Part of NZTA still stuck in the 1960s

I’ve been relatively complimentary to NZTA in the past few days: of their realisation that funding rail has big benefits and their somewhat positive noises about the CBD Rail Tunnel project. But another of their recent board papers (passed on to me courtesy of regular commenter rtc) indicates that part of the organisation is certainly still stuck in the 1960s with their thinking.

The board paper, prepared by Transport Planning Manager Neil Cree, provides a bit more information behind the announcement last year that around $160 million was planned to be further allocated to motorway widening projects of State Highway 1 throughout Auckland: at either end of where the Western Ring Route “hooks into” the northern and southern motorways. It seems likely that this is a response to the chaos that occurred when the Manukau Connection motorway was opened late last year.

Here’s a summary of what the board paper says about the “need” for further spending on motorway widening around each end of the Western Ring Route:
The phrase ‘completing the state highway network’ is starting to sound a bit hollow in my opinion. When will the network ever actually be ‘complete’ to a level acceptable by NZTA? They seem to be sticking on more and more projects, all supposedly critical for ‘completing’ the network.

A lot of the supposedly necessary additions to the state highway network appear to be a knee-jerk reaction to the problems that occurred when the Manukau Connection was opened. This is elaborated upon later in the document: A fairly detailed (and expensive) set of improvements have been proposed to supposedly “fix” this problem (or more realistically, just shift the congestion somewhere else on the network):
Stage one alone has an estimated cost of around $40-80 million.

At I noted earlier, further upgrades to the northern end of the Western Ring Route are also proposed. The price tags for some of the possible projects are pretty eye-popping:
I can recognise the potential need for widening SH1 between Constellation Drive and Greville Road to three lanes each way – one would imagine this could be done as part of extending the Northern Busway to Albany. Stage 2, the really expensive stage, seems rather unnecessary at first glance though – basically spending half a billion dollars to make the map of Auckland’s motorway system look a bit prettier as ‘everything would link up’. I struggle to believe that the motorway-to-motorway connection would generate $1.5 billion of economic benefits (I suspect its BCR is largely dependent on phantom time-savings benefits).

The map below shows more detail on the proposed upgrades: Oddly enough, even after proposing to spend well over a billion further dollars on more motorways, NZTA still admit that this won’t solve the congestion problem: Of course the solution is not to think logically and recognise that you can never build your way out of congestion, but instead to continue the 1960s mindset and propose even more motorways that are supposedly ‘necessary’: A further map included in the board paper suggests that NZTA foresee a great number of additional motorway/expressway projects in the future – including ones that haven’t ever really shown up before – like a Karaka-Weymouth connection and a return of part of the Eastern Motorway (that seemed to have previously been banished from AMETI). This map is actually quite scary:
Unless NZTA are building a “secret bridge” between Karaka and Weymouth, I presume the notation of that project as “current works” is incorrect. The Mill Road corridor, which seems to be the yellow line to the east of State Highway 1, is also a long way from being a “current work”.

It’s time NZTA woke up to realise that it’s not the 1960s anymore. Petrol prices have just hit $2.08 a litre, every motorway project we embark upon only proves that you can’t build your way out of congestion, the Auckland Council is focusing its efforts on improving public transport. Surely NZTA can drag themselves into the 21st century and abandon their motorways addiction. “One more project… just one more project and we’ll fix congestion” has surely been proven to be a complete failure?

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