Thursday May 8th, 2008. 1:34 pm by frog
Yesterday Jeanette came out in support of Walk Auckland’s call for walking and cycle lanes across the Auckland Harbour Bridge. I hope she succeeds because I have entrepreneurial plans to open up a juice bar at the midway point.
Photo Credit: Walk Auckland
Posted in Environment & Resource Management | by frog | Thu, May 8th, 2008 |
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May 8th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Could string a rope under the bridge and let people tight rope across it but otherwise: leave our bridge alone. It’s hard enough now getting to Ponsonby Primary in the Chevy to pick up the boy without Curran Street being jammed up by North Shore-ites waiting for the occasional radical cyclist foolish enough to cycle across the Harbour in 80km/h side winds.
May 8th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
‘radical’?
You know this is about a clip-on though right maw?
May 8th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
StephenR: and who will be paying for this clip-on ? Tolling sounds like a good idea.
May 8th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
There’s a FAQ there http://www.getacross.org.nz/
May 8th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Wouldn’t mind some forward planning re: the ‘price of oil and all that’ either.
May 8th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
“Within Transit’s budget there is also a $3 million allocation for walking and cycling projects. Last year, none of this money was spent at all.” Sounds like a good idea.
May 8th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
I meant it sounds like a good idea to spend the money on a cycleway on the bridge
Be a great attraction. My wife often takes our son to Onepoto Domain to ride his bike, he could ride the whole way from Ponsonby with this.
May 8th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
You will also have a kid with impressive calf muscles.
May 8th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Clearly either proposal would need widening as there are safety implications of surrendering road width for a cycle lane.
However a walkway is a whole new issue, it’s not as easy. In essence the bridge needs substantial restrengthening and reconstruction work to handle the resonance of people walking over it day in day out. One of the reasons the protest march a few years ago was banned from the bridge (but did it anyway) was because of the safety risk of damaging the bridge from large numbers of people walking on it. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s true - 44 tonne trucks require a different design to people walking.
Having said that, while it costs a fortune to do ($40 million) it will be a far better contributor to reducing congestion that any rail project of similar value. It will need a lot of security of course.
May 9th, 2008 at 12:01 am
LS- exactly what I came here wanting to say. It seems ridiculous that transit will fork over so much cash for extra motorways but won’t consider doshing out $40m for walkways on what is essentially the biggest block to traffic flow in Auckland.
I agree it’s not easy, and it’s the sort of thing that makes people who think cars are the only way to get around laugh, but with rising oil prices and kyoto obligations to meet, it’s a cost that’s really worth paying, I think, especially seeing how neglected walking, cycling, and public transport have been in Auckland compared to funding for cars.
May 9th, 2008 at 12:08 am
There is a good description of the Nippon Clippon’s Pedestrian Synchronous Lateral Excitation problem. The Millenium Bridge “fix” might not work, or not as cheaply, because the Nippon Clippon’s are mounted on rollers to counter the Vehicular Dynamic Lateral Excitation problem.
May 9th, 2008 at 12:20 am
Ari, There is nothing ridiculous about the situation at all. Transit is, until the end of next month, the SOE that is paid by motorised highway users to provide services to motorised highway users. Land Transport NZ is a different kettle of fish. This Crown Owned Entity was created by Labour to facilitate the use of roading revenue for MMP pork barrel politics. If Labour wants it they can make it happen. As long the (mostly Auckland based)media ignore the fact that the rest of the country is being bled dry, both financially and physicly, to fund this “biggest ever land transport spending” for Auckland it’s a simple case of anything Auckland wants Auckland gets.
May 9th, 2008 at 12:25 am
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Millennium_Bridge#Resonance
May 9th, 2008 at 12:30 am
mawgxxxxiv, Tolling sounds like an excellent idea. But why stop with Harbour Bridge upgrade. Do the same with the Newmarket Viaduct upgrade, the Manukau Harbour Bridge duplication, The Upper Harbour Bridge duplication, the Waterview interchange upgrade and the Victoria Park viaduct tunnel and you’ll be so close to having a congestion cordon that you might as go the whole hog.
May 9th, 2008 at 7:40 am
Kevyn,
The congestion cordon is not needed in Auckland as the CBD is not the problem anymore. Sure spagetti junction on a bad rushhour day might take 10 minutes to travers, it is not the problem area.
These are now Albany, Takapuna, Penrose, Mt Wellington, East Tamaki, Manukau.
People dont go to the CBD like they used to. They work and play in the suburbs.
That is where the congestion is.
Hence the upgrades to the private transport network in the roading in these area’s.
Toad will be happy as the old 70lb Onehuga rail line has been ripped up to be replaced no doubt with new heavier track.
Now, have the designers of the new Mangere SH20 bridge allowed for the rail line from Onehunge to service the Black Bridge, Mangere Mountain areas? Potentially running the track to the airport to loop back to Puhinui?
There is a walk and cycle lane under the Mangere SH20 bridge but I would think you would need to be pretty brave to use it. It is heavily graffiti-ised and looks pretty dodgy. No cleaning, no policing. Would happen on the Auckland Harbour bridge as well.
And will the Harbour Bridge walkway need that plasti-glass covering like the Grafton Bridge to stop people jumping off?
May 9th, 2008 at 8:01 am
Oh and Kevyn,
It is not Auckland getting what it wants and never mind the rest.
Auckland roading is in a catch up mode, it needs about 30 years of uncompleted work to be finished.
For those 30 years we have paid out roading taxes so that South Islanders have tarsealed roads instead of dirt. Because if you were to fund regionally that is all the roads you could afford. Was that viaduct to the West Coast solely paid for by the West Coaters? Off course not. Did Aucklanders complain when that the bit of infastructure was build at the expense of a new harbour crossing in Auckland? No.
If you want strictly regional funding for roads then go for it, but think about how much of the regional roading network you would be able to afford to build and maintain.
Bridges like the Kopu bridge would never be replaced nor the just completed road bridge south of Blenheim (to replace that single lane over and under rail/road bridge).
So next time you drive the highway think about if the local popolation solely paid for every kilometer or did someone in Auckland help contribute as well?
May 9th, 2008 at 8:10 am
Tolling a pedestrian crossing might help to reduce the graffiti. I didn’t know there was a cycleway across Mangere Bridge, fascinating. Given proximity to Mangere hardly surprising graffiti is an issue.
Harbour Bridge is already under surveillance and police patrol so vandalism would probably not be to much of an issue.
May 9th, 2008 at 8:23 am
mawgxxxxiv,
The walk and cycle way is slung under the roadway facing the Onehunga wharf.
Which I think is the problem. A great homeless shelter and what looks like a dark tunnel.
A design fault from a users point of view. The lesson I guess is that the cycle and walk way needs to be in full view. Like the Golden Gate bridge where the walkway is on the road deck.
Wind could be a factor, but it does nor seem to worry walkers on the Golden Gate so should not be a massive problem on the Auckland Harbour Bridge.
May 9th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Auckland really doesn’t get much serious wind anyway.
I think tolling pedestrians would be very difficult when one is extolling the virtues of having tourists, cyclists and families being able to walk/bike across - politically anyway.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:47 am
I think a toll could work: think about the great views you would get. Maybe a $2 pp toll so it is a simple coin operated gate. Whats that $8 for a family of four ? About the same price as a Mc Donalds combo and a lot healtheir.
May 9th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
why should we pay more money to the roading companies?
more roads, more cars, more traffic, more pollution
whats is the purpose of the toll and who would profit from it?
what is the profit made from NZ roads?
May 9th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
sorry the last one was ment to say - where does the profit from NZ roads go?
May 9th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
By the way Gerrit, I don’t whether to laugh or throw up at your ignorance and how many other Aucklander’s genuinely believe they are God’s economic gift to the rest of New Zealand. You can find the truth about which region paid for the Viaduct and tarsealing Auckland’s dirt roads in this comprehensive spreadsheet.
http://www.petroltax.org.nz/XLS/Rev-Exp-08.xls
May 10th, 2008 at 1:04 am
Gerrit, You have nice line in urban legends. None true of course.
You can find the official statistics in two comprehensive spreadsheets at my website’s stats page. It’s obvious from your posts that you have the intelligence, aptitude and time to take the physical and financial roading stats and draw your own conclusions.
I had to go through 85 years of annual reports to obtain the data in these spreadsheets so it’s hardly surprising that the government knows it can make any claims it likes and the media and opposition won’t be able to challenge because it’s too time consuming to obtain the proof that they are pulling the wool. The fact that I’m not a lobbyist, academic or consultant means I don’t have a reputation therefore my work is not “reputable”. Doesn’t actually mean there is anything wrong with the work, after all it’s just a time-series compilation of published data, it just ain’t reputable and that’s all that counts with today’s “journalists”.
May 10th, 2008 at 6:40 am
Kevyn,
Had a scout around your web site.
critisism - it is extremely hard on the eyes with small white font on black background and red hyperlinks. It’s extremely “busy” graphical design adds to the hard to follow menu. Not a web site that says “I have a point of view and I want you to read and understand it”. Maybe that is why it is not taken seriously. It is so hard to dig through the the web site to get meaningful information.
More importantly what is your message?
And equally what is you answer?
I could not get either from the web site.
My first question to you would be what do you consider to be Aucklands’ geograpical area for road funding.
Auckland in my view stretches from Warkworth to Pukekohe. And this is where your staticstics get distorted. Auckland as a region has grown.
Where for example would you place the Waikato Freeway in your calculations. It is of benifit to both Auckland and Waikato provinces.
Similarly the Auckland Motorway extension north to Puhoi benefit both Auckland and Northland.
But is the moneys allocated to these roading projects attributed to Auckland only?
And that is the point. All roads are of benefit to all provinces and all people. When I trailer a boat from Auckland to Christchurch for a regatta I utilise all the roads in each province. Roads I, as an Auckland helped to pay for through general and petrol taxes.
Remind me again what is the point of your web site? That roading finances are concentrated in Auckland and not distributed fairly? Is that why the Kopu bridge needs to fall down before it is replaced?
May 10th, 2008 at 11:02 am
I think the Greens should sponsor issues based websites for those such as Kevyns. Interested parties could contribute. It would be a novel approach to policy formation.
May 10th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
JH,
Have some reservations on that score as web sites need to be kept up to date to be meaningful. The photo of the truck squeezing out of the Awatere Road/Rail Bridge is now out of date - for example.
While I admire Kevyn’s work and owe him a thanks for making me see the 30 year catch up for Auckland roading could in fact be an urban myth, I cant figure out if the information on the web sites actually allows for demographical and geographical changes in the historical figures.
It simply cannot keep up with the demographical changes happening right round the country (more people in Auckland, higher truck numbers - daily milk tankers - on rural roads where dairy conversions have been happening, etc.).
Nor can it account for local politicians rorting the system (new harbour crossing in Tauranga thanks to Winston Peters pulling strings) and diverting funds from one project (Kopu bridge?) to another.
Another issue not addressed is how local road maintenece and repairs are funded by local ratepayers if the National road network is not developed.
For example we have an inland port facility and massive warehouse distribution centres in Wiri. Access to Wiri from the Southern Motorway is via the busiest intersection in New Zealand (Great South and Wiri Station Road intersection).
So the “B” trains bypass this route and use the local roads to get to Wiri. So far the Manukau city council have had to resurface Mahia Road twice in 5 years to take that heavy traffic in what is basically a local suburban road.
All funded by local rate payers. Not out of the national coffers.
So while Kevyn looks at National Road Funding Distribution, he does not look at the local funding needed to keep national traffic flowing.
Especially were National Roads have not been completed or the demographics have changed (who knew back in 1950 that shipping containerisation would place a heavy demand on local roading and a new concept of “inland ports” was not even a figment of the imagination?).
May 10th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Actually I was thinking of a wiki Gerrit. One with an agreed format and regular revision and pruning.
May 10th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Gerrit, I use LTNZ’s geographical regions as LTNZ and it’s predecessors are the source of all the regional roading statistics since 1924.
As the land transport fund receives all of it’s revenue from road users there is no need to take general taxes into account.
To avoid the problem of fuel or RUCs being purchased in one region and used in other regions the revenue figures are calculated from the National Traffic Database to ensure that the revenue is accounted for in the regions where the vehicle is driven rather than being attributed to the region in which the vehicle is garaged.
http://www.transit.govt.nz/content_files/news/ConferencePaper9_PDFFile .pdf
http://www.transit.govt.nz/technical/traffic-volumes.jsp
I think there may have been a bit of talking past each other going on here. My original criticism relates to Auckland’s dominance since 1999. But even that dominance has been at the indulgence of cabinet. Remember the decision on how to allocate the last 5c petrol tax increase? The Auckland mayoral forum was the only local government involved in the decision making but it was only allowed to decide between accepting the government’s “offer” and getting nothing. For three-quarters of a century before then the road fund did operate on the principal that “All roads are of benefit to all provinces and all people.”, although always with the caveat that the benefits flow more from country to town than from town to country. Hence Auckland subsidised Northland and Rotorua highways and recieved the benefit at Auckland airport. Canterbury did the same thing for South Island regions and likewise benefited at Christchurch airport. But it hard to see how taking money from Christchurch City and giving it to Auckland City to solve a problem that is actually worse in Christchurch than Auckland can benefit Christchurch in any way. In effect Christchurch is being forced to pay to lose its competitive advantage (percieved lack of congestion) in the battle to attract businesses. In fact that is true also for all of the other regional centres that could easily accomodate the sorts of businesses that congregate in Auckland. With the possible exception of the “celebrity” businesses and the Head Office Country Club types. Most regions already have there own variations on that type of “elite” cliques so they don’t need the head office people, just the head office salaries shared around a bit more.
I agree that the Waikato Expressway is of benifit to both Auckland and Waikato provinces which is one reason why I raised the question why has it’s progress been delayed by the requirement for Waikato to subsidise the road works in central Auckland? In fact the same question could be asked about ALPURT. Why was funding shifted from ALPURT to CMJ? Or more precisely, from Rodney District to Auckland City.
The point of my website is simply to provide the facts to demystify the urban myths and political rhetoric. Inspired in no small part by the claims made by Labour and Banksie that Auckland’s roading “crisis” was the result of not getting it’s fair share of the funding. That’s a rather extreme right wing economic view for a Labour PM to be espousing, what happened to the egalitarian principal: from those who have the means - to those who have the need. Worst is that neither the crisis nor the underfunding are all that exceptional compared with Waikato, Taranaki (per capita) or Canterbury. One can only assume that more undecided voters live in Auckland than live in the other provinces.
Gerrit, the fact is you, as a tourist, help to pay for Canterbury roads because you, as a tourist, use Canterbury roads. You, as an Aucklander, have not contributed to roads south of Cook Strait and you, as an Aucklander, may never have benefited from roads south of Cook Strait.
The same should be true for this ex-pat Aucklander resident in Canterbury but for purely political reasons it isn’t so anymore.
May 10th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Gerrit, You’ll get a reply when frog clears the moderator.
May 11th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Kevyn, it’s ridiculous that we’re perpetuating further car-intensive infrastructure when we’re about at or approaching the peak of affordable personal car use. Transit isn’t excused because it has a bad directive, as directives can, as you note, be changed. Even more easily with recommendations from the people who have to follow them. It’s merely terrible planning that it hadn’t been done earlier.
I find it interesting you seem to think that a tax on one type of good or service should only be invested back into that same service. If that were the case, we’d have very little public infrastructure at all, and ridiculously overfunded trade and labour initiatives. Using a double-edged approach is a highly effective policy to produce social change, by taxing something undesirable and using it to fund desirable alternatives.
May 11th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Ari, The petrol tax is different from every other tax we pay simply because it was introduced on the principal that the motor user shall pay for the development of motor roads. The development of the telephone and electricty system were also funded by user fees. Although these fees were introduced by governments they were never refered to as taxes. Had it been possible or practicable to have toll gates at every highway intersection or mileage meters on cars then we wouldn’t have needed a tax on petrol. The “tax” on toll calls and electricity paid for that infrastructure as surely as the tax on petrol paid for all-weather roads. One big advantage of having the dedicated excise duty is that it resulted in some of the most transparent public accounting we have ever had. That is one big advantage of getting all land transport funding from this source. Currently railway funding isn’t coming entirely from the LTF so how much is being spent on various activities in various places is shrouded in mystery. Notice that OnTrack hasn’t published it’s 10 year plan on it’s website so goodness knows what, if anything, is going to be done to make the railways workable and at what cost.
May 11th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Solid Energy is one company very happy about the buy back re-nationalization
http://westportnews.co.nz/tuesday.pdf
so the point was - should there be public accesss and bike access across the auckland harbour bridge?
should we something more than cars, motorways and traffic jams… and endless time wasted trying to find a park in the city…?
May 11th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Ari,
“it’s ridiculous that we’re perpetuating further car-intensive infrastructure when we’re about at or approaching the peak of affordable personal car use.”
You are making a huge assumption that personal transport options such as cars are going to be forever petrol powered.
This is obviously not true as already we have elctric cars. Maybe in the future we have compressed air or hydrogen powered cars. Maybe even pedal powered cars (or flash bikes).
What is glaringly obvious is that people prefer the independence and freedom of the personal carriage rather then a public transport system. So road building makes perfect sense.
Treesoft,
Yes there should be but just dont make the sanme mistake as was done on the SH20 Mangere Bridge. ie a dark tunnel under the roadway.
Make it like the Golden Gate where is level with the traffic.
May 11th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Gerrit Says:
May 11th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
> You are making a huge assumption that personal transport options such as cars are going to be forever petrol powered.
> This is obviously not true as already we have elctric cars. Maybe in the future we have compressed air or hydrogen powered cars. Maybe even pedal powered cars (or flash bikes).
yes, there’ll be electric cars. Maybe pedal cars. Probably some petrol-powered cars for the next century or so, but the numbers will get fewer as petrol gets scarcer. I suspect that after the end of cheap oil there will be a much wider range of systems for powering vehicles than there are at present, but all added together the number of vehicle-kilometres travelled will probably be less than at present, simply because all these methods together are unlikely to add up to enough cheap energy.
Even if the number of cars on the road at any one time only dropped back to what it was in 1970, we would still find ourselves with more road capacity than we need.
May 11th, 2008 at 11:32 pm
treesoftomorrow, There is public access across the harbour bridge…for those who are willing to pay the price. Unlike the Golden Gate and Sydney Harbour Bridges the Auckland Bridge was built on the cheap, from foreshore to foreshore, which requires a steep 1 in 20 gradient to provide enough clearance at the centre for container ships to reach the container port at Traherne Island. It’s not quite the leisurely crossing by foot or bicycle that many people may imagine.
Assuming Cycle Action’s $5m option is viable the payback in carbon emissions reductions is 250,000 tonnes of CO2 @ $20/tonne = 12,500 tonnes per year (assuming 20 year economic life with no discount rate) = 35 tonnes per day. Assuming an average car will produce 200gm CO2 per km and an average round trip is 20km then 17,500 car trips will have to be displaced each day to break even. Is that likely? I doubt it at current fuel prices. The benefit to individual travellers is going to be a balancing act between savings in vehicle operating costs and increased commute times and that really doesn’t break even till fuel hits $10/litre.
I am getting the uneasy feeling that the abrupt increase in funding for alternatives to roads has created a civil servant mentality when comparing spending on roads and alternatives to roads. Rather than judging investments on how much they save (in lives, fuel, CO2, etc), they are being judged how much is being spent. Currently the funding in each LTNZ region appears to be apportioned between roads and alternatives to roads in proportions very similar to the proportion of work trips made by car and other modes (when work at homers are excluded since most ofthem seem to be farmers).
May 12th, 2008 at 8:26 am
Well you sort of alluded to this in the second paragraph, but “lives, fuel, CO2, etc” are often quantified anyway are they not?
May 12th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
and Judith Tizard thinks auckland problems are only because it is ‘too popular’.. not that she admits there are problems.
what about buses and trains that carry bikes?
cars are clogging the roads, giving us low grade air and causing mass accidents.
whats is the road toll (the other kind of toll..) in nz each year?
new motorways + more cars being importted = more cars on more motorways = more traffic jams.
why mimic LA’s traffic madness and bad urban design?
Be interesting to know Transits links to Oil companies.
—————
# Gerrit Says:
May 11th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Ari,
“it’s ridiculous that we’re perpetuating further car-intensive infrastructure when we’re about at or approaching the peak of affordable personal car use.�
You are making a huge assumption that personal transport options such as cars are going to be forever petrol powered.
This is obviously not true as already we have elctric cars. Maybe in the future we have compressed air or hydrogen powered cars. Maybe even pedal powered cars (or flash bikes).
What is glaringly obvious is that people prefer the independence and freedom of the personal carriage rather then a public transport system. So road building makes perfect sense.
Treesoft,
Yes there should be but just dont make the sanme mistake as was done on the SH20 Mangere Bridge. ie a dark tunnel under the roadway.
Make it like the Golden Gate where is level with the traffic.
May 13th, 2008 at 1:52 am
treesoftomorrow, nice logic - pity it’s not supported by the evidence. The problem has never been importing more cars or building more motorways. At the heart of traffic growth is that we keep creating new reasons for using our cars. Fifity years ago car owners were content to drive to work and take the family for a sunday drive. Then they started driving to supermarkets and shopping malls and garden centres and all those other “modern” “progressive” “innovations” of the ’60s. Then we decided we needed to become two income families if we didn’t want to be poor so that meant two cars to drive to two workplaces and drop off the kids at kindy/school because it’s not safe for them to walk with so much traffic on the roads and convicted pedophiles living in every second house and because now we have such busy lives that we don’t have time to wait around for buses. Get rid of all those new (and often imaginary) reasons for driving and traffic will go back to what it was in the 60’s. Get rid of quarter acre sections and we might even get back to the amount of traffic we had in the 1920s! Just don’t expect cycleway, busways or railways to make any difference because they don’t tackle the root causes of congestion any better than building more motorways.
May 13th, 2008 at 1:55 am
“whats is the road toll (the other kind of toll..) in nz each year?” Twice what it would have been if the National Road Safety had been in control of the Land Transport Fund. All that money wasted in vain attempts to solve Auckland and Wellington’s peak congestion would have been better spent on building safe roads and highways. But alas there’s no votes in that.
May 13th, 2008 at 1:58 am
May 13th, 2008 at 2:36 am
Kevyn, one point, Transit has never been an SOE… sadly
otherwise excellent stuff although I still believe building roads to relieve bottlenecks has validity if modelled in a post road pricing environment. Amazing how rational objective evidence based analysis moderates the faith some have in the holy grails of rail cycling and other slow modes.
May 13th, 2008 at 3:46 am
libertyscott, The documents prepared by the government discussing the merger of the various transport agencies refers to them as SOE’s. But the Transit NZ Act simply refers to Transit as an entity. I have always thought of it as nothing more than a renamed National Roads Board since that’s what it basicly was before Transfund was split off, and what we will again have from July. The new Transport Agency is officially a Crown Entity. Yet another example of politicians confusing a change of name with a change of performance.
I quite like slow modes as long as they are predictably slow which sadly most of them aren’t.
May 14th, 2008 at 2:07 am
Er, shouldn’t someone give this gentleman a copy of the road code