The Council has made a complete botch-up of the consultation process for Manners Mall.

On the surface, Wellingtonians have become very concerned about the impending loss of a pedestrian space in the central city, but the reason for the concern has as much to do with the poor quality of the proposal as anything else. There’s definitely a case to be made for improving the transport spine through the Golden Mile, and sorting out the torturous and winding track of buses through the city would certainly be a smart idea.

However the core of the problem is that Council officers wanted to run buses through Manners Mall, and replace the pedestrian space with …. nothing at all.

The obvious solution that many submitters identified in the public consultation round – replacing the Manners St mall with a mall in Lower Cuba St – is eminently sensible, and addresses many of the concerns expressed by Wellingtonians. Turning Lower Cuba St into a mall between Manners St and Wakefield St would bring significant benefits; the continuity of the current Manners Mall would be improved, there would be better connection to the Michael Fowler Centre and Civic Square, and the developing cafe culture in the street would be enhanced. There would be ample opportunity to create a high-quality streetscape that highlighted the best aspects of the Victorian facades on the Eastern side of Lower Cuba St, better connection with the James Smiths building, and a thematic consistency in the way the mall looks and operates from Ghuznee St all the way to Wakefield St.

It seems an obvious solution. So it’s a pity that instead of proposing a plan that would add vibrancy to the pedestrian cityscape and which many Wellingtonians would support, Council officers suggested that Manners Mall be opened to buses, and to compensate, Lower Cuba St be turned into a car park.

It’s obvious to everyone that there’s already ample car parking in the immediate area, which is nowhere near peak capacity. So it looks alarmingly like officers are conducting a simple revenue grab rather than looking for the best solution to the interlinked issues around Manners Mall. They have confirmed that the additional parking would bring an extra $300,000 into Council coffers each year, but this seems poor compensation for the loss of the pedestrian space.

So this is a plea for sanity in the increasingly contentious debate around Manners Mall, and a request that the Council officers do the smart thing – replace Manners Mall with a Lower Cuba Mall. Wellington will be a better place as a result.

There are other issues in this proposal that show the same lack of attention to the wider impact – such as how Dixon St is treated, and the astoundingly poor decision to signalise the Courtenay Place pedestrian crossings – but they can wait for another post. In the meantime, Wellingtonians need to be asked if they would support the replacement of one mall with another.

In German Suburb, Life Goes On Without Cars

So the plan is out. Wellington Airport have released their Draft Master Plan (PDF) giving the long-term view of both the development of the airport and its relationship with the Wellington region. Obviously there are significant implications for transport in Wellington, and to its credit the report takes the issues facing the airport seriously. This is an important document in the development of the region’s transport links and deserves a close read.

Like most strategic documents the Draft Master Plan is based on some assumptions about the shape of the future. And like too many strategies it does seem overly reliant on the idea that the future will be largely like the past, only more so. The unspoken assumption is that everything will be bigger, brighter and faster in the future – air passenger volumes will continue to increase, the demand for international travel will always grow, and that in a time of carbon constraints and resource limits there are still no real impediments to unending increases in passenger numbers.

The Airport’s view may well be correct – as the old saying goes, making predictions is difficult, especially when they involve the future. But I can’t help thinking that Wellington in 2030 may only bear a passing resemblance to the vision outlined in the Draft Master Plan.

As a city, we’ve sometimes got the prediction business seriously wrong – the Overseas Passenger Terminal on Oriental Bay is the poster-child for the world turning out to be a different place than we thought. The future is very much a foreign land, and the march of “progress” sometimes takes us into uncharted territories that are not always well mapped out in strategy documents.

In the 1950s it was a statement of faith that passenger arrivals by ship would continue to grow; no doubt many well-intentioned planners ran their rulers through the graphs of increasing sea passenger volumes, consulted shipping lines about the larger ships they intended to launch, and concluded that the golden age of sea travel was just beginning – and a modern terminal for them to use was a sensible and pragmatic investment in the city’s future. As we now know, the end result was completed just in time for it to be declared obsolescent.

So we would do well to treat Wellington Airport’s predictions with a degree of skepticism. We are a long way away from the rest of the world, and any changes in the macro-economy that make it more expensive to travel long distances will have a remarkably negative impact on the number of people flying to Wellington; factoring the cost of carbon into airline ticket prices may well have that kind of effect. If there are limits to oil extraction and carbon emissions, then the rosy projections of mass tourism via ever-larger aircraft may be nothing but wishful thinking.

Wellington Airport is, of course, a private company – albeit one with a public shareholding. So it is very much entitled to predict and plan its own future, and to make investments on whatever basis it sees fit. Putting more money into runways and facilities is a decision for the company’s Directors, and I have no doubt that they will make those decisions with the best information they have to hand. But as a city we should be cautious about rushing pell-mell into supporting investments that are predicated on Wellington Airport’s view of the world – and the multi-million dollar roading projects enthusiastically endorsed by Deputy Mayor Ian McKinnon fall into that category.

Infrastructure investments are, by their nature, akin to making bets about the future. We’ve proved we can get it wrong before so we should be careful to not take a simplistic approach to those bets. The world won’t end if Wellington takes a cautious approach to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a second Mt Victoria tunnel, the flyover at the Basin Reserve and all the supporting roading network that Cr McKinnon seems to think is essential to the growth of the airport. The economy is less than buoyant, passenger volumes are falling rather than rising, and the jury is very much out on whether any of these projects will ever justify their very considerable costs.

The Draft Master Plan for the Airport is a very interesting document, but it should not be used by the Council as an excuse to push through projects that may be completely unnecessary by 2030. We should watch and wait, and see if the rosy future envisaged by Wellington Airport comes to pass. One white elephant in the city is enough.

There has been considerable media coverage of Rodney Hide’s determined attack on the ability of councils to increase rates, and growing discussion of using a capped rates system as a way of enforcing fiscal discipline on local government.

Hide’s proposal looks sensible on first blush, and taps a nerve with many people who have looked at escalating rates bills over the last few years with something approaching disbelief. And it’s true that at least some local government spending has been of poor quality, so it’s hard to argue that some fiscal boundaries wouldn’t be a bad idea.

However the devil is in the detail, so it’s useful to look at both the theoretical basis and practical implications of such a policy, particularly when it comes to transport.

The theory says that – like any other organisation – New Zealand’s councils need to live within their means. This seems self evident but is in fact somewhat simplistic. For instance, in Mr Hide’s beloved private sector there’s scant evidence that organisations function well within rigid budgetary constraints. Most commercial organisations are predicated on the basis of continual growth, part of the accepted capitalist dogma in the Western world. The vast majority of companies explicitly drive for increased revenues and decreased costs year on year; they are looking for a better return on shareholder capital, and in most cases there is no reward for a steady-state approach to running their business. Any CEO who approached their Board, shareholders and the market with a plan to never increase revenues above the rate of inflation would not be long for his executive suite.

The commentary around the current recession is illuminating; it is widely (and rightly, in my view) regarded as a crisis, where revenues and profits are expected to fall or at best remain static. This structural lack of growth is the cause of the debt restructurings and the layoffs that are occurring across the globe. While the causes of the credit crunch are exogenous to the vast majority of companies in New Zealand, there is a palpable air of crisis as a result of the sudden reversal of the growth paradigm.

Flexibility of budgeting allows flexibility to operate in this kind of dynamic environment. When the economy turns down – or conversely, an astounding export opportunity opens up – then companies expect to adjust their budgets accordingly. Very few companies assume their budgets (revenue, capex or opex) will remain static from year to year in real terms, yet this is what Mr Hide’s policy would put in place for councils.

So given the proposed tight constraints, how are councils meant to approach the inevitable ups and downs of the economic cycle, or the changing needs and expectations of their citizens?

California’s experience in this area is illuminating. Back in 1978 the US state passed Proposition 13, which capped property taxes (effectively rates) at 1% of the value of the property, and required the state to “live within its means”. This may well have been the ideological inspiration behind Rodney Hide’s approach.

The results for California haven’t exactly been an unqualified success. The first item to note is that the state is much larger than the local government entities we’re talking about in New Zealand – in fact, if it suddenly seceded from the rest of the United States, California would be the ninth-largest economy in the world, with a population of 36 million producing an annual GDP of about NZ$3.1 trillion. Even with these economies of scale, however, there are persistent and seemingly intractable deficits, with this year’s expected to be about NZ$27 billion.

The key problem, it would seem, is that a fixed budget can’t take account of altered circumstances. The world has changed a lot in the 30 years since Proposition 13 was passed, and the expectations on local governments have changed as a result; however the Californian straight-jacket appears to be constraining some of the necessary adjustment. For instance, the state currently funds major infrastructure projects largely through debt, but with the collapse of the international debt markets it finds itself unable to either roll over the existing debt burden nor take on additional commitments to fund new projects. As a result, some essential projects have simply been mothballed when part-way complete, as there is no ability to fund their completion. And thanks to Proposition 13, the state can’t increase property taxes to even pay staff wages, let alone complete water and sewerage projects.

As an aside, one of the ways California has attempted to work around the restrictions is through non-tax mechanisms such as development levies. Undoubtedly this would occur to New Zealand councils as well, which might well force up the cost of building a new home – a perhaps unintentional but otherwise entirely predictable outcome of Mr Hide’s proposal.

California’s example is one that should worry anyone concerned about public transport in New Zealand. (See, eventually there was a link to transport!)

As we saw from the run-up in the petrol price last year, there can be sudden and significant shifts from private to public transport modes – and half of all public transport funding comes from local authorities. But the kind of capped budgets proposed by Mr Hide are unlikely to allow sufficient flexibility to cope with these escalations in demand, leaving a massive shortfall in council budgets. And Mr Hide seems notably silent on how any shortfall should be met – from central government? From taking on more debt, thus hamstringing future budget? From defaulting on old debt? Either way, increasing rates won’t be an option.

Because their budgets are always fully committed, the only way a council could begin doing a new thing would be to stop doing an old thing. A new bus route to a new suburb would come at the expense of closing the local swimming pool or cutting the road maintenance budget or removing the bus service to another suburb. It would become a zero-sum game, where the council couldn’t improve services for one sector of the community without seriously disadvantaging another group.

Of course we all want the unachievable – lower rates combined with better services. Sometimes, some of these things can be achieved with better planning and greater efficiencies, and councils have been as guilty of poor quality spending as any other organisation. But putting a simplistic cap on council budgets – “no, you can’t have any more pocket money!” – shows an alarming lack of understanding of the complexity of modern New Zealand, or perhaps some truly cynical populism.

Today’s Sunday Star Times has taken a thoughtful and informed leap into the Auckland transport debate with their Bright Lights Big Mess article, where they examine Auckland’s transport woes in light of advice from overseas – and the result is a resounding indictment of the National Government’s road-building mantra. The key quote is this one, from Paul Mees at RMIT in Melbourne:

Auckland has spent more on roads per head than any Australian city – and look at the results, Mees says. “There’s nothing remotely comparable to Spaghetti Junction in any Australian city – nothing on the scale of that. Auckland has that, and yet it has worse traffic congestion than larger cities that don’t have it.”

And further on in the article:

“I actually use Auckland in some of my books on the basis that it’s one of the most extreme cases in the world of a city that’s spent 50 years putting all of its eggs in the motorway basket. It isn’t reasonable for someone to say Auckland should have invested more in motorways, because there’s no one who’s invested more in motorways, relative to its population and income, than Auckland.”

Emphasis added.

As international experts have been pointing out for many years, building more roads generates more traffic – demand will forever outrun supply. And for all the billions of dollars that have been poured into Auckland’s motorway network, it can’t be said that the quality of life or even the time necessary to travel across the city has changed for the better in the last three decades.

A recent trip to Auckland was illuminating. I stayed overnight in the Beaumont Quarter, a delightful urban infill development at the base of the Ponsonby rise in St Marys Bay. Aside from the highly attractive surroundings, the chief reason for choosing the location was the walkability to my meetings in town, and some familiarity with the area thanks to living in Ponsonby back in the 80’s. Time-wise, it took about the same 20 minutes to walk to the downtown high-rises as I would have spent walking to work in Wellington – but the sheer volumes of traffic, continual road noise and anti-pedestrian engineering made it a singularly unpleasant experience.

The thing that struck me the most was the pervasive road noise. Everywhere I walked in Ponsonby and the CBD was overwhelmed by the roar of traffic, which barely diminished into the small hours of the morning. Waking briefly at 3am, I was astounded that the traffic volumes on the Victoria Park flyover were barely any less than during the day – although the noise seemed to be more the bass rumble of heavy commercial vehicles rather than the generic rush of cars.

And everywhere I went in Auckland the story was the same; conversations in cafes were regularly drowned out by sudden bursts of traffic noise; it was impossible to make yourself heard standing on a street corner; every change of lights resulted in a torrent of noise as the traffic raced away to the next intersection. It was a graphic demonstration of the fact that Auckland has capitulated to the car and the motorway and the tyranny of the traffic engineer, and all it has succeeded in doing is destroying every other urban value.

There’s a lesson here for Wellington. While more motorways won’t achieve the lower congestion and better economic performance their promoters claim, they do have a demonstrated ability to thoroughly degrade the urban fabric of a city. The opponents of the flyover at the Basin Reserve point out that the traffic noise will simply drown out the sound of the cricket game, and that the noxious fumes from cars and buses and trucks will wash across the sports grounds in waves. And the Victoria Park flyover in Auckland is a glimpse into this possible future for the Basin Reserve: a little used green space, surrounded by roads, beset by noise and fumes, crossed by a flyover taken straight from the set of Blade Runner, all hard-edged graffiti and pollution and urban dysfunction.

Lying awake in the small hours, listening to the mindless roar of the traffic, smelling the ozone on the breeze, it’s hard to see how the motorway binge has benefited Auckland or its residents. The Sunday Star Times is right – motorways are the problem, not the solution. It’s a lesson we badly need to learn in the Capital.

There’s lots happening in the world of transport sustainability at the moment – particularly given the relentless desire of the new National government to return us to the 1960’s – so you can expect a much better posting schedule in the future.

Over at No Right Turn, I/S notes that New Zealand’s oil import bill has been steadily dropping over the last quarter, in parallel with the run-up in petrol prices. While this should surprise no-one – Econ 101 tells us that demand falls as prices rise – it’s salutary to see that real-world stats are backing up the intuitive view that there’s less traffic on the roads these days. Of course, as No Right Turn also notes, some of the change may be that the oil companies are running down stockpiles. Figures from the next quarter should show where the trend is going, but if we continue to import less oil products the impact on our balance of payments could be considerable.

One of the centrepieces of the Ngauranga to Airport Strategy is a massive concrete flyover across the nothern frontage of the Basin Reserve. The highly photogenic (and likely to be highly unrealistic) artists impression can be seen in the Draft Corridor Plan:

There are a couple of things to note about the flyover. Firstly, it’s one of the few pieces of new construction in the Strategy that has a positive cost/benefit payback for its estimated $35 million price-tag – although the cost/benefit fails to take account of the destruction of amenity values at the Basin Reserve, such as the delight in being sprayed with diesel particulates from trucks on the flyover when you’re watching a cricket match.

However there may be some method in the madness.

If you take a look at this Google Maps mashup – which shows the impact of 12 metres of sea-level rise due to the breakup of the West Antarctic ice sheet – and zoom into the Basin Reserve, you’ll see that a flyover across the northern end of the Basin will be one of the few ways to cross the gully at the bottom of Mt Victoria. Practically everything else along the Kent/Cambridge gully will be flooded.

So perhaps we shouldn’t rush to judgement – a concrete monstrosity may have its uses. Albeit not one that the pro-car pro-global warming lobby had in mind.

A number of websites are reporting a recent release from the US Department of Transport, noting a decrease in the number of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) year-on-year. The significance of this is that VMT has been steadily rising since the end of WWII, so this reverses a trend that’s around 60 years old.

The reason for the change in behaviour seems to be linked to rapidly rising fuel prices and the slow-motion implosion of the US economy. Simply put, the number of miles driven by US consumers is gradually falling, and the usage of public transport is rising to compensate. The graph speaks volumes:

 

And where the US goes, many western democracies follow. The economic pressures being felt by American consumers are no different to the ones being experienced in New Zealand, and – anecdotally at least – public transport volumes in Wellington seem to be up, whilst congestion seems to be reducing. It’s what you’d expect when the price of oil has risen by around 40% in six months.

However the response of the roading-centric DoT in the US is probably also indicative of the kind of thinking we can expect from our local . Rather than using the data to re-assess the viability of building more roads predicated on rising traffic volumes, the Department of Transport are suggesting that new funding sources – rather than just fuel levies – need to be found to keep construction progressing at the historical rate!

Sooner or later, reality will need to sink in – that VMT may have passed its all-time peak, and that more roads are going to represent a poor investment in a society that will be driving less in the future.

I couldn’t help noticing the juxtaposition of two stories in the NZ Herald over the last couple of days. The first announced breathlessly that Transmission Gully has received the go-ahead from Transport Minister Annette King. The issue of tolls for the new road was not mentioned, so the funding for the $1 billion expenditure isn’t exactly clear – but hey, it’s an election year!

The second story was a couple of days earlier, and noted that traffic volumes on the Auckland motorways have begun falling as petrol prices have increased. Apparently this was a bit of a surprise to Transit, if not to anyone else in New Zealand.

So at least we’re clear about transport strategy in New Zealand – as peak oil bites and traffic volumes decline, we’ll continue to build more roads. I guess the transport planners just don’t understand the meaning of the word “irony”.