Workers in the daily grind of the ‘rat race’, choose whether to stay on the motorway looping away from where they’re heading, or travel on arterial roads stopped by traffic lights along the way, or take shortcuts through the back roads and residential streets becoming a ‘rat runner’.
Apparently, AT traffic modellers designed Meola Road to stop ‘rat running'! This explains Auckland Transport’s flawed design of road narrowing and restricting the roundabout for the direction of commuting traffic to a single lane.
Meola’s an arterial road over an old dump, linking Ponsonby, the city and the North Shore to West Auckland. It's quicker than the morning motorway major pinch-point where traffic queues to the bridge off-ramp, where it also services the city at Newton Gully.
In the 1980s speed humps and trees in chicane islands were added to streets to stop actual ‘rat running' through residential side streets, pushing through-traffic onto the main roads where it belonged. Motorways were designed to relieve the pressure of congestion on these arterial roads.
At the birth of the SuperCity, traffic design took a philosophical ‘u-turn’ attempting to stop car use altogether, in the name of 'climate change', claiming to reduce congestion.
June 2021, NZTA CEO Nichole Rosie told a parliamentary select committee, “Through queues rather than traditional speed signs and other things we slow communities down.” Telling us that causing congestion is deliberate to force us out of cars by taking away free left turns and aids to the free-flowing traffic, parking and the narrowing of dual lane arterial roads to single lanes. In an experiment akin to social engineering, surveys asked, “Would you walk or cycle if…?” by adding together walking and cycling creating false positives for the ‘ultimate weapon’, separated cycleways.
Yet the ‘powers’ seemed surprised when the cycleway experiment failed, becoming an expensive outdoor gymnasium for the few. The impact on shopping villages regularly located along arterial routes was the experiment ‘fall out’. AT CEO Dean Kimpton said, “In that emissions reduction plan, cycling is supposed to rise to 17% of all trips. But it's still stuck on 1%. We've got the facilities available and people aren't using them. So is the lesson that even when you build it, they still won't come?” NZ Herald
Mayor Wayne Brown identified two pinch points on the motorway: Penrose to Mt Wellington; Lincoln Road to Te Atatu Road and two times: 7am to 9am heading towards the city; 4.30pm to 6pm heading away from the city. His solution, a ‘time use charge’. Yet AT keeps talking about a ‘congestion tax’, charging entry into the city and night parking.
Bus lanes only in those hours would be consistent, yet the city is full of empty buses on empty bus lanes for AT’s ‘revenue traps’ to spend on unused cycleways.
His idea of transponders on buses that trigger lights can also lessen congestion. Add to that changing the phasing of traffic lights at those times to pull the traffic off the motorway in favour of other road users. Yet AT keeps light phases short with some lights only letting two vehicles through.
Public transport is definitely a solution, if only it was reliable. Trackless trams with light batteries, following magnets on existing roads and in bus ways rather than having to lay tracks required for light-rail.
“Auckland Transport has publicly stated via media releases (publicly available on the AT website) that we will in future be taking a different approach in relation to safety measures and raised infrastructure,” via official information request.
Central and local government concur with the latest philosophical u-turn in traffic design, AT continues with unrevised, old thinking, flawed designs:
· Great North Road with 23 raised crossings when most of the side roads intersect with the ridge from steep inclines where hill starts are required, takes away parking and narrowing this arterial route to single lane with 24/7 bus lanes.
· Closing off Mercury Lane to pedestrians only with a public toilet in the middle of the road, when it’s too steep for a quarter of the population with mobility impairment. This is why Beresford CRL Station was added at the top of the hill. The only reason to get off at the bottom is for the car park located in a straight path from Pitt Street down Mercury Lane. Better than AT’s rat maze loop left into K' Rd, right at Queen, left at Cross, left at Mercury Lane and left again into the car park.
· Pushing the community rejected ‘Waitematā Safe Routes’ in Surrey Crescent and Garnet Road (refer OGR).
I know all the shortcuts through my local streets to avoid congestion and short light phases, so I guess that makes me a ‘rat runner' swimming against the tide set by the controllers by refusing to run their ‘rat maze’. (Gael Baldock)
30 July 2024
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