Auckland's Transport History - Part 3

In the previous two posts we have looked at what was happening with transport in Auckland and the first policy put in place being the 1955 Auckland Plan.

In this post I will look at the implementation of the 1955 plan and how this influenced the next next plan created in 1965.

Prologue - 1920 to 1955:

To summarise the first two posts; we found that as far back as 1920 the transport mode of choice in Auckland started to change from walking and public transport to the private auto-mobile, this resulted in Auckland rapidly branching out from what was a small dense city. So whereas in the existing city people needed to live within easy walking distance of public transport resulting in small houses on small sections, residents started to take advantage of the freedom offered to them by the auto-mobile living on larger sections further from the city.

Continuing a trend that started in the late 20's the annual growth in PT trips plateaued  and then started to fall with there being approximately 65 million annual PT trips by 1955. At this time the 90% of all passenger and freight movement occurred on the road network with the PT component being on buses and trams, the rail network at this stage accounted for less than 3% of all passenger trips. 

Something else that happened over this period was the conversion of the tram network to buses. One of the driving factors behind this conversion was that the tram network had been heavily overtaxed during the WWII PT surge and was in need of repair, however the main reason for the conversion was that buses were faster, cheaper to operate, more flexible and less disruptive.

1955 to 1965:

By 1959 Auckland had exploded in size, one example of this is by the eastern bays of such as St Heliers as shown in the following images. In 1930 this area was mostly grassland until Tamaki Drive was built in 1930, the resultant growth can be seen between 1940 and 1959. Many more examples can be seen using the Auckland Council GIS Viewer.

Eastern Bays - 1940

Eastern Bays - 1959

The Ministry of Works(MoW) had developed a regional transport plan in 1946 and a slimmed down version of this was included in the 1956 plan, by 1959 the easier "green fields" sections had been completed however pretty much nothing had been done inside Auckland City itself.

In 1965 a new plan was developed which built on the previous work that had been done, similar to the two previous plans this one looked at the region as a whole and proposed an extensive motorway network along with a large Rapid Transit Network (RTN) roughly double the size of today's railway network.

1965 Motorway Plan:

Based on a review of the historical aerial images one of the more interesting things I have found is that of the 1955 plan very little was actually built; all of the sections of motorway built by 1959 were part of the 1945 MoW Plan with the one section shown as being under construction in 1959 at Westgate not even being part of the 1955 plan, to a similar extent all of the planning and design for the harbour bridge occurred during the late 40's.

When the 1965 plan was released Auckland had gone through a period of some 30 years of not making any improvements to its inner road network. Although the rural motorway network had been largely been put in place 10 years prior Auckland city itself had gone through a process of infilling with little strategic direction.

The 1965 Regional Plan was based on extensive surveys, such as origin destination surveys, traffic counts and developed a programme looking forward to 1985. The plan was very extensive, and somewhat excessive with its liberal application of motorways, however it had vision as to where the main traffic corridors would be and these corridors hold true to today.

1965 - Motorway Plan

With the plan in place land could be set aside so that as Auckland grew around the locations for these planned transport links, in true Auckland fashion however the amount of land reserved was hardly adequate for the intended purpose and quite often developments were allowed to occur within this corridors forming a road block.

Blocked Eastern Highway

Quite a few sections of the 1965 plan are actually on the ground today, although many have been implemented on the cheap as arterial roads rather than motorways, in addition pockets of land can been seen around that form part of a route but have been rendered redundant by other sections of the route being sold off.

Pakuranga Motorway

1965 RTN Plan:

The 1965 Plan realised that Auckland was spreading out from the old city centre at a great pace and therefore the existing network wasn't going to be sufficient for the growing city. To this extent some rather large upgrades were proposed heading to the Northshore, the Airport and east Auckland.

Similar to the motorway plan, the RTN links shown in the plan would be extremely effective if they were part of the city today. Sadly the only part of the RTN network to get implemented has been the Northern Busway as far as Albany, this has the eastern and western sides of south Auckland without any RTN. East Auckland by Botany and Howick have been hit particular hard with neither the planned rapid transit or motorway network.

Of the various routes shown its extremely hard to find much evidence of there being any more than token provisions of land for these routes which is likely to be one of the main reasons why these routes are yet to be implemented.

1965 - Rapid Transit Plan

1965 to 1996:

The following plan shows the parts of the Auckland motorway network that were built both prior to 1965 (blue) and then after 1965 (red). As can be seen, much of the outer motorways where built prior to 1965 when these areas were rural farm land making them very similar to the Waikato Expressway or the Northern Motorway past Albany. In the years after 1965 the rural motorway sections were further extended to both the north and the south, the inner section of the motorway was built and construction started had started on Western Ring Route to let traffic bypass the CBD. 

1996 - Auckland Motorway Network

Referring to the above map it can be seen that although the 1965 plan had roughly 145km of motorways planned, and 37km of this had been built in the 15 years between 1950 and 1965, over the next next 30 years Auckland only managed to add another 43km to the motorway network with 40% of this being extensions to the rural motorway network.

Although only 30% of the planned motorway network got built over the 30 years between 1965 and 1996 this is more progress than what was seen on the RTN plan. All up 120km of RTN was planned for the city however no progress was made on this, although the existing rail network did provide for approximately 65km (45%) of the network a service was never run to satisfy the definition or rapid transit.

Lost Opportunity:

The current going rate for building a rural expressway is $20 M/km and therefore the total cost of the 1965 motorway network in today's money would be $2.7 billion, excluding the CMJ and Harbour Bridge and the Southern Motorway between Ellerslie and the CBD which would all have a much more expensive unit rate.

The cost of not building these routes or planning for them adequately has come at a huge cost to Auckland, one such example is the Waterview Connection which had it been built or had land set aside 50 years ago when first planned would have cost $80 million rather than the $1.4 billion we are spending today equating to a 6% annual construction cost increase.

To a similar extent Auckland's poor implementation of its plans has left it with than half of its planned Rapid Transit Network. Similar to the planned motorway network much of the planned RTN was in rural farmland and therefore would have been very cheap to build, however this would have also required electrification of the network, a new harbour crossing and two new undergound rail lines in the CBD.

Shaping the City

In my next post I will look at how the implementation of these plans have shaped our city.