Wellington’s Huge Commuter Tide

• Wellington is an unusual city due to a huge portion of jobs being in the CBD
• We experience serious “tidal” congestion due to the huge morning inflow of commuters into the CBD and then out from CBD in the evening
• The peak time pressure on the Golden Mile is huge but otherwise Wellington is quite an accessible city

One could rightly say that every city is different but, on the spectrum of city characteristics, Wellington City is unusual in a number of ways. Most obviously, Wellington is built on a very hilly, indeed mountainous, area with a much lower percentage of flat land compared to most cities.

The Terrain limits transport access to central Wellington to the harbourside from the north and a few valley corridors to the West, South and East. The Wellington CBD itself is largely crammed onto about 2km² of flat beachfront land around Wellington Harbour much of which is reclaimed land. An example of the challenging geography is shown in that Wellington City includes the huge area of rolling valley land in Mākara-Ohariu Valley which, despite being less than 8 km of the CBD, remains as farmland due to the difficult terrain to access it.

The other major factor is Wellington is the New Zealand capital and so is home to many large government departments, ministries and many other professional service-related businesses.  This has resulted in a high concentration of jobs in the CBD compared to most other cities.  In fact Wellington City has one of the highest CBD job concentrations of any western city:

The very high level of jobs in the CBD is reflected in the travel statistics such as the Wellington 2013 Journey to Work Census tables which shows 41% of all travel to work across the region is travel to jobs the Wellington CBD:

This, in turn, means for a city of it’s size, Wellington has terrible traffic peak time congestion. The annual traffic report from Tom Tom compares travel times between peak and free flowing times and, by this measure:

… congestion in Wellington at its morning peak hour was one of the worst in the world with a 75 per cent increase in travel time at rush hour compared to free flowing traffic, exceeding other big cities like Istanbul, Los Angeles, London and Sydney.

However, Mr Irvine said there were issues with comparing percentages, especially at specific times, because they didn’t gage how long the peak was. For example, in Rio de Janeiro traffic is heavy until 2am, however in Wellington it’s only for an hour in the morning and afternoon.
Driven.co.nz 22/03/2016

Wellington City’s Huge Commuter Tide

However, Wellingtonians know that our traffic congestion is very peak-time peak-direction.  For off peak and counter-peak travel (except for around 3pm at the end of school which has its own peak), most parts of Wellington are mostly not congested. That Wellington does not have much congestion off-peak is likely a significant reason why we rank so poorly in the Tom Tom congestion index because this is a measure of peak versus off-peak congestion.

No, Wellington does not have an all day traffic problem like Auckland (with which it is too often compared) but a peak time transport capacity problem.  This problem is most apparent in the Wellington bus boarding and alighting statistics (Note this bus boarding data is from February 2019 and was released by the GWRC under LGOIMA).

The following shows the pattern of Bus Boarding for bus stops along Karori Road:

In fact, more people board buses heading for the CBD between 7:00am and 9:00am than board Karori buses for the rest of the day.  This pattern is echoed in the evening with bus alighting (people getting off buses) at bus stops along Karori Road:

Note the high spike just after 3pm which is from school students returning from outside Karori who are a significant part of bus patronage.  Also note the total patronage numbers per half hour are only half that of the morning peak … the evening peak period in Wellington is longer but also not as bad as the morning peak.

Similar patterns of “peaky” travel are reflected at bus stops across the city such as along Adelaide Road (with Wellington Hospital and schools also being significant destinations for some commuters):

And in Miramar:

The Transport Pressure Point is along the Golden Mile

Having looked at the suburbs across the city and, indeed, the whole region, from where commuters are travelling, we need to look at the CBD itself which is the major destination for travel.  In terms of bus services, the following table shows the pattern of boarding and alighting at bus stops along the Golden Mile:

The pattern is the same but the scale is much larger of course. However, unlike in the suburbs, along the Golden Mile commuters are Alighting from and Boarding onto buses travelling in both directions as can be seen in the following charts:

Key points on the bus patronage patterns along the Golden Mile are:

• the very high passenger numbers alighting off buses along the Golden Mile in the morning peak and the equally high numbers boarding buses in the evening
• like the suburbs, over half of the commuters who travel by bus into the Golden Mile do so in the 2 hours of the morning peak. Most of the day buses on the Golden Mile are travelling nearly empty but the perception of most commuters is they are full to standing room because most commuters only travel during the peak hours.
• the lack of alternative roads means this one corridor has to support almost all bus commuters who want to travel into or through the CBD and this means that the Golden Mile already has to support over 330 buses to carry these passengers.

Finally, the bus passenger numbers outlined above are a reflection of even greater numbers of commuters who travel in and out of the CBD by car, train, bicycle, ferry, cable car and, of course, walking.

Conclusion

Every morning Wellington experiences a huge incoming tide of commuters travelling from suburbs to work or study in the CBD with a similar outgoing tide in the evening.  The rest of the time, with some notable exceptions such as the Basin Reserve, the Wellington CBD is quite easy to travel around by any mode.  Past efforts to support this daily tide of commuters has resulted in high public transport usage.

As outlined in the previous article on Lets Get Wellington Moving Commuter Numbers, planned population growth will only make this huge daily tide increase in size. Wellington’s regional leadership is also committed to increasing bus, rail, walking and cycling mode share by 40% which means major investment in each of these modes is required to support what could be a doubling of peak time non-car commuter numbers in the next 25-30 years.

But most importantly, in assessing any proposed transport solution from the Lets Get Wellington Moving programme, readers should remember the following points about Wellington transport:

• Unlike most cities, most of Wellington congestion is a peak hour, peak direction, problem for travel to/from the CBD. With some notable exceptions, Wellington is otherwise relatively easy to get around when travelling against the peak as well as off-peak and in weekends
• The worst congestion is in the 2 hour morning peak when both workers and students are travelling into town
• The only place where travel is really congested both ways is the 2Kms stretch in the CBD between Wellington Railway Station and Courtney Place. This is the key transport bottleneck and so the obvious place where investment in improving transport should be focussed.