Parking up in the RLTP

Last week, the Council endorsed the Regional Land Transport Plan (RLTP) following it being signed off by the Regional Transport Committee – essentially just the Auckland Transport board with a different hat on – this, despite the RLTP not aligning with the Council’s own climate action plan. As we noted in our roundup last week, this was not a unanimous decision, with some Councillors voting against endorsement.

There were some changes to the RLTP from what was consulted on back in May and early June. The background paper for Councillors highlighted the key ones.

Key changes endorsed by the RTC in response to the public feedback are as follows:

• change to the ranking scores to elevate State Highway improvements projects so that they sit as the overall third ranked group amongst the discretionary projects, in alignment with public feedback.
• minor changes bringing forward funding for the Unsealed Roads Improvements and bus optimisation programmes, with some deferral of the ferry decarbonisation funding.
• allocation of an additional $600m, budget which was approved through the LTP 2024 to make PT faster, more reliable and easier to use, and to optimize the transport network, as follows:
  • $503m to support the delivery of the Takaanini level crossings.
  • $92m to the park and ride programme

It’s that last one I wanted to talk about, because based on the text below and reports I’ve seen from people watching the proceedings, it appears to have occurred almost entirely based on the reckons of the RTC – with little evidence behind it. It’s a classic case of car-first thinking.

An increase of $92 million to the Park and Ride programme. While other alternatives were considered based on local board priorities, including spreading the funding across cycling, grade separation of level crossings and park and ride, this approach reflects the RTC’s workshop preference to direct the funding where it could have a meaningful impact on a specific project or programme.

Park-and-ride does have a role to play in our transport system. It often gets attention because the facilities we do have tend to fill up early and there’s always a stream of people asking for more spaces. But far too often, the importance and impact of park-and-ride is overstated.

Cost

The cost of delivering parking facilities is something most people underestimate. So let’s look at what we might get for that $92 million.

AT have built a number of new or expanded parking facilities over the last decade or so, which we can use as a basis to answer this question.

• In 2015, the Swanson P&R was opened with 136 carparks at a cost of $2.5m. That’s $18k per carpark.
• In 2017, the Hibiscus Coast P&R originally opened with 481 carparks at a cost of $6.2m. That’s $13k per carpark
• In 2018 a further extension to the P&R at Albany was built with 135 carparks at a cost of $2.7m. That’s $20k per carpark
• In 2022 the Warkworth P&R opened with 137 carparks at a cost of $3.7m –  $27k per carpark, although the cost here also included bus facilities and a signalised pedestrian crossing.

A few other park and ride facilities have opened in that time too, but in general, a cost of between $10-20k per carpark seems appropriate. Given the more recent examples have been at the upper end of that scale,  and there’s been huge construction cost inflation in recent years, I’ll go with $20k per carpark for this post.

That means for our $92 million set aside in the RLTP, we may get about 4,600 parking spaces.

It’s not just the monetary cost either. These facilities eat up a lot of land. Based on some of our existing facilities, AT will need to find something in the region of 15 hectares of land for that many carparks. That’s over four times the size of the main Albany station carpark. Of course, this won’t all be at one station but it still a lot of land.

Even after these carparks are built, the costs don’t stop: there are ongoing operational costs for P&R, such as forlighting, security, cleaning and other maintenance tasks.

Public transport ridership

An additional 4,600 additional carparks might sound like a lot, especially when you consider we currently have just over 6,000 P&R spaces around the network. However, it’s not something that drives all that much ridership of public transport.

For the most part, these carparks will only ever be filled once a day, by one car, on the approximately 250 working days each year.

I would assume park-and-ride attracts a higher number of single-occupant vehicles than normal, but let’s use the typical 1.2 people per vehicle we see on the road. That means each carpark likely generates about 600 public transport trips per year (250 days x 1.2 people per car x 2 there-and-back PT trips per day).

So, these 4,600 carparks might result in around 2.7 million trips a year.

Not bad – but, even if every carpark attracted a brand new rider to the PT system, this would only increase usage by around 2.5% on what the system achieved pre-Covid. To put that in context, even Albany’s massive park-and-ride carpark only accounted for around a third of all boardings from that station.

There’s another issue: do new park-and-ride spaces attract new riders to public transport?

While park-and-ride is intended to serve areas not well connected by the public transport network, previous research by AT has highlighted that many of the people who park and ride live close to stations – some less than 2km away (a walkable and bikeable distance, if the streets are safe enough to do so), and many more…