Back on track: blinkered

File under: transport, sustainability, Wellington

The headline figures that I quoted yesterday from the Regional Land Transport Strategy (RLTS) Annual Monitoring Report (954kB PDF) make encouraging reading, since they show a significant shift from private cars to public transport. Since the regional council says that the report "informs our planning for long-term sustainable transportation", and there's also the North Wellington and Ngauranga to Airport studies under consideration, you'd think that this would herald a change in thinking away from road building.

To track their change in thinking, let's look at the previous year's report (2.2MB PDF). The Outlook section and Implications for transportation planning (p25) says this:

Daily traffic volumes will continue to grow by around 3% to 4% per annum, with some decline in the proportion of private car journeys to work ... The Wellington region's dispersed development means the private car will be the dominant form of transport in the foreseeable future. Traffic volumes will grow alongside economic activity. Increasing traffic demand will not be met without the construction of significant new infrastructure. RLTS proposals seek to maximise road network efficiency while encouraging travellers to use public transport and active modes for appropriate journeys.

Instead of a 3-4% increase in traffic volumes, state highway vehicle numbers stayed static while the volume of cars entering the CBD actually decreased by 9% for the year (see graph). Time for a rethink, surely? But as late as April this year, when the surge in public transport use was already giving the lie to these projections, the regional council was still persisting with a goal that Option 3 called "myopic" and I referred to as a "puny": merely maintaining public transport's mode share. And here's the equivalent text to the above quote from this year's report (pp27-28):

Daily traffic volumes are likely to continue to grow by around 3% to 4% per annum, with some decline in the proportion of private car journeys to work ... Initiatives encouraging the use of public transport especially for peak-period commuter trips remain important, but travel by car will continue to be the predominant form of regional transport. This is partly due to dispersed development in the Wellington region. Traffic volumes are expected to grow alongside economic activity. Increasing traffic demand will not be met without the construction of significant new infrastructure.

What the...? Page after page of figures and graphs show that traffic volumes are static or decreasing, then they conclude by saying that volumes "are likely to continue to grow"!? Apart from the insertion of the weasel word "likely", they haven't even bothered to try explaining it away as a blip by saying something like "traffic volumes may have declined, but we expect them to start growing again". They're happy enough to trumpet the results as good news, but it looks as if they won't let the facts get in the way of the drive for more and bigger roads.

There's only one sign that they've actually looked for a rationale behind their forecasts of more traffic. In the same section, they write:

The passenger transport network will not be able to accommodate continuing growth in patronage. There is a three-year time lag before new rail rolling stock will be operational. The rail service may not currently be meeting passenger expectations during the peak periods. For this reason, and along with easing congestion and fuel prices, more people may revert to commuting by private vehicle.

In other words, because of their blinkered insistence in the past that increased traffic volumes are an immutable force of nature, the ongoing decline of public transport infrastructure has left it unable to cope when their projections turned to custard. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy! If they'd actually made the forward-thinking decision to invest in passenger transport, the petrol prices of the past year might actually have been the catalyst for a change of mindset. They're also looking at recent petrol price drops and thinking "phew, thank god that's over!" rather than "how can be ready for it next time?" In fact, the local petrol rice trends show that current prices are actually higher than the average for the period under consideration (March '05 to March '06), so they shouldn't expect people to be running back to their cars just yet.

This called for a rant, so I sent this off to the Dominion Post:

It's good to see from the Regional Council's figures that road congestion has markedly decreased over the last year. Surely this is the result of building more roads? After all, we're constantly told this is the only practical solution to congestion.

Actually, no. The "bypass" is still months from completion, and Transmission Gully hasn't started. Instead, people have switched from private to public transport, to the point where the underfunded infrastructure is unable to cope and the council has to scramble for desperate and unsatisfactory measures such as ripping seats out of trains (Oct 3).

Imagine if instead of spending $40 million on the "bypass", that money had been invested in public transport. By now, we'd be ready for increased petrol prices, so that new riders would stay with public transport rather than switching back to cars when petrol prices dip.

But it's not too late. The Regional Council needs to drop its blinkered insistence that traffic volumes will inexorably increase. The City Council can take advantage of the reduced congestion to reclaim road space for transit, cycles and pedestrians. Most of all, we should scrap the ruinously expensive Transmission Gully and invest in quality public transport for the future.