building bonanza going on in Auckland at the moment. In fact, there has been one going on for the past few years now. However, the only time when congestion actually decreased was when petrol prices increased. It makes one think that instead of spending billions on more motorways, perhaps the government should just tax petrol more to solve congestion.

Now there's an interesting thought to ponder.

I did quite well with my posting towards the end of last week. I felt really sick on Friday but still managed to have an excellent whinge about public transport in Auckland. I guess it just goes to show that it's pretty damn easy to moan about public transport, at least it is for me. I won't go on too much about transport in this post as it feels like there's plenty of other stuff for me to write, but I was once again annoyed today by Auckland's ineptitude. Not that there were any problems with the two buses I caught today, both arrived just when needed and got me just where I wanted to go, faster than I thought they would. Sounds unbelievable, but actually true this time around. No, my annoyance comes from an ongoing battle I'm having with ARTA over the timetable at the end of our street. Having a bus timetable at the end of your street (especially when you're only two houses back from the end of the street) is very useful, as you can pop down to the bus stop to see when the next bus is - if it's more than a few minutes away you can head back to the house for a drink before the 30 second walk down there again. But anyway, a few weeks ago the roadworks that were happening along our street eventually led to the pole upon which the timetable was attached to being replaced. Instead of cleverly restrapping the timetable to the new pole, the contractors just dumped it in the bus stop shelter to roll around. Inevitably someone thought it'd be a funny souvenir to have (though I must admit that I'd thought about how funny it would be to have our bus timetable sitting in the kitchen, but realised how annoying this would be for everyone else) and it disappeared.

No drama I figured. I'll email ARTA so they replace it. So I email them - and don't get a reply for a week. So I email them again, and - ah excellent - get a response. In fact, the response says it'll be done in the next few days. Then today I get another email saying that the work is done, in fact it was installed late last week. Sweet. The problem is that when I got today to check, there's no timetable in sight. I suppose there's the possibility that they did install the new timetable late last week, and someone already decided to grab it, but I reckon that's pretty unlikely.

My email back to ARTA was nicely to the point I think:

Hi ****, whoever says that the timetable has been replaced is lying. It is not there, I checked 10 minutes ago. Could you please make sure it ACTUALLY gets replaced. Thanks.

Anyway, minor issue really. It bugged me though. It is these little things that can make a big difference to the effectiveness of a transport system.  I doubt NZTA would wait weeks before replacing a motorway sign, or that council just wouldn't get around to fixing a traffic light. But I guess anything to do with public transport gets put at the bottom of the pile. Or it 'supposedly' gets fixed.

So, what of the weekend? Well first things first damn it felt like summer. This is kind of ironic as on Friday I'd been moaning (through my facebook status, a useful moan outlet) that it was damn freezing and where the heck was this summer meant to be? I think now that was probably just the last remnants of my fever showing through, as I would fluctuate from being crazily hot to crazily cold every few minutes. Saturday was a generally quiet day, as I was still trying to recover from late last week, when I hadn't been well. I still managed a few things: took Amalia to swimming, hung out at my parents' for a while, went to playground for a while with Amalia, had dinner with Leila at Mission Bay... before eventually crashing to sleep. I also managed to read a big chunk of "Paper Towns" by John Green, although I'll get back to that more later.

Then yesterday Leila and I went for a rather long drive. The odd thing was that it was quite unplanned, as after breakfast at a very nice Grey Lynn cafe (Occam) we just started driving. About halfway down the Southern Motorway I decided to go check out Awhitu as I remember my parents saying it was a really nice spot. I didn't quite realise how long it would take to get there, as driving to Drury along the motorway is actually only about a third of the story. After that it's another 30 odd kilometers to Waiuku, and then at least that amount again on to Awhitu. But it was a nice spot, so Leila and I read for a few hours - enjoying the sunshine and how much it felt like summer. I do very much enjoy just heading to some random spot around Auckland that is nicely scenic, and then just reading for a few hours. It feels peaceful, and like that's definitely the way a good book should be enjoyed. And I was reading a good book, but once again more on books later.

We returned to civilisation via the very tip (or at least as close as we could get to it) of the Manukau Heads. It was quite spectacular scenery, and I deeply regretted not having my camera with us. The road ran along a very high ridge for most of the last leg of this drive, and the drops off each side of it were a mixture of amazing and terrifying. Amazing when it was safe for me to have a look around at the huge drops off each side of the road, terrifying when I realised how close the road went to the edge of these precipices (why can't precipice have a better plural?) Leila did a pretty stellar job as navigator, as we wound our way from the tip of the Manukau Heads back to Waiuku, via a very interesting peek at the ocean beach (Awhitu is on the harbour side of the peninsula). There were a pile of hoons doing doughnuts on the beach, which was more funny than annoying, but it was blowing a gale (I wonder if it ever doesn't blow a gale around there) so we eventually drove home. Snow Patrol's new album "A Hundred Million Suns" played on the car stereo for most of the day, and was a very very good soundtrack for the day. I wonder if, over time, I will continue to associate songs from that album with our trip to Awhitu - like other albums have sometimes ended up being associated with a particular time or place.

So yes, it was good to make the most of the nice weather. Somehow I just feel more 'alive' when the weather is good. Not just 'OK', but definitely sunny enough to not bother with much more than a T shirt, sunny enough that when you head back inside you can feel the sun's warmth on you and in you still (although hopefully not because you've been sunburnt). The downside was last night, when it was so damn hot and sticky that I couldn't get to sleep forever. Though I think I was just caught up in a struggle to distinguish the reality of me trying to get to sleep from the non-reality of the book that I was reading. But yes, more about books later. Soon. Humid, sticky nights are probably my biggest annoyance about summer, but clear sunny days definitely make up for the nights.

But anyway, the books, the reading. Interestingly enough, I'm not the kind of person who reads many fiction books. I usually have one or two books on the go at any time (at least), but they're usually a mix of cricket, trains and urban planning. Particularly this year, thanks to the awesomeness that is amazon.com, my collection of urban planning books has grown like topsy, and until recently it had kept me going with some before-bed reading pretty much ever since Leila and I got back from Europe. However, as the New Zealand dollar has gone down significantly against the US dollar in the last few weeks, Amazon isn't really worthwhile any more, at least not as worthwhile as it used to be. Including freight, a book I bought a few weeks ago for $US 12 ended up costing something in the region of $NZ 40. And that was a pretty cheap book.

Fortunately, to help me with my "what to read" predicament, thankfully I have a girlfriend with a extraordinarily large book collection and a growing understanding of what I like and don't like. To be fair on her, I have a growing understanding of what I like and don't like - I'm getting there with truly understanding it myself. Weirdly, although I very rarely find myself reading fiction (only usually after I've exhausted all other options) I have to admit that I actually really like it. I really get into books in a way that just can't happen with a movie or whatever other source a story is coming at you from. I can totally understand why a good number of the people I know are total book freaks, even though 95% of the time I really am not. The strange thing is that I really enjoy getting into books, feeling like I'm somewhat living them, that the distinction between my life and the lives of the characters in the books I'm reading have blurred a bit. The surreality of it all seems really nice to me, as though even while it's making things seemingly 'less real', that's somehow making my life more distinctive and more interesting.

So yeah, I think from now on I will make much more of an effort to read more fiction. Not for anyone else's sake but my own, because I really do know that I greatly enjoy it.

Whilst I have many problems with Auckland's public transport: frequencies, reliability (especially the trains), ticketing and so forth - I think perhaps the biggest issue, and one which doesn't seem to get the attention that it should, is simply the fact that it's so darn slow. In most other cities around the world catching public transport is faster than driving, particularly at peak hour. This is somewhat because, contrary to popular belief, Auckland's motorways aren't actually particularly congested by international standards, and are actually incredibly comprehensive by international standards. While a lot of focus goes on the unreliability and lateness of many services, I think a significant deterrent for people using public transport actually happens after they're on the bus/train.

A couple of examples. From my work in Avondale there is a bus stop just a couple of minutes walk down the road. The service is reasonably frequent during the day, at 15 minute intervals (although I'm sure there used to be a 10 minute service a few years back along New North Road). Whilst some of the routes are inevitably late (the 224 which I have a personal vendetta against), the 211 and 212 services are generally very reliable. However, it's a minimum 40 minute bus trip into town from here. A couple of times it has stretched out to 50 minutes if I'm unlucky and end up on a 224 which goes via a slight detour to St Lukes or the bus is particularly heavily loaded. This is off-peak, and as there are no bus lanes along New North Road until you get to Kingsland (about 2/3rds of the way in along this route) I can only imagine that at peak hour the trip takes even longer. By comparison, at off-peak times I can probably drive into town from here in 15 minutes maximum. My boss and I, when we do need to take trips into the city for meetings and the like, really do want to catch the bus so that we're acting more environmentally sustainable and supporting Auckland's public transport, but a lot of the time it's just a no-brainer when you compare the length of time the trip takes.

A second example comes from yesterday actually. After many attempts, I finally managed to meet up with a friend from the Skyscraper City forums. He lives out in Meadowlands, which to be fair is a heck of a long way from the city. Meadowlands forms a part of East Auckland that has grown like topsy throughout the last 10-20 years into the most horrific part of the city in my opinion (no offence to people who live there, it's not your fault). It is the most classic example of urban sprawl you'll ever come across - massive houses, cul-de-sacs everywhere, completely residential neighbourhoods and an utter belief that everyone will drive everywhere. I met up with my friend (Marcus) at just before 6pm yesterday afternoon, after he'd caught a bus into the city from Meadowlands. The trip down Symonds Street was so slow (although this is because they're constructing 24 hour bus lanes, so council don't incur my wrath for this) that he got off at the university and walked down to where I met up with him. Now the scary part is to come, he got on his bus at 4.10! That means it took almost two hours for him to get from Meadowlands to central Auckland, two hours! That's to cover a trip which I've measured to be (approximately) 23km long. That's an average speed of not much more than 10 kph - you could almost walk that distance faster!

Now perhaps that was an unusually slow trip, and it did coincide somewhat with the evening peak (even though he was going counter-flow), but to me it truly shows why that part of Auckland has the lowest levels of public transport use in the whole of Auckland. Who would be crazy enough to put themselves through that each and every day? Clearly, it's criminal that such a large part of Auckland was developed without provision being made for a railway line. It is also criminal that there aren't even bus lanes along the two main routes out that way: Pakuranga Road and Ti Rakau Drive. Yet there are no real plans to do much about it. ARTA does plan some sort of RTN (rapid transit network) to go up Te Irirangi Drive and then along Ti Rakau Drive, but who knows how they'd ever be able to build it? An RTN should be either a rail line or a proper busway (very different to bus lanes) so unless ARTA magically is going to end up with hundreds of millions of dollars to buy an enormous number of houses to build a proper transit line through the area, the best it seems we can ever hope for are top-quality bus lanes. Great job planners of the area in the 1970s-1990s. NOT.

But anyway, bringing this back to the main topic of this post. Why is public transport so slow and what can be done about it? I guess for a start buses are inherently a slow form of public transport, and as about 80% of Auckland's public transport trips rely upon buses, it's no wonder PT can't compare with the car when it comes to the speed of trips. It's interesting to note that along the very limited number of corridors where decent bus lanes have been constructed and there is significant traffic congestion (Onewa Road and Dominion Road), public transport is actually enormously popular. Apparently 50% of people travelling along the Dominion Road corridor in the morning peak use public transport, and I would imagine Onewa Road would be fairly similar. This clearly shows that speed is a huge issue for people commuting: make public transport faster and people will definitely use it. Other areas where public transport is probably the fastest method of getting to the city would be along the Eastern Line railway, which once again is enormously popular by Auckland standards. This situation was identified as horribly intolerable by John Banks a few years ago, who proposed to build a massive motorway along the railway route to ensure that the normal situation of ensuring the car was the fastest way to travel, was restored. Fortunately that project has been shelved.

So why so slow? Clearly the first reason is the lack of bus lanes. Where buses have to intermingle with traffic they will always end up slower than someone driving along the same road - simply because they need to stop and pick up passengers. However, even on roads with bus lanes often the bus stops aren't actually indented towards the footpath, which means that any bus coming up behind another bus that has already stopped has to either stop itself, or pull into the general traffic lane/lanes, thereby negating much of the advantage a bus lane creates. While Auckand City and North Shore City have done a good job over the past few years expanding their bus/transit lanes, there is still a long way to go. Why doesn't Manukau Road have bus lanes? How about New North Road? Ellerslie-Panmure Highway? Lagoon Drive? The list goes on. And that's not to even mention the lack of action by Manukau City and - somewhat surprisingly given their eco-city image - Waitakere City. The second reason is the often circuitous routes that many buses travel along. Sure, this is useful in terms of maximising the number of people who are close to a bus stop, but it certainly comes at a cost. Another clear reason why buses travel so slow is that they're often forced to do right-turns at very busy intersections at peak hour, which when they're stuck behind a line of traffic can add up to 5 minutes to a journey. There's a classic example of this just up the road from me, where the 233, 007 & 008 bus routes are forced to make right-turns onto Mt Albert Road that I wouldn't even consider making at any time close to peak hour. Somewhat fortunately the bus drivers take a "might is right" attitude and edge out onto the main road making the other drivers stop for them. However, that's not much help if they're stuck behind a slightly timid driver for 5 minutes waiting to make a right-turn. Surely, the location of traffic lights should be matched up better with bus routes, or alternatively the bus routes be modified to avoid situations like these.

Finally, and most significantly I think, buses are slow because they're so incredibly slow to board. I have gone on about this before, but I think it's an utterly critical point. By requiring the driver to interact with everyone getting on board a bus, it just takes forever for the bus to load if there's more than 5 people waiting. This becomes particularly obvious on Symonds Street in the evening peak when all the university students load up the buses through a procedure that takes just as long as actually driving up this highly congested road. While I understand that some people won't have a bus pass (which one would hope can be solved once integrated ticketing occurs - as I would personally send everyone in Auckland a transport pass to encourage usage) and therefore have to pay cash, it seems nonsensical that someone with a bus pass can't just validate it at another machine on the bus and find their seat all while the bus driver is digging around for change to give the original person. However, at the moment no, the bus pass holder must wait in line themselves along with everyone else, while those already on the bus tear their hair out and vow to drive to work from now on.

Projects like the Northern Busway have shown that Aucklanders will most definitely catch public transport. However, it is utterly critical that everything possible is done to improve the speed of services. I strongly believe that is the only way we're ever going to get more than 7% of the population catching public transport. Which is a rather embarrassing statistic to be honest.

A few months ago the idea was first floated to add a walking/cycling lane (or both preferably) to the sides of the Auckland Harbour Bridge. I think the idea formed out of the cycling lobby initially, but made a lot of sense as the NZTA (who own the bridge) were spending $40 million or so to upgrade the clip-ons so they didn't fall off. It seemed that with all this work going on anyway, a few extra million to add a bit of extra width wouldn't be too much of a problem. Furthermore, it would finally address an utterly horrific issue that I have with the Harbour Bridge, that bus and car are the only ways in which to get across it. In Sydney you can catch a train across their bridge, or walk across it, or cycle across it - but here in Auckland you were forced to jump into some sort of road vehicle in order to make your way across. I guess it shows Auckland's attitude to transportation most clearly.

The idea of adding on a walking and/or cycling lane got a mixed reception. The Auckland Regional Council were really keen, as was the North Shore City Council. The car-lovers at Auckland City Council couldn't understand the concept as they were probably hoping for another lane of traffic. There was a significant push for the idea from the cycling lobby, but at the same time Brian Rudman - who I usually agree with on most urban matters he writes about in the Herald - strongly opposed the idea for reasons I am still trying to get my head around. However, it still seemed to me like almost everyone was missing the point, as they became fixated on how many cyclists would use the bridge to commute to work on weekdays. Right from the start I saw the best part of the idea as simply making it possible for people to walk across the bridge, particularly on a nice sunny day at the weekend. The view from the Harbour Bridge - particularly looking east - is utterly spectacular. I've been across it thousands and thousands of times yet I'm still impressed. However, it is a little frustrating that you have to be driving at 80 kph to actually enjoy what is probably the best view in Auckland. A few weeks back I caught a bus up to Albany along the Northern Busway, and it was actually amazingly nice to head across the bridge for once and not have to be concentrating on driving, although once again the view did pretty much zip by.

So I think that making it possibly for people to walk and cycle across the bridge would have its biggest benefit in much broader ways than just allowing people to commute via cycling from the North Shore. It would be one hell of a good tourist attraction for the city to market, and a great way of celebrating our beautiful harbour. Furthermore, it would also be a clear sign that the city does give a damn about more than just cars and is actually concered about providing for people.

Unfortunately, it does seem like the NZTA can't quite get their head around the wider benefits of this project, and has not included it in their list of project priorities for the next year. It is a pity that our transportation agencies continue to be so narrow minded.