Innovation required to relieve Auckland's Congestion

Auckland's increasing congestion is proof that the city cannot provide enough roads, bus or train services to cope with its rapid growth. The main limitation is that the funds and time required to to relieve congestion will always be behind Auckland's growing transportation demands.

Many are now focused on solutions such as a new Eastern motorway, harbour crossing, park and ride expansions and Rapid Transit Networks. Unfortunately these huge projects require titanic amounts of funding, take decades to complete and will cause a massive amounts of disruption (and congestion) during its construction. The end result being that when many of these are opened in 10-20 years time Auckland's population will be over 2 million, much of the motorway would have been gridlocked for the majority of that time and the new infrastructure will be overloaded almost immediately.

If Auckland wants any chance of moving over the next 10-20 years its Leaders and Transport Planners must consider trailing innovative proposals that are capable of reducing congestion using less funding and time than any proposed infrastructure projects.

Below is a list of proposals which meet the criteria and should be at least be trailed to determine the potential to reduce congestion in the least amount of time and cost.

1. http://www.projectmicrocar.co.nz - Incentivised fleets of single commuter electric cars which doubles lane capacity and will get our motorways moving again at 25% uptake

2. http://www.skycabs.co.nz - Light dual sky rail over existing roads/rail infrastructure which can use existing public land to provide additional public transport

3. http://maas.fi - Mobility as a Service is a virtual market place which has the potential to financially incentivise car sharing and car pooling services for more users to share vehicles

The Project microCAR discussion paper was published in 2013 and super EV Tango T600 demonstrated to many of Auckland's Civic leaders in 2014. The Tango T600 is the same size as a motorcycle and like a motorcycle can travel in staggered formation which in effect doubles the capacity of the road. Studies show that if 25% of full sized cars transferred to either a motorcycle or a Tango T600 then that would create enough road space to have the motorway free flowing. Project microCAR estimated that a sufficent sized fleet could be built/deployed in fives years time and cost a fraction of the proposed infrastructure projects.

The cost of not trialling these innovative proposals will be the continued congestion of the entire motorway network over the next 15-20 years.

This is one decision Auckland cannot afford to make.
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