We’ve been waiting quite some time to hear about NZTA’s latest review of whether the next Waitemata Harbour Crossing should be a bridge or a tunnel. A few years back this debate was pretty much settled, with the preferred option being a set of tunnels. But then the crazy ANZAC Bridge idea came along, got some political support from Steven Joyce, and the bridge idea in general was back on the agenda.
The review was supposed to be released earlier this month, but NZTA delayed the announcement because of the Christchurch earthquake, as they (quite justifiably I think) thought it might be a bit stupid to propose a next step on a multi-billion dollar Auckland transport project when Christchurch needs to rebuild its basic roading system. However, at the last meeting of the Auckland Council Transport Committee, NZTA gave us some clues about what the review document will contain – including mentioning that the document does not contain a preferred option, it just lays out the different options (including, one would imagine, the costs and benefits, advantages and disadvantages, of each option). Their presentation can be read here.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the presentation is the map showing the different options:
The purple line is the rail tunnel alignment, the red line is the road tunnel alignment and the green line is the bridge alignment. It’s worth noting that the map considers it would be a road bridge only.
Looking at the city end in a bit more detail is quite enlightening:
It’s interesting to see that the bridge option wouldn’t go through Wynyard Quarter, but rather straight down the middle of Westhaven Marina. Considering the marina is quite an iconic landmark for Auckland, the effects of putting a bridge through the middle of it seem quite extreme. I also think the St Mary’s Bay residents association (who fought really hard for many of the mitigation measures in the Victoria Park Tunnel project, which was originally just going to be a viaduct widening rather than a tunnel) would be rather horrified by this prospect too.
The thing I find strange about the tunnel alignment though is whether it would make use of the $400 million Victoria Park Tunnel that’s currently under construction, or not. It would seem utterly stupid to spent a huge amount of cash on this tunnel, only to then build a new tunnel in 10-15 years time that makes this one redundant.
My position on the bridge versus tunnel debate is that we don’t need either for a long while yet. At the Transport Committee meeting, NZTA State Highways manager Tommy Parker noted that the lifespan of the clip-ons is indefinite, their use will just need to be managed into the future – potentially by excluding trucks from them. Traffic flows across the bridge have been stable for many years, an increasing proportion of people crossing it during peak times are using public transport. With rising fuel prices a future inevitability, I think we could potentially get away with simply building the railway tunnel. If I had to choose between a road tunnel and a bridge I would definitely go with the tunnel. Having two bridges of different design so close together would simply ruin the Waitemata Harbour in my opinion – destroying to some extent Auckland’s awesome natural setting.
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If we do build the tunnel rather than the bridge (my preference too), they could demolish the old Vic Park viaduct and feed the old Harbour Bridge with 2 lanes each way through the Vic Park Tunnel couldn’t they?
Yes, this is one of the benefits of the tunnel option. Although it would likely only be one lane each way through the Vic Park Tunnel, the tunnel is three lanes and if you make it bidirectional you would need to use the centre lane width for the median barrier and associated shoulders.
One lane each way would be perfectly adequate though, as you would only be connecting to the Cook/Wellington pair of ramps. The rest of the traffic would bypass in the main tunnel or exit to Fanshawe St.
Another option would be to use the Vic Park Tunnel to carry the busway to Cook St/midtown.
There are a number of questions that this raises.
1. The ANZAC bridge group were pushing not only for a bridge to be the chosen option but that by doing so we would remove the existing bridge and sell the land off around St Marys bay. It isn’t very clear yet if this study from the NZTA is saying we will end up with one or two bridges. If they have gone with the one bridge option it doesn’t really add an ‘additional’ crossing.
2. If the bridge option is for two bridges, I think it will end up looking quite stupid having them quite close together, surely they must have thought about the urban design issues as that could add a lot to the cost.
3. With the bridge option (and assuming we keep the existing bridge) what happens where it meets the existing motorway? the initial plans for the tunnel were to keep the bridge effectively as an offramp for the city and the tunnel would bypass the CBD, is this still the thinking and if so does that mean we are going to see some ugly junction going through here undoing all of the work to remove the viaduct.
4. Have they considered the cost of public opinion, many Aucklanders, even those not interested in transport think it was stupid we didn’t build a rail line into the harbour bridge when it was built 60 years ago. Proposing a road only bridge and leaving the rail tunnel for some future time is going to have a strong public backlash towards it and would be seen my most as repeating the mistakes of the past.
5. Have they considered the impact of a bridge on the residents of St Marys bay, they have already put in expensive noise walls and other mitigation measures to keep them happy. Landing a new 6-8 lane bridge is going to be hard to mitigate. Land values in the area could be severely affected as much of it is related to the view they currently have. Residents of the area are much more likely to be able to afford high priced lawyers to fight this.
I’m sure even NZTA know that attempting to build a bridge would be impossible and unlike driving a motorway through ‘poor’ neighbourhoods like Waterview, the people affected here have the money to fight. I don’t think many RNZYS members would take lightly to having their marina partially destroyed.
It is such a political issue that I suspect this is why they haven’t recommended an option, they know that if they recommend the bridge Aucklanders will be pissed off at them but if they leave it up to the government then any anger will go in that direction. At the end of the day they will build what they are told to build.
Another aspect that also needs to be considered is who is lobbying for each option behind the scenes, most of the construction companies would probably prefer a bridge as they would already have good experience in designing and building them plus would have most of the equipment needed already but with a tunnel they would probably need to get specialist engineers and equipment brought in which for them would mean more risk and probably less profit.
The option of two bridges could be a visual nightmare. Imagine Sydney harbour bridge with a neighbor in close proximity, I guess that’s why they have a tunnel.
I watched a doco on the building of the Sydney harbor tunnel recently. It’s a box section constuction, built in a massive dry dock up in Newcastle then shipped down and floated into place, submerged to the prepared sea floor. Bolted and cemented together, the tricky part was the transition from water to land. They made it look easy.
I agree Paul, two bridges next to each other but not even on parallel alignments? Well that’s not going help Auckland get it’s first class waterfront is it? And presumably if they pick a bridge it is to cut corners and do it on the cheap, so it certainly isn’t going to be some spectacular architectural piece, it’s going to be an ugly concrete motorway bridge like the ones at Mangere or Pakauraga.
In just about every regard (aesthetics, capacity, mode, alignment) the tunnel wins out hands down. The only thing it might not win on is penny pinching… but really it is just a case of trading in further impacts on the waterfront area. It would come cheaper in cash, but far more costly for St Marys Bay, Westhaven Marina and Wynyard wharf.
The need to build any new crossing as a state highway bypass of the CBD, not driving a new motorway through the waterfront. Only a tunnel can furnish that bypass.
The whole idea of raising this at this time is arrant nonsense and is I belive designed to create a comparison between the CBD Rail Loop and a new harbour bridge, while allowing the Holiday Highway to disappear off the radar!
This about tinkering with a designation that is not required to be built for another 20 years or more.
Designating a harbour bridge has the potential to severely compromise the Westhaven Marina, St Marys Bay and Wynyard Wharf.
The Anzac Bridge at least had ideas on how to try to provide a package that advanced Auckland, this NZTA Proposal looks to be very second rate document produced at the behest of the Minister.
The Western Ring Road is the solution for at least the next 20 years……….and its being built right now!
I look forward to some clever St Mary’s Bay community sponsored lawyers shooting this nonsense down.
I have to say that i favour a bridge. I think that that it could become a better feature on the Auckland landscape provide it has everything. Walk, Cycle, Trains (or Light Rail) and of course cars, trucks etc.
Far out – if I interpret the chart correctly on page 8 then NZTA will have about a billion dollars left over by 2015 that they haven’t committed to spend?! Is that what they mean “discretionary funding”? Now let me see, are there any projects that cost about 2 billion dollars that NZTA could contribute half to? Hmmm…
On the topic of another possible harbour crossing, I’d like to put my software development hat on and ask “What is the problem we are trying to solve?”. Is it:
1. The existing bridge is getting too old and is about to fall down.
2. The existing bridge is running out of capacity to handle the number of people wanting to get across.
3. There needs to be redundancy in the network in case the bridge becomes unusable.
I suspect that none of these are the problem. So what is the problem exactly. Then we can talk about possible solutions. At the moment we run the risk of defining the solution without understanding the problem we are trying to solve. In software development this always leads to a sub-optimal result.
You’ve hit the nail on the head there Cam. I don’t know what the problem is that we’re trying to solve. I suspect it’s more accurately something like “we’ve always thought we’d need another crossing, so we might as well get around to it sooner rather than later”.
This lack of a proper engineering approach appears to be a problem across many major projects. It seems the process is: Government decides they want a road, a bridge, a motorway, a tunnel, because its sexy and gives them a hard-on, then NZTA produce a bunch of nonsense reports trying to justify it, but fail miserably.
Cam, I actually think all these three ARE problems. I just disagree with NZTA’s proposed solution.
1) Nobody can disagree that the existing bridge IS getting old, and will need increasing-frequency overhauls. Furthermore, it is also “old” in the sense of not providing modern standards (i.e. walking and cycling).
2) There IS a capacity issue. As hinted at, if we keep improving the capacity of the roads to it, there is a capacity problem on the bridge, even if the current numbers don’t increase (yet). Further, we have a capacity issue because Auckland is proposed to grow several hundreds of thousands of people in the coming decades! There certainly IS a capacity problem – but what kind of capacity growth do we need? More roads? Preferably not. Rail or busway capacity increases should take that added population load.
3) Redundancy – again, I kind of agree with that being an issue. Another reason for a tunnel, and a spruced up old bridge…
Its a good idea to do this type of planning now, however NZTA should have figured out the question first.
I suspect most people think question 2. is correct, however that is not right at all.
Vic Park tunnel should fix the worst of the off peak southbound queues on the shore that exist for most of the day.
Plus if at least one-way peak time bus lanes were added it would increase the carrying capacity hugely.
Probably not required for a number of years considering the lack of capacity on peak time NEX services.
The gov. claims they want more efficiency out of existing assets, therefor doing everything to get more people onto buses on the Shore to continue the recent increase in efficiency [more people yet fewer vehicles crossing the bridge] of the existing bridge is surely the priority….
Josh have got access to the latest numbers for this? Be good to see them again.
This image shows the numbers:
Seems like since 2004 bus numbers have gone from around 5000 to 8000 during the morning peak. There has been a reduction in car trips from 17,000 to 16,000 over the same time period.
Interestingly, 8000 people by bus over a two hour period is two lanes of traffic. (2000 cars per hour x 2 hours x 2 lanes).
Hello, this is VERY interesting.
The busway does not seem to have reduced congestion by much at all, because the car trips being done are about the same in the same time period.
The car trips are about the same, however the number of trips overall has increased. I can’t tell what pre-busway figure was as I’m assuming that it was opened in 2004.
It opened fully in 2008 which is from when you can start to see increases, from Wikipedia
The busway was officially opened in February 2008 after several years of construction, though the two northernmost stations had been operating since December 2005 using the normal Northern Motorway lanes.[6][7] It was credited with having reduced peak traffic on the Northern Motorway by around 500 cars each rush hour one month after the opening,[8] and about 39% of passengers on the ‘Northern Express’ bus service had never used public transport before.[4] The busway was initially used by 70 buses per hour during peak time,[5] which includes both existing and new services like the ‘Northern Express’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Busway,_Auckland
Car trips in 2010 were around 1000 below that in 2004. That’s quite a significant reduction compared to historic trends.
I remember seeing NZTA predictions of car counts from back then that just extrapolate previous trends in a limitless constant upward arc so that by now they were expecting way more than we have had. Rather like the EIA used to do with oil production…. so to have any kind of fall is a big change from what they were planning for.
The graph shows actual flow not demand. So as bus patronage increases the queue theoretically decreases. I fear that when vic park opens true peak demand will emerge. Without that delay why catch the bus.
What it looks like is driving this project is NZTA’s own highway building momentum… it clearly has institutional capture by it’s highway building subcontractors. Unconsciously or not NZTA’s people clearly see themselves as ‘partners’ with those who they work with everyday on current projects… comparable to the military and their suppliers [in the US], who is working for whom really? What else get’s discussed as a project nears completion… ‘what’s next?’
No wonder they cast about for the next x billion dollar project… and, it goes without saying, that’s got to be a road; it’s what they do. NZTA: Roads ‘R’ Us.
And yes I know that that is especially their remit under SJ, but I don’t see anyone there questioning that…. please show me I’m wrong, anyone from NZTA out there?
I think the best option would be for a second bridge right beside and in a similar design to the present one, just like Brisbane has done. It would cause less eye clutter on what is a truly beautiful harbour. You could have separate cycle and walking lanes across the bridge in both directions and rail lines hung underneath. The increased traffic carried to the north, and hopefully south as well could be carried by widening roads into land already set aside for roading. And the train line north, once it leaves the bridge, could run up the middle of the opposing motorway lanes, or just beside them on the bus lanes, as far as Whangarei if you wanted and, similarly, south to Hamilton perhaps also using the median strip on the Southern Motorway. Both should incorporate fast rail, to decrease travelling times for the daily commuter run. We have experienced rail travel all over the world. As an aside getting people out of their cars would increase fitness levels throughout society as a whole, while cleaning up air pollution levels in the inner city. Brisbane has a fantastic rail, bus and ferry card system which made travel there enjoyable and affordable.