Super City: where to now?

As I noted yesterday, the Super City election results are pretty good for public transport advocates like myself. We have a new Mayor who talks great vision when it comes to improving the rail network and seems highly determined to turn that vision into a reality. He’s also backed up by a number of councillors – most notably Mike Lee, but also including Christine Fletcher (who we have to thank for Britomart railway station remember) – who are likely to support this vision. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the way forward will be easy, in terms of turning this vision into a reality. All of the big rail projects – aside from electrification and integrated ticketing – are currently unfunded and are generally at an early stage of their planning and design. Neither the CBD Rail Tunnel or the Airport Line even have a designated route protected for them.

Further to that, the new council will have the difficulty of battling with a government whose transport policy is decidedly roads-focused. As NZTA recently pointed out, there is a massive gap between the funding plans of central government (which is roads-focused to an extreme extent) and the more balanced Regional Land Transport Strategy. Yet the RLTS doesn’t envisage building many of the big rail projects that form part of Len Brown’s transport vision for another 20 or so years. So I would say there’s now an even bigger divide between the government’s transport plans and what Auckland has so clearly voted for in the Super City elections. Here’s the particularly relevant bit of what NZTA said: Solving this problem will be critical in terms of making the rail projects that Auckland has voted for becoming a reality. In the end I foresee a giant battle of wills between the government and Auckland Council over transport priorities – although with the public seemingly on the side of rail improvements, I don’t know whether it’s an argument the government will particularly want to have.

In my opinion, the first thing that is needed to make the transport vision a reality is to allow rail projects access to NZTA’s funding pool. I have explained before why roading income should help pay for rail improvements (because it hugely benefits road users). If all transport projects had equal access to a transport funding pool, then I’m sure we would end up with better quality funding decisions being made. Is there any reason why the Puhoi-Wellsford holiday highway shouldn’t have to compete against the CBD Rail Tunnel for its $1.5 billion of funding? I certainly don’t see any reason for that to be the case – both projects have similar cost, they both have similar construction timeframes, there’s probably only enough money in the next 10 years to fund one of them – why not have them compete against each other for the money, with the project that provides the greatest benefits winning?

Getting a better deal out of central government should be a big gain from the shift to a Super City. Successive governments have specifically avoided doing this, so that they could continue to divide and rule over Auckland, so it will be interesting to see what happens now with a much more powerful voice representing all of Auckland.

There are other transport matters that the Super City will need to turn its attention to very quickly. By the end of next year it is expected that Auckland Council will produce a “Spatial Plan” – an integrated document driving how Auckland is intended to grow and develop over the next few decades, with the infrastructure projects that will be necessary to support that growth being tied in. Getting the Spatial Plan right will be critical to Auckland’s future – both in terms of land-use planning and transport policy. It is the opportunity to truly integrate planning and transport, so that hopefully we will no longer see them effectively working against each other like what has happened over the past 10 years (when we’ve planned for intensification but developed transport infrastructure to support sprawl).

If Len Brown wants to make his transport vision a reality, it needs to be front and centre of this Spatial Plan – as the core of Auckland’s future urban development. Rail improvements naturally support intensification around growth nodes, and the CBD rail tunnel will naturally support a re-centralisation of economic activity in Auckland, something that I think is necessary to drive economic growth in a world economy that increasingly relies on innovation and creative thinking. Decentralisation versus recentralisation of employment, sprawl versus intensification of residential growth, how to improve housing affordability, how to align growth with infrastructure investment… these are all questions that the Spatial Plan will need to answer, and are all questions which revolve around the issue of transportation. The new Auckland Council will need to get a running start on ensuring that the Spatial Plan fulfils their vision for Auckland.

In the next while we will also find out who become Deputy Mayor, which two councillors find their way onto the board of the Transport CCO (let’s hope Mike Lee is one of them), what committees the council has, who heads those committees and generally how this is all going to work over the next three years. It is all very exciting, and feels like a once in a generation opportunity to really get things right for Auckland.

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