The little town of Puhoi first learned of what residents consider its death sentence two months ago.

“No off-ramp for Puhoi”, read the innocuous headline on a brief story buried [...]]]> There’s an interesting article in today’s NZ Herald about local opposition in Puhoi to losing access to SH1 if/when the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” is constructed. Here’s an extract:

The little town of Puhoi first learned of what residents consider its death sentence two months ago.

“No off-ramp for Puhoi”, read the innocuous headline on a brief story buried in this newspaper.

No bad thing, you might suspect for the settlement nestled beside the muddy tidal river that curls lazily through the village, 45km north of Auckland and a minute off the highway. Why should the historic settlement be so agitated about connecting to a shiny $1.65 billion new motorway pushing past the end of the road?

“Because we’ll die otherwise,” comes the response from store owner Nick Lodewyks.

“If we don’t have an off-ramp, I’m going.”

Without a connection to the motorway, people driving south to Auckland will be required to follow the old State Highway 1 route through Waiwera and built-up Orewa, adding 16km and a fair bit of time to their journey.

Setting aside for a minute the main question over whether we should be building this extremely expensive motorway, when I first learned that NZTA’s preferred option was to have interchanges at Warkworth and Wellsford, I thought that was probably a good idea. My thoughts were that putting an interchange at Puhoi would simply encourage development around that area – which would contradict our urban growth strategies. Furthermore, Puhoi residents wouldn’t be any worse off in terms of their accessibility than they were back before January 2009 when the Orewa-Puhoi extension opened.

However, thinking about things in a little bit more detail, if the holiday highway is built without an interchange for Puhoi, for someone visiting the town and its surrounding area you would need to take a vastly different and longer route than the new main road. For the first time, Puhoi wouldn’t be easily accessible from the main road – and I suspect as a result the economic impact on the shops within the small village would be devastating.

Eventually the article gets on to talking about the justification for the road as a whole:

One position the NZTA will not budge on is the need for the road, which critics label the “holiday highway” because it could ease gridlock during long weekends.

Estimates as high as $2 billion make a pricey strip of bitumen, and the ARC transport committee doesn’t believe it’s worth the investment.

The Campaign for Better Transport has concluded that almost half the benefits such as journey time savings could be achieved for 20 per cent of the Government’s budget. The lobby group argues that by spending $160 million to $320 million on bypasses and upgrades, the country’s 10th deadliest road – it claimed 41 lives in the past decade – would be a lot safer and faster to drive.

But Mr Parker says the project is proceeding: “The motorway is funded as one of the roads of national significance within the state highway programme. We are pushing ahead on that basis.”

Good to see the hard work of the Campaign for Better Transport getting a mention. A bit of a pity that the Herald didn’t include mention of the 50 people who will die along the road over the next 12 years while the holiday highway is built – but I guess one can’t hope for everything. What’s also interesting is the exact wording used by Mr Tommy Parker of NZTA – that they’re pushing ahead because it’s a “road of national significance”, not because he thinks it’s a good idea, or that it’s necessary or that it’s cost-effective. I really do wonder what NZTA think of the holiday highway. Surely they have enough smart people working there to realise what a complete waste of money it will be?

Getting back to the Puhoi access issue, I think that ultimately the whole debate is pointless – because what we should be doing is not building the motorway in the first place: but instead focusing on safety improvements and a Warkworth bypass. That alternative would obviously retain access to Puhoi.

A few thoughts come to mind:

Here’s a brief [...]]]> There was an interesting radio interview of Transport Minister Steven Joyce on Radio NZ this evening, with the topic of conversation being his response to the various large promises being made by mayoral candidates for the Auckland Super City. The interview is available to listen here, and it’s certainly worth having a listen to.

Here’s a brief summary from the Radio NZ the story:

Transport Minister Steven Joyce says candidates for the Auckland mayoralty need to consider who will pay for promises being made on the campaign trail.

Mr Joyce told a conference in Auckland on Thursday that talk of a rail link to Auckland’s North Shore or the airport could be some way off in the future.

Mayoral candidate Andrew Williams wants a rail tunnel built within eight years, while all the leading candidates are keen on a link to the airport.

Mr Joyce says many roading projects are still to be built and should come before any talk of new rail projects.

There are some aspects of what Joyce says in the interview that I agree with. As I have noted previously, I don’t think a North Shore railway line is a priority, predominantly because there’s a perfectly good busway there, which only opened a couple of years ago. The busway could not be easily upgraded to rail, because of the need to ease many of the grades and also of course to build a tunnel under the Waitemata Harbour. It’s likely such a project would come at a cost of at least $3 billion I think. Interestingly enough, even the 2010-2040 Regional Land Transport Strategy – a document which I imagine scares the living daylights out of Steven Joyce because of the number of large rail projects in it – does not actually include a rail upgrade on the shore within the 30 year timeframe of that strategy.

Now I am sure that one day we will need to build a railway line to the North Shore. The Northern Busway will certainly hit its capacity, and we will effectively have little choice but to upgrade it to rail. But, along with the ARC’s RTLS, I am doubtful whether that will happen for another couple of decades.

The other area where I can understand Joyce’s caution is with regards to an Airport Railway Line, which he doesn’t say much about but seems to throw into the group of “big expensive rail projects that aren’t needed for a long time” (although promisingly he does make some sounds to suggest that the CBD tunnel may not fall into that category). I think it’s essential that in the next couple of years we protect the route for this line, and steps are now being taken to do just that, but until a full business case analysis is done to determine the cost-effectiveness of such a project – I can understand caution, particularly when many overseas airport rail connections have not proven to be as popular as forecast (although usually that’s because they charge exorbitant fares). This project certainly needs to happen in the future though, and probably a lot sooner than a North Shore Line, as much to provide southwest Auckland with a rapid transit option as to provide rail connectivity to Auckland Airport.

So in general I support his caution with regards to supporting enormously expensive projects where there hasn’t been an analysis of cost and benefits yet (I only wish he extended this same approach to his pet motorway projects, but more on that later). However, there are at least a couple of places where I do take issue with Joyce’s approach to the whole “what big transport projects really should be happening in Auckland in the next 10-2o years” question. The first is that he seems to be continuing what I am tempted to call the “Auckland disease”, which is saying that “we’ll do public transport once we’ve finished building the roads”. We’ve been saying this for decades now, and we’re still finding new projects to form part of “completing the motorway network” to avoid having to make a concerted start on improving the public transport system. Surely once the Waterview Connection has been completed, that is the end of the motorway network.

The Puhoi-Wellsford holiday highway is not part of ‘completing the motorway network’, and as I have shown over and over again recently it is extremely poor value for money. A third harbour crossing, while being included on transport plans for Auckland over many many decades, could cost up to $6 billion according to Treasury, which seems completely unnecessary as traffic flows across the Harbour Bridge continue to decline. In other words, a project that could cost as much as four CBD rail tunnels is becoming less and less necessary by the day – why on earth would that be a priority? I just worry that if we don’t put an end to this “let’s finish the roads then shift onto the rail” mentality, we will keep finding new roading projects like the holiday highway to suck money away from desperately needed public transport projects. A pretty simple principle should be “do the project most needed first, regardless of type.”

Finally, and I hinted at this earlier, perhaps the thing that bugs me most about Joyce’s “careful careful, let’s not get carried away with big rail projects that haven’t been subjected to a business case yet” attitude is how he is completely disregarding these principles when it comes to the Puhoi-Wellsford road. To add to the multitude of reasons I have outlined recently why a full motorway from Puhoi to Wellsford shouldn’t be a priority, I found this graph the other day from an NZTA commissioned study on the cost effectiveness of the seven roads of national significance. It compares the benefits (both traditional transport benefits and wider economic benefits) of the seven different RoNS: As well as showing once again that the cost-benefit ratio might well be significantly less than the 0.8 stated in previous documentation ($500 million in benefits for a $1.7 billion cost returns a lot less than 0.8 according to my calculator), what this graph shows superbly is how pathetically the Puhoi-Wellsford road compares against the other roads of national significance. Most notably, it would appear as though the Victoria Park Tunnel is expected to generate around four times the amount of benefit as the holiday highway, yet will cost around a quarter the price ($400 million instead of $1.7 billion). By my reckoning that means the Puhoi-Wellsford road has only one-sixteenth the cost-effectiveness of the Vic Park Tunnel. Now I know the Vic Park Tunnel probably has a pretty high BCR (heck even I support that project), but really what this shows is how pathetically Puhoi-Wellsford performs in terms of its return on investment.

We certainly have some interesting times ahead, with a show down between the CBD rail tunnel and the Puhoi to Wellsford road seeming increasingly likely once the business case for the rail tunnel has been released. As I have said many times before, I don’t think there’s enough money in the pot for both of them. Which project will we get? I think Joyce is going to have a tough time arguing for the holiday highway when its numbers look so bad (and when a pretty good alternative exists).

Panmure residents are wondering if a [...]]]> An NZ Herald article today shines light on some growing worries that the “Auckland Manukau Eastern Transport Initiative”, known more commonly as “AMETI” may be a first step to reviving the dreaded “Eastern Motorway” – which Aucklanders resoundingly rejected in the 2004 local government elections. Here’s an extract from the article:

Panmure residents are wondering if a new road through their suburb is the first stage of a revived eastern highway across Hobson Bay to the city.

A $1.33 billion package of eastern suburbs transport works retains all the elements necessary for reviving the eastern highway, Panmure Community Action Group spokesman Keith Sharp said yesterday.

“We wonder if there is any good reason for retaining the hugely expensive trenched option for the north-south route through Panmure when the currently proposed road is supposed to go no further than Glen Innes,” he said.

Mr Sharp produced a 2007 plan for the Ameti (Auckland-Manukau eastern transport initiative) project showing the northern route continuing from Merton Rd in Glen Innes to St Johns Rd in Kohimarama.

“Once at St Johns it’s just over the hill and down the other side to Purewa Creek.”…

…Mr Sharp said too much of the Ameti planning had occurred without genuine public consultation, with all major decisions being made before the public were aware of the implications.

He said planners had been allowed to adapt old plans for the eastern highway to fit Ameti, which were two different projects.

“The eastern highway was designed to link Manukau City with the Auckland CBD. Ameti is intended to facilitate traffic movement into and out of the Tamaki areas of Panmure and Glen Innes.”

The new north-south road would come off the Mt Wellington Highway, go behind the back of the Harvey Norman Centre and through a trench under the Ellerslie-Panmure Highway.

There seems to have been relatively little public debate and involvement in discussions about what form AMETI should take, which is surprising considering its cost is around the same scale as that of the highly controversial and publicly debated Waterview Connection. From my various transport contacts I understand that there’s some pretty large areas of disagreement between the various agencies involved over the form that AMETI should take: whether it has too much of a roads focus, whether there should be a motorway component, whether the bus lanes are enough to justify being called “rapid transit”, whether building massive viaducts is appropriate in the urban environment and so forth.

But the problem is that most of these discussions have taken place behind closed doors – simply between Auckland City Council staff and Manukau City Council staff, with ARTA apparently involved but with there being little sign that public transport is really being taken that seriously by the project. Only very recently was there an open day to show people what was planned for the Panmure stage of the project, but effectively (somewhat typically I must add) it seems to be a case of “here’s what we are going to build, what do you think?” rather than “what do you think needs to happen here?”

The image below is from the open day, and includes a lot of “this road will be built here, this road will be built there”: Perhaps there has been what I would call “micro-level consultation”, over things such as where a bus stop should go, whether a certain road should have two lanes in each direction or just the one lane and so forth. But there still seem to be some fundamental characteristics of AMETI that are truly bizarre.

As I have noted before, the number one utterly bizarre characteristic of AMETI is its complete ignorance of the “big picture” in terms of providing what must be the most glaring missing link in Auckland’s transport system – a rapid transit line to the southeast. The plans note that bus lanes will be provided along the Lagoon Drive and Ellserlie-Panmure Highway corridor, and pretend that constitutes what a Rapid Transit Network should be (which is absolute rubbish, but let’s leave that aside for the moment). However, it appears as though absolutely no thought is going into answering basic questions like the following:

1. What happens to our Rapid Transit Network once the buses have passed through Panmure on their way to the CBD?
2. How is the Rapid Transit Network provided on the eastern side of the Panmure Bridge?
3. Since when did bus lanes constitute an RTN?
4. Has any thought whatsoever gone into actually providing a decent standard Rapid Transit line to this huge, fast-growing swathe of southeast Auckland?

As I have said time and time again, I really think that the only solution for providing high-quality rapid transit to the southeast part of Auckland that will be of such a standard that people will actually use it, is through constructing a railway line that would actually branch off from the existing Eastern Line just south of Panmure, and approximately follows the route in the map below:

Everyone keeps saying to me “but this route would be horrifically expensive, it’s not on any of the plans at the moment, it’s the stuff of dreams” and justifiably so (it would be expensive and it’s not really planned for at the moment). However, I think that if this railway line was built then it would take enough traffic off the road to make pretty much the whole $1.33 billion AMETI project unnecessary. Furthermore, future projects that are likely to be required such as an upgrade of Te Irirangi Drive to motorway standard (or near it), plus further upgrades to Ti Rakau Drive would also become unnecessary in my opinion. Even if this project cost close to $3 billion to build, it might very well stack up economically because it would render other projects, such as the roadsfest that AMETI seems to be turning into, unnecessary.

It seems to me that AMETI is basically a giant excuse to say to people “hey, we’re trying to do something here” while actually completely ignoring the real problem, the “elephant in the room”, which is the lack of a southeast Rapid Transit route. It’s a depressingly typical Auckland situation where everyone knows what the real problem is, but because it is seen as too difficult, everyone’s just ignoring it and instead building other stuff that will inevitably do little to reduce congestion but most certainly will ruin a fair few local communities with massive roads being cut through their heart.

Perhaps the best thing we can do with AMETI is stall it for a few months and hope that the Auckland Transport CCO does a complete rethink of it, a rethink that stops ignoring the elephant in the room and gets around to providing a real southeast RTN for this part of Auckland.

Here’s what the media [...]]]> NZTA have announced that over the Father’s Day weekend at the start of September the Newmarket Viaduct will need to close for around 36 hours. This closure sounds essential in undertaking the last bits of “tying in” the existing roadway with the first half of the new viaduct, which has now been constructed.

Here’s what the media release says:

The NZ Transport Agency [NZTA] is advising people to avoid Auckland’s Southern Motorway on Father’s Day weekend [4 and 5 September] when it plans a maximum 36 hour closure of a section of the highway for necessary work to open the first stage of the new Newmarket Viaduct.

The motorway’s southbound lanes will be closed between the Gillies Ave off-ramp and Greenlane interchange from 5pm Saturday, 4 September, for final preparations to allow drivers on to the southbound lanes of the new viaduct from Monday morning, 6 September.

The NZTA’s State Highways Manager for Auckland, Tommy Parker, says closing a section of the southbound lanes has the potential to cause extensive congestion throughout Auckland and he advises people to stay away from the Southern Motorway that weekend.

“Travel delays will be inevitable, and they will be considerable and widespread” he says.

Detours are planned, but Mr Parker says the alternative routes will not be able to cope if regular weekend traffic flows occur.

“We’re talking about trying to re-direct up to 80,000 vehicles on the Sunday alone,” he adds. “Even with detours, the impact of the closure will be felt well beyond the Southern Motorway and people need to allow a lot more time for their journey if they do have to travel. “

Detour routes to key destinations, such as Auckland International Airport, are available online, at www.nzta.govt.nz/newmarketconnection and www.facebook.com/switchmyroute.

Mr Parker says construction of the new viaduct is ahead of schedule and the NZTA and its Newmarket Connection partners want to deliver the benefits from the project to drivers as quickly as possible.

“To have reached the stage where we’re now ready to switch southbound traffic across to the new structure, significantly ahead of schedule, without having previously closed the motorway to daytime traffic, is a remarkable achievement,” Mr Parker says. “We are now asking people to recognise these efforts in keeping the city moving, and support us through the closure.”

The Automobile Association is also urging people to avoid unnecessary trips. If they do have to travel says AA spokesman Simon Lambourne, they should plan their journeys and drive with patience and care.

“Congestion will be significant with the closure of the southbound lanes,” Mr Lambourne says, “but the short term pain will be well worth it given the long term benefits of the new viaduct.”

Over the next month, The NZTA will run an extensive communications campaign using traditional and social media to make people aware of the closure and its impact on travel.

During the closure, the viaduct’s new lanes will be connected to the motorway and the blue lifting gantry shifted on to the existing southbound lanes for stage 2 of the Newmarket Connection: Viaduct Replacement Project. When traffic is switched, work can also start to complete a fourth southbound lane across the viaduct to Greenlane, due to open early 2011.

The weekend before it opens to traffic, people will have the chance to walk over the new viaduct. The community event is planned for Sunday August 29, from 9am to midday. More information is available online at www.nzta.govt.nz/newmarketconnection and www.facebook.com/switchmyroute.

The closure is the second involving projects that will improve journey travel times through Auckland’s Central Motorway Junction – the country’s most congested section of highway. The Victoria Park Tunnel project is closing the north bound Wellington Street on-ramp for three months from 22 August. Mr Parker says neither closure will impact on the other.

Somewhat fortunately for myself, I will be out of the country by this weekend, starting my three week holiday to North America. However, for the rest of the world I can see this being absolutely chaotic. The Newmarket Viaduct carries on average well over 160,000 vehicles a day – and while over the weekend the number is much lower, we can still expect traffic chaos not only in the immediate vicinity but also on alternative routes.

As well as people simply avoiding the mess by staying at home on that day, I wonder whether NZTA should be looking at some potentially quite drastic measures to enable people to avoid driving – with the most obvious being why not make public transport free that weekend? The more people using public transport, the fewer who would be on the roads – and NZTA could well justify picking up the tab for the loss of fare revenue as mitigation for what will be an enormous disruption to the way traffic works in Auckland.

We might need to run a few more buses and trains, particularly on the Southern Line, but that has been done before for special occasions (such as Santa Parades). I wonder if it’s worth a try to at least help minimise the chaos.

This is a pretty exciting project and, unlike some of the other roads of [...]]]> While looking for some detailed plans of how NZTA will manage the closure of the Wellington Street onramp for three months starting pretty soon, I came across a couple of great videos providing updates on how building the Victoria Park Tunnel is progressing:

This is a pretty exciting project and, unlike some of the other roads of national significance, the numbers seem to stack up pretty well in terms of its cost-effectiveness. I only wish NZTA had been smart enough to stump up with a little extra cash to underground both directions of the motorway so we could have Victoria Park back as a full, undivided, inner city park.