GREATER AUCKLAND...Auckland is urbanising to a new intensity: getting bigger as well as undergoing profound morphological change. These shifts make Auckland an anomaly in New Zealand,

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Essays on Transport and Urbanism

GREATER AUCKLAND

2016 GA.

Greater Auckland Essays on Transport and Urbanism

A Publication of the Greater Auckland Incorporated Society

Articles first published on transportblog.co.nz

WRITERS

Matt LowrieKent Lundberg

Peter NunnsNicolas Reid

Patrick Reynolds

PHOTOGRAPHY Patrick Reynolds

ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHYKent Lundberg

Auckland Library Heritage Collection Cover photo: stock image

COMPILED BY Nicolas Reid

DESIGN AND LAYOUT Laura Dueker at duekerdesign

WEBSITE www.greaterauckland.org.nz

TWITTER @GreaterAuckland

EMAIL [email protected]

Auckland is at a critical juncture. Tāmaki Makaurau, Tāmaki of a thousand lovers, is different, from how it used to be and from anywhere else in New Zealand. Our city is becoming more livable. Public and active transport play a growing role in its mobility, and well-located apartments and terraces play a growing role in its housing needs.

Auckland is urbanising to a new intensity: getting bigger as well as undergoing profound morphological change. These shifts make Auckland an anomaly in New Zealand, but it is starting to look more like the best global cities. We should encourage this and capitalise on it. It’s a key challenge for New Zealand policymakers: the solutions we’ve tried in the past, or for other cities, will not work for Auckland today. Can Auckland rise to this challenge, and what tools does it need to succeed?

This collection of essays may hold some clues. We believe that “if you give people attractive and frequent public transport services they’ll choose to use them” (essay #3), and that “density and amenity aren’t mutually exclusive” (#4). The essays are hopeful, because we see great potential for Auckland and are inspired by the possibilities.

We hope you do too.

INTRODUCTION

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p6-11 | METAMORPHOSIS: The Return of the CityESSAY1

p12-16 | RECOVERY: How Rail was saved in AucklandESSAY2

p18-29 | UNBOUND: The City unleashedESSAY3

p30-34 | URBAN NATION: New Zealand can’t put the urban genie back in its bottle

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CON

TEN

TS.

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p42-45 | PRODUCTIVITY: Where does New Zealand’s economy happen?

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p46-48 | PREDICTION: Auckland in ten years timeESSAY7

p36-41 | PROXIMITY AND INTEGRATION: The Metropolitan Revolution

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Designers and financiers are at work and the men and machines are about to start. The caterpillar is

entering that difficult and mysterious chrysalis phase; what kind of butterfly will emerge?

Auckland is now a builders’ boom town; it will resemble nothing other than an enormous sandpit for the next few years.

META- MORPHOSIS.

The Return of the CityBy Patrick Reynolds, first published on 19 March 2015

Some of the probable additions to Auckland’s skyline

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Some of the probable additions to Auckland’s skyline

Waterfront Auckland have announced new mid rise apartment developments and a new hotel beginning as well. This list is by no means exhaustive.

Regardless of the forms of these buildings they are going to have profound impacts at street level; flooding the footpaths with people, stimulating more and more retail and especially hospitality services. Add to this the disruption of the works themselves, for example the first stage of the City Rail Link is about to start. Digging up everything from Britomart through Downtown, up Albert St to Wyndham St. If the proposed Light Rail system goes ahead that will mean the digging up of the whole length of Queen Street and other places, Dominion Road, Wynyard Quarter. Street space is becoming more and more contested. Driving in the city is going to get increasingly pointless; so most will avoid it. But unlike last century that won’t mean people won’t come to the city. One, because it’s become so attractive with unique retail offers, unrivaled entertainment attractions, and a fat concentration of jobs. Two, because people are discovering how good the improving transit options are becoming, so why bother driving. And three, because

AND THAT TRANSIT BOOM IS GOING TO CONTINUE, OR EVEN ACCELERATE.

If even half of what is proposed gets underway almost every aspect of the centre city will be different.

Precinct Property’s $600 million total rebuild of the Downtown centre and a new 36 story commercial tower is confirmed to start soon. The 39 story St James apartment tower is also all go [with the re-opening of the ground floor to the public soon]. An apartment tower on Albert and Swanson has begun. There are a huge number of residential towers seriously close to launching some of which are 50+ floors. These are on Victoria St, Customs St, Commerce St, Greys Ave and more. The biggest of them all Elliot Towers is rumoured to get underway next year. Mansons have bought the current Herald site and are planning to replace the current low rise buildings there with Auckland’s tallest commercial tower. On the same block 125 Queen Street is finally getting refurbished bringing much needed new commercial space in the city [and about 1,000 new inner city workers]. Of course the Convention Centre and its associated hotel will start too.

Greater Auckland: Essays on Transport and Urbanism 7

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increasing number of people are already there; it’s where they live anyway.

And that transit boom is going to continue, or even accelerate. Britomart throughput is now running at 35,000 people daily, when planned it wasn’t even expected to reach 20,000 until 2021.

Why is this happening? A lot of people in wider Auckland still think the city is unappealing or unimportant. Aren’t we spreading new housing out

at the edges? Aren’t new businesses building near the suburbs in those business parks? Well ironically one of the reasons so much growth and investment is happening in City Centre is because those same people, the ones that prefer their suburban neighbourhoods to the city, don’t want any change near them. The City Centre is one of the few places that it is possible to add new dwellings or offices at scale, and because it is a very constrained area with high land value this can only be done with tall buildings. The more that suburban people refuse to have growth near them the more, in a growing city, investment has to concentrate where it can, and in Auckland that means downtown.

Auckland is still spreading outwards and businesses are growing in suburban centres, but these areas are not appealing or appropriate for all people and all businesses, and nor are they sufficient; the City Centre is growing by both these metrics too, and at a greater pace. The 2013 census showed that Auckland city is the fastest accelerating place to live in the entire country, growing at over 48% between 2006-2013, and currently the city is experiencing a new shortage of office space and an interesting

ESSAY 1

The Return of the City


reshaping of the retail market. The education sector is also still strong there, with Auckland Uni consolidating to its now three central city sites and building more inner city student accommodation. City growth is strong and broadly based: residential, commercial, retail, and institutional.

There are risks and opportunities in this but what is certain, outside of a sudden economic collapse, is that the City Centre will be a completely different place in a few years, in form, and in terms of how it will operate. And the signs are promising that what we are heading to is an almost unrecognisably better city at street level than it has been in living memory.

What is happening is simply that it is returning to being a city of people. Ten of thousands of new inner city residents, thousands of new visitors in thousands of additional hotel beds each night, hundreds of thousands of workers and learners arriving daily from all over the wider city each day

too. All shopping, eating, drinking, and playing within the ring of the motorway collar. Auckland is moving from being one of the dullest and most lifeless conurbations in the world to offering a new level of intensity and activity. Well that is certainly the possibility in front of us now.

Auckland has had boom times before, and each of these leave a near permanent mark on the built fabric of the city. So it matters profoundly what we add to the city this time. We are at the beginning of the opportunity to correct the mistakes of the postwar outward boom that came with such a high cost for the older parts of the city. By forcing the parts of the city built on an earlier infrastructure model to adapt to a car only system we rendered them unappealing and under-performing, and the old city very nearly did not survive this era. Only the persistence

AUCKLAND HAS HAD BOOM TIMES BEFORE, AND EACH OF THESE LEAVE A NEAR PERMANENT MARK ON THE BUILT FABRIC OF THE CITY.

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of some institutions, particularly the universities, enabled it to hang on as well as it did. The car as an organising device is ideal for social patterns with a high degree of distance and dispersal. It is essentially anti-urban in its ability to eat distance because this comes at the cost of its inefficient use of space; it constantly fights against the logic of human concentration that cities rely on to thrive. It not only works best with dispersal; it also enforces it.

But now the wheel has turned and cities everywhere are booming on the back a of model much more like the earlier one. This old-new model is built on the understanding that people in numbers both already present in the city and arriving on spatially efficient transit systems providing the economic and social concentration necessary for urban vitality and success.

This seems likely to lead to a situation more or less observable in many cities

world-wide where there is an intense and highly walkable and transit-served centre surrounded by largely auto-dependent suburbs. Melbourne, for example, is increasingly taking this form. And, interestingly the abrupt physical severance of Auckland’s motorway collar might just make ours one of the more starkly contrasting places to develop along these lines. A real mullet city: one made up of two distinct patterns.

Frankly I think this is fine, it could make for the best of both worlds. Those who want to live with the space and green of the suburbs can continue to do so but are also able to dip into a vibrant city for work, education, or especially entertainment, on efficient electric trains, buses, and ferries when that suits. A vibrant core of vital commercial and cultural intensity sustained by those who choose to live in the middle of it 24/7. The intensity of this core plus any other growing Metro Centres [will Albany really become intense? Manukau City?] meaning the sprawl isn’t limitless and the countryside not pushed so far away that it is inaccessible. Auckland as Goldilocks; not all one thing or the other; neither all suburb nor all city. People will use or ignore which ever parts they want, and soon members of


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the same households will be able to indulge their different tastes without some having to leave the country.

What are the threats to this vision? Well we do actually have to build the transit, this means completing the City Rail Link soon as is possible, and ideally replacing a good chunk of the buses with higher capacity and more appealing Light Rail. To connect these two halves; the success of both the centre and the region it serves depend on it. But also we have deliver a much better public realm on the streets and especially at the water’s edge. We have to retain and enhance the smaller scale older street systems to contrast

with the coming towers, like we have at Britomart and O’Connell St. All these moves require leadership and commitment and an acceptance that the process of getting there will be contested and difficult.

I have no fear that people in the wider city won’t be happy to choose to leave their cars at home for some journeys, especially into the city, then jump back into them for others across the wider city or out of town. After all it’s happening already. This is not then a bold prediction, merely the extrapolation of current trends. And it is the trend that tells us more about the future than the status quo.

Bourke St Transit Mall, Melbourne 2014


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ESSAY2

How Rail was saved in AucklandBy Matt Lowrie, first published on 22 April 2014

RECOVERY

Monday the 27th of April 2015 was a historic day for transport in Auckland, for the first time the city

had electric trains carrying fare paying passengers.

Electrifying the rail network was something that had been talked about for 90 years before then, mostly in conjunction with a version of the City Rail Link.

Brand new AM class electric trains at Britomart, the successors to the Perth fleet.

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Brand new AM class electric trains at Britomart, the successors to the Perth fleet.

Greater Auckland: Essays on Transport and Urbanism

While the opening of Britomart station downtown was undoubtedly a turning point for rail in Auckland, it wouldn’t have been possible without some key events (and a whole pile of luck) that occurred just over a decade earlier, without which it is unlikely we would have a rail system today.

One man was at the centre of it all and this is the story of how he saved rail in Auckland.

The story starts in the late 1980’s where the Auckland rail network is in serious decline. Unlike Wellington which had fairly new electric trains at the time, the trains running on the Auckland network were decrepit and consisted of former long distance carriages that had been converted for suburban use. They were originally built in 1936 and had steel frames but the bodies were made from wood. They were also hard to access, requiring customers to climb up steps into the trains from what were basically oversized kerbs that masqueraded as station platforms. Unlike today, there were no double ended driving cabs for the train to change direction, the locomotive had to be uncoupled and moved to the other end of the train at a station with a passing loop track. At the time

Auckland had also seen numerous grand plans for new public transport networks but none ever saw the political support needed to actually implement them. At the dawn of the 1990s the latest idea was convert the Western Line to light rail, using trams from Henderson that would go via a tunnel under Karangahape Rd before running down the surface of Queen St. The main problem was the idea couldn’t get political support. The City Council didn’t want trams running on Queen St and the regional council saw the whole scheme as competition to the Yellow Bus Company, a business which they owned 90% of. That left Auckland with its near derelict trains and not much hope for the future.

It’s now the early 1990s and enter Raymond Siddalls. With a year to go before the regional council took over the contracting of rail services he was in charge running the suburban fleet. However the reality was bosses had tasked him with shutting the Auckland passenger rail network down. With an aging fleet, falling patronage and little political support (both locally or nationally) no one thought it could be made to work. After looking at the operations Raymond was surprised to find that, with an operational restructure, he was be able to cut

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down the costs and have the company actually start making a profit on the gross contracts it held. Raymond took a basket case liability and turned it into a profit for the council.

The critical time came in 1991 when a decision needed to be made on how to move forward. New legislation controlling how public transport services would operate was coming

into effect and it changed everything about how buses and trains could be run. Public transport could no longer be treated as a social service in the aftermath of Rogernomics and the focus was on making transit stand up commercially. The legislation also didn’t allow for any distinction between rail and bus services which meant bus companies could tender to replace rail routes with buses running on nearby roads.

However, with the network actually making a profit the rail operation was kept going and the company tendered to retain the few services a day that they were running at the time. One immediate problem they faced was that was each service had to take on the full cost of running the network, a quirk of the neoliberal process. Nonetheless they were subsequently able to re-tender for the services as a combined timetable which allowed the costs to be shared across all services.

The councils started to get on board and the company was awarded the contract to run the Auckland suburban rail network for four more years. The stability of a four year contract allowed them to look into for new rolling stock, with the argument that more trains and services would boost ridership and fare revenue.

How Rail was saved in Auckland

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Around this time it just so happened that one staff member was about to go to Perth to attend a wedding. Perth was just about to finish electrifying their rail network so the staff member was asked to drop in to find out what they were planning to do with their unneeded DMU (Diesel Multiple Unit) trains – vehicles that were purpose designed to run urban rail service.

It turns out that Perth had no plans for their old units so subsequently Raymond flew over to inspect and value the trains. He made a guess that there were no other buyers interested and put in a low-ball offer to buy them at scrap value. His hunch about no other buyers being interested paid off: he managed to buy nineteen trains for Auckland for little more than the price of the steel they were made from. Securing a new fleet of old trains wasn’t the end of the problems though.

For a start Perth is a flat city and the steepest track has a grade of 1:200, barely perceptible as a slope at all. Meanwhile Auckland is notoriously far from flat with trains needing to run up grades six times steeper. This meant the Perth trains needed their engines and transmissions overhauled to be able to run on the Auckland network. Furthermore, they needed to refurbish

the worn out train interiors by re-upholstering the seats and replacing the floor coverings. Lastly there was a lot of work required to raise the platform heights at every station in Auckland so that people could actually get on and off the new trains. To make things even more difficult the rail unions were striking at the time, trying to reopen the workshops and re-employ some of the staff who had been laid off by the earlier rail restructuring.

With the mounting bill of upgrades and refurbishments it was determined that the only way to make it viable would be if the rail contract was extended to ten years. However due to the confirmed availability of rolling stock this was considered a good deal. As such the regional council ended up voting unanimously to support the proposal with one person abstaining (the abstention was from a light rail


PUT SIMPLY, wITHOUT THE INITIATIVE AND HARD wORK OF RAYMOND SIDDALLS AUCKLAND ALMOST CERTAINLY wOULD NOT HAVE A PASSENGER RAIL SYSTEM TODAY.

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advocate), a reversal of fortunes from just a few years earlier.

In another stroke of luck all of this happened just before the rail network was privatised nationwide by the central government, something that could have put the whole idea in jeopardy.

At the time the Perth DMUs were introduced patronage on the rail network reached its lowest point ever, struggling to survive with just over one million trips per year. However shortly after introduction the new trains began to reverse the patronage decline that had been witnessed over the previous decades. Ridership continued to grow and reached about 2.5 million trips a year on the back of the new train fleet. It was this resurgence that helped generate the political courage needed to subsequently get Britomart station built in downtown Auckland. For this we have extra thanks to pay to

Mr Siddalls. Raymond tabled the idea of Britomart all the way back in 1990 and was instrumental in ensuring that a corridor was left through the rail yards to the site of the future city terminus. At the time the plan was to sell off all the rail yard land entirely, a move that would have prevented Britomart station being built.

Put simply, without the initiative and hard work of Raymond Siddalls Auckland almost certainly would not have a passenger rail system today. Rail patronage would not have recovered, Britomart would not have been built, the lines would not have been extended, electric trains would not have been purchased and the City Rail Link would never have gotten underway.

One day Aucklanders will look back in sheer disbelief at the very idea of our city existing without it’s rail transit system. Raymond is nothing short of a hero for whom the city should be eternally grateful.

Note: Thanks to Raymond for agreeing to share his memories with us. Also thanks to Raymond’s employer Auckland Transport for allowing us to talk to him and publish this article.

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How Rail was saved in Auckland

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Britomart Train Station in downtown Auckland

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UNBOUND.ESSAY3

There’s an unseen revolution taking place in Auckland right now. In transport.

Auckland is at last a city. No longer just an overblown provincial town, it has become properly city-shaped in the nature of its problems and its possibilities. For some this is an unwanted prospect and for others a much longed-for one, but either way it’s happening as it usually does: automatically and unevenly, and in our case quite fast. Auckland the teenager now finds itself becoming an adult.

The City unleashedBy Patrick Reynolds, first published on 22 December 2014

Everyday people using New Lynn Train Station in West Auckland

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When did we cross this line? We may decide the moment coincided with the reorganisation of local government, the formation of the so-called Super City in 2010. Or not. It doesn’t really matter, the point is that our combination of size and intensity means Auckland is now subject to the logic of cities the world over: crazy prices for tiny spaces, gridlock on the streets at almost anytime, hardship right next to luxury.

There is also a new and thrilling diversity: of people, of activity, of possibility. City intensity means all manner of niche businesses become viable – just look at the range of food we’re now offered: not just the ethnicities, but also paleo, raw, vegan, hipster…

While an insane range of complicated and hitherto unimagined ways to brew coffee is not the sole point of city life, it may be a good proxy for its vitality. The café trade thrives on diversity, specialisation and excellence, all driven by competition, and those things are also observable through a much wider range of human endeavour. Whether it’s in the law, education, services, the arts, whatever: only the agglomeration of individuals in tight proximity to the economic and

social force that is a city can generate such opportunities.

And, of course, there is urban velocity. Everything, for better or worse, is subject to the city’s law of impatience. It has always been thus: just as density creates obstacles to movement, so the demand for movement increases. Perhaps this is the greatest of all the contradictions of a city: more is more but also less. This is also the source of much opposition to the very idea of the city.

Nowhere do these contradictions gather more intensely than around the hotly disputed issue of congestion on the roads. Traffic.

For the last 60 years we have consistently taken one approach to the problem of how to allow people to move around in the growing city: we’ve built a lot of roads. We’ve got really good at it, and we’re still at it, with whole sections of the economy worryingly addicted to it.

But building ever more roads in cities doesn’t work. Far from curing the patient, this medicine is strangling it. In this, here in Auckland we are different from the rest of the country: in our scale, density, and pace of growth we have passed a tipping point. Bigger

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roads don’t cure our congestion, they enable it.

All evidence supports the view that the most effective way to both improve connectivity and de-clog our streets is to invest away from them. This may seem counter-intuitive but it’s true.

The data around this is compelling and full of possibility. And if you are interested in how cities work, in improving our economic performance, or simply if you love this place, it’s also exciting.

There’s a revolution going on right now in Auckland. It’s largely unseen, and even many of the people directly involved in it don’t see it as that. But it is real and it affects us all.

Over the last year almost three million more trips were taken on Auckland’s rail network compared to the previous year. That’s 14.5 million over 11.7 million: a big jump and profoundly good news.

Good news for the experts who examined our public transport system and said, frankly, it’s crap, but if you give people attractive and frequent services they’ll choose to use them. Good news for the public who have long pleaded for better services. Good news also for the tax and ratepayers of Auckland who have funded the upgrades, as well as for the politicians, local and central, who backed them.

Most of all, it is good for drivers. Good for everyone who likes or needs to drive on Auckland’s roads. And while Aucklanders are rushing to ride the trains, we are also piling onto buses at new rates too. Overwhelmingly, all these new trips on public transport (PT) are happening instead of car journeys.

It isn’t just new Aucklanders who are taking part in this rush to PT. The city’s population is growing at 2.3 per cent per year, while over the last year PT use was up 9.4 per cent: that’s more than four times the rate of population growth. Growth in rail use jumped 22 per cent.

In contrast, according to figures from the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA), driving in Auckland is flat on a per capita basis, and still below the 2006 peak.

The City unleashed

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So even if you don’t use the new services yourself, those people who do are out of their cars and out of your way. It may not feel like the streets are any clearer, but if all those travellers were still driving your trip would be much, much worse.

The biggest winners of Auckland’s new-found and hard-fought transit renaissance, therefore, are the users of cars and trucks.

Despite this, the public response to transport funding announcements is peculiar. After 60 years of investing in driving, each announcement of more spending on the roads is met with a shrug. We are currently spending billions (with billions more planned), even though the roads programme has not led to greater satisfaction or better access.

Yet every time we improve our public transport systems, the response – on two fronts – is huge. Improvements to the rapid transit network in particular

(that’s rail and the Northern Busway) have led to great uptakes in patronage. But at the same time, the spending this involves has been hotly contested.

No one is suggesting that driving won’t remain the dominant means to get around Auckland. But it is clear the highest value to be gained now in Auckland with transport dollars is through investing in the complementary modes: trains and buses, ferries, and safe routes for cycling and walking. They’re the ones attracting greater use.

To fix gridlock on the roads, we need to stop spending on roads and put that money into the alternatives.

Nowhere is this more true than on the rail network and our only properly “rapid” bus route, the North Shore’s Northern Busway. The electric upgrade of the rail network that was begun under the previous government and continued under the current one is being met with open-armed enthusiasm: last month, the two lines that are now running the new trains added 32 per cent and 50 per cent more passengers. And the upgrade is still far from complete.

The popularity of rail when a languishing service is electrified and


THE POPULARITY OF RAIL wHEN A LANGUISHING SERVICE IS ELECTRIFIED AND MODERNISED IS KNOwN INTERNATIONALLY AS THE “SPARKS EFFECT”.

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ESSAY3modernised is known internationally as the “sparks effect”. There’s no mystery to it. Here, as in cities all over the world, they have started to offer fast, frequent, reliable and comfortable services, running late into the night and on weekends. And people are flocking to use them.

This is true rapid transit, and the key to its success is that the service must run on its own right of way. That allows it to be faster, more frequent and more reliable. Trains are the best example and that’s one of the reasons rail is so desirable, but buses can also be given this advantage – as has happened on the Northern Busway.

The busway is a train-like service with stations, not stops, high “turn-up-and-go” frequencies and direct unencumbered routes. It attracts riders well above the rate of other bus services, simply because it is better, and consistently so.

Promisingly, we are not yet delivering services to true rapid transit standards. As the rail service introduces the new trains to all its commuter lines, we can expect higher frequencies and longer operating hours. And as the city end of the busway gains more dedicated lanes and proper stations, its services will

The City unleashed

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also improve markedly. Currently, only 41 per cent of its route is separated from other traffic.

All of this makes it baffling that when the government recently announced special accelerated funding (not from fuel taxes) for NZTA’s plans to widen the northern motorway, it slashed the extension of the busway north of its existing limit. Similarly, the proposed North Western Busway has been excluded from the plans for all the work currently being done on the north western motorway.

This is especially concerning as the buses on the busway run at full cost recovery, or very close to it: fares pay for all, or nearly all, their operation. Not only that, buses on the busway are twice as efficient as buses in the rest of the city. For the same cost a busway bus covers twice the distance of other buses and carries more people. And because they are not stuck in traffic we are not paying for them to pump out diesel fumes pointlessly as they battle through clogged streets.

A similar logic is at play on the rail network. The new trains glide silently along on our own clean, largely renewably generated electricity, and those electrons cost less than half the price of the dirty old carcinogenic

and imported diesel. The new electric trains can carry more than twice the capacity of the existing trains, and as we’ve seen already, they attract many more fare-paying customers.

Those two million new passengers, each paying anything from $1.60 to over $10 a ride, are adding around $5 million for services we were running anyway. Just one more reason the new trains are as pretty to a cost accountant as they are to anyone concerned about the planet.

For the price of building rapid transit systems we get material improvement to both fare income and cost of operation, as well as relief for road users and “place quality” improvement.

It’s worth noting, also, that only a very small part of the whole current system even aspires to rapid transit status. There is no rapid transit in the North West, the South East or around Mangere and the airport. But the potential exists.

While the city works its way round to embracing that potential, there is much else that can be done. Many other bus priority measures can deliver service upgrades and significant operating savings.


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Auckland Transport could decide, for example, to reduce the amount of street parking on arterial bus routes. This would enable the creation of fully joined-up bus lanes on major bus routes like Mt Eden Rd and Manukau Rd, and could easily be done for at least the peak and shoulder hours.

The major cost here lies in having to endure the complaints of relatively small numbers people used to parking on these public roads, and of car drivers who fail to grasp that the more fully laden the buses are, the easier their drive will be.

As international evidence shows, the higher the priority given to other modes (including cycling and walking), the better the traffic will flow. This happens because as the other modes improve more people choose them out of rational self-interest, leaving their cars at home more often.

Auckland Transport needs to patiently but forcefully explain to drivers that bus and bike lanes are their best friends, emptying their lane of other vehicles, saving them in rates and taxes, and increasing the productivity of the whole city. It is not clear the culture at AT is ready for such sophistication.

Over the next year-and-a-half the two big lines, the Southern and the Western, will get their new trains and higher frequencies. More rail ridership growth is already baked into the pie – but even on the rail network there are looming problems.

One issue is the boom in rail freight going on right now, especially into and out of Auckland and Tauranga. This is great news: it’s far better to be moving those heavy loads on trains and not on dangerous, less-fuel-efficient, road-damaging trucks.

ESSAY3

The City unleashed

ESSAY3

AS INTERNATIONAL EVIDENCE SHOwS, THE HIGHER THE PRIORITY GIVEN TO OTHER MODES (INCLUDING CYCLING AND wALKING), THE BETTER THE TRAFFIC wILL FLOw.

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But it also means the rail lines at the core of the Auckland network are getting a great deal of new traffic carrying both passengers and freight. The long-planned third mainline on the main trunk route through the industrial areas of south Auckland is desperately needed to alleviate this pressure. It won’t be a huge expense – certainly, it will cost a great deal less than the $140 million being showered on one intersection on the way to the airport – but because it’s rail it gets no love from the government.

Which brings us to the City Rail Link. Without the CRL, all growth on the network has an absolute upper limit. We exceeded 10 million trips last year. Even if we don’t increase the current 18 per cent growth rate, that will double in four years. But that rate will increase, as the rest of the network experiences the benefits of electrification. Passenger trips are likely to top 20 million a year before the end of 2017.

And there the growth will stall. The dead end at Britomart means it just won’t be possible to run more services. The CRL, however, will turn Britomart from an in-and-out station into a genuine metro-style through station. That will allow more than

twice as many trains on the lines, which will mean more frequent, and therefore more patronised, services to and from the suburbs. The potential for this to transform not just our travel behaviour but much else in the city is enormous.

And if the CRL doesn’t proceed? We’ll waste half the capacity of the existing rail network. Auckland will be stuck with its inefficient over-reliance on car travel; we will lack the balance of a city with great options for its citizens; we will have less freedom of choice.

It is hard not to be deeply critical of the way Auckland Council and Auckland Transport have communicated the value of this project. Even though surveys repeatedly show the public is way ahead of the government and its officials in understanding the need to invest in urban rail, the possibilities the project will unlock have not been well presented.

It seems easier to discuss what it costs than what it’s worth. Perhaps that’s because the outcomes are so multifaceted and game-changing. Perhaps it’s also that those responsible for promoting the CRL struggle themselves to imagine how different the city will be once it’s here.


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The new Aotea Station under midtown will be bigger than Britomart, and therefore the whole central CBD area, from the universities across to Sky City, will be transformed. But the CRL will have a bigger impact than that – and it will occur far from the route of the tunnels.

Turn-up-and-go frequencies (as opposed to the less frequent timetable-driven services) are critical to PT success. The CRL will allow them throughout the network. And there will be no assumption that your destination is always in the inner city: you will be able to make any number of intermediate and less-predictable journeys.

One way to think of the CRL is to compare it to the motorway junction it will pass under. Imagine driving into town on a motorway, and having to stop short because there is no Spaghetti Junction to join everything up. That’s how it is for public transport

users in Auckland now. The CRL is the key that will unlock the whole urban rail network, just as Spaghetti Junction has for motorway users.

And despite being just two little tunnels seamlessly snaking their way beneath our streets, it will be more like the motorway network in capacity than you might expect. The CRL will enable up to 24 trains, each carrying up to 750 people, to run each way every hour. That’s like adding an eight-lane motorway into the city, without putting a single extra vehicle on the streets.

This is the spatial efficiency of urban rail. It delivers an enormous economic force: people, without each one of them coming with a space-eating tin box.

We now have around 90km of nearly fully upgraded electrified rail line. Some 40 stations of varying quality. Yet the potential of this high-capacity resource is underutilised and largely hidden from most Aucklanders. Doubling patronage to 20 million trips a year is not enough. Rail will remain a bottled-up force until it climbs to 30, 40, 50 million trips.

This is the great opportunity of the CRL, and there is no other city in the world in Auckland’s position. Most would leap at the chance to get a

ESSAY3

The City unleashed

ESSAY3

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widespread metro system just for the cost of 3.4km of tunnels and three new stations. This is the greatest deal we will see for generations.

That’s how the CRL should be being marketed. Not as an inner-city project but as the means to deliver clean, efficient, reliable rapid transit – a true metro system – across most of the city.

This will change our options in so many ways. Just one example: want to catch a show at Vector Arena – or any of the

other big venues south of the harbour bridge, for that matter – without the hassle of trying to find or pay for a carpark? Problem solved.

And although Auckland Transport isn’t communicating this well, the CRL will speed all journeys. This is especially so for those on the Western Line, because it will give those trains a direct route instead of trundling them on a roundabout journey south, with a few minutes turning around at Newmarket.


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This will lead to some startling time savings. Travellers from New Lynn, for example, catching a train to town and then a bus up to the site of the new Aotea station at midtown will cut their journey from 51 minutes to 23.

The CRL will in effect pick up every station on the Western Line from Mt Eden out and shift them substantially closer to the inner city. And proximity equals value.

The harbour bridge itself, opened in 1959, was the last Auckland project to achieve this kind of transformation, by moving the North Shore closer to the city. The CRL will help do for the West what the bridge did for the North.

West Auckland needs that. It struggles with a lack of local employment and underpowered local business opportunities. Westies will be able to commute more easily to the huge job market of the central city, and that will

ESSAY3

The City unleashed

make Avondale, New Lynn and centres further west more attractive to live in, and therefore more attractive to do business in.

Why stop there? I have an even bolder claim for Auckland, once the CRL is operating, and I’m certain I’m on the money: I believe this new layer to our world will profoundly alter Auckland’s idea about itself.

The growth of a metro system out of our inefficient little commuter network


will redefine the city. The beautiful harbours and extraordinary volcanic cones, and all the cultural strengths of tangata whenua and the waves of immigration that have followed – those are the things we treasure because they make us not like anywhere else. But we’ll also have a thing that’s taken for granted among nearly all really good cities. We’ll have decent rapid transit. We’ll be a metro city.

With our new metro system and the spatial improvements made possible by its seamless capacity, Auckland will genuinely be able to compete with those bigger cities across the Tasman for quality, economic effectiveness and desirability, and it will better them. We won’t even need to get that big.

The Jewel of the South Pacific.

It’s right there, that possibility. Now.

Footbridge over the rail line at Pt Resolution

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URBAN- NATION.

ESSAY4

New Zealand can’t put the urban genie back in its bottle By Peter Nunns, first published on 29 August 2014

Although the majority of New Zealanders have lived in towns and cities for almost a century, it sometimes

seems like we’re in denial that we live in an urban nation.

This unease came to the fore during the debate over the Auckland Plan and the Unitary Plan. As it turns out, some people are uneasy about Auckland’s emergence as a large and increasingly sophisticated city.

31Greater Auckland: Essays on Transport and Urbanism

At that time, the New Zealand print media published several articles calling for a “national population strategy” to forestall further growth in Auckland and direct it to rural centres. Here’s some examples of the arguments put forward:

“Redirecting people away from settling or living in Auckland would be a positive step. As so much of the population increase is likely to come from an increase in births, a decrease is urgent. Incentives need to be

provided such as free contraception, especially to those under 20 years of age. The provision of family benefits regardless of whether you have two or 10 children should be looked at.”

“Short of putting contraceptives in the water supply we are unlikely to do much about our rate of natural increase – so realistically any policy needs to focus on migration patterns, particularly within New Zealand – the so-called ‘ northward drift’.”

“Realistically we cannot talk about Auckland in isolation from the rest of New Zealand. We have no national population strategy – though some useful work has been done in the past. Neither do we have a regional development strategy, an essential mechanism for achieving a more equitable sharing of economic and population growth.”

This is a seductive idea, but it won’t work. Developing policy to redistribute growth is bloody hard without spending massive amounts of money and tightly controlling economic activity. If we seriously tried to subsidise or regulate growth away from Auckland, we’d probably just end up mis-allocating resources and reduce our wellbeing. As urban

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O’Connell Street - Central Auckland

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economist Edward Glaeser is fond of pointing out, good policy should aim to help poor people rather than poor places.

Fortunately, we don’t have to speculate about the consequences of regional growth policies, as we have a real-world historical example to draw upon. From the 1930s to the 1980s, New Zealand tried a massive policy experiment – it invested heavily in regional development and used regulatory controls to spread investment and employment around the country.

Looking back on it, the reach of these regulations and investments is extraordinary. So, for example, you had:

• Costly production and export subsidies for farmers to prop up uneconomic farms. By 1984, subsidies accounted for almost 40% of the average sheep and beef farmer’s income - a clearly unsustainable situation.

• The Transport Licensing Act 1931, which banned trucks from moving goods more than 150 kilometres before its repeal in 1982. This imposed high costs to distance, encouraging small-scale local production rather than centralising plants.

• Regulations that virtually prohibited the opening or closing of meatworks and other rural processing plants between the 1930s and 1980s. When the Patea meatworks closed in 1982, they were the first meatworks to close in half a century – which is bizarre when you realise how much cheaper refrigerated shipping got over this period.

• A policy of distributing major industrial facilities around the country – an aluminium smelter for

ESSAY4

New Zealand can’t put the urban genie back in its bottle

IN SHORT, wE SHOULD ACCEPT THE REALITY OF URBAN GROwTH: PEOPLE wANT TO LIVE IN AUCKLAND AND START BUSINESSES HERE FOR GOOD REASONS

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Bluff, a steelworks for Glenbrook, a pulp and paper mill for Kawerau, etc.

• The use of the Railways Department and Forest Service as rural employment schemes.

So it’s worth asking whether these policies worked. We know that they were economically costly – but did they actually succeed in redistributing growth from Auckland to the regions? The data suggests that the answer is no.

Auckland’s population growth began diverging from Wellington and

Christchurch early on, in the period after World War II. Interestingly the almost total removal of rural subsidies during the 1980s doesn’t seem to have accelerated Auckland’s divergence. In fact, Auckland’s annual per capita growth rate seems to have fallen after deregulation, although growth slowed more in other places.

In short, we should accept the reality of urban growth: People want to live in Auckland and start businesses here for good reasons, and we can’t (and shouldn’t) try to stop them. The idea


Population growth in New Zealand’s major cities from 1926 to 2006 from Grimes and Tarrant (2013).

-

200,000

400,000

600,000

800,000

1,000,000

1,200,000

1,400,000

1926 1936 1946 1956 1966 1976 1986 1996 2006

New Zealand's urban population growth, 1926-2006

Hamilton Dunedin Christchurch Wellington Auckland

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that we can put the urban genie back in its bottle is sheer fantasy. If we try, we’ll only make ourselves worse off.

Our only choice is whether we will have a good city – an interesting and prosperous place – or a crippled, unsuccessful city. Given that, our focus should be on making the best urban places we can. We need Auckland to be a dynamic and liveable city rather than an overgrown small town. And that means investing and planning in a city-like way: getting ambitious about rapid transit, celebrating our mixed-use public spaces, and accepting that density and amenity aren’t mutually exclusive.

ESSAY4


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Auckland Waterfront - Queens Wharf

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ESSAY5

The Metropolitan RevolutionBy Kent Lundberg, first published on 23 May 2014

Our open, innovative economy increasingly craves proximity and extols integration, which allows knowledge to be transferred easily between, within, and across clusters, firms, workers and supporting institutions, thereby enabling the creation of new ideas that fuel even greater economic activity and growth.

Bruce Katz, The Metropolitan Revolution.

PROXIMITY & INTEGRATION.


A while back I took a look at land values in the Auckland

City Centre and discovered how extreme it is compared to properties adjacent to, but not in the centre.

Taking a cross section look those land values also reveals some interesting anomalies on the western side of town where land values seems to be compromised compared to the valley around Queen St and the ridge to the east. Steep elevations and historical land use activity were suggested as an explanation, but it is more likely influenced by the motorway-scaled one way road systems of Hobson and Nelson streets which create a barrier to movement and accessibility.

The fundamental function of a city is to facilitate exchange- social, economic and cultural. Urban land value is created by accessibility and centrality; simply, how many people can access the site, or inversely what can people access within close proximity from the site. While useful for shaving a few minutes off a commute, streets designed to prioritise vehicular access such as the one-way couplets of Hobson and Nelson Streets destroy urban land value.

Here are couple of images from a dystopic tour of the west side of the City Centre.

The prioritisation of automobiles repels human activity. So while it may be easy to access offices and places in

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the City Centre from the motorways, this access comes at a cost. In urban settings automobility limits personal mobility (walking) both by creating repulsive environments and by the spatial requirements of moving and storing cars, resulting for example in having to wait for two minutes to walk across a street.

To put it another way, while the prioritisation of the long distance

car trip with motorway-style infrastructure may save time on one trip, these designs severely obstruct other short trips or more spatially efficient public transport trips.

This returns us to the value of a city: its ability to facilitate exchange, or as some spatial economists obliquely say ‘to minimise transport costs’. Today we continue plan our transportation systems based upon the objective of minimising motor vehicle delay, but this is seriously flawed, especially in urban contexts.

The most valuable trips in urban areas are not the motor vehicle trip, but the ones buried in the ecosystem of city life which go unmeasured. Critically these “trips” are enabled by highly efficient transport modes.

ESSAY5

The Metropolitan Revolution

Space required to move vehicles at particular speeds (Modified from Happy City, Charles Montgomery)

Amount of area (m2) required for mode when not moving

2m2

Amount of area (m2) needed to move one person at a specific speed

5m2 7m2 140m2

30m2

2m2

2m2

0.5m2

5km/hr 15km/hr 50km/hr 50km/hr40-60 Passengers Single occupant

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These trips enable the phenomenon of cityness – the messy, complex, dense convergence of the physical environment at multiple scales. Increasingly these spatial properties of cities are being recognised for their value in fostering innovation and productivity. In the recent book Metropolitan Revolution, Bruce Katz documents how cities are radically adapting to the new realities of proximity that are required for businesses and cities to compete on the global scale.

The proximity effect can be staggering: Gerry Carlino has found that the number of patents per capita increase, on average, by 20 to 30 percent for every doubling of employment density, with the greatest increases expected within the most densely populated portions of a metropolitan area. Stuart Rosenthal and William Strange find that intellectual spillovers that drive innovation and employment drop off dramatically as firms and people move more than a mile apart.” At a distance of just over a mile, the power of intellectual ferment to create another new firm or another new job drops to one-tenth or less of what is in closer in.

Here is a map of the Auckland CBD showing this mile metric. Coincidentally it fits nicely within the motorway collar.

“Intellectual spillovers ...drop off dramatically as firms and people move more than a mile apart.” Bruce Katz.

On a finer scale Katz refers to the often cited work of Arzaghi and Henderson who found that the value of clustering for advertising industries is highly dependent on proximity to other agencies and thus being “close to the center of action.” The value gained from proximity for this industry outweighed the rent premiums. In fact they found that these spatial advantages


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ESSAY5


(information spillovers and frequent contact) to be so narrowly focused geographically that they dissipate over a short distance if walking to a meeting place becomes difficult… “and are gone by 750 meters.”

Katz’s bigger point here is that it is not just media companies that require this spatial fix now, but a broader range of knowledge-intensive sectors such as science and technology heavy fields.

Lets consider that 750m metric for a moment. This distance generally represents a 10-minute walk. Add a hill, throw in an intersection or two (or just Fanshawe St) and very quickly that employment-dense catchment that firms would pay a premium for is now marginalised. Here is an illustration of 750 meter (radius) catchments across the CBD. Consider if these circles having the depth that is required to support a job dense environment in this economy. Now chip away at these circles with a motorway, a one-way couplet, a two-minute wait at a traffic signal, some hills, and even the water’s edge. What’s left?

Benefits of clustering for some industries “dissipate very quickly with distance… and are gone by 750 metres”

In Auckland the premium for city centre land is impressive. Also, the motorway system seems to radically constrain the cbd like a noose. This also has the effect of concentrating capital values excessively in the very centre (near Queen Street) since this is where the abundant proximity remains. Firms locating on the edge, or cbd-adjacent (outside the motorways) have limited access to the concentration of people in the city centre.

THE HUNGER FOR KNOWLEDGE AND THE IMPERATIVE TO COLLABORATE HAS SPATIAL IMPLICATIONS. PARTNERS WANT TO BE NEAR PARTNERS FOR THE SIMPLE REASON THAT PROXIMITY ENABLES CONSTANT INTERACTION AND KNOWLEDGE SHARING.

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As a single fix the City Rail Link has the potential to span the motorways and create “centre of action”-like proximity to places like Karangahape Rd, Newmarket and Eden Terrace. In addition to the massive mobility efficiency of underground rail, it will also critically bring a degree of scale to our CBD which is currently chopped

into an archipelago by the motorways. The rail tunnel however, will not address the street-level barriers that repel movement and proximity. This will require a major shift in the way people see the value of the city and recognition that there are real trade-offs associated with applying outdated transportation objectives in urban areas.

Westhaven Promenade - Saint Marys Bay

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The economic importance of cities is well known internationally. Cities are tremendously productive

precisely because they concentrate a lot of skills, ideas, and capital in a small area.

But surely things are different in New Zealand due to our much more agriculturally-based economy? To answer this question, Statistics New Zealand’s GDP and employment data was used to measure the distribution of economic activity throughout the country.

The results show that our economy is primarily urban. The majority of New Zealand’s economy is located in its three main cities – Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch.

ESSAY6

Where does New Zealand’s economy happen?By Peter Nunns, first published on 13 October 2014

PRODUCTIVITY.Downtown Auckland


Where is New Zealand’s GDP produced?

56% of NZ GDP

44% of NZ GDP

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Where does New Zealand’s economy happen?

All together, 56% of New Zealand’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is produced in a mere 0.9% of its total land area. There is more economic activity happening within the three orange blotches than outside of it.

While rural and urban economies are interdependent – they sell goods

and services to each other – this data highlights the degree to which New Zealand’s economy is now an urban economy. This won’t change any time soon – if we are to generate new sources of wealth in the future, it will happen in the cities.

This same pattern can be seen from the GDP produced in New Zealand’s smaller cities. The fifteen largest urban areas in New Zealand, from Auckland to Gisborne, are home to over three-quarters of our national economy.

Auckland’s economy alone outweighs, by a large margin, the non-urban economy of the rest of New Zealand.

ESSAY6

Rank City Employees GDP Cumulative GDP1 Auckland 549,800 $72.4b 34.2%2 Wellington 192,000 $25.9b 46.4%3 Christchurch 178,500 $20.7b 56.2%4 Hamilton 72,600 $8.4b 60.2%5 Tauranga 47,300 $5.4b 62.7%6 Napier-Hastings 47,900 $4.9b 65.0%7 Dunedin 44,100 $4.7b 67.3%8 New Plymouth 25,700 $4.5b 69.4%9 Palmerston North 37,700 $3.7b 71.1%10 Nelson 27,300 $2.6b 72.4%11 Rotorua 20,900 $2.4b 73.5%12 Invercargill 19,200 $2.3b 74.6%13 Whangarei 21,800 $2.2b 75.6%14 Whanganui 13,600 $1.3b 76.3%15 Gisborne 11,600 $1.2b 76.8%

Fifteen largest cities 1,310,000 $162.6b 76.8%Rest of New Zealand 425,200 $49.0b 23.2%

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Where does New Zealand’s economy happen?

Central Auckland’s newly revived Fort Lane

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“We are well past the turning point. Auckland is already reurbanising in the best possible way.”

ESSAY7 PREDICTION.

Auckland in ten years’ timeBy Nicolas Reid, first published on 7 October 2014

Within ten years Auckland will have the best transit system in Australasia.

The City Rail Link and the near-metro rail system it creates will only be a couple of years old, but well ahead of projections. More importantly the new bus network will be carrying several times the patronage it does today,

New medium density greenfields housing in Hobsonville

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Most of the growth will happen across the day and on evenings and weekends, with the biggest gains coming from the suburbs rather than the city centre.

People will have had seven or eight years to get used to the fact that using the bus network is fast and easy at any time of day, and any day of the week, and usually easier than dealing with traffic and parking. Passenger transit will become a normal thing, not a commuter thing. We’ve seen fourfold increases on the busway and rail systems as a result of changing to regular, reliable, usable systems. That is about to happen for every bus route on every street in Auckland.

A whole generation will have moved through high school and university knowing that it’s often easier to catch transit, and cheaper too. And it will be cheaper, not just because of new “all you can eat” fare passes, but especially because the large increase in all-day use will have bumped up the fiscal efficiency of transit. Fares will be the same as they are today in dollar terms, but considerably cheaper in real terms.

Traffic will be as high as ever, sitting at about the same equilibrium. Parking will be more expensive. People will drive a lot less per capita, but there

will be more people. Cars will look and feel much like they are today, as will roads. People will still call for huge new motorways, but the sheer cost of retrofitting them to the built up city will ensure they stay on the drawing board.

Cycling will be a big thing, still not huge in absolute numbers, but high profile. Trunk cycleways will stretch across the region and cycle lanes will be painted on to city and suburban streets with every upgrade or repair.

Aucklanders will continue to flock to jobs in the city centre, but will favour working in true town centres rather than suburban industrial-office parks. People will expect a range of transport options to get to work and demand services and entertainment within revitalised employment nodes.

Housing will be cheaper. Not because there is more land, but because there are more options to buy the right home

Greater Auckland: Essays on Transport and Urbanism

AUCKLAND wILL BE A wORLD CAPITAL OF CULTURE AND COOL. wE ARE ALREADY ON THE RADAR OF TREND SPOTTERS, IT wON’T TAKE TOO MUCH TO BUMP US UP TO THE TOP OF THE LIST.

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This will have a huge impact on the vitality of Auckland. Just going out once a month more on average will mean an extra twenty million person trips and activities a year.

We are well past the turning point. Auckland is already reurbanising in the best possible way.

We can’t see it so much because we are in the middle of the change, but looking back in ten years we will see this as the decade where Auckland grew into its boots as a stunning, confident and fantastic city. Like everything, we’ll look back and wonder why we didn’t do it all sooner.

to suit one’s needs be it a flat, house, apartment, terrace, townhouse or studio. Good quality developments in the places people want to live will have taken the crisis factor out of living in Auckland.

Auckland will be a world capital of culture and cool. We are already on the radar of trend spotters, it won’t take too much to bump us up to the top of the list. The urban form of the city centre will go from strength to strength, and suburban centres will be copying and innovating too. Transport becoming far cheaper and easier will mean people go out more, boosting attendance at shows, plays, gigs, bars and restaurants, but also parks, playgrounds, beaches and squares.

ESSAY7

Auckland in ten years time

LIKE EVERYTHING, wE’LL LOOK BACK AND wONDER wHY wE DIDN’T DO IT ALL SOONER.

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Auckland in ten years time

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For more information on Greater Auckland or to join the society visit www.greaterauckland.org.nz

For more information on Greater Auckland or to join the society visit www.greaterauckland.org.nz

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GA.www.greaterauckland.org.nz

Documents

GREATER AUCKLAND...Auckland is urbanising to a new intensity: getting bigger as well as undergoing profound morphological change. These shifts make Auckland an anomaly in New Zealand,