Auckland has never been immune to congestion on the roads. New Zealand Herald photograph by Jason Oxenham. NZH 06Feb20 - Aucklanders face nearly 40 closures for roadworks over summer across the city centre. Photo / Jason Oxenham NZH 09Dec20 - Auckland Council has plans to spend on a lot of traffic projects.Photo / Jason Oxenham
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. Schools and universities are back in session and most people are back at work.
So it’s nightmarish whether you’re biking, driving or taking a train or bus.
Auckland Transport’s group manager of public transport operations Rachel Cara said AT is prepared for the increase in demand and has been planning for it.
“We have added additional services, including school buses, on routes we know will be busiest, meaning we can carry an extra 2700 people on our public transport services across the day,” she said.
“Last year we saw close to 400,000 trips taken on public transport in a single day and we’re expecting to see similar numbers again this year.
“It will be particularly busy at peak times, which are weekdays between 7am-9am and 3pm-6pm.”
However, it leads to that age-old question: How do we solve our traffic problems?
Greater Auckland director Matt Lowrie told The Front Page it’s hard to keep up with demand when it comes to the city’s roads.
“There’s a lot has been done but the issue is that Auckland has grown massively over even just the last decade. There’s only so much infrastructure that can be built, and particularly when this stuff costs a lot of money, it takes a long time to deliver,” he said.
Introducing congestion charges has been an idea that’s been toyed with for years.
Successive governments have talked about congestion charging for 20 years, with most of the focus on Auckland, but nothing has happened.
The Government last year looked poised to replace Auckland’s regional fuel tax with congestion charges, to help pay for its Roads of National Significance (Rons) programme. But Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown has said congestion charges must be strictly a demand management tool, not a source of revenue for central government.
Singapore was the first country to introduce congestion charging in 1975 and since then a handful of cities, including London, Milan and the Swedish cities of Stockholm and Gothenburg, have introduced schemes.
“The most recent one of those is New York,” Lowrie said, “it has been beneficial, it does raise revenue, and that revenue can be used to fund other infrastructure or other services that can help make it easier to get around.”
Lowrie thinks it’s time to seriously think about introducing the time-of-use charges.
“One of the things that congestion pricing can do is encourage people to think about how they travel and when they travel. Sometimes some people could delay their trip by an hour ... That might be enough to help ease congestion.
“We see the impact that a slight reduction in traffic can have, it feels like a lot, but it’s only a slight reduction in real numbers. 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 a free-flow condition, but it is easier to get around and that’s a small percentage of users changing their habits and their travel,” he said.
One major disruption to Super City commuters has been ongoing work on the City Rail Link project. The CRL is the country’s largest transport infrastructure project ever – a 3.45km-long tunnel being built underneath Auckland’s city centre.
Auckland’s train services will have been suspended for almost 100 days, between Christmas 2024 and January 2026, as improvements are made to the rail network before the CRL is complete.
And this week, RNZ reported there’ll be a planned six-year wait for new bridges to be built after CRL opens.
Automobile Association (AA) policy director Martin Glynn told RNZ the delay would mean more congestion in the interim.
Lowrie told The Front Page several level crossings need to be addressed.
“There’s a couple down in South Auckland and various pedestrian ones, and there are about 20 on the western line that need to be addressed. Those are going to hinder the capacity of the rail network because of various rules that have been put in place by regulators about how often those barriers can be down. So it is an issue that needs to be resolved,” he said.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about traffic woes and what can actually be done to ease congestion.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
'We had delays, licencing issues, staffing issues, a cyclone, we had every type of thing.'