Unitary Plan provides development capacity… and congestion

The one plan to rule them all has just been released and I think most would agree it has achieved what has become its major objective – it has released capacity for development in Auckland. Take a look at these fairly incredible numbers from the ‘compact’ overview document.

Some 400,000 dwellings will be enabled, around twice the feasible capacity of what was originally planned. Greenfields have been expanded 30 per cent and brownfields by a factor of over 3. As the inside/outside 2010 MUL figures indicate, the Panel has clearly made a concerted effort to achieve the Auckland Plan’s 60-40 target.

This is consistent with a view which says the Unitary Plan is the enforcement tool of the strategic Auckland Plan. It is also consistent with what has clearly become the Unitary Plan’s priority objective after 6 years (and the rest) of fairly serious housing failure in Auckland.

Unfortunately, the Auckland Plan’s 60/40 (70/40) vision was never supported by any evidence which showed it would achieve anything other than the protection of a few low value peripheral farms. Subsequent evidence has shown that artificially constraining land to the existing footprint results in house price inflation, but also has shown that Auckland cannot accommodate density without unacceptable levels of congestion – the two issues which are actually most important to Aucklanders.

The housing problem I think speaks for itself, but just in case you’ve recently landed from Mars, this is the Auckland Council’s record on housing:

The Council has been determined not to release greenfield land for development for reasons which are inexplicable, but appear to have something to do with getting either central government to pick up the tab or promoting a bizarre obsession with intensification. Rezoning existing homes and businesses is obviously a spot tricky and the Government has refused to fund Council's obligations, so Aucklanders have been left to suffer horrendous housing problems.

The more interesting bit, however, because it’s less well understood, is transport. As it turns out, we now know Auckland can’t intensify without congestion quite out of proportion to the city's size: roads are narrow, so buses and cyclists can’t fit alongside general traffic, let alone rail, and the position and orientation of streets is inconsistent with what you’d design if you were trying to get people to walk. That is, we don’t have a grid network which take pedestrians in a fairly direct path where they want to go and with lots of pedestrian friendly intersections. Have a look at these comparisons of Auckland against other cities from a 2013 UN Habitats report:

We’re the bottom of the pack. Only the world-famous-for-its-congestion Moscow is a contender for our crown. In comparison, the well-functioning New York (given its extremely high density) has allocated twice as much land to “streets” (a 'street' being the whole ‘road’ corridor, including footpaths, bus-ways and cycle-ways) across its city core. This space for movement means New York can accommodate density. Auckland cannot.

Or, at least, it can't at acceptable cost. Authorities can buy up properties along corridors and widen streets. They can bulldoze homes and create direct walkways where people want to go. Or they can just ignore congestion and the public and focus on “alternatives”.

This was the emerging approach before the Auckland Transport Alignment Project kicked in. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, their analysis has shown that Auckland will be gridlocked all day every day within a decade (black=gridlock; red=almost gridlock; yellow=really bad traffic):

So, far from needing intensification so that we can somehow get Auckland moving, the Auckland Plan has become a recipe for outright planning failure. Yet the Panel has picked up on the strategic prerogative to achieve a 60/40 split and consigned Auckland to a destiny of congestion which no amount of funding - in public transport or roading or both - can cure.

Here's hoping councilors realise that the objectives and aspirations of the Auckland Plan are not being promoted through the Panel's plan and that well-planned, but not constrained, development on the urban periphery offers lower costs and better outcomes.