March Madness doesn’t have to be such a pain

2026-03-04 - 16:07

It happens every year in Auckland: traffic snarls, public transport ridership jumps, buses skipping stops displaying BUS FULL signs instead of their destinations. Wellington, too, records a spike in public-transport use in March. People have returned from summer holidays, winter illnesses have yet to spread, and there’s a second round of back-to-school energy in the air. “It’s a lot of different factors that kind of just add up, and it becomes the most-travelled month, period,” says Tim Welch, a senior lecturer in transportation planning at the University of Auckland. Beyond the annoyance of March, congestion has a price. A 2025 estimate put the cost of being stuck in traffic in Auckland at $2.3 billion a year, measured in lost time and stifled economic growth. Vehicle emissions also harm people’s health: a 2016 study found that air pollution from vehicles caused around 2200 premature deaths and 13,000 cases of childhood asthma across the whole country. This toll on human lives and health also has a financial price, bringing the total social cost of motor vehicle air pollution to $10.5 billion. What are the solutions to March Madness, and the rest of the year’s congestion? Why do roads get clogged up in March? Auckland’s roading network now operates near capacity for long periods of the day, says Douglas Wilson, an associate professor in transportation engineering and director of the Transportation Research Centre at the University of Auckland. That means adding just a few more vehicles at peak times can lead to congestion. “Even a little bit of increase in traffic volumes during this March period has a significant effect,” he adds. “So suddenly people say, ‘Wow, it’s taking me double the travel time to get to work. Why is that the case?’ It’s not that you’ve doubled the traffic volume. Actually, the volume has only gone up a little, proportionally, but the traffic flow has reached capacity.” Transportation planning lecturer Tim Welch. Photo: Supplied The influx of tertiary students in March provides that increase. “The universities turn on, so you’ve got the 25,000 at AUT plus the 42,000 students at Auckland University suddenly coming onstream,” says Wilson. “It has a huge impact, and it won’t go away, because we’re operating close to capacity. But there are other underlying problems that we need to deal with.” Multiple studies show that adding more road capacity doesn’t help for very long: “The demand will fill that extra supply pretty quickly, and we’ve got another problem a few years later again. So just adding more capacity to our system – or supply – is not going to solve the problem.” Wilson says we have the capacity we need, over a whole day, to get Aucklanders around the city: we’re just not using it very well – or we’re all trying to use it at the same time. Step one: Invest in more shared transport and active transport modes There’s a lot of space on the roads, but right now, it’s not efficiently moving people because the roads are mostly full of private motor vehicles. “We have very, very low people occupancy in vehicles and we’re not that good at sharing,” says Wilson. “The private motor vehicle is still the dominant mode in Auckland for commuting.” In fact, New Zealand has one of the highest rates of car ownership in the world, but with some of the lowest vehicle occupancy rates: we own more vehicles now per capita than the United States. Most other ways of getting around the city can reduce congestion: carpools, public transport, park-and-ride schemes, cycling, walking. They’re also associated with lower emissions and better public health. But are they practical enough for people to switch to them? Transportation engineering professor Douglas Wilson. Photo: Supplied Not yet, says Tim Welch: public transport isn’t fast, cheap or wide-reaching enough to be useful to many Aucklanders. It’s catching up, says Wilson, but that’ll take time, and continued investment: “We have underinvested in transport, full stop, for many, many decades. Not so much the last decade – we’re actually spending more now than we ever have before on transport, but we’re playing catch-up.” So far, that spending largely focuses on long commuter routes rather than neighbourhood transport. “And that’s been a big issue for Auckland,” says Welch. “We can get [people] across the city really efficiently, but there’s nowhere for them to go safely without a car on either end of the trip. And if that’s the case, then the public transportation system is, for most people, useless.” The city could also put money into sustainable transport options that don’t have long-term running costs. For instance, more people now travel by bicycle than by ferry in Auckland, yet ferries receive higher capital expenditure in the council’s budget. In addition, ferries carry operating costs of $84.5 million per year. Bike lanes don’t. In 2023, the then-transport minister Simeon Brown wrote to local authorities instructing them to stop work on initiatives to promote cycling and walking, though these are the ideal modes for people to access rapid-transit stations. Active transport also makes a difference to air pollution: Paris cut its traffic and its air pollution levels in half in some areas of the city after a multi-year concerted effort to make cycling safer. Step two: Drop the expectation that public transport pays for itself Auckland’s public transport is up there with the biggest cities in the world on one metric: price. The city’s weekly fare cap costs about the same as the one for buses in London, and it’s barely cheaper than those in Paris or Sydney. It’s possible to go anywhere in the five boroughs of New York City for the same price as getting from one zone of Auckland to the next. Auckland’s high fares are due to the fact that public transport operators in New Zealand are required by law to cover at least 50 per cent of their running costs through fares—or, at least, to attempt to recoup that much. “Which is just a massive amount,” says Welch. “No public transportation system has ever really achieved those levels. Most robust public transport systems barely break thirty percent. It’s just not a feasible rate.” New Zealand’s small tax base is often given as the reason for its unusually high farebox recovery rate. But high fares bring the risk of a phenomenon known as the ‘transit death spiral’. “So when the cost of public transport goes up,” says Welch, “it means that more people drive, the public transport system gets slower, fewer people ride it, they’re making less money, so they’ve got to crank the fares back up to make that farebox recovery higher, and it’s more expensive, so fewer people use it. You just get stuck.” When Auckland’s fares increased last month [subs note: February], commuters pointed out that it’s often cheaper for families to drive than use public transport. Free fares for children were axed by the current government in 2024. Welch suggests dropping fares for all public transport in the month of March to encourage commuters to trial different options during the busy time. “We can make public transport a whole lot cheaper just for that month, right? Cut it in half or make it free.” In addition, a trial of free buses in New York City had a surprising finding: assaults on bus drivers dropped by almost 40 per cent during the year-long pilot, while patronage increased by 30 to 38 per cent, depending on the day of the week. Pricing can also help spread demand: in Wellington, ‘early bird’ fares offer cheaper rates to any commuter travelling before the peak-hour rush. It’s not about gimmicks, says Welch. “We’re not going to put Wi-Fi on a bus or something and suddenly people will see the value. People think in real terms: ‘How much is this going to cost me, and can I just drive?’” Step three: Incentivise behaviour by changing relative costs Auckland is currently investigating congestion charges, but experts warn these need to be carefully considered in order to work. University of Auckland quantitative geographer Hyesop Shin told RNZ that without better public transport and active transport options, a congestion-pricing scheme could result in more driving – more emissions, more traffic – if drivers simply take the long way around in order to avoid the fees. Shin warns that congestion charges could create bottlenecks, increase the noise and air pollution in quiet neighbourhoods, and increase traffic on roads that were only designed for lower use. Wilson isn’t in favour of this kind of traditional congestion pricing – drawing a ring around a certain area of the city and then introducing a fee to enter it. “You create all these boundary problems that need to be managed, and also an equity issue, because if you can afford a house within the zone, you don’t pay the cost.” Instead, smart time-of-use charging would be a fairer option. “So that’s congestion pricing but ramped up completely: if you use a vehicle, and you drive five kilometres, whether it’s in rural New Zealand or whether it’s in Auckland, you will be priced differently based on the network, and by the vehicle type, and by the damage you do to the road network. Then, charges can be varied by the time of day. “If you travel at eight o’clock and you’re adding to that peak capacity problem, you’re going to be charged more. In off-peak periods, you could say, well, you’re not adding any problems to the network, so maybe it’s free.” New Zealand has already been trialling this, says Wilson, in the form of electronic road-user charges for truck fleets. More than half of heavy trucks in 2017 had an electronic transponder installed. “And it’s tracking basically where those vehicles are going and what kind of road they’re going on, and at the end of the month, that company has to pay a bill of road user charges to the government.” Auckland is packed with transit challenges: it’s hilly, it’s covered in volcanoes, it has two giant harbours, its substrate is particularly difficult to tunnel through, and its population is spread over a wide area. “So, yeah, it’s complex, but we can always do better,” says Wilson. “We’ve got to be able to see that over time we’ve gotten better. We’re growing up as a country and a city in regard to public transport – and so we’re beginning to provide alternative options to using a private motor vehicle.”