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By Matt L, on January 31st, 2012 After months of silence, Len Brown has started talking about the City Rail Link again. In an opinion piece in the Herald yesterday he talks about the need for the region to get on with building the transport infrastructure it needs like the CRL and associated with that the funding mechanisms to pay for it all.
The second major issue – transport and how to pay for it – is something we will need to work on for the next two decades.
Our transport infrastructure is already under stress. We must begin work on some key projects such as the additional harbour crossing, access to the airport, transport links to South-east Auckland, upgrading arterial roads and busways, investing in walking and cycling, and upgrading our ferry service.
The level of investment needed to cope with Auckland’s growth is considerable.
One thing I am pleased about is that he has started to articulate some of the benefits of the CRL and why it is needed, there are of course other benefits that he doesn’t mention, things like faster journey times but at least it is a start. The council and Len much more actively selling the project is something I have been suggesting needs to happen for some time.
Unblocking Auckland’s transport system is one of the keys to unlocking New Zealand’s economic potential. We need a much more efficient system for businesses to operate effectively.
As a trading nation, transport is our lifeblood. We cannot afford to have our products and workers sitting on blocked roads. A more efficient transport system is crucial if we are to reduce our carbon footprint, and improve the environment.
Our transport system must be integrated. Yes, we need new roads, but we know from past experience that new roads clog up almost as quickly as the bitumen sets. Unless we are investing in alternatives now – in a single transport system, involving trains, buses and ferries with an integrated ticketing system – perish the thought of driving across town in 2030.
The City Rail Link is crucial to this. It will essentially “complete” Auckland’s rail network, and effectively double the capacity of the rail network across Auckland. By turning Britomart Terminal into the through station it was designed to be, it will allow more trains to move around the entire network more frequently.
Combined with our new, clean and fast electric train fleet arriving next year, it will mean more trains stopping at your local station or transport interchange, with less time in between services.
Considerable analysis has been done on this link. There is significant public support for it. We know we need to get on and build it but what we do not yet know is how we will pay for it. The cost is significant, and we will need to look at a variety of sources.
So far, the Government has declined to contribute to the project, leaving the council to consider other sources of funding for this and other projects. Rates, obviously, are the principal source of funds for local government and will form part of the solution, but they are a blunt option and we need to always be mindful of issues of affordability. We must investigate new funding avenues. I want to consider a range of solutions.
He then goes on to talk about some potential funding options and has this nice little line for the likes of the AA who complain about road taxes being used to fund PT projects.
Yes, as the AA tells us, road users already pay for the costs of new roads, but they also stand to benefit considerably from reduced congestion with any shift towards public transport.
Of course while the funding issue is far from sorted, one thing the government did agree to last year was the council seeking a designation for the project. AT’s Chief Executive report to the board in December had this to say about what was happening.
Preparatory work to support the lodgement of the NoR to protect the CRL route continued in November. This included communications and stakeholder engagement planning to support this process, and a detailed review of the NoR material previously prepared for KRG/ARTA. The Terms of Reference for a CBD Access Study to respond to the Minister’s request was finalised by the Project Team and is now ready to be released to tender. An engineering delegation from CNTIC (China) visited Auckland and Christchurch in November. AT met with CNTIC and discussed the CRL tunnel construction.
Its good to see things are continuing, even if it isn’t as fast as we would like but even so I suspect that over the course of the year we will get a lot more information about both the designation and the funding options.
By admin, on December 31st, 2011 Trying to get my head around whether 2011 was a good year or not such a good year for advocates of a more balanced transport system like myself, is a bit of a challenge. There were a number of good things which happened, but at the same time there were also a number of steps backward. Here’s my brief summary of the year.
The early months of 2011 were a time when Auckland Council and Auckland Transport were still very much “settling in”. We saw some really interesting first glimpses of what the council’s vision for Auckland’s city centre was in January, we found out that Len Brown’s goal for public transport patronage was 150 million trips a year by 2021 (and we wondered how that would be achieved). We also saw construction of the now open Wynyard Quarter tram loop. Submissions on preferred options for the Puhoi-Warkworth section of the holiday highway were written.
The February 22 earthquake in Christchurch obviously stands out as the whole country’s biggest event of the year, but seemed to have a remarkably little impact on the transport discussion here in Auckland. The government passed over a golden opportunity to back down over Puhoi-Wellsford (or at least downgrade it to something more sensible at a time when the whole country would have understood such a move), while Auckland Council sensibly pointed out that it would be many more years before serious money for the City Rail Link project was required. Behind the scenes, it was becoming fairly clear that officials reviewing the business case for the CRL were unlikely to come to agreement on the project’s merits.
In March the Auckland Unleashed discussion document was released, outlining the Council’s vision – at a broad-bush level – for Auckland over the next 30 years. We saw a great video of Len Brown’s rail vision for Auckland, but once again this positivity was tempered by the government’s feedback on the document (weirdly released before the discussion document) that pushed for more sprawl and more roads. Following hot on the heels of all that spatial plan discussion, we finally saw some progress on the implementation of a smartcard ticketing system in Auckland, with the launch of HOP. Unfortunately the complexity of the deal done between Auckland Transport, Thales, Snapper, NZ Bus, NZTA and so forth meant that the launch was generally met more by confusion than celebration.
From the optimism of those early months (earthquakes aside), the middle months of the year were a little more depressing – although the superb patronage stats throughout the year tempered this disappointment. The 2012 Government Policy Statement for Land Transport Funding turned out to be even stupider and more roads-obsessed than its 2009 predecessor, proposing additional RoNS that were so crazy they didn’t even end up being adopted into National’s election transport policy. But perhaps the biggest disappointment of those middle months was the review of the City Rail Link project, with the narrow-minded thinking of Ministry of Transport officials ignoring matters as fundamental as the bus and car capacity of the CBD when assessing the merits of the project. It was not a great year for the MoT, who also managed to forget to record the spending of around $180 million.
On a brighter note, the actual implementation of the HOP card went smoother than most (including myself) had expected. Bus loading times declined dramatically thanks to the speed of tagging on (although I still get annoyed at the cash-paying idiots who block the whole entranceway – any chance of some signage NZ Bus?) On a personal note, June was a pretty epic month with baby Adele arriving five weeks earlier than anticipated, leading to a couple of weeks of very regular travel to the hospital.
August saw the introduction of the Outer Link bus, as well as significance reconfiguration of all Western Bays services. Although further tweaks have been necessary (and probably will continue to be necessary in the future), overall the changes were very positive and have led to an increase in patronage exceeding what was forecast. After that, all eyes turned to the Rugby World Cup, which began on that fateful day of September 9th.
The transport chaos of RWC opening night was very unfortunate, but told us some very insightful things. As suspected, the CCO model of delivering many of council’s services through separate agencies did mean that they became siloed and didn’t talk to each other over matters as simple as the number of people expected to attend opening night. The highly fractured structure of running public transport in Auckland meant that everyone could point the finger at everyone else, whilst avoiding responsibility for that happened. But more positively, we also saw (and hopefully didn’t put off forever) an unprecedented willingness of Aucklanders to use public transport. There were over 140,000 rail trips around Auckland on September 9th, there probably could have been over 200,000 if we had the system to cope with them. I don’t think we’ve seen too much long-term damage from that evening, but perhaps we might see some long-term benefit with the realisation that it very much is Auckland’s public transport system that lets us down in our quest to become a truly world-class city.
During, and just after, the RWC, we saw draft versions of a number of really important documents that will help guide Auckland’s future. These included, the Draft Auckland Plan, the City Centre Master Plan, the Waterfront Plan and an Economic Development Strategy. I put together a fairly detailed submission on the Auckland Plan, and overall many thousands of submissions were received by the Council. Final decisions on these plans will be made in the first few months of next year.
In September we also found out one of the best pieces of transport news for the year – that we would get 57 electric trains rather than the originally proposed 35. The excellent work by Auckland Transport to secure this deal probably hasn’t been given the praise it deserves, especially as many tens of millions of dollars were squeezed out of the government as their contribution to the additional trains. It was also very welcome to learn that the trains are going to look damn nice too.
After the RWC was finished, the election rolled around pretty quickly. While the overall result wasn’t particularly positive, as it seems we will see more of the same from central government, there were some interesting outcomes. We will have our first transport planner MP, in the Greens’ Julie-Anne Genter, Labour’s new leader David Shearer has been a long-time supporter of public transport in Auckland, while Phil Twyford becoming labour’s transport spokerperson should also lead to a greater focus on Auckland transport issues. In the interests of fairness, we should give new transport minister Gerry Brownlee a chance before passing final judgment on him.
So overall it has been a pretty damn busy year when it comes to Auckland transport issues. As I noted at the start of this post, there have been a number of steps forward but also a number of steps backwards. 2012 should hopefully see the resolution of a number of these issues: a finalisation of the spatial plan, hopefully some agreed way forward on the merits of the City Rail Link, the proper implementation of integrated ticketing and many more interesting things.
I’m just hoping for a slightly less crazy year than this one.
By admin, on December 22nd, 2011 I am glad that the “City Rail Link” name for the Britomart to Mt Eden Tunnel has replaced previous names for the project – like the CBD Rail Tunnel, the CBD Rail Link and (my least favourite) the CBD Loop. Calling this project a “City Rail Link” emphasises the fact that its benefits are not just felt in the city centre, but across the whole of Auckland.
And this is important, because we are consistently seeing this project being attacked on the basis that it will only provide a benefit to those working in the CBD – and that’s a relatively small proportion of Auckland’s employment. One recent example of such criticism comes from a blog post on the “Cities Matter” blog (a rather ironic name for what seems to be a very anti-cities blog), written by Phil McDermott – a consultant in ‘urban, economic and community development’ .
The post makes the following critique of the project:
Around 21,000 trips a day from the West and the North of the region went to the CBD in 2006. But 38,000 had to get past it (although some from the west would have gone near it at all).
Significantly fewer north- or west-bound trips indicate more limited employment opportunities in those areas. But there were still 15,000 from south of the CBD to the north or west.
So, 54,000 trips went past the CBD, nearly as many as destined for it (58,000). And 127,000 went to other parts of the Isthmus. While the CBD is the largest single destination (around 14% of the city’s total jobs using our definition) the real congestion issue is how to cater for – or reduce — cross-city commuting, and especially north-south trips that must use the motorway system to drive round it.
Will the proposed city rail link meet the Plan’s expectations? No. Not just because it does not address cross-city congestion. But also because in 2006 30% of trips from elsewhere on the Isthmus into the CBD already used PT. In some nearby Isthmus areas the figure was much higher e.g., 50% for Mt Eden North, 40% Newmarket, 42% Sandringham, 41% Newmarket, and 40% Surrey Crescent. And a substantial 26% of commuters from the North and 27% from the South to the CBD also used PT in 2006. (These figures do not include ferries, which accounted for 7% of PT boardings in the year ending October 2011 – all to the CBD)…
…It must be asked: how we can justify over $2bn in capital spending to raise rail’s share of CBD-focused travel in which PT already plays a large part? Because we face the prospect of diminishing returns by way the high cost of each additional unit of demand that might be satisfied by spending up large on the rail link, especially because this does not really address where the problem really lies: with cross regional travel. There may be more cost effective and enduring measures we can take.
The information above is informed by a table, showing journey to work patterns around Auckland (which seems to match up with this other table?): This kind of analysis of the City Rail Link project has two obvious flaws, which I will get onto soon, but the fact that this type of critique continues to emerge highlights the need for the regional benefits of the project to be explained in more detail and given a bit more focus.
The first flaw is to ignore the fact that cross-town trips obviously do benefit from there being fewer ‘suburb to CBD’ vehicle (either by car or bus) trips. Someone travelling from New Lynn to East Tamaki clearly benefits from not having to compete for road-space with someone who used to drive along some of the same roads on their trip from Avondale to the CBD, but now catches the train. Ultimately, we all know that Auckland is growing quite significantly (another million people by 2040) and we know that it’s extremely difficult and expensive to expand the road network to accommodate all these extra people – so the need to use our rail network more efficiently is obvious. As, once again quite obviously, the only way we can squeeze a lot more out of the rail network is by building the City Rail Link, to ease the Britomart bottleneck.
The second flaw is linked to the first, being an ignorance of the City Rail Link’s ‘enabling’ of higher frequency trains to be operated across the whole rail network. In March next year, when the next rail timetable comes into effect, we will be maximising Britomart’s ability to handle trains at peak times. Even post-electrification we won’t be able to run more trains at peak times (although they will generally be much longer). If we are to run frequencies across the whole network that are better than one train every 10 minutes, then we need to build the City Rail Link. If we ever want to expand the rail network (building Airport rail or whatever), then we need the City Rail Link. Higher train frequencies and the potential for an expanded rail network clearly benefits far more people than just those travelling to the CBD. If you travel from Papakura to Ellerslie for work, then you’d benefit from having a train every 5 minutes rather than every 10, same for people travelling from Henderson to New Lynn. A higher frequency rapid transit network will help increase the very low rail modeshare for trips to employment centres along the rail network other than the CBD. Once again, this will help take more cars off the road than we would otherwise see.
Another critique of the project made in the blog post, relates to the belief that investing further in the bus network is an alternative to building the rail tunnel:
Buses account for the bulk of the growth in public transport patronage to date, and will continue to do so whether or not a city rail link is built.
Bus services offer relatively low marginal costs for expansion, route and service flexibility, capacity for continuous improvement to rolling stock, and a better ability to cope with disruption than rail. They offer wider network capacity and greater passenger convenience and responsiveness. They are less prone to system-wide disruption.
Given a long-standing legacy of rail transport to a few suburbs it may make sense to incorporate what we already have into a multi-modal system, but putting a lot more money on the line to “benefit” from sunk costs in a system that is inferior to the alternative is not good economics.
Auckland Transport, and ARTA before them, have brought on this type of critique by not reforming the bus network over the past few years to reflect that we now have a functioning rail system in Auckland. We still run buses from Swanson and Papakura all the way into town, competing and undermining the rail network – having huge over-provision of services on inner parts of Great North and Great South roads, not only clogging the city centre with buses at peak times but also wasting a huge amount of public subsidy on service kilometres that just aren’t necessary (evident from the low seat utilisation of these services).
Buses clearly have their place, and in Auckland will continue to provide the bulk of public transport trips. However, they aren’t particularly efficient when it comes to long-haul services (a lot of driver time per passenger carried) and could be reworked to improve both their efficiency and the efficiency of the rail network by becoming feeder services in many more parts of the city. While buses do offer route and service flexibility, greater convenience and coverage than rail, and lower capital costs, at the same time they obviously don’t offer anywhere near as much capacity (per vehicle) as rail does, meaning they end up taking up a lot of space at high levels of demand. In effect, buses should focus on what they do best, rail should focus on what it does best, and they should integrate – not compete – with each other.
There is certainly going to be ongoing debate about this project, perhaps particularly around its land-use interaction. While the whole of Auckland does benefit (directly or indirectly) from the City Rail Link, the benefits are certainly most acutely felt in the city centre (largely by increasing its accessibility and ensuring it avoids being clogged with buses and cars). It should encourage more businesses to locate in the city centre, particularly around the three proposed station sites, just as Britomart has been a boon for development near the waterfront. By encouraging a centralisation of employment, and encouraging more people to live along the rail corridors to take advantage of the accessibility benefits the project brings, the City Rail Link works to support the council’s overall land-use strategies – unlike many other transport projects that often actively undermine those strategies.
What this means is that the question of whether we proceed with the City Rail Link, or look for alternative ways to boost the capacity of Auckland’s transport infrastructure, is somewhat dependent on what our vision is for Auckland’s future form. Clearly Phil McDermott, the author of the blog post criticising the City Rail Link, thinks that the city should decentralise and sprawl – something that the CRL would undermine. Clearly the Council (and I, for that matter) thinks that the city centre should play a more important role in the functioning of Auckland, wants development to be focused around the rail corridors and wants to limit (to an extent) the amount of sprawl allowed.
To achieve this vision of Auckland, the CRL is utterly critical.
By admin, on December 3rd, 2011 In a post a couple of months ago I looked at how the way we calculate the transport benefits of different projects ends up having a huge difference on its cost-benefit ratio. In particular, it was extremely interesting to note that if we had used the British discount rate and length of assessment when analysing the benefits of the City Rail Link project, it would have around five times the amount of benefit compared to the way such a project is analysed in New Zealand. The graph below summarises this issue: A recent paper by economic researchers NZIER provides a useful summary of discount rates and how New Zealand using a “discount rate” much higher than other countries affects the mix of projects we end up funding and not funding.
A discount rate lower (by a certain percentage), the amount of benefit from a project each year into the future, reflecting the fact that having money now is more valuable than having the same amount in the future. At 8% if a project delivered $1 million of benefits in its first year, then even if its benefits were the same in the second year, they would only be counted at $920,000, $846,400 in the second year, $778,688 in the third year and so forth. This is explained further below, in the introduction to the research paper: To illustrate, you can see the difference in ‘level of benefit’ after a variety of years in the graph below – using two different discount rates: Much of the rest of the paper makes an argument that we should use a lower discount rate, to take more into account benefits of a project that will continue to exist well into the future. It also appears that there’s relatively little theoretical or practical logic behind the current rate used.
Obviously, if a lower discount rate is used and benefits are measured over a longer time-scale, then the cost-benefit ratios of our projects will go up. You can see this by comparing the (traditional transport benefits, earliest business cases) cost-benefit ratios of the City Rail Link and Puhoi-Wellsford projects:
The purpose of the comparison is not to compare the projects, but rather to highlight that lowering the discount rate has a fairly major impact on the BCR of a project. As we only have a certain amount of money available to spend on transport projects, a lower discount rate would – by necessity – raise the bar for the point at which projects were considered to make financial sense. We would have so many projects that look like they perform excellently, that we would have to make tougher decisions over which ones we proceeded with.
For this reason, I don’t really see having a lower discount rate as necessarily justifying a greater amount of expenditure on transport projects (although I’m pretty sure organisations such as the NZ Council for Infrastructure Development will do this). What will be of perhaps greater interest is how the mix of projects funded might change with a lower discount rate but a higher cut-off point. It seems logical that we might see projects with longer-lasting, but slower accumulating benefits, doing a bit better than those which give a quick, but short-lived, pay off. This would seem to be likely to benefit a project like the City Rail Link, perhaps a bit more than something like a motorway widening which will provide some benefit for a few years, before induced demand goes and eats up all that gain.
Auckland Council seems pretty determined to pursue, in partnership with the NZIER, further analysis on this issue and is wanting some more logic to sit behind whatever discount rate we decide to use. It will be interesting to see how this develops, as the government might be keen to try anything that will help improve the cost-benefit ratios of some of the RoNS projects – even if that’s done in a way which ends up benefitting the economic analysis of the City Rail Link even more.
By Nick R, on December 2nd, 2011 I had a few moments spare in the city library yesterday and thought I’d have a peek up at the Auckland Research Centre. This section of the library is great for finding old plans and proposal on anything related to transport or urban planning (by the way, just about every report, plan or meeting minutes from any council in Auckland is held on desk copy in the archives in the library basement. If you ever wanted to know about any council document it is there).
While there I luckily found what I was looking for, a copy showing the 1972 Rapid Transit Plan for Auckland. The history of this plan is eerily similar to our current situation in many ways. It was a revolutionary scheme championed by the charismatic mayor of Auckland Dove Myer Robinson (leading to the nickname ‘Robbie’s Rapid Rail’), despite the mayoralty and council not having the means to actually fund the thing independently. They began working on alternate funding solutions such as a targeted land tax but found them impossible to implement without support from Wellington. In the end by the Labour government reluctantly offered an election pledge to fund the proposal, but failed to deliver on that pledge. A wholly unsupportive National government were voted into power in 1975 and in 1976 the plan was cancelled completely.
The 1972 plan was based on the De Leuw Cather report of 1965, and it actually goes into very fine detailed design, modelling of patronage and economic analysis. It even goes so far as to include scale diagrams of the necessary grade separations on the western line, designs for park and ride stations and timetables for the integrated bus feeder services. One wonders if project DART planners couldn’t have simply checked this document out from the library and got stuck in!
I’ve taken photos of two pages that outline that out line the main components of the scheme so I’ll go through the interesting features of each one. Overall it is such a huge shame we didn’t build this scheme, as it would have provided us with a five line rapid rail transit system with a central city underground loop, fed by integrated bus feeders and park-n-ride and a focus on development around key nodes. Auckland would be a much different (and in my opinion better) place if we’d had such a system shaping the city’s development for the last thirty years.
The city loop (an actual loop)
Unlike the current proposals for a City Rail Tunnel, the 1972 scheme did actually contain a tight loop of tunnels under the core of the CBD. Two main stations were proposed: one downtown in the vicinity of theQueen St/Shortland Street intersection, and a second midtown between Queen Stand Mayoral Drive, about halfway between Aotea Square and Albert park. A third city station was to be built at K Rd, but this would have been a stop on the western line only.
 The City Loop proposal from 1972. Click to view full detail. Now I’m generally against rail loops, especially one way loops but this one seems to be small and tight enough to work. With only two stations and about a two kilometres right around it would be very quick to circuit and would have worked well. (Compare this to the modern suggestion of using the City Rail Tunnel and the existing Newmarket to Britomart line as a loop: that would be 9.3km around with seven or eight stops on the way. Just plain loopy!).
We can see that the main link to the existing system comes via a tunnel and viaduct leading to the old Auckland Station. Indeed next to the former railway hotel opposite the station buildings there is still the empty section of cliff where the viaduct was to enter the tunnel. A good benefit of this scheme is that it maintained the old terminus as a proper ‘central station’ for long distance trains and generally kept them clear of the suburban tunnel operations. Also visible is the tunnelled link to theNorthShoreline, which passes underneathWynyardWharf. If only we had that tunnel today we could already have the station for the waterfront development.
As an aside, if you look closely at that page (sorry about the quality, I snapped it on a camera phone) you can see the full central motorway junction plans in all their monstrous glory. Notice how the spaghetti stretches right down Grafton gully to a elevated Eastern Motorway, while the CMJ is insanely complex due to the links to the mercifully never built Dominion Motorway (note how the Dominion Motorway runs beside the huge new North Rd interchange, rather than through it as commonly assumed). Could we image the traffic nightmare the full junction would be today, not to mention the urban destruction? Sounds like Dante’s tenth circle of hell to me, a combination of Limbo and Treachery.
The suburban network
Moving on to the second image we see the real extent of the rapid transit system proposed. One thing I can’t quite figure out is whether the dots indicate the only stations, or if they are simply the major stations. If it is the former then the plan involved a major rationalisation of stations and would have been a really rapid rail system.
For example the southern line would have only six stop between Newmarket and Papakura allowing for some lightning transit times! I guess we can assume that every station would have been a major bus interchange and almost all passengers would have used a feeder bus to get to their local station. An interesting omission here is a Manukau link, perhaps we would have seen Papatoetoe or Manurewa be the ‘centre’ of south Auckland instead, or perhaps they would have simply built the branch at the time Manukau was first developed rather than thirty years later. Looking at the lines in turn now, perhaps the most obvious addition is the North Shore rail line. Not surprisingly the station locations are almost exactly the same as the busway interchanges. The first is one at the bottom of Onewa Rd in Northcote, originally planned for the busway but never built. Next we have stations as Barry’s Point (aka Akoranga), Wairau valley (aka Sunnynook), Sunset Rd (aka Constellation) andAlbany. From there the line takes quite an interesting route north, via a station at Redvale (presumably a big park n ride?) it curves around the waterfront at Stillwater to a station half way along the Whangaparoa peninsula like a sort of rail based Penlink. Again with only six stations between Whangaparoa and the CBD transit times would have been around 30 minutes or less.
 The rapid rail network proposal from 1972. Click to view full detail. The western line appears much the same, except for the fact there are only four stations remaining between Henderson and town. The main difference is that the route leaves the existing line at Ranui and curves north along a ridge beside Don Buck Drive to terminate at as station called ‘Hobsonville’, which if we look closely is actually right where Westgate exists today. A quick glance at Google Maps shows that this ridge line is still largely undeveloped, perhaps we could still use this route to extend the rail line up to Westgate and the upper harbour?
Over on the Eastern Line close inspection shows something interesting. Unlike the Western and Southern which use the existing tracks, it looks like the eastern rapid rail would have run alongside the existing tracks in the same corridor. In particular we can see a station at St Johns Rd and an alignment that appears to cross over the existing tunnel, both of which suggests the new line was intended to climb up the hill rather than use the low level tunnel. I guess this is in order to keep the old ones for port freight. Perhaps this is something we could still look too in the future (that is keeping the existing eastern line tracks for freight and building a new set in the corridor to specifically to take rapid transit), especially if we were considering some from of light rail or light metro for a line out to Botany and beyond. At Panmure the rapid rail line has definitely deviated from the main line and it passes east of the Panmure lagoon before passing further east to new stations at Pakauranga and Harris Rd (just before contemporary Botany Town Centre) to terminate at Howick. Apart from the last station, this route is pretty much the same today on the Auckland Plan and the AMETI busway plans. This is an interesting concept, modern designs have rapid transit to Botany then heading along Te Iririangi Drive, but a spur out toward Howick would certainly get right deep into the neighbourhoods on the Howick peninsula.
The last line is quite a curious one. The outer section of this is extremely similar to current proposals for an Airport/southwest suburbs line, more or less following the motorway corridor from Onehunga to the Airport via Mangere Town Centre. The interesting bit is on the inner section: rather than travelling along the Onehunga branch and the Southern line into the city, it actually swings up part of the old Avondale-Southdown corridor through to Mt Roskill then along Dominion Rd straight into town. Certainly this would be quite a good way to get a direct trip to the airport plus take care of the central ithsmus transport needs at the same time. A close look at the map suggest the line runs parallel just east of Dominion Rd, presumably in the same corridor as the proposed motorway. Luckily for us we never carved that horrific scar across the central suburbs, however unfortunately that likewise make such a rail line quite infeasible today. I suppose a long Dominion rail tunnel or some sort of light rail or metro system could work (if we had the funds), but generally I think a rail line via Onehunga paired with trams on Dominion Rdwill take care of those transport needs.
From a modern viewpoint this system is extremely radial and CBD focussed, like the system in Melbourne. However if we had had these lines in place by the late 80s we can assume that other lines would have been built since, for example the Te Irirangi – Flatbush corridor probably would have included a rail link between the eastern and southern lines in addition to an expressway, and probably over to the airport too. Likewise completing the gaps in the route between Avondale, Onehunga,Westfieldand Panmure would have been a logical choice for an ithsmus line linking all the main radials.
A real shame this network ended up being cancelled shortly before it got started, but perhaps there is a thing or two we could learn from this proposal for the future of rapid transit in Auckland.
By admin, on November 30th, 2011 The election result on the weekend was obviously not particularly conducive to achieving where I think the country’s transport policy should be heading, but I wasn’t quite expecting things to go bad quite so quickly. First, here’s new North Shore MP Maggie Barry talking about the City Rail Link and a duplicate harbour crossing (road based, one assumes):
Maggie Barry hit the ground running as the North Shore electorate’s first woman MP.
The morning after National’s resounding victory she sent a strong message to Auckland mayor Len Brown, saying there would be a CBD rail link before a second harbour crossing “over our dead bodies”.
And the former broadcaster also affirmed her support for the Puhoi-Wellsford motorway extension.
She attacked those who have labelled it the “holiday highway.
“I refuse to use the `H’ word. It will be an umbilical cord for the far north and its economy.
“It is an arrogance for the critics to take money already set aside for this purpose and use it for something else.”
It’s a bit difficult to know how much thought she has put into these matters before sounding off on them. Does she realise that the cost of a road-based tunnel is around $5 billion, or does she support a bridge option? Does she understand how pointless the additional crossing is in the next decade or so, because traffic across the harbour bridge is falling? One suspects not.
Second, we have the two councillors who continue to oppose the City Rail Link – George Wood and Cameron Brewer – using the election result to continue to push their argument (not shared by the rest of the council) against the project:
The returning National Government is unwilling to commit to Auckland’s city rail link and the project should be put on the backburner before the expensive plans topple the council’s credit rating, two city councillors say.
The proposed 3.5km underground loop would include stations at Karangahape Rd, Aotea Square and Newton at a cost of $2.4 billion and, according to council, unlock the economic potential of the inner city and transform Auckland’s rail network.
But uncertainty about how the project will be funded, and a lack of support from the National-led Government, is putting Auckland Council at risk of a credit downgrade.
Earlier this month Standard & Poor’s put the council on a 90-day credit watch due to projected levels of debt needed to fund major transport infrastructure.
Councillors George Wood and Cameron Brewer say as a result the council needs to consider reprioritising the ambitious project which the Government is yet to commit funding for.
The council has indicated it expects the Government to contribute 50 per cent to costs but incumbent Transport Minister Steven Joyce has previously said he is not convinced by the council’s business case for the project.
The details of the credit-rating downgrade show that its impact on borrowing cost is relatively minor. Most of the former councils have the same rating as Auckland Council now does.
I feel it’s going to be a long three years as we try to push forward with this project.
By admin, on November 24th, 2011 Councillors on the Auckland Council are having a pretty busy month at the moment. Not only are they wading through listening to many hundreds (possibly thousands) of submitters on the Auckland Spatial Plan, but they’re also making really critical funding decisions about the 10 year Long Term Plan. The Long Term Plan guides how councils spend ratepayers’ money, how high rates will be, what rating systems will be used and so forth.
The Draft Long-Term Plan will go to public consultation early next year, but the detail of what ends up in that Draft Plan have been hammered out through a few marathon sessions of the council’s Strategy and Finance Committee over the past few weeks as they discuss and make amendments to the basic plan put forward by Mayor Len Brown.
The minutes of these marathon sessions makes for quite interesting reading, as we can see which councillors supported and which opposed certain proposed additions to the baseline plan. There are a lot of additional projects added in, which suggests that some changes to baseline funding plans will need to be made – but this is to be expected as the priorities of the old councils may be somewhat different to areas of priority for the new unified council.
A lot of the debates between councillors seem to be around rating policies, and this is to be expected as bringing together the different rating systems of the old councils is likely to be one of the toughest things the Council will have to do in its first term. But there are also some interesting notes about transport matters, which begin with the big one: funding of the City Rail Link. Here’s what the minutes say about that project: There are 21 councillors, so Councillor Northey (who would have voted for the motion) and Councillor Quax (who probably would have voted against it) were absent from this particular vote. It’s good to know that the council is very close to being unified in support of the City Rail Link – even when it comes to the difficult matter of committing serious cash towards its completion.
Turning to other transport matters, some other key decisions went through unanimously – which is great: There are some important projects funded in here – an increase in subsidy to continue dealing with rising public transport demand and also to help ensure public transport can make a real difference as part of the Southern Initiative; funding for school travel and safety plans (surely the best value for money investment in the entire long term plan), some money to construct the extension of the Wynyard Quarter tram to Britomart (hopefully enough to include a bridge) and finally some funding set aside to secure the route for rail to the airport.
As I noted at the start of this post, this certainly isn’t the final version of the Long Term Plan, and will be open for public consultation in the not too distant future. However, in general it’s good to know that most of the council is on the same page when it comes to transport priorities.
By admin, on November 23rd, 2011 I’m not quite sure how to approach this particular opinion piece in the NZ Herald today by Eric Thompson. There are just so many plain errors in the piece, so perhaps it’s worthwhile starting with a factual examination of some of the assertions:
Taking money from the $1.7 billion highway between Puhoi and Wellsford and ploughing it into Auckland so that Magda can shop in Newmarket and then pop across to Britomart smacks of pandering to city dwellers when most New Zealanders don’t live in cities and need to drive to get anywhere.
Oh dear the good old “it’s a loop and the trains will go around in circles” argument. This misunderstanding of the City Rail Link is the reason why calling it a loop is silly. Of course as anyone who’s spent more than half a second analysing the City Rail Link will understand, its biggest benefit is opening up the capacity of the whole rail system, allowing us to take cars and buses off the streets and significantly increasing the capacity of Auckland’s whole transport network. Secondly, what on earth is he talking about with the “most New Zealanders don’t live in cities”. One third of us live in a single city, Auckland. Add in the other main cities: Wellington, Christchurch, Hamilton, Dunedin and Tauranga and you’re probably looking at well over half the country’s population being within just these six cities.
Moving on, you just know it’s going to be a great argument when Owen McShane gets brought up:
Owen McShane, director of the Centre for Resource Management Studies, said in the New Zealand Herald two years ago: “We are often told that Auckland has poor public transport use compared with cities such as Adelaide.
But such arguments compare the Auckland region with the Adelaide metropolitan area.
“We must compare apples with apples. Half Auckland’s region – including Rodney and Franklin districts – barely have roads, let alone buses.
“A metropolitan area needs a population density of 8000 people a square mile to make rail viable. Hong Kong has a population of 6.5 million at a density of 76,200 a square mile. Auckland has 1.26 million at a density of 5500 a square mile. That’s why we can’t have a rail system like that of Hong Kong.”
It’s a bit of a challenge to work out how the population of metropolitan Auckland compares to the population of the region as a whole. Wikipedia suggests an urban population of 1,354,900 and a metropolitan (assuming this means the whole area covered by Auckland Council) population of 1,462,000. So we’re looking at around 93% of Auckland’s population being within the urban part of the region – so really saying that half the area of Auckland has no public transport is somewhat irrelevant.
In terms of our density (which Wikipedia suggests is 1,247 per square kilometre although Demographia suggest somewhere around 2,200) yes we are definitely no Hong Kong – but very few places are and that doesn’t mean they don’t have functioning rail systems. Perth, Sydney, Vancouver and Brisbane all have either very similar or actually lower densities than Auckland – yet all have very well performing rail systems.
But it gets funnier:
It’s blatantly obvious that rail is dead in the water. Billions and billions of dollars have been thrown at it over the years in this country and it’s still on he slippery slope to oblivion.
Just for interest’s sake, here’s a graph of rail patronage in Auckland over the past eight years:  Not exactly what I would call “a slippery slope to oblivion”.
But it gets more amusing:
When it comes to the London Underground, that system constantly runs at a loss and is used by the unions as a threat whenever they want more money. Shut that puppy down and London stops – I know, I’ve been there when there’s been a strike, and it’s chaos.
So London’s Underground is pointless because it runs at a loss and is used by unions as a threat when they want more money, but – hang on- at the same time when the underground is shut down the entire city stops. So maybe it’s quite important after all?
And finally:
It has been reported that the Greens want a compact central city built on efficient transport, and cited Auckland Transport’s estimate that the CBD capacity for employees and residents could triple if the rail link were built.
Are they mad? By adding a couple of hundred thousand rugby supporters to the Auckland mix at the start of the World Cup, the place ground to a halt and fans couldn’t use the rail system to even get to Eden Park.
Of course the obvious point to make is that if we had the City Rail Link in place then the rail system would have vastly more capacity to deal with large crowds like we saw on Rugby World Cup opening night.
I’m not quite sure whether the whole article is just a “wind up” – or whether the author is serious about what he’s saying. With so many blatant errors I must say I’m leaning towards the former. The comments are an interesting read though – an increasingly well educated public when it comes to transport matters seem to be generally winning through.
By admin, on November 19th, 2011 Many of the debates over the City Rail Link’s cost-effectiveness have revolved around the question of rail capacity. At what point does the railway network, without the CRL, become overloaded? How many people will be discouraged from taking the train because of this overcrowding? If they go back to driving, what congestion would they create? If they go back to catching the bus, what congestion does that create? All these sorts of questions are at the core of how, in particular, the Ministry of Transport undertook its review of the project’s cost-benefit analysis.
That’s how you end up with complicated tables like this:
 In case you’re wondering why there’s nothing for the eastern line, it’s because the Ministry of Transport’s analysis showed that even without the City Rail Link, there was enough capacity in the rail network for Eastern Line trains right through until 2041. Yes, seriously.
A lot of the detailed analysis of the City Rail Link’s cost-benefit ratio confuses me, because – as I explained in this recent post – all the analyses make one big assumption: that car and bus capacity is unconstrained. What that means is that the modelling used to estimate the number of people catching the bus, train or driving into the city centre in future years does not have, as a part of its workings, anything which says “at a certain point the roads will be full of buses and cars and you can’t fit anymore in.”
What this means is that all the business case assessments of the project so far assume that the number of bus passengers in particular, will increase dramatically in the future – both in the “2041 with the CRL” and “2041 without the CRL” scenarios:
You get some idea what this might mean on the ground through the maps in this report, prepared by NZTA to inform the Waitemata Harbour Crossing Project. Firstly, looking at the number of buses we have not along key routes in the AM peak: The colour of the arrows are explained further in the table below: What this suggests is that above 80 buses an hour you start to get issues, and over 100 buses an our things really start to get problematic – requiring multiple lane busway operations that simply aren’t feasible in Auckland’s city centre.
Keeping this is mind, if we look at the “2041 no City Rail Link” scenario, we can see that the number of buses that would flood the city centre is completely infeasible: If running over 100 buses an hour along arterial roads is problematic, then running two or three times that number along Symonds Street, Albert Street (both ways) and Fanshawe Street is, quite frankly, impossible. As someone I was talking to earlier this week said, as this point you’d need people sitting on the roof of the bus for such a scenario to make sense. So the map above makes a good argument for the necessity of the City Rail Link (and possibly also a North Shore Line).
However, it’s the next map which is perhaps even more interesting – the number of buses in the “2041 with City Rail Link” scenario: While buses coming in from Grafton Bridge have reduced down to a more feasible level, we still have a completely impractical number of services coming in from Upper Symonds Street, we will have a huge number of services both ways along Albert Street and, obviously, we’ve done nothing about the North Shore issue.
The impossibility of running so many buses along Albert and Symonds Street, even in the “with CRL” scenario, means that these passengers would have to travel by some other means. Travelling by car is pretty infeasible, as we will have dedicated so much roadspace in the CBD to bus lanes to handle the North Shore buses, as well as whatever we find to be the actual maximum number of buses from the south and west the city’s streets can handle. Also, if we’ve started giving effect to the City Centre Master Plan, much more of our city’s roadspace will be dedicated to pedestrians. The train is the only feasible alternative.
This potentially has a huge effect on assessing the cost-effectiveness of the City Rail Link. Let’s analyse what the capacity of the city centre for buses and cars might actually be:
- In 2010 there were around 34,000 car (including drivers and passengers) trips into the CBD at peak times. If we think about the City Centre Master Plan reducing roadspace throughout many parts of the city centre (like Quay Street, Queen Street, Hobson/Nelson streets and Victoria Street), as well as having to give up roadspace to bus lanes to accommodate the significant increase in bus numbers, I think a future car capacity of the CBD is unlikely to be much more than 30,000.
- In 2010 there were 23,000 bus passenger trips into the CBD at peak times. Most of these end up along Fanshawe, Albert and Symonds Street, which are all getting reasonably close to that 100 buses per hour capacity limit where things start to not work particularly well. Improved bus routes within the CBD (such as taking all North Shore buses off Albert Street and sending them via Wellesley Street instead) should allow for a fairly significant increase to this number, but certainly not more than half as many buses again. So let’s say a capacity of 35,000 trips at peak times.
If we set these car and bus capacity constraints, we see a huge impact on the number of rail trips. The three assessments done disagree on the total number of trips into the CBD at peak times in 2041 (excluding walking and cycling), but we can take an average of the three to come up with just under 105,000. Assuming ferry patronage increases from 3,000 to say 5,000 – you start to see that the rail system will have to take a pretty massive number of trips.
In the “2041 with CRL” scenarios, none of the assessments done suggest that rail will have this many trips – simply because they haven’t recognised the capacity constraints on the city centre’s road network. Therefore, all the assessments have under-estimated the impact of the project, they have significantly under-estimated rail patronage and therefore it is likely that they have all under-calculated the project’s real cost-benefit ratio.
By admin, on November 14th, 2011 Interest in comparing the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” with the City Rail Link has, unsurprisingly, risen in the past few weeks with Labour and now the Greens both promising to scrap the Puhoi-Wellsford road to help pay for the rail project. The debate is obviously causing a bit of consternation with the government, as David Farrar’s Kiwiblog has weighed into the debate with an interestingly well researched post on comparing the two projects:
Labour and the Greens refer to the the proposed Puhoi to Wellsford SH1 upgrade as the Holiday Highway. They would have people think it is a little used road, that only gets a bit crowded on Friday nights. In fact it is far more than that.
The road between Puhoi and Wellsford is part of SH1. As a two lane road, motorists will know that traffic flows at the speed of the slowest vehicle on it. We must be one of the only countries in the world that doesn’t have at least two lanes each way on our major highway.
That road actually has more people use it every day, than use the entire train network in Auckland. Around 28,000 people a day use that highway, and 27,000 use Auckland trains (UPDATE: In recent months this has increased to 33,000). Is Labour really claiming 28,000 people a day are off on holiday?
I don’t think anyone quite knows the comparison of how many people use the Puhoi-Wellsford section of State Highway 1 with the Auckland rail network. Are we measuring the number of people travelling along any part of the network during an average weekday, an average day including weekends, the busiest day of the year? Are we comparing the busiest part of the rail network with the busiest part of the state highway? It’s hard to tell. But anyway, I think the debate over “which has more people” is somewhat irrelevant to the question of which is a better project. Most busy arterial roads in Auckland have many more vehicles travelling along them each day than the Puhoi-Wellsford road, and we’re not exactly proposing to spend $1.7 billion on each of those roads.
The real question of which project we should proceed with comes down to three key issues in my opinion:
- Which one provides a greater benefit?
- Can the benefits of either project be realised through a cheaper alternative?
- How does the project align with land-use/economic development strategies?
Debate over the “amount of benefit” each project will provide is, somewhat unfortunately, not the objective process that we might wish it was. Different assumptions can lead to vastly differently results – as I highlighted recently in this post. Change a discount ratio so it favours long-term projects more, and all of a sudden your cost-benefit ratio changes enormously – as best illustrated by comparing the City Rail Link’s “benefit stream” under the UK and NZ systems: Looking at the Puhoi-Wellsford project, we also see debate over the cost-benefit ratio, depending on which costing is used and how many years the project’s benefits are measuring over. The table below, from an independent report into the BCR’s of the various RoNS projects, gives Puhoi-Wellsford a pretty low 0.4:
One argument for the Puhoi-Wellsford road that’s often put forward relates to benefits the project will bring to Northland. At a “quick glance” level I can sort of see where the thinking is coming from – reinforcing the link between Auckland and the north should provide some benefits to the economy of what is a poor part of NZ. The Kiwiblog post picks up on this matter:
Now I am not sure about you, but I don’t think many people go to Wellsford for their holidays. Those driving north to holiday have generally left SH1 well before Wellsford. So why is the Govt looking to make it two lanes each way, instead of single lane? Three reasons.
- Better connectivity between the main producing activities in Northland, particularly dairying, forestry and mining, and the major markets for these activities in areas lying to the south of the region and overseas accessed by the ports at Auckland and Tauranga.
- Reducing the costs of commodities transported to Northland from the south for consumption or for input to the manufacturing industries in the area, so making Northland a more attractive place to live and to develop employment activities.
- Making tourist destinations in Northland more accessible to the large market and population in the Auckland region.
This is all about economic growth for Northland. Northland is one of the poorest areas of New Zealand, despite having significant resources. One of the reasons for that is the woeful transport links.
However, if you look into the details it just becomes a bit hard to believe that slicing 10 minutes off the trip along a section of road that doesn’t even touch Northland will revolutionise their economy. But I might just be biased in that view, so I took a read through the 2008 Business Case prepared for the project to see what it said about “Regional Economic Impact”: So while the project will obviously have some benefit, NZTA’s own assessment suggested that these regional economic issues were unlikely to make a significant contribution to the viability for constructing the project. Furthermore, NZTA’s assessment noted that improving rail connections to Marsden Point port would actually reduce traffic pressure on the road, potentially leading to a decline in traffic interactions with Auckland.
On the second matter, whether the benefits of either project can be achieved through a cheaper project, this is a fundamental difference between the project in my opinion. Well, actually not just my opinion – also the opinion of Martin Gummer: former head of transport funding agency, Transfund:
This is one big difference between the projects. The CBD rail loop is an all or nothing project. A loop that stops halfway is not a loop but a dead-end – or loopy.
The holiday highway, however, has a lower cost alternative – improvements to the existing road, that could defer replacement for a further 20-30 years. Corners could be smoothed, alignments improved, maybe a short bypass built around Warkworth, and three- or four-lane sections with a central wire barrier built in the Dome Valley.
This is essentially the point of Operation Lifesaver: try to solve 90% of the problems that exist along the road between Puhoi and Wellsford for 10% (of 20%) of the cost. I don’t exactly know which projects would help achieve this, how much a Warkworth bypass would cost, exactly which sections of road are most dangerous and require immediate upgrades – but I’m sure with a few hundred million to play with along this section of road we could achieve a pretty large chunk of the full highway’s benefits. We could even build the Warkworth bypass in such a way as it could be incorporated into a full highway at some point in the future, if/when it’s needed.
As Mr Gummer points out, it’s more difficult to do the City Rail Link in stages and more difficult to achieve its benefits by anything other than the full blown project. Sure, we can add more bus lanes in the city centre, we can run more trains direct from west-south, but with rail patronage constantly growing at around 20% a year, plus with no room to build more roads in the city centre (or anywhere much in Auckland) those solutions are only going to last so long.
On the final matter, alignment with land-use plans and economic strategies, I think it’s fair to say that the City Rail Link sits at the very core of pretty much every plan and strategy Auckland Council has come up with over the past year. In fact the City Centre Master Plan is nigh on impossible to implement without the rail project. Puhoi-Wellsford is being somewhat tacked onto the Auckland Spatial Plan, but certainly doesn’t seem to be as central to any economic strategy or land-use plan as the CRL. One might also think that improving access to the city’s core may have a bigger impact on economic growth than making it a few minutes faster to get out of the city.
Overall I find myself pretty convinced that the City Rail Link is a better project for the government to spend money on.
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