Planning

Auckland's Motorway Plan: A Template Other Places Should Steal

Most motorway strategies are similar - widen this bit of a motorway, implement some form of tech to make the motorway 'more efficient'. The New Zealand government has released its strategic plan for Auckland's motorways, and it is a breath of fresh air that deserves to be a template for other jurisdictions.

Key Takeaways

• The plan acknowledges that, with long-planned corridors now built out and much of the motorway network widened as much as is practical, a new approach is needed.
• Four main challenges:
  1. Deteriorating motorway network performance, leading to congestion, delays and poor travel reliability.
  2. The motorway network is not consistently fulfilling its intended functions within the wider transport system. (There is limited prioritisation or supporting infrastructure for key roles such as freight, public transport, and active modes. A lack of alternatives to private car travel contributes to congestion, as many people feel they have no realistic options).
  3. Growing resilience challenges and increasingly widespread impacts of unexpected disruptions.
  4. Negative impacts on people, the environment, and quality of life.
• Can’t build their way out of the challenges facing the Auckland motorway network. A balanced approach is required to enable the network to move more people and freight, more efficiently and effectively.
• Three-part strategic approach:

Comment

New Zealand is expanding its use of road user charging, one of the few countries to do so. Therefore, it is good to see Time of Use charging as part of this strategy, as it will be fundamental to delivering on the outcomes.

This plan goes a lot further, focusing on providing people with good alternatives to the motorway, improvements in other modes and integrating land use with the strategy.

What Next?

What can you learn from this motorway strategic plan for your own strategic plans?

Strategy

Stuck in the Paradigm: Why Cities Struggle to Escape Car-Centric Planning

Moving from car-centric cities to more multimodal approaches is a consistent challenge. This research looked at why reform struggles.

Key Takeaways

• For decades, public agencies have responded to congestion with a familiar toolkit: roadway expansion, parking provision, traffic operations improvements, and, more recently, vehicle-centered technologies, such as autonomous vehicles.
• At the same time, many cities have also invested in public transit, bicycle infrastructure, pedestrian improvements, curb management, and travel demand management.
• Yet, the broader urban system often remains defined by extensive car use, long trip distances, high household transportation burdens, substantial land consumption, and recurring congestion.
• The difficulty lies not only in insufficient funding or weak implementation but in the persistence of a dominant planning paradigm organized around roadway network structures, dispersed land use, and performance measures that prioritize hierarchical vehicle movement over connected multimodal access.
• Multimodal improvements are expected to operate inside a system fundamentally optimized for automobile movement. As a result, they may succeed locally while failing to produce metropolitan-scale transformation.
• Car-centric transportation planning is treated as a dominant planning paradigm: a framework that shapes what counts as a legitimate transportation problem, which interventions appear appropriate, and which performance measures define success.
• Strongly car-centric systems generate several recurring contradictions that fit the analytical definition of anomaly:

• If the central problem is the car-centric paradigm persistence rather than isolated project failure, then policy must address not only infrastructure but also metrics, governance, and sequencing.
• Several implications follow:
  • First, public agencies should reform performance measures. Metrics should instead include accessibility, person-throughput, multimodal reliability, safety, and access equity.
  • Demand management and curb and parking reform are essential. A region cannot meaningfully reduce car dependence while continuing to subsidize abundant parking.
  • Transit priority must be treated as a network issue rather than a corridor exception.
  • Long-term land-use and street-network reform also matters because transportation outcomes are closely tied to urban structure.
  • Agencies should screen capital decisions for whether they reproduce auto-dependency or expand multimodal access and redundancy.

Comment

This paper uses a different lens to understand the challenges of tackling the car-centric paradigm. It usefully explains why so many cities, despite sometimes large investments in multimodal systems, still fail to move away from their car-centric paradigm.

This paradigm affects the advice and recommendations that are made to decision makers by transport agencies and so the outcomes that we see. The need to make the paradigm shift is one of the reasons that I believe that transport agencies need to be led by experts who understand our transport systems and understand both the need for the shift and how to undertake it.

What Next?

What needs to happen to shift the car-centric paradigm where you are?

Integrating Transport and Land Use

Where Land-Use and Transport Integration Really Breaks Down

Integrating transport and land use is fundamental to better transport systems but most places find this integration exceedingly hard to do. This paper looked at four European cities to see what lessons could be drawn.

Key Takeaways

• Setting integrated land-use and transport objectives is easy. Actually implementing them isn't. Opportunities for genuine integration shrink at every stage of the planning process.
• The study found cities overwhelmingly rely on information-sharing and organisational resources, not binding rules or dedicated funding, to pursue integration.
• At the top level (city-wide visions, masterplans), land-use and transport genuinely get co-created. This is where integration succeeds most visibly.
• As strategic visions get translated into implementation programs, they consistently get re-sorted back into sector-specific silos, one for mobility, one for housing, etc.
• Budgets are allocated by department at the detailed planning stage. By the time a project starts, there's rarely a mechanism to pool funds across land-use and transport, even when a combined intervention would deliver better results.
• Groningen and Turku (medium-sized) showed more cross-sectoral procedural instruments than Amsterdam and Helsinki (larger metros), likely because fewer actors makes coordination logistically easier.
• Integration at the project level often starts because individual planners build personal working relationships across departments. But without formal backing, these relationships are fragile against staff turnover.
• All four cities reported a mismatch between multi-year infrastructure planning and 4-year political terms. New administrations can quietly let inherited plans stall.
• Ex-post evaluation of integration outcomes was strikingly rare across all four cities.
• Cities need new procedural instruments specifically at the detailed planning stage (not more strategic vision documents) to stop sector-specific fragmentation before it hits implementation.

Comment

This is an important paper for understanding the challenges in integrating transport and land use.

One of the challenges not covered is that planning and transport departments often report to different political masters, creating an additional level of coordination required for good outcomes.

I would also like to see more research into how significant 'transport projects' such as new metro lines do and do not integrate well with land use.

What Next?

Where are the gaps in how you integrate transport and land use effectively?

Quick Adventures in Transport Wonderland

Here is what else I came across this week:

• ​Walking is at the top of the transport hierarchy. So why do we still treat it as an afterthought? - A LinkedIn article on why walking continues to be relatively ignored in transport.
• ​Transit ridership trends are dismal but regional plans are oblivious - A blog discussing ridership trends in Seattle.
• ​What drives urban transportation safety? Exploring the role of modal composition and travel exposure - Research looking at mode share implications for road safety.