In the wake of his departure from Tauranga City Council, Brendan Bisley, the former director of transport for the last four years, brings a seasoned perspective to the future of the city’s road network in an exclusive opinion piece which has been published on SunLive.

Drawing from years of experience overseeing the intricate web of urban transportation and his background in civil engineering, Brendan offers a unique vantage point on the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

As the city continues to evolve, Brendan’s insights promise a thought-provoking analysis of what the road network may resemble during the next two to three decades, shedding light on the crucial decisions that must be made to ensure a sustainable and efficient transportation infrastructure for generations to come.

“We need to be having that wider community conversation about the roading network and what it looks like over the next 20-30 years,” says Brendan.

His council role was disestablished in 2023 during an internal council restructuring and he took redundancy at the end of last year, returning to work in the private sector.

“So I have a good understanding of the issues, and now I’m not there I can put out this opinion piece as it’s my own personal viewpoint.”

“We need to look at what needs to change on the transport network to improve the current situation to try and improve the understanding of why we can’t simply fix the congestion.”

Brendan would like the public to be well-informed ahead of the Local Body Elections in July, and stimulate engagement and conversation around roading.

 “With elections coming up, I don’t want to influence who is coming in, but want to create better understanding for the public so they know what we need to do long term about roading and transport – and not just build more roads.”

Brendan’s opinion piece titled ‘How do we make the road network in Tauranga work?’ on SunLive, covers what he sees as the current situation, why we have these issues and what he sees as the solution.

“It is not a council opinion piece and the views do not reflect council policy. It is intended to stimulate conversation and get the community thinking about what needs to change in the transport system for the city to continue to thrive,” says Brendan.

Read his opinion piece below.

Brendan Bisley. Photo: Brydie Thompson.

How do we make the road network in Tauranga work?

What the current situation is

As any Tauranga resident know, traffic congestion in Tauranga can be bad at times especially in the morning and evening peak hours when workers are trying to get to and from work or home and schools are starting or finishing for the day. It only takes one accident during these congested periods and the whole city can almost grind to a stop as traffic tries to bypass the congestion and uses alternative routes that then become so congested, they stop moving.

A lot of people ask why it is so bad and what’s changed as it didn’t use to be that way? They also ask why is the traffic so bad and can’t we simply build more roads so we can get back to a city that allows residents to get anywhere within 10-15minutes which is what Tauranga was 20 years ago?

To understand how road systems work, you need to think of each road as a hose. If you think about a hose, there is only so much water that can flow down it at any time as the hose only has a certain size and that determines it capacity. If you try and add more water, it just backs up until the hose can clear it at its maximum flow rate. Traffic is the same. A road can only absorb so much traffic (about 1200 vehicles per hour in each lane maximum) and once you get more traffic than that, it simply backs up elsewhere and this is what we perceive as congestion. The reason we have congestion in Tauranga is there is too much traffic trying to fit into the road space and it is above the road’s maximum capacity in the peak periods, so traffic becomes backed up.

What is worse is that the most efficient situation on a road is to have traffic moving at a constant speed, even if it’s slow as that moves the highest number of vehicles along the road. When you get congestion, traffic becomes stop/start so the volume the road can carry is reduced even more which increases the congestion further. Tauranga has this situation now on most of its arterial roads, so the overall network capacity has dropped.

Why do we have these issues?

There are a lot of small issues that have contributed to the current problems, but the main reason is that the city didn’t invest enough money in the roads over the last 20 years to keep ahead of the growing population and we now have capacity issues across most of the city roads that will continue to get worse as the city population continues to increase.

In relation to congestion, 20 years ago, the city had plenty of spare capacity on the roads as it had a good network that had been well funded, well planned and was growing with the population. With little investment in new infrastructure or widening the existing roading network within the city, the spare capacity that existed has slowly been used up little by little each year. Over the first 10 years, the system had enough spare capacity within the roads and congestion was not really an issue, so the city continued to think there wasn’t an issue with the low funding levels, and it helped keep rates low.

The issue with not doing that ongoing investment as the city grew, with no new significant capacity being built, once the existing roads reached capacity it quickly turned to congestion as traffic was unable to get down the limited lanes in the peak periods. Initially it was only a single road this was seen on, but as time went on, this congestion spread as traffic has tried to find other routes. What will happen now is the congestion period will get longer as traffic volumes keep growing. This is now why areas like Arataki have congestion on all the routes in and out of the area in the peak periods. In Arataki, traffic only has two arterial roads (the State Highway and then Oceanbeach/Papamoa Beach Road) and these have reached capacity in the peak hours, so traffic is backing up and where the start point is moving further back along Papamoa Beach Road in the morning as more traffic is created by the growing population in the wider area. B2B will make a difference initially, but over time its impact will reduce as traffic volumes continue to grow in the wider area. Similar congestion issues are seen on Hewlett’s Road, Maunganui Road, Turret Road, Cameron Road, Davenport and Fraser as examples so it’s not just Arataki with the congestion. The congestion impacts on the lives of those that live in the area significantly as they struggle to get to and from their houses.

Another feature of Tauranga that makes traffic congestion worse is that people do not live near where they work generally. Areas such as Papamoa, Welcome Bay, Matua or Bethlehem, as examples, have few jobs in the immediate area people live, so residents that live there need to travel to work, often across the city, and the vast majority do this by private vehicle, typically with just a single occupant in the vehicles. The location of schools is similar, with students crossing the city to get to their school.

The impact of this level of additional traffic caused by the movement of students can be seen in the school holidays. Traffic volumes only drop by 10 per cent on average when students are not being taken to and from school, but the roads have noticeably less congestion across the city. It is only a 10 per cent reduction in volume, but its impact is significant on congestion. It was the same when workers were encouraged to work from home (not during the formal lockdowns but when community cases were high) and typical traffic volumes dropped to 93 per cent of normal. There was little traffic congestion across the network at the time and that was only a seven per cent reduction in traffic volume compared to normal traffic flows.

There are some other things occurring on the network that increase our congestion levels. Due to a lack of resources undertaking enforcement of traffic speeds, driver behaviour (such as using cellphones while driving, seatbelts, speed, drink driving, dangerous driving etc.) Councils around the country have been forced to undertake hard engineering solutions to improve safety at critical locations such as near schools.

The hard engineering solutions being installed by Council’s are options such as using raised platforms on pedestrian crossing, or pedestrian traffic signals to slow traffic to a safe speed as they pass over the crossing or stopping traffic through the traffic signals. Without them, most traffic does not want to stop for pedestrians or pass the area at unsafe speeds as they are in a hurry to get to their destination and/or already frustrated by the congestion levels. The issue with these types of hard engineering treatments is they impact traffic 24/7 and reduce capacity for traffic volumes that can move along the road, but they are the only way to get improved safety without enforcement.

Another hard engineering solution is to use “all red” phases at traffic signals. With so many vehicles regularly running red lights, Council use all red phases to increase safety at key intersections. This means that all approaches to an intersection are given short periods (2-4 seconds) of red so that the accidents are reduced from red light runners being hit by traffic on the other leg of the intersection moving once their light goes green. The issue with needing to use red light phases that is all traffic loses five per cent of the available green time it would otherwise have and therefore less traffic is about to get through the intersection. Five per cent seems small, but all these small reductions at each intersection add up over the network and reduce overall capacity. Enforcement and ticketing of the red-light runners would be a better option, as it would stop the behaviour from continuing and give more time back for traffic and reduce congestion. Council is unable to issue these tickets as it is a moving vehicle offense, and these are only able to be enforced by the Police so Council does what it can via the all red phases. The red-light runners are less than one per cent of the vehicles using the intersection, but impact everyone by the loss of capacity to make the intersection safe.

What is the solution?

A lot of people would say that there is a simple solution to solve the issues in Tauranga, build more roads and get us back to having that spare capacity in the network.

The key issue for Tauranga is its topography. We have narrow spits of land that have gullies and areas of steep ground that is not always stable if cut into for roads. The narrow land areas are surrounded by water with limited bridge connections and the growth of the city has been on the extremities (Papamoa, The Lakes and planned development in Tauriko) or in Western Bay (Omokoroa) which has resulted in increased traffic volume that is car dependent.

The topography of the area means that each land spit has 1 or 2 arterial roads, designed to move higher volumes of traffic, and then the other roads are designed as residential streets to cater for residents to get to and from their house. These arterials no longer have sufficient capacity in the peak periods for the traffic volumes trying to use them, so we have congestion across the city.

A high-level analysis of the cost to widen the arterial roads across the city to see if that would be a feasible option to increase capacity and remove congestion showed it is not viable. The city would need to spend between $10 - $20 billion (at today’s costs) to purchase the houses and widen the arterial roads to provide more lanes across the city. It would require the purchase of 3000 - 3500 houses and business premises that front those roads, and for those families and businesses to move to other properties in Tauranga.

Council currently allocates circa $250million per annum to maintain the road network, undertake safety improvements at critical locations, to renew old assets such as footpaths and kerb and channel and build new infrastructure connections such as Papamoa Eastern Interchange.

If the Council used all the available budget to build the widening on the arterial roads to increase capacity, it would take the city between 40 and 80 years to complete the work due to the available budget. It’s likely the costs would be significantly higher due to inflation over that time, so it would more likely be over one hundred years to fully complete the work. By then, the city population will have increased significantly, and we would be back to the same or worse congestion levels so very little would be achieved for the expenditure. It also means there are no other urgent safety improvements across the city or new infrastructure built as 100 per cent of the transport funding would be used for widening the arterial roads which would result in ongoing crashes and injuries on the network. Overall, the city would go backwards in terms of safety and congestion levels.

The other aspect that needs to be considered is if the widening were to take place, the level of additional congestion impacts from the construction activity would be significant as that would be the equivalent of 5 Cameron Road projects under construction each year over those 40 – 80 years. Cameron Road was a $50m spend per annum and we would be spending $250 million on arterial roads per year.

If the funding for transport was doubled to speed up the programme (with the corresponding massive increase in rates for residents) it would still be a minimum of 20 - 40 years to complete the work and the city would still have congestion issues due to the population growth over that period. It is also very unlikely that the city would continue to function with that amount of roadworks underway on the arterial network at the same time. It would be the equivalent of 10 Cameron Road projects every year being done on the key roads people use to commute around the city.

From my four years in the Director of Transport role I realise that most residents do not want to have a hard conversation about what the city looks like and how are we going to continue to move around the city, but the conversation needs to be had. Most residents assume building a couple of new road links will resolve the congestion issue, as that worked in the past when the harbour bridge was built for instance. Our population is now too high (it’s doubled over the last 20 years, and we are now over 150,000 residents). Not having the conversation about how we need to move around the city in the future and ignoring the issue does not make the problem go away, the congestion is continuing to grow as the population continues to increase.

If we do nothing and congestion continues to grow, Tauranga becomes less and less attractive to live. If that happens, house prices will drop over time as demand drops, and companies looking to invest and create jobs will look elsewhere in New Zealand where they have better access and movement for goods and services and can attract staff to live.

As residents, we are already paying for the current congestion issues as the plumber, builder, electrician and other trades and services we use know that due to the traffic congestion they can’t get as many jobs done in a day, so the rate we are charged for them is higher to cover the travel time needed. If congestion was reduced, our costs would be lower.

To reduce congestion, we need to move more people in the existing road space on most of the key arterial roads. Widening the existing arterial roads is not the solution to solve the cities issues. It needs a balanced approach that delivers strategic capacity increases on key routes, construction of new connections such as the Papamoa eastern Interchange and increasing the capacity of the roads within the current road space. Additionally measures to reduce demand in the peak periods will be critical as the city continues to grow.

The best way to resolve the congestion in the longer term is to get more people moving in the same space. If you can increase the number of people that can travel along the road in the same space, we can reduce the congestion or at least hold it at the current levels as the population grows.

There are projects planned to address bottlenecks in the current road network at key intersections, also to install missing connections such as the Papamoa Eastern Interchange, but these on their own will not resolve the congestion issues and other measures are needed.

The way to move more people in the same road space is to either use buses (they can hold 60 people in the same space as two cars), use the space currently used for carparking for cycle lanes or incentivize carsharing to get more people per vehicle on the road. If we can reduce the traffic volumes by 10 per cent through doing that, we would significantly reduce the current congestion to what it is like in the school holidays.

To make buses work better, the hours they operate need to increase and they need to be higher frequency with some express services to make them quicker for those that live further out. This needs investment from the Regional Council. The Council is investing in better facilities such as bus shelters and improved bus stops to make bus use more attractive. Buses also need to be allocated road space across the city so they can move quickly as having them stuck in general traffic congestion will always make them slower than using a private car. This is why in highly congested areas (such as Hewlett’s Road) we have bus lanes so buses can get past the queued traffic and are an attractive option to use.

As the city continues to grow, we need to consider how we use the road space and on arterial roads we will need to consider removing 100 per cent of the carparking to potentially fit another lane similar for buses, cyclists and/or T2/T3 lanes where vehicles with two or three passengers can get a quicker journey. This helps to encourage carpooling. This does impact residents and businesses that are along those roads and that is the tricky balance. Its road capacity v quality of life or business viability and that is where options such as part time clearways just in the peak hours can be effective to balance those competing outcomes.

People question what cycle lanes achieve. With cycle lanes, each cyclist is one less vehicle on the road and it creates a safer space for the cyclist who does not have the protection of a vehicle around them if they get in an accident. When you have a good quality cycle network that is safe you can get high numbers of cyclists that choose to bike rather than take a car. In Christchurch, where they have invested significantly in separated cycle lanes since the earthquakes, they have had 20% year on year growth in cycle volumes across the city and on key cycle routes they now have up to 10% of all users using the street who are cyclists. Prior to the cycleway being built this was less than 3%.  This is on streets with over 10,000 vehicles per day, so the cycle volumes are significant and the cost for the cycleway is a lot lower than what it would have cost to build another traffic lanes for the extra 1,000 vehicles if the cyclists were in cars.

The other advantage for building cycleways is that regular cycling improves health and fitness in the population and therefore we have less demand for the hospital system.

Some would say Tauranga is too hilly for cycling to be viable, but with e-bikes this is no longer an issue (and e-bike costs are dropping quite quickly) and most trips are under 10km so easily bikeable and would typically take 20-25minutes in the peak hours. That’s a lot quicker than a car for a similar journey in the same peak period.

Unfortunately, the solutions Tauranga needs to implement are often caught up in politics. Traditionally the left favours the use of alternative modes for travel and invests in that, whereas the right favours movement of vehicles and funds that. In Tauranga we need to have both solutions to solve the issues we face, and funding needs to remain for both.

If you didn’t want to either encourage the use of buses or cycling to move more people in the existing road space, an alternative to resolve the congestion issues in the peak hours would be to reduce the traffic volumes on the network in the peak hours by the 10%. This could be done via road pricing, so vehicles pay to use the road in the peak hours with higher charges in the peak periods or delay their travel to a quieter period and pay nothing or lower costs. This reduces the volumes to what the road can cope with in the peak hours but does mean some journeys need to be deferred or delayed. This is a cost for users that have no ability to change the time they need to travel, but doing nothing is no longer an option given the congestion the city experiences every day. This congestion will continue to build as the city continues growing.

Reducing the congestion levels is also something that businesses can assist with and some already do. It is not just Council that can change the congestion levels. Businesses could incentivize their staff to use alternative modes rather than bringing cars to work, businesses could introduce flexible working options, so staff do not need to travel in the peak hours or work from home some days each week to reduce their overall impact. All of these contribute to the collective reduction in volumes in the peaks and make it better for residents and businesses that have no option and need to be on the road in those peak times.

Some arterial roads will need to be widened even with moving people to other options such as buses or cycling. 15th Ave and Turret Road are examples. These need an additional lane currently as its overcapacity with the current one lane in each direction across the bridge. The traffic coming into and out of the city is very directional on this road, with high volumes heading into the city in the morning and the corresponding volumes heading out in the afternoon. It does not need to be 4 lanes immediately and a three-lane variable lane would work at this location so there are two lanes towards the city in the morning and two lanes out in the afternoon. The third lane would swap what direction it works in based on the time of the day to provide the capacity needed. The cost to do this is one-third of the cost of building the full four lanes. Other arterial roads could have a similar treatment if needed in the future as an interim change before full four laning at a future date.

The other change the city needs to start is to build up to increase the people living within the current residential areas, rather than constantly going outwards for its new housing. If we continue to grow outwards our congestion will increase as most residents will need to use their vehicles to get to and from work, shopping and other activities unless high quality bus and cycling networks are built into those new developments as they are constructed. If we can build up in existing housing areas where the typical activities such as schools, work, shopping and entertainment are nearby, those residents have options other than needing to use private vehicles. This is one of the reasons the city is planning for apartment style living along the Te Papa Peninsula. Another 15,000 residents can fit in the same space without the need for additional roads and they have options to walk, cycle or bus to a lot of the activities. They can also use their car, but that is not the only option. This also needs to be considered in other areas across the city.

It's important to remember that some residents have no option but to use vehicles due to their circumstances. The road network needs to function so that those that have no choice can continue to use a vehicle, but also give safe and reliable options for those that could use alternatives. If 10 – 15 per cent use an alternative mode, the city will move with significantly less congestion, and everyone gains. 85 per cent of people will continue to use vehicles as their main way they move around the city.

In the past I have heard people say Council is trying to get everyone out of their cars. As you can see that is not the case. It’s the simple reality that we can’t build our way out of the congestion as its not affordable or practical, so we need to look at alternatives that reduce the peak traffic volumes to what roads can cope with (variable road pricing, changing business hours etc.), have people living in a more dense environment so they don’t need to use vehicles as much or shift 10-15 per cent of the current car users to alternative modes such as buses or cycling. It needs to be a combination of all the above over the next 20 years and if we can achieve that Tauranga will be a great place to live and the economy will thrive which creates more jobs and better incomes over time.

The one thing we cannot do is pretend that we can simply build more roads and ignore the wider discussion we need to have as a community.

- Brendan Bisley