Yoda.
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast.
Presented by the New Zealand Herald.
March madness is upon us, which means it's the busiest time of year for anyone trying to get anywhere. It usually marks the end of the summer holiday period. School and university is back in session and most people are heading back to work. So whether you're biking, driving, or taking a train or bus, it is night marish. But it does lead back to that age old question how do we solve our traffic problems? Today on the Front Page, we're joined by Matt Lowry from Greater Auckland to.
Look at some of the possible solutions.
So, Matt, we always love to find someone or something to blame with problems like this. Auckland's Mayor Wayne Brown has pointed the finger at road cones mostly for example. But do we actually know what causes traffic jams and congestion?
Yeah? I mean, ultimately it's too many people trying to use the same piece of road or service. And so if you have too many people and not enough capacity or not enough alternatives, then you get congestion and you get frustrated.
Well, Auckland does have been bitching about traffic for decades, probably since the first motorway was built. Why does it seem like we haven't done much to change anything.
There's a lot has.
Been done that The issue is that Auckland has grown massively over even just the last decade, and so there's only so much infrastructure that can be built, particularly when this stuff costs a lot of money. It takes a long time to deliver, you know, that's hard to keep up with the demand of.
Essentially, is it time to start introducing congestion charges? I know we all love talking about that.
Yeah, I think it is.
We've seen in cities where it has been introduced that it has made a big difference, and the most recent one of those is New York, and New York is seeing substantial crops in congestion and that means people who are driving and taking having faster journeys. But it's also not impacted local businesses and what have you that have
that was you know, people were worried about. So it has been beneficial and it does raise revenue, and that revenue, as you can be used to fund other infrastructure or other services that can help make it easier to get around.
Yeah, but when I think of New York, I think about the subway system. Do we have something similar here?
We don't, not directly, but we will have the city round and shortly, which will make our rail network significantly better. And then you know, we have the Northern Busway, which is which is kind of like around network, which is great, and we've got more of those coming, but we also need to build a lot more of them that you know, that will cost money, takes time, and one of the things that congestion pricing can do is encourage people to think about.
How their travel and when their travel.
So you know, sometimes there are people who are traveling who simply could delay their trip by an hour or something like that to go to where they might be wanted to go, and that might be enough to help these congestion. We see the impact that a slight reduction and traffic and it feels like a lot, but it's only a slight reduction in real numbers that school holidays have and that means that as soon as school holidays come around, the roads are generally a lot freer.
There's still some congestion.
It's still not like a free flow condition, but it is easier to get around, and that's a small percentage of users changing their habits and the travel. And if congestion pricing can enable that, you know, we could have school holiday levels of traffic all the time.
It's not a surprisingly new thing.
You're just encouraging people to change their day or do something differently or better still, get on a bus. There are options, you know.
Get on a bus.
Browns take more people.
Yeah, but therein lies the problem with our public transport.
The main problem is people just don't want to do it.
I remember having a conversation here on this on this program and the feedback that came through from people.
When they tried to.
People when we talk about congestion charges, how much like what are some of the numbers being thrown around?
Yeah, generally it's potentially a couple of dollars per journey, and that means you might travel in an out of, or through congestion zone.
And so it's a cost to travel through that. It's not a huge roup. It's also not in significant over a long period of time.
But the exact amounts have to be whipped out and whipped through that The previous estimations were sort of in the in a few dollars to three four dollars, depending on the time of day, the location.
Per journey.
What has patronage been like on Auckland's public transport?
Has it picked up post COVID not.
Fully, So we're back to sort of around eighty five to ninety percent of what it was post COVID pre COVID, I should say, but what we're seeing is that there are a wider range of people using public transport, but they're using it often at different times. So where particularly on things like crosstown buses or buses that aren't going to the city center or trains, those trips are actually higher than they wear pre COVID on the weekends off, so those trips are there are more people using public
transport now than there were back prior to COVID. Where the drop has been is in the sort of commuters to the city center, and that's really what's driven those numbers to change.
Has anyone actually ever crunched the numbers and worked out how much it had cost to make public transport completely free.
Yeah, I don't have the.
Exact number of the topic, but it's hundreds of millions of dollars a year to do that. And the challenge has always been with this discussion is what's the best use of that money. Is the best use of that money to make public transport free and make it easy. But the problem that you come with that is if you have a lot more people using it at buses are also also have congestion issues and capacity issues, so our trains do we have enough capacity.
In our public transport system to be able to cope with that?
And what has been seen in some cities that have tried this is that the buses and the trains get so forward people who are who might be instead of walking a short distance or cypling a short distance or whatever, they switched to using the public transport system that clogs the public transport system up, which means that it's not very usable for people who might want to use it somewhere else, and so you don't necessarily get the beach shift in usage or in behavior that you might expect
you to get if you just gather for free, and that money is money that could be used to help improve the system well.
Organs train services will have been suspended for almost one hundred days between Christmas and January twenty twenty six as improvements are made to the rail network before the City rail Link is complete.
Have we seen much disruption here so far?
Yeah, there's been.
Huge disruption that has occurred within the round it within the last five years.
Really since about twenty twenty.
We've always had disruption that's occurred, but the last five years it has been quite significant with various amounts of you know what called rebuald work, with various issues that have had to have cropped up and needed to be fixed, and these often take quite some time. That is still being worked through, and their intention is to hype, is to get that finished before the City rail and opens up.
And if you actually look at what's going on and why, it's really frustrating as a user to have to experience that disruption. We're effectively building a whole almost a brand new railway system in the middle of that times because they're having to dig out all the foundations, relay all the tracks because you know, some of these foundations are of the tracts are over one hundred years old, they're
not in great condition, they need to be replaced. And now we actually seen similar things happen and a lot of other cities around the world where these networks are having to be gone to undergo quite significant maintenance and repair cycles. In Australia number of lines that can think of that are doing that right now, and other countries as well.
That has to be frustrating for people who usually do or do rely on those services. Hey, do you think there's any changing that attitude, particularly when I guess rail network seems to be shut down all the time, blood buses can't turn up late, and I mean, what do we do?
Yeah, it's really it's a really tough thing.
It's hard to justify someone using a public transport system when it's unreliable. And so the two biggest drivers of public transport usage is the frequency of services and obviously where they go to is important, but the frequency of services and the reliability, and so we've taken the reliability away quite substantially.
Buses.
We also had the reliability issue last year or a couple of years ago when we had a bus driver shortage.
Those that bus driver shortage has been resolved and actually if you look at the bus the numbers, the bus usage is almost back to what it was pre COVID, so that the bus usage is about ninety seven percent of what it was prior to COVID versus trains and ferries are trains are sort of more in the sixty percent, So that's where we've talked earlier about the up to ninety percent of pre COVID levels, but buses are actually closer to one hundred and that's because they are more reliable.
Again, they are.
Moving people that The issue with buses is often that they get stuck in congestion, and the solution to that is generally we need more bus priorities, a bus lanes, things like that that allow buses to avoid that congestion. And that means that when they do that, they'd be reliable, they're faster, and they become more intrecutive. And we just have to look at the Northern Busway as a great
example of a very high level bit of structure. More people travel on the Northern Busway than any other bus route of the country by a substantial margin.
There's no such thing as a sure thing in construction. Nothing is guaranteed. And I've been around long enough to see things come and whack you around the head when you thought you heard everything resolved. And I've stopped in my career some time ago, promising ministers there's certainty because there's a danger they'll be disappointed. If you look at any project, you have a whole series of traditional construction risks. You have a procurement risk, numbers are always different once
you get into contract. You have a design risk. We had a big underground risk where nearly all the city ratlink is built underground. So once you go underground, you're going to find things you didn't anticipate. We've found faults and various things we didn't anticipate.
What are we expecting the CRL to be up and running by the way, Yeah, current.
Planning is that it will be open early next year. The executator has not been set. That depends on how testing goes. And there's a bunch of work that can transport has to do inters, training drivers and setting up their own processes. So that stuff is underway. But the indications are currently probably early next year, maybe February to April, but that's.
Not locked in yet.
Well, given all the red tape there is around this stuff, do you think it's enough time from saying now to February next April for this to be sorted out?
Yeah? These level crossings won't be sorted out by then.
Part of the issue with resolving them, particularly that six years mentioned in Southakland, is that they can't all be done one at the same time, because that would mean that there's no crossings available for people to get across it around it, So you have to do some and then wait for that to be finished before you can start the next one. So that's why that time frame is in place. But those will be resolved at least
relatively shortly. You know, six years is a long time, but it's still relatantly shortened the ground scheme of things. But there is currently as I mentioned, no there is twenty level crossings on the Western Line.
There's no plans for those.
And the Western Line is actually going to experience huge benefits from the Cereal because it have much shorter Juney times to the city center and there's gonna be a lot of usage and not going to be able an increased capacity very much.
From what it is currently.
I mentioned earlier.
Wayne Brown's anti traffic cone stance is just this week called for a pause on the sixty million dollar Victorious Street upgrade, which is adding cycle paths from Sky City to Albert Park and reducing traffic to one lane each way.
Do you think his concerns here are valid?
No, I don't.
This has been a plan that's been in place for over a decade. It's twenty twelve that original Council Ridgie signed Blok. It was confirmed again back in twenty twenty that this was a preferred option.
And what's recapning here is Victoria.
Street is where one of the main entrances of the t y Heritaria station for the City railminkers. We're going to have thousands and thousands of people pouring out of that station every single day, and the upgrade that's going on is about making sure there's enough capacity within that pedestrial, within the streets, and within the parts to handle all these people that are going to be using the trains that now from the City railant when it does open
in the future. And it's about making the city center more walkable, more pedestrian for it. And what we're seeing is when we do that in other areas of the city center where individuals have happened, that we see increases in usage in retail it occurs, and better outcomes for businesses, for residents and to make courage more people to use it as well.
It feels like we're constantly talking about how unequipped to Auckland's roading network is for its population size, and we're only getting bigger. Is there any hope on the horizon? And don't tell me that everyone needs to get on bikes?
No, I don't think you've runs on bikes and even a small a smaller proportion using bikes at five ten percent would make a huge difference to how Aucklander is get around it, and really is we need a wide
range of options. You know, we need better better bike options, we need better public transport options, and we need to make it easier to It's hard to make it easier to drive, but we can, through things like congestion pricing, make it free up the roads a bit and that by encouraging people to either is it not travel at the side at peak times or change out they travel. And so it's really not a single solution. There's a wide range of solutions that are required.
Yeah. The challenge. One of the.
Challenges with Auckland is because of our geography, we have a lot of pinch points on our roading network that other cities don't necessarily have, but that means a lot of traffic is funneled into into and full of crossings, and so for you to think about on coming into the dismus you've got, it's only a can full of roads that.
People can actually use, and that funnels all.
That traffic into very narrow corridors, and so it's very hard to avoid congestion completely when you've got that sort of situation occurring.
Looking at road options, there's very few options.
That you could build that for that you do, particularly anything affordably betwood, that you make any material difference to congestion with an auckland. So it's really about providing more options for people, is the key.
Thanks for joining us, Matt Problem.
That's it for this episode of The Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzadherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Seals and Richard Martin, who is also our sound engineer.
I'm Chelsea Daniels.
Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in on Money Day for another look behind the headlines.