Auckland is too big, needs to stop growing, and preferably shrink a bit

Friday, 24 December 2021

The Dame Whina Cooper City Rail Link tunnel boring machine breaks through at Aotea station site

OPINION: Auckland city has expanded outwards from a narrow isthmus between two splendid harbours – and that has led to some big problems that appear likely to only get worse.

The isthmus is entirely built up from the Manukau Harbour to the Waitematā Harbour. There is no land route around the urban development.

That means anyone wanting to travel between Waikato and Northland, with no interest whatsoever in stopping in Auckland, is still forced to travel through the city. That’s no good for the travellers and no good for the people working and living in the city.

Traffic heading north on the southern motorway near Greenlane is heavily congested.

All New Zealanders have heard horror stories about Auckland’s traffic, with the Southern Motorway being a hellscape of particular awfulness.

Peak morning traffic on the Auckand Northwestern Motorway.

* Better public transport needed now

* Auckland 2038: A city on the move but not at the wheel (as much)

Avoiding the city during peak traffic times – which have mostly become longer over the years – is a key factor in any travel plan that involves crossing Auckland.

A spill over a lane on Auckland's Harbour Bridge caused traffic to back up on the Southern Motorway.

What are the chances it will ever get any better? Probably almost none, no matter how attractive Aucklanders with reasonable access find the Northern Busway, or the improved railway system when the City Rail Link opens in nearly four years’ time.

According to the TomTom traffic index in 2019 – before Covid confused things - Auckland was the 105th most congested city globally, out of 416 cities in 57 countries covered. It was 2 per cent more congested than in 2018.

While Auckland isn’t close to being worst, it is much further from being the best.

A $315 million rail line through south Auckland will be completed in time for the opening of the City Rail Link in 2024.

As for light rail, if construction ever starts, the priority is for a staggeringly expensive line from downtown south to Auckland Airport. Part of the justification for the project is that it will enable tens of thousands of new homes to be built.

And that was before Labour and National passed a sweeping law in December that will force councils in major centres to allow even more infill housing than they were previously aiming for.

That could mean more people living on the Auckland isthmus, putting even more pressure on the already jammed motorway system through the city.

There was an argument that the new law will not change the total number of people living in cities, but there seems little doubt the number of people living in Auckland will keep on growing, after edging lower in the Covid-hit year to June 2021.

According to Demographia, updated in 2021, the Auckland built-up urban area has a population of about 1.4 million. That area covers 523 square kilometres, and is continuously covered in urban development, with no rural land.

Stats NZ estimates the country’s population is nearly 5.13m. So, about 27 per cent of New Zealand’s population lives in the Auckland urban area.

Council budgets might be squeezed, but major existing projects including the City Rail Link continue unaffected.

The Auckland region had an average population growth rate of 2 per cent a year between 2013 and 2019, and before the Covid-related dip in the year to June 2021, had averaged population growth of 1.8 per cent a year for 20 years.

Stats NZ has said Auckland will likely have the highest average annual growth of New Zealand’s 16 regions over the next 30 years, and that the region’s population could reach 2 million by early next decade.

Even with the decline for the Auckland region as a whole in the latest year, the Papakura local board area grew 3.7 per cent, the fastest of any of the board areas. The large Franklin board area, which surrounds most of Papakura grew by 1.7 per cent.

Franklin and Papakura are in the south of Auckland, and large population increases in those areas would be expected to add users to the Southern Motorway, which passes through both of them.

A crash slows traffic on Auckland’s Northern Motorway.

Between the censuses of 2013 and 2018, the Papakura local board population grew by 26 per cent, compared to 11 per cent for the region as a whole. Franklin grew at a more modest 14.6 per cent, while the large and more rural board area at the north of the region – Rodney – grew by 21 per cent.

A big difference between the south and north is that a magnificent new piece of road is being built in the north, and will be providing four lanes of motorway through to the north side of Warkworth, hopefully by May 2022.

Driving north out of Auckland has always been a slow, winding grind, but over the decades, significant improvements have been made, pushing the stretch of four-lane motorway further north.

Hopefully by mid-2022, when the Hamilton section of the Waikato Expressway is due to be finished, there will be four high quality lanes all the way from just south of Cambridge to just north of Warkworth.

Labour Weekend traffic in 2020 at the interchange where Auckland's Southern joins the Southwestern Motorway.

But that won’t solve the problem of getting through Auckland. The growing population and increased housing density could well make the problem worse.

Continuing to push more people into an area that provides an unavoidable impediment to travel between two of the more habitable parts of the country – Northland on one side and Waikato/Bay of Plenty on the other – seems to be rather careless.

Drone footage taken between 7.30am and 8am looks at the impact on traffic of the opening of the Waterview Tunnel in 2017.

A sustained effort to attract people and industry to the many other desirable locations within, say, a 2½ to 3-hour drive from Auckland could end up providing far more benefits than those to be gained from continuing to jam more people into the city.

Along with the impossibility of avoiding Auckland if you want to travel on land between Northland and Waikato, another factor that could be seen to count against Auckland is its shape.

Some researchers have suggested the best shape for a city – in terms of moving efficiently from many points to many points within the city – is a circle, or something close to it. One research paper suggests it’s particularly important for encouraging walking trips.

Of New Zealand’s three large cities, Christchurch is the one closest to circle-shaped, while Wellington is far from it – apart from the concentrated area around downtown.

The Auckland isthmus does somewhat approach the shape of a circle, but that is only a portion of the city’s urban area. Add in all the rest of the built-up area, and it’s nothing like a circle, obviously because a large chunk of the space is water.

All that water helps provide a great landscape to live on, however it also appears to be making the development of a well-functioning city an insurmountable challenge.

There are other great, smaller places to live in the upper North Island, where large new towns could be built to meet modern needs, using knowledge developed over centuries about how to make a place somewhere good to live.

And while Auckland doesn’t cover a particularly large area – it’s only about 70km from Papakura in the south to Orewa in the north – getting around it at any reasonably busy time can be remorselessly slow.

Which brings up another point. In 1994, Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti developed the idea that became known as the Marchetti Constant. He proposed that throughout history, regardless of the mode of transport, people were willing to spend about an hour a day travelling. When it comes to commuting that’s half an hour each way.

According to the AA, during morning peak travel times in November 2019 it took 39 minutes to travel by car from Albany to the CBD, 33 minutes to travel from Westgate to the CBD, 43 minutes to travel from Papakura to the CBD, and 28 minutes to travel from Auckland Airport to the CBD.

Travelling by train it took 50 minutes to get from Papakura to the CBD, according to Auckland Transport. For a trip lasting just 30 minutes commuters would have to get on the train at Papatoetoe.

On the highly popular Northern Busway, a trip from Albany to downtown took 36 minutes during the morning peak, and a bus trip from Te Atatu Peninsula to town took about an hour.

Those times don’t include travel from home to the bus stop, and from the bus stop to the work place.

Obviously, not everyone travels into the CBD to work, and some people will have only short trips from their home to work.

In 2015, The New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, involving researchers from several universities, found Aucklanders had an average commute time of just under five hours a week.

That does fit in the one-hour-a-day window, but of the participants in the survey, 50 per cent reported spending more than five hours commuting a week, and 25 per cent reported spending more than eight hours.

Many Aucklanders might find they enjoy living in a city that isn’t growing so fast that infrastructure is always lagging behind.