Another state highway project and another pretty animation, this time it is the turn of Puhoi to Warkworth.
Some of the earthworks in this project are going to be absolutely massive although in this video doesn’t really show them as well as the previous video due to it being zoomed out a bit more. Also I find it interesting how the NZTA is very reluctant to say anything about what the time savings of this road actually are, for pretty much every other project they tout how much faster it will make journeys e.g. they say Waterview will take 15 minutes off the journey from the Airport to the CBD. I suspect this is because the time savings aren’t actually that great. It’s also interesting how they show the the existing road all the way to Whangarei, I wonder if this is their attempt to tie Northland into a project that exists solely with the borders of the Auckland Region or if they are indicating that they want to eventually extend the motorway all of the way to Whangarei?
Here is a similar video they releases last year when the indicative route was announced, you can see a bit more clearly some of the huge earthworks and viaducts that are being planned.
The NZTA has announced its preferred route to build a motorway from Puhoi to Warkworth which is part of the Puhoi to Wellsford Road of National significance. The route makes a few changes to what was announced about a year ago and said to be due to them having refined the engineering and environmental issues along feedback from locals from consultation. Hidden in the information is news that they plan to start building the motorway in 2014 with a completion date for this section of 2019. Reading through the announcement and various bits of information it raised a lot of questions but first, here is the new alignment aldong with the key changes:
We have already seen that the previous alignment would require some absolutely massive earth works along with multiple viaducts and I don’t think that this has changed much. The first question I have comes from the yellow box at the bottom of the image where they quote that Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga generate 36% of the countries GDP. The problem with that is Auckland alone currently generates 37% of the countries GDP so getting basic facts like that wrong is not a good start. Here is the key part of the media release:
As the main road link for the freight industry, the new route will better connect Northland to the markets of Auckland and the central North Island to stimulate economic growth in Northland and the Upper North Island.
NZTA State Highways Manager for Auckland and Northland, Tommy Parker,says the agency’s traffic modelling shows that the average number of vehicles travelling between Puhoi and Warkworth each day is expected to increase from an average of 19,700 in 2012 to Puhoi and Warkworth to 31,300 per day in 2026.
“Drivers will make significant time savings on an Auckland-Whangarei journey in 2026 when the Puhoi to Warkworth section of the RoNS is operating, and these time savings are expected to be greater for heavy vehicles carrying freight.
“A divided motorway with a central median barrier will also greatly improve safety, eliminating the kind of head-on collisions which have claimed four lives on this stretch of highway since 2006.”
It seems that with this project you really need to read between the lines because what they aren’t saying is often just as important as what they do say. They claim that 31k vehicles will use the route by 2026 but the key thing here is that it is across both routes, not just the motorway. I also wonder if that increase in vehicles is based on the same growth projections used in other projects and still get used despite traffic volumes being static or even reducing over the last 7 years.
They claim that there will be significant time savings for vehicles but the key thing here is that the benefit is only for drivers coming from further north, that is because the only connection to Warkworth will be on the northern side of town. That time saving benefit was estimated in the past to only be about 5 minutes and those that live in the town will have to drive North to get to the motorway before heading South again which means for many that there will be little to no time saving benefits over what they have now.
There are quite a few other things that could have a big impact on this road. The NZTA have said that they haven’t made a decision yet on whether it should be tolled. Their experience with the existing motorway from Orewa to Puhoi is that even though that piece of road has greater time savings than this new section is expected to deliver, about 30% of traffic still uses the old free route. Using that ratio as an example it would mean that we would still see about 10,000 vehicles per day using the existing route and the motorway would carry about the same amount of traffic as the existing road does today. I believe that would mean it is carrying less traffic than any other motorway in Auckland and less than most arterials.
They have also said that at this stage they won’t be building an interchange at Puhoi which would have interesting outcomes.
The residents on Puhoi and Mahurangi West would no longer have direct access to the motorway. They would instead be forced to use the free road which takes longer and is more dangerous. I wonder if that has been taken into account in the BCR.
As there is a big impact on vehicle numbers if the road is tolled, no interchange at Puhoi means that the NZTA either have to toll the whole motorway from Orewa to Warkworth or remove the existing toll. If they take the latter option they should include the remaining debt that the toll is currently paying into account as that would still need to be paid and so it should be added to the costs for the project.
The NZTA is going to get this consented via a board of inquiry like they did with Waterview, and you can be sure that the locals of Puhoi and Mahurangi West will want ramps built. Given the mitigation that was required for that Waterview with things like vent stack locations, I suspect the locals will have a good chance of winning but that raises another question. Part of me thinks that the reason for not including ramps at that location is that the NZTA know their time savings estimates are bogus so are going to try and force as many people as possible to use the motorway as that would make the old route much longer once again.
So what about the financial and economic aspects of the project, this is what the NZTA has to say:
Estimated costs for the Puhoi-Wellsford project are $760m for Puhoi-Warkworth and in the order of $1b for the Warkworth-Wellsford section
The Puhoi-Warkworth section has a BCR of 1.5 and the overall Puhoi-Wellsford project has a BCR of 1.0
From memory $760m is a little cheaper than when the route was announced last year but still bloody expensive for how many people will use it daily. The total cost of the project has increased though from $1.65b to 1.76B. The more interesting thing is the Benefit Cost Ratio (BCR), it isn’t clear if this includes things like wider economic benefits or what discount rates have been used, one thing we can be sure of is that they will be the best case scenario. Taking these numbers at face value they suggest the section to Warkworth is marginally ok but that the section from Warkworth to Wellsford has a BCR of only 0.6. This once again highlights one of the biggest problems with the RoNS, to get some of the bad and uneconomic parts built, they are lumping them in with other projects to bring their scores up. The NZTA hasn’t actually released that much information so I think an OIA request will probably be in order to get a copy of the latest business case.
Other than the costs, there also has been no new information the section from Warkworth to Wellsford. The indications are that they still can’t find a workable route through what is one of the most geologically unstable regions in the country. Perhaps the people working on it also know how stupid the project is and are trying to delay it as much as possible because if spending $760m on a road that currently carries only ~20,000 vehicles per day is bad, spending $1b on a road that carries less than 9,000 vehicles per day is just madness.
One of the amusing things about me and the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” is that my family actually owns a beach-house at Mangawhai Heads and our trips to and from that house would very much benefit from this highway being put through. In fact, I write this blog post from that house – as we’re up here for a few days at the moment. Heading up yesterday morning the traffic we encountered wasn’t a problem, although for those heading south the “Warkworth problem” was highlighted once again.
My general feeling is that the “need” for the Puhoi-Wellsford road as something to significantly ease congestion (not just during holiday periods, but obviously most particularly at those times) is getting mixed up with a more pressing issue – what to do about Warkworth and the effect it has as a giant bottleneck on State Highway 1. Over the past few years some work did occur on widening parts of the main road through Warkworth, although that somewhat stupidly stopped short of resolving the two big problems – a two lane bridge in the middle of Warkworth and the horrifically complex Hill Street intersection.
This thing: I’m sure that most people who have travelled through Warkworth at some point will be familiar with this intersection and the stupidly complex situation that arises for people trying, for example, to get from Elizabeth Street to Sandspit Road, or from Matakana Road (further north off Sandspit Road) to the south. We’re left with one lane each way for through traffic on State Highway One and giant conflicting movements between traffic getting out of Sandspit Road and southbound SH1 traffic.
Further exacerbating the problem is the fact that there’s actually a heck of a lot of traffic trying to get from SH1 to and from Sandspit Road and Matakana Road – because there’s actually a lot of area and population those two roads serve, particularly during holidays periods. Sandspit Road serves Snells Beach, Algies Bay, Mahurangi East and (surprisingly enough) Sandspit. Matakana Road serves Matakana, Omaha, Tawharanui Peninsula, Leigh, Goat Island and many other places. Traffic volumes on State Highway 1 south of Warkworth are around 50% higher than north of Warkworth – indicating a lot of traffic is either bound for Warkworth or turns off on these roads out to the eastern beaches.
In effect, we have two Warkworth problems:
We are funnelling a lot of vehicles through pretty much the middle (if not the town centre) of Warkworth. This both severs the town, and also generates congestion by mixing through traffic with local traffic.
The complex intersection at Hill Street, and the conflict between traffic bound for eastern beaches with through traffic and with town centre linked traffic, causes mayhem. Not just at holiday times – but most severely then.
If we look at this issue, yes sure the Puhoi-Wellsford road would solve it – but is that the cheapest, quickest and most logical way to solve this congestion problem? I tend to think not. There have been a few options for western collectors roads in Warkworth over the past few years, but what I think is really needed is a proper bypass – at 100 kph road with perhaps a couple of giant roundabouts providing access to existing roads at the very southern and northern ends of town. Something like this:The details of such a scheme obviously need further work. I’m not certain whether this is the perfect place to put the bypass (though I wouldn’t want it any closer to Warkworth, especially if the place is set to grow significantly), I’m not certain whether you may shift the connections further north or south (though once again I wouldn’t want them any closer to the town). I’m proposing that the new bypass directly pass over both Woodcocks Road and Falls Road – to not put too much pressure on those roads as links to Warkworth town centre and also to allow through traffic a pretty free run. Full interchanges could be done instead of roundabouts – the cost versus benefit analysis would need to be done on that matter. Finally, the link road to Matakana Road could continue to Sandspit Road in the longer run I suppose.
As a general scheme, this is what I’ve always envisaged when saying the words “Warkworth bypass”. It would be interesting to see how much a scheme like this would cost (somewhere in the $50-80m bracket is once again what I’ve always envisaged as we’re travelling over fairly flat land). I really do think such a scheme would largely solve the congestion issues we get in and around Warkworth – for at least a few decades to then work out if the whole Puhoi-Wellsford scheme is needed or not.
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.
Tomorrow, December 27th, is the one day of the year we actually could do with the Puhoi-Wellsford holiday highway. Here’s what happened last year:
Bumper-to-bumper traffic stretched almost the length of the 7.5km toll road between Orewa and Puhoi for three hours from late yesterday morning.
Some hot and frustrated drivers and passengers got out of their cars to stretch their legs and cool off.
Angry motorists vented their frustration on Twitter.
Doug Hanna wrote that he had visitors from Auckland staying with him at Oakura, north of Whangarei: “Took 5 hours 40 to get here today. Took us 3.10 yesterday.”
Hamish Rouse was travelling in the opposite direction: “NZ Traffic anywhere out of Auckland is insane. Just came down from up North. Poor northbound travellers.”
The giant traffic jam was caused by two lanes of motorway traffic having to merge into one lane before the Johnstone’s Hill tunnel, and then merge again with vehicles from the coastal road on the one northbound lane beyond the toll road.
Although the Government has designated a $1.65 billion four-lane highway from Puhoi to Wellsford as one of seven “roads of national significance”, the first stage to Warkworth will not be completed until 2019 and the final stage not until 2022.
Thousands of motorists spent hours stewing in traffic jams between Auckland’s Northern Gateway toll road and Warkworth yesterday.
Traffic started banking up north of Puhoi at about 10.30am, and three hours later was jammed for about 25km from Warkworth back to the Hillcrest Rd bridge over the southern end of the toll road at Orewa.
The worst problems were where lanes merged, whether at the end of passing lanes or at the northbound entry to the Johnstones Hill tunnel at the Puhoi end of the toll road.
It was not until 4pm that the Transport Agency reported a relatively free flow had been restored to the tunnel, which is confined to one northbound lane for safety reasons at the other end, where traffic from the alternative free coastal route through Orewa merges with State Highway 1.
Transport Agency northern highways manager Tommy Parker said State Highway 16 through Helensville remained free-flowing throughout yesterday as an alternative route to Wellsford, and drivers should always consider that option if travelling further north over the holiday period.
The agency regards December 27 as traditionally its second busiest day for traffic over the Christmas-New Year break after January 2 for the main road north from Auckland, with about 50 per cent more vehicles than the daily average, but Mr Parker said yesterday was even worse than usual.
“It was particularly bad this year – we have seen some quite large delays made worse by a lot of vehicles towing boats and caravans,” he said.
“We had expected the traffic would spread across a number of days, but people decided to travel on the same day.”
Mr Parker said traffic was unexpectedly light on Boxing Day, and he was at a loss to know why.
“Presumably people were all at the races or the sales.”
But after yesterday’s chaos, he was confident the traffic would also be “significantly lighter” today.
Despite extra difficulties observed by Herald staff where traffic ground to a standstill in attempted mergers at the end of passing lanes, Mr Parker said the agency was not considering temporarily closing the lanes to simplify flows.
He said that had not been done for years.
The agency had discontinued the practice because it believed some drivers became confused and erratic when confronted by cones blocking the lanes.
As well, the agency had no evidence that blocking the lanes improved flow.
Neither did he believe motorists had been short-changed by paying $2 to use the toll road, only to be forced to a slow grind little more than 2km along it, during the worst of yesterday’s congestion.
He said electronic signs south of the road warned drivers of queues ahead, giving them options of going to SH16 from the Silverdale interchange or using the Hibiscus Coast highway, which was also relatively free-flowing until it merged with SH1 near Puhoi.
We could go and spend close to $2 billion on solving a problem that happens one day a year – or we could spent a fraction of that money on a bypass of Warkworth and a safety upgrade along the Puhoi-Wellsford section of road: greatly improving things much quicker for users of this road 364 days a year.
I’ll bet there are further Herald articles on Wednesday describing the hours and hours people spent travelling north and how the Puhoi-Wellsford road is so incredibly necessary because of this horrific traffic jam. Or, people could just not drive north tomorrow and we could save well over a billion dollars.
With special votes seeming likely to result in the Green Party getting one more MP, at the cost of National, and the chances of Auckland Central and/or Waitakere swinging from National to Labour being relatively (but not impossibly) slim, we have a fairly good idea about the shape of the future government.
We have 121 seats – a one seat overhang. This is down from the current parliament, which has 122 seats. This means that 61 seats are necessary for a majority.
National are likely to end up with 59 seats, which leaves them two short of a majority. They will require two “parties” (it feels a bit wrong calling one man bands of Act & United Future parties) out of United Future, Act and the Maori Party for support. This shouldn’t be too difficult. Ironically Labour might be kicking themselves for winning Te Tai Tonga as then there’d be a two seat overhang and National would need all three of these support parties – a much harder ask.
Interestingly, the total number of seats of parties generally supporting the government is down from 69 to 65 (assuming the Maori Party supports them), which gives a little less breathing space than we had previously. If either John Banks or Peter Dunne disagree with National on anything then they could make life pretty difficult – although I think this is unlikely as both will probably become defacto National MPs.
What does this all mean for transport? Well obviously the government is likely to continue with its current policies – as I outlined in this post we are likely to see further investigation of four additional Roads of National Significance. Personally I think these extra roads are more election bribes than anything else as there’s unlikely to be any money in the transport budget for major new projects for at least a decade if the government keeps pushing forward on their current RoNS.
In three years time obviously Victoria Park Tunnel will be fully completed and opened (I wonder if it will still be plagued by horrific congestion, I suspect so), construction on the Waterview Connection will be in full swing and widening of the SH16 causeway should be well under way. I’m not entirely sure what progress is expected to be made on Puhoi-Wellsford by that stage. Assuming that Labour and the Green Party stick to their pledge to scale back this road, a change of government in three years time could well mean that the “holiday highway” never happens, unless so much construction on it has occurred by 2014 that it’s impossible to back out of. I think that’s unlikely.
My pick for the big “elephant in the room” issue for road construction over the next three years will be declining fuel tax receipts putting enormous pressure on NZTA’s ability to actually deliver on the projects the government is promising. Already this year we are seeing NZTA finding it desperately difficult to “pay the bills”, having to put off many of its subsidies that go to Auckland Transport for a month or two here and there, so that they can manage their incredibly tight cashflow. If petrol prices continue to rise between now and 2014 this trend will only increase and we might find it very difficult to fund either the smaller projects (generally those with the best cost-benefit ratios) or we may have to be looking at delaying some of NZTA’s bigger projects. I feel that even increasing NZTA’s ability to borrow (as proposed in the LTMA reforms) will only delay this inevitability.
Of course it’s not all doom and gloom over the next three years. By late 2014 pretty much all our flash new electric trains should be running on the Auckland rail network, and judging by recent trends our rail patronage may be getting close to 15 million trips a year. With an enlarged Greens caucus, and key Labour MPs with a strong interest in Auckland transport issues (Phil Twyford, David Shearer and Jacinda Ardern) being returned to parliament and identified as rising stars, there should be an even better informed political debate over transport in the future. As I have noted in a few recent posts, I am particularly excited that Julie-Anne Genter has made it into parliament – I’m looking forward to parliament’s first questions on parking policy!
Like with many things, the real wildcard might be New Zealand First. Which side of the political divide they fall on transport policy is probably yet to be determined, but they may find it a useful weapon to attack the government on. Although Andrew Williams was clearly the worst mayor North Shore City ever had, the fact that he has been in that position means that he must have a reasonably good awareness of transport matters in the Auckland area – which must be a good thing.
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.
Last night the Campaign for Better Transport ran a meeting of transport spokespeople from five different parties, asking them two key questions:
How they think the government’s $3 billion a year contribution to transport should generally be split across the different modes.
What their party will do specifically for transport matters in Auckland over the next three years.
There was a pretty good response from the political parties, although it was a shame that Steven Joyce didn’t turn up and we ended up with David Bennett instead. For some strange reason Steven Joyce doesn’t seem to be the Campaign for Better Transport’s biggest fan. The speakers were:
David Bennett, MP (National)
Shane Jones, MP (Labour)
Gareth Hughes, MP (Greens)
Don Brash (ACT)
Colin Craig (Converatives)
Don Brash spoke first, and pretty much devoted his entire time to arguing for road pricing. This wasn’t necessarily too much of a surprise, given ACT’s ideological bent and I must say I was reasonably impressed by his knowledge on the topic – referring to examples in Sweden, Singapore and the typical London case. He made the point that if we ran airports and air-travel like we run land-based travel, we’d have huge queues for peak times planes and nobody on planes at others times – strangely similar to what we have for land transport. There wasn’t too much about whether road pricing should be used as a revenue generation mechanism or a demand management mechanism (I’m guessing largely the latter), and also not much said about whether it should lead investment in alternatives or whether it would follow that investment – I’m guessing the former. While he didn’t say much about what plans the ACT party might have for transport in Auckland in terms of new projects, I guess the feeling is that if we price roads properly we might not need new projects.
Gareth Hughes from the Greens was unsurprisingly very comprehensive in his answers on both the questions raised. He pointed out that the Green Party has been pushing for better public transport and a more sustainable approach to transport for a very long time, although he welcomed Labour’s shift over the past few years. He was scathing of National’s spending on the various Roads of National Significance, not just the usual whipping boy of the holiday highway but also other projects with dodgy cost-benefit ratios like Transmission Gully. While the Green Party launches their transport policy this coming Monday, Gareth gave us a few insights that the Greens want to push for a 60% government contribution to the City Rail Link, they would make walking and cycling a much greater priority (pushing for 100% NZTA funding over the next few years) as well as making significant baseline increases to the PT operating funding budget. All up, he certainly seemed to have the most detailed grasp of transport matters out of all the candidates.
Colin Craig rambled on a bit about all sorts of things, noting that he was standing in the Rodney electorate so felt compelled to support the Puhoi-Wellsford road even if it wasn’t quite clear whether he personally thought it was a good idea or not. He talked quite a bit about utilising New Zealand’s ability to innovate and suggested that we should look a bit outside the square for transport solutions. My overall impression was that his knowledge of transport policy was fairly basic, but I guess that’s not particularly surprising as he’s the leader of that party rather than their transport spokesperson (if they indeed have one). In general he came across as a fairly friendly character.
Shane Jones outlined key aspects of the Labour Party’s transport policy, which obviously include shifting $1.2 billion from the Puhoi-Wellsford funding pool and putting it into paying for approximately half the City Rail Link. Interestingly, he noted that this had caused him some grief amongst his Northland supporters and seemed to have been quite a challenging decision for the Labour Party to make (clearly some residue from the roads-centric days gone past). He also talked about Labour wanting to make better use of coastal shipping and the ports, as well as using rail freight to a much greater extent. For some reason he still can’t help himself from calling PT “public sector transport”.
Finally, David Bennett probably felt a little bit like a sacrificial lamb being required to talk at such a meeting and he certainly came across as being quite nervous for much of it. He talked a lot about all the roads the government has been building over the past few years and all the roads they want to build over the next few years – while making some relatively brief mentions about improvements to public transport at the same time. Probably the most interesting argument he made was in response to Labour’s funding decision for the City Rail Link, where he pointed out the potential for some misalignment between the timing of Puhoi to Wellsford and the timing of the City Rail Link – saying that much of the big funding requirement for the motorway would not be for many more years whereas Auckland Council want to advance the CRL almost immediately. Personally I don’t think this is much of an issue as Puhoi-Wellsford was proposed for completion by 2022 while the CRL has always been seriously proposed for completion by 2021.
Unfortunately I couldn’t stay for the question and answer section, so it would be interesting for those who did stay to add in if anything interesting was raised.
Labour’s announcement on the weekend that they would provide $1.2 billion to help construct the City Rail Link was credible because they have a source for the funding: redirecting the money from the Puhoi-Wellsford project which is often termed the “holiday highway”. The January 2010 project summary statement noted the following ‘forecast outturn cost’ for the Puhoi-Wellsford road:
The final costs of the RoNS corridor will include future years escalation (normally three percent) due to increases in input costs largely following national economic inflationary pressures. The actual amount of escalation attributed to individual projects depends on the time frame for the construction. If a project is constructed earlier than predicted then the amount of escalation would be lower. Equally if construction is later than predicted the cost of escalation would be higher. However, at a RoNS corridor level the individual project effects are less marked. Thus the forecast outturn cost of the RoNS corridor would be $1.69 billion with a confidence range of $1.53 billion to $2.04 billion.
So our best cost-estimate for the project is around $1.7 billion, meaning that Labour’s policy of redirecting $1.2 billion onto the City Rail Link is not only easily possible, but also leaves around $500 million to spare. Usefully, a key part of the announcement on the weekend effectively picks up on a piece of work that I did along with the Campaign for Better Transport back in 2010 – to come up with a more cost-effective alternative to the “holiday highway”: something we called Operation Lifesaver.
Operation Lifesaver was initially presented to the Transport and Urban Development committee of the former Auckland Regional Council, to help inform their submission on the Puhoi-Wellsford project. It was generally fairly well received, particularly the focus on safety. You can read the whole document here. The summary is outlined below: As you might be able to guess by its name, the purpose of “Operation Lifesaver” was not just to find a cheaper solution to the full Puhoi-Wellsford motorway, but to come up with some safety improvements in particular that could be implemented a heck of a lot faster than constructing the full motorway. This is because the current road is extremely dangerous – this slide comes from our presentation to the ARC (figures from the NZTA business case document): With the Puhoi-Warkworth section not due for completion until 2019 and the Warkworth-Wellsford section until 2022 (likely to be even later now due to geotechnical difficulties) we worked out that around 50 more people would die, based on trends since 2000, before the full motorway was opened. That was a pretty shocking number and drove a lot of the thought behind trying to come up with a solution that could be implemented a lot sooner than the full-blown motorway.
With a lot of helpful input from an NZTA Official Information Act response, we put together two options for more immediate upgrades to state highway one between Puhoi and Wellsford: largely safety improvements as well as a Warkworth bypass.
Of course we are not transport economists or engineers so there was a bit of guess work in the assessment of costs and the assessment of cost-effectiveness, but this was done fairly conservatively on a “what proportion of the full project’s safety/time-savings/vehicle costs etc. benefit are we likely to get from this” approach. It would be interesting to get a bit more expert analysis of the idea – particularly now that Labour have effectively committed $320 million to State Highway 1 between Puhoi and Wellsford. I suspect that what we could get for that price might fall somewhere between the two proposals, as things are always a bit more expensive than you thought.
It’s important to keep in mind, when looking at policies to “abandon the holiday highway” and “do Operation Lifesaver instead”, that Operation Lifesaver is a fairly extensive proposal – particularly if you have $320 million to play with. Many of the congestion issues faced by this road are caused by Warkworth and would be solved by a bypass. Many of the safety issues could also be fixed much more quickly and efficiently if we don’t have to wait 10-20 years for the full motorway to go through.
One argument made for the Puhoi-Wellsford road is its ability to help Northland’s economy – perhaps in a way that Operation Lifesaver can’t (if we set aside the relative costs of the options for now). While I can’t really see how savings 7-10 minutes off a trip between two Auckland towns will revolutionise Northland’s economy (and a Warkworth bypass would generate much of this time saving anyway), I think the last word on the issue of economic development should go to a 2008 report commissioned by NZTA into the upgrade (just before it was nominated as a RoNS): In short, while there would be some economic effect, it would be pretty minor. Certainly not worth spending $1.7 billion on when there are better alternatives around.
There was an interesting exchange in parliament yesterday about the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” – and in particular focusing on the issue of whether the Minister was confident the project still represents good value for money. Here’s the video:
Here’s the full discussion. I think of particular interest is the following:
DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert) to the Minister of Transport: Is he satisfied that the Pūhoi to Wellsford road of national significance represents good value for money and has had its costs and benefits adequately assessed?
Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister of Transport) : In regard to the Pūhoi to Wellsford road it is too early to confirm exactly what the final cost-benefit ratio will be. The New Zealand Transport Agency remains in the design and investigation phase and this work is ongoing. The most recent published benefit-cost ratio is 1:1, including wider economic benefits, and this can be found on the New Zealand Transport Agency website. Given the nature of the ongoing work, the exact cost—the “c” of the “b-c”—will not be known until the design is complete, and the New Zealand Transport Agency will continue to update me as this work progresses.
It is somewhat strange that this project has been dedicated a significant amount of funding without a final cost-benefit analysis having been prepared. Imagine what the government would think of such a process for an Auckland rail project?
There’s some amusing debate over the phrase “holiday highway”, as it seems Steven Joyce is getting rather annoyed by how much that name has stuck – but I think of most consequence is that it would appear there remain significant uncertainties over the final cost of the project (particularly north of Warkworth). That could have some interesting effects on the project’s final cost-benefit ratio – particularly it it’s very much hovering around 1 at the moment (with wider economic benefits included).
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 
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.
With the Puhoi-Warkworth section not due for completion until 2019 and the Warkworth-Wellsford section until 2022 (likely to be even later now due to geotechnical difficulties) we worked out that around 50 more people would die, based on trends since 2000, before the full motorway was opened. That was a pretty shocking number and drove a lot of the thought behind trying to come up with a solution that could be implemented a lot sooner than the full-blown motorway.
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