It took a bit of searching, but I have found the video played today at the launch of the spatial plan: on the role of rail in Auckland’s future. It is pretty awesome.
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It took a bit of searching, but I have found the video played today at the launch of the spatial plan: on the role of rail in Auckland’s future. It is pretty awesome.
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Bloody good. Is his delivery always that wooden though?
Good to hear mention of the ‘thriving retail precinct that has sprung up around Akoranga Station”. Any new rail stations in Auckland really need to be bus interchanges first and foremost, but it is fantastic idea to develop around them too.
But I can’t help think they are pushing loopyness of the ‘loop’ a bit much, the fact that trains may (or rather probably won’t) go right around doesn’t actually benefit anyone. They should maybe focus on the network/ease of connection it affords instead.
Very Impressive video
I agree there was a huge focus on the loop. To sell the CBD link to the bulk of Auckland the advantages it offers to the whole network should be emphasized.
Didn’t the sheds on queens wharf look ugly in introduction. Im glad that one of them is gone now.
I hope the airport station is integrated into teh terminal building (like Hong Kong), rather than being on the far side of the car park. (I ralise it is an issue for later stages of design.
Nice video – I think they push the loop idea but discussing throughout etc etc is going to turn people off (despite the fact that that is the most important part). It is true however, that many people will use it is a loop to get from say K’Rd to Newmarket etc.
Overall it was good. I’m glad to see some of the benefits of it being pushed as that is what will help sell the idea to more people who will then then help put pressure on the government get involved. Perhaps they should have mentioned things like it will allow trains every 5 minutes on each line so there is never long to wait.
Good to see a leader with a positive vision and practical plans to make it happen. I have a few quibbles about some tactical emphasis, all of which has been mentioned here before: ‘Line’ is better than ‘Loop’, Trains will almost certainly not run in circles around the CBD and it is too easy to feel you’ll never use that if you don’t visit the CBD much, so as Matt said above better to emphasize the importance to the whole network of this line…. I would have liked to have seen more on the economic necessity too….
But isn’t it great? Imagine what Banks would have done?
Don’t quibble too much guys. This is wonderful. Never thought i’d see the day. Everyone in Auckland needs to see this.
Isn’t it scary to anyone here that the troublesome ADKs will run our trains in 2040 😉
As a whole it’s brilliant, and I hope that people watch it and get behind it. I think Len’s been a bit slow out of the blocks, particularly in letting the govt pre-empt the release of the spatial plan with those position papers a couple of weeks ago – they landed the first punch, but Len makes his point loud and clear here – let’s hope that enthusiasm proves infectious rather than small minded minds of yesteryear dismissing him as a dreamer. The most important little quote out of this vid has to be “it’ll cost money, but it’ll cost a lot more if we don’t…” etc. Th
Agree that there should have been perhaps a bit more emphasis on the capacity benefits of the CBD tunnel to the whole network and the frequencies it will allow, but at the same time the emphasis on those various families makes the point I suppose.
Does anybody else find it funny that Rodney Hide when interviewed last night said that the Council and central govt agreed on “95% of it”??? Did he read his own papers a couple of weeks back?!?!
Does anybody else find it funny that Rodney Hide when interviewed last night said that the Council and central govt agreed on “95% of it”??? Did he read his own papers a couple of weeks back?!?!
Skimming through the draft document, many of the things raised in by the government have also been raised by the council. Where they differ is the council seem to have put better information around the issue and the various options to solve it i.e. the document in one part talks about why intensification and starts by looking at areas of the city where the market has provided intensificaiton as wanted and areas where the market hasn’t worked. It then goes through the various reasons for that and gives options to address that in the future. The idea being that areas where the market is working as expected wouldn’t need council intervention but other areas might.
The station shown next to the sky tower in the video — is that actually an impression of what’s proposed? If it is it’s *far* to small surely, with a small platform, and only two escalators at one end… (not to mention its just plain uninspiring from a sation design POV… I’d rather see something with a mezzanine to support links to any future cross station and ticketing etc)
It’s just an artist impression, you’ll notice they use exactly the same render for the airport station too. For one Aotea station will be far deeper underground, and it will be under the roadway, not next to it. Likewise with the airport station they would have to be mad to stick it in a trench out in the carpark, especially given they are planning a big new terminal extension where it could be located very nicely.
It looks just like the New Lynn station without the building on top, I’m guessing they used that as their inspiration.
Surely it will be actually deeper and integrated into the retail levels of any new building on that site…. not an inspiring design….. presumably something thrown together for the video…. Did look well Mickey Mouse
When was the last time we had a Mayor outlining this sort of vision for the city?
I just hope the commenters and armchair critics don’t whinge about the video too much, that it didnt say this and didn’t show that. Focus on the positives. If this video was a reality i’d move back home.
The computer visualisations are very cool.
As everyone else has pointed out, the emphasis on loopyness makes the tunnel sound like a tiny Circle Line, running around and around but not going anywhere. Is the capacity constraint explanation just too difficult for people to grasp and it really has to be simplified to the point of triviality?
At about the 3:30 mark Brown claims that his improvements will lead to roads that are “not congested”. If Steven Joyce had made such a claim then everyone here would be dumping on him for not understanding the basics of transport.
At about the 5:30 mark he talks about 2040. That is hopeless… you can’t make plans and expect your children and grandchildren to be bound by them, any more than people now feel bound to follow Muldoon’s Think Big plans in 2011. You’re also telling North Shore people that they’ll be paying 30 years worth of increased rates for rail projects before they get a rail line. That’s a whole generation and is not politically viable.
As someone from the North Shore I might get annoyed about the fact that the North Shore has already done far more work on its stormwater and wastewater systems than other areas (particularly Waitakere) and will now be paying for other those other areas. But train lines can be used by everyone. I regularly use the bus/train and would use the rail loop and the airport link. They would just need to make sure the NS buses integrate well with the CBD rail stations in the mean time.
Shorites (which includes myself) should probably remember that they got their busway more or less handed to them and have the best transport in the region as a result… and as you say we are all one region now, and everyone can use rail and other improvements as long as it is properly integrated.
That is truly brilliant. Let’s not nit pick it but get out there and support it!
Frightening. Been in power just under 6 months, is there no end to the promises of infrastructure delivery.
Where is all this money going to come from? Can New Zealand afford Len Brown?
The money is available it is just being spent in wrong areas, changing our priorities could easily free up enough money for much of this.
1. The council is spending about $300m a year on new roads in the region, if it changed the funding priorities quite a bit more money could be freed up that way.
2. The government is planning to spend close to $2bil on P2W when 90% of the benefits (both speed and safety) could be achieved for less than 20% of that figure. This could be done by bypassing the towns, realigning some of the bad corners and provide more passing lanes. That would free up another $1.5b without actually comprising improving the road.
3. After the current group of motorway projects are completed (Newmarket, VPT, WRR and other minor improvements) then the Auckland motorway is complete. That will free up government funding for other projects. (we would likely need a different government with more balanced priorities first). The NLTF which funds these projects is about $3b per year so based on current numbers it means about $1b per year could be spent on Auckland without impacting the rest of the country.
4. These are long term investments that will provide an economic benefit, that benefit can be used to pay for loans/debt. Other funding options are also available.
Yes Grum, Auckland can afford it. We have about $1.5b earmarked from various local and central government agencies to transport per year. This council has to complete what was started under the various previous administrations but, we have 4 years of planning for the tunnel to finnish off all the previous BS and then the money can start flowing for the real construction.
I say we should borrow the money! Why?
1. It will benifit later generations more than todays one.
2. The governement and NZTA will see the benifits to general motorists not too long after openning and can therefore be billed their share of the construction.
How to finance the loan?
1. While this government are being total pratts the council should halt all payments and maintenance of arterial roads the service the State Highways. People can bleet to Joyce, after all their petrol taxes pay for the roads [yeh right!!!]. $$$
2. Council cracks down serverely on Road Code vialators – driving and parking on footpaths alone would cream in millions.
They forget the ending when the two families open their rates bill and recoil back in shock at the $1000 annual rates increase to pay for Brown’s election promises.
WTF, I was meant to pay for this?
It could be worse, you could be paying $2b for a road that will LOSE between 20 and 60 cents in the dollar that National wants to build.
Even some of the collapsed finance companies are offering better returns than that.
Brown’s election promises amount to around six and a half billion dollars over a twenty year time frame, or about $325 million a year.
No one has said this is going to come out of rates so far. However even of all of this came out of rates it would only represent a ten percent increase over current council rates revenue. So no family would be seeing a $1,000 increase unless they were paying ten grand a year in rates to begin with.
Slick presentation..but for the Islander guy picking his Mum up from the Airport, what if he lives 2km away from the Train Station. How would he get to his house? Catch the bus? So then why not catch a bus from the airport that gets closer to his house and forget about the train?
Or if it is pouring down with rain, who would want to stand around in a bus or train station with a pile of suitcases and your Mum tired from her flight. You would take your car wouldn’t you.
What I’m getting at here guys, there are some journeys not suitable for the train or bus…the train isn’t the answer to everything & not worth the price tag that Len Brown is attaching to it..the Govt knows this.
Train then $5 cab perhaps instead of the usual $50 cab?
Cars will still be allowed to transit on roads… as long as you’ll pay for fuel.
I think that is just to appeal to the masses, which is probably quite wise as most Aucklanders would have experienced some airport motorway horror story to make then think a rail alternative is a very good idea. However if you look at the reports on the ‘airport’ line almost all the patronage comes from workers and residents in the airport precinct and the south-west of Auckland, I think it was just under 10% of peak patronage from air travellers. Riccardo, I think you are falling into the trap that thinking a route called the ‘airport line’ is only good for people going on holiday.
Ricardo no one is going to make you blow up your car or rip up the road, car travel will still remain an important part of the mix, the plan is simply to put balance into the whole system for the benefit of all types of travel and travelers. So there is real choice. Of course some journeys are not best for the train, and that is especially the case at the moment as the network is limited and the service has been made to wither through underinvestment, but some journeys are not best by car either, and as the city grows more and more journeys are becoming more expensive and less convenient to make by car.
Investment in rail is needed to allow Auckland to grow and keep functioning as it is the only travel that is not competing for use of our roads and streets. As the rail system becomes more widespread and frequent more and more people are using it and this means cars off the road and out of parking spaces, so investment in rail is investment in the road network functioning too. So much so that even the road happy NZTA calculates that for every dollar they spend on public transport in AK is worth $4.40 in savings on roads.
What the govt. is doing is looking backwards not forwards, back to when AK was a provincial town and did not have the numbers to support efficient rapid transport, it does now and we desperately need it for the quality of the city and its economic success.
Totally disingenous. We’re going to have to pay for better transport in Auckland anyway – unless “Grum” really loves traffic jams, which is a possibility. So obviously Grum doesn’t mind paying via taxes for roads, basically because he’s a greedy ideologue who thinks that trains are point 8 of the Communist takeover plan.
OK, so Len Brown should have mentioned in his presentation the importance of Taxi Cabs in the future of Auckland…don’t get me wrong, a train would be great for a commute to work if you lived near the Station…but with the Mayor’s dream train network, many people will still live a long distance from the Station for it to be convenient…so then why not rely on buses as they have a better coverage of residential suburbs and avoid the massive capital cost of trains…
You don’t have to live right next to a station to use it! There are almost no one who lives within walking distance of the stations of the Northern Busway and patronage is going insane. They all catch a bus to the station, park and ride, get dropped by someone else or even ride a bike. It’s called an integrated transport system, and it can be very efficient and effective.
Why not rely on buses? Because buses are subject to delays at intersections, traffic lights, from traffic congestion etc. That means they are slow and unattractive, and to make them come close to being as fast and direct as a train likewise requires a huge amount of capital in roadway improvements, most of which would involve taking away traffic lanes to make bus lanes. You would spend twice as much trying to get buses to provide the same speed an level of surface as a train on the same route.
Another issue is that buses are expensive to run, you need one bus and driver for every forty of fifty people. With trains it is around seven hundred passengers per train and driver. Thats a huge saving in operational costs on busy routes… and consider it the other way then. To replace a rail line that has one train every five minutes would require about a hundred and sixty buses. There isn’t room on our city streets for that amount of buses, local highways couldn’t handle it.
Think of the rail network to be the core of the public transport system, the fast high capacity backbone. You might make a five minute bus trip or a short drive from your home to a station a couple of km away, then you have a quick twenty minute blast to your destination across the other side of the city at up to 120km/h. Doing the same thing in a bus could take you an hour.
It’s like with motorways, you don’t have to have a driveway opening right on to an on-ramp to use a motorway, and likewise you don’t have to have a house right next to a railway station to use rapid transit.
Buses will be an ESSENTIAL part of an integrated transport system. Your train system will not work properly if you don’t have bus feeding into the train stations. Along Perth’s Mandurah line, many stations get 50% of their patronage from connecting buses. Without those feeder buses, that train line would not be possible.
So the Mayor’s train plan is just as much a bus plan as it is a rail plan. The rail scheme will not work properly if bus is not included. Run bus rapid transit (BRT) out of the train stations!
It isn’t about Rail vs Bus but Rail PLUS Bus.
Ricardo – many Wellington commuters each drive to their local train station, park the car and ride the train, ditto North Shore Busway. Its really easy heh!
In regard to your argument to push for buses, for rapid transit to work, it needs a dedicated right of way and it really needs the vehicles operating along that right of way to be independent of whatever traffic jams are going on. In reality, the North Shore Busway will likely work best at peak times with Busway buses kept on the busway, and local pick-up and drop off buses kept off the busway………however, thats another story.
Anyways, rapid transit can be buses or trains……but crucially, a dedicated right of way is required.
The benefit of rail, is that the train tracks can be used for freight as well as commuters. This is an area that should make the government happy given their focus on demanding Auckland transport corridor investment money is spent on infrastructure investments that can carry goods as well as people.
Guys, you are making good sense…however when I referred to buses I meant dedicated bus lanes similar to North Shore, if we expanded that concept South, West & East then we will be winning, and for a substantially lower cost…The ideal concept would be a CBD rail loop (as buses would clog CBD streets so we definitely need rail), but for outer residential areas these would be serviced by dedicated bus lanes…Auckland doesn’t have the critical mass for a full blown train network…maybe 30 years time, but not now, not enough money and population..and buses provide better coverage of residential areas…
Ricardo I think that’s a bit of an over-simplistic approach. We should look at each corridor individually before deciding whether buses or trains make sense and analyse the following matters:
1) What’s the level of demand that’s likely?
2) What existing infrastructure is there to work around?
3) What land-use impacts might this result in/what land-use impacts are we trying to encourage?
Analysing those different questions will lead to different answers in different situations. Let’s take the three rail projects Len Brown is proposing in turn:
CBD Tunnel:
There’s no really any way of creating a busway tunnel to connect Britomart with Mt Eden. The project business case looked at a Mt Eden to Fanshawe Street tunnel but it was more expensive than a rail option and had fewer benefits. Furthermore, it would be pushing capacity from day one and require massive bus upgrades to arterial roads. So the existing infrastructure leads to the CBD tunnel proposal as one that opens up capacity in the existing network.
Airport Rail:
There’s probably a bit of a better argument of buses v trains here, until you start to look at the Onehunga to City section of the route – where we already have a railway track. Try putting a Northern Busway standard bus option between Onehunga and the city and see how much that would cost + the disruption it would cause. Once again, if we leverage our existing rail infrastructure rather than duplicating it, rail simply makes more sense for this corridor. Rail is also more likely to generate TODs along the line through Mangere, reinforce the Onehunga TOD and so forth.
North Shore Rail:
Here we already have a busway so the real question is “when will that hit capacity”. I’m writing a fresh post on this very issue at the moment, but essentially it comes down to the question of how many buses we think the CBD can handle before being choked by them. Then we have the question of whether to take the railway line up the busway alignment or along a different alignment. That will be an interesting debate.
So you see, if you actually analyse things corridor by corridor you can understand the situation better – rather than just going “oh the Northern Busway works, let’s do them everywhere”. There’s no point having a southern busway – it just duplicates the rail corridor. As for an eastern one, well that’s already being proposed as part of AMETI (though it suffers from the same “what do you do between Panmure and the city?” question as I explained for the Airport Line issue. In the west, well certainly a Northwest Busway along SH16 would make sense, but once again we already have a Western Line why would we duplicate that with a busway along the same alignment?
Just to add to that, as a general rule it costs about the same to build a full proper busway as it does to build a rail line.
However with buses they tend to be not quite as fast, efficient or comfortable as trains, and the maximum capacity is lower so you could end up with less outcome for the same cost. So there aren’t always any cost savings to be had, and once you take into account the operating costs as noted above busways can actually be a lot more expensive to run.
All things being equal you are proabably better off building a rail line than a busway on a busy corridor, although there are obviously many exceptions to that and finding the right mode isn’t always straightforward. Like on the North Shore where it was far far cheaper to run buses over the existing bridge and through town than to build a rail tunnel under the harbour and the city… but it looks like we’re going to run out of busway capacity in about ten years anyway and might have to build the rail line after all.
I think the fact that there is already a underutilised backbone of railway in Auckland is a big plus for the rail camp. As Admin says, for the airport we would only need to start the railway at the exiting terminus at Onehunga, with a busway you’d really need to start it in the CBD and find a route right across the inner suburbs first.
Ricardo I would agree that buses generally are best for residential areas, but they aren’t particularly good for the trunk routes. The obvious solution in an integrated network where local buses and regional trains work together. A system where you can catch a quick bus down the road to your local shopping centre or to the next suburb over, or where you can also take that bus to your nearest train station or ferry terminal to get a express trip to the CBD or to a suburb on the other side of the city.
This is really the thrust of Brown’s proposals, he’s not suggesting that rail be extended to every little suburb like a metro system but rather there be a high capacity fast backbone of rapid transit. This could indeed come in the form of busways, monorails or whatever, but for the most part it seem trains are the best option.
I have to agree with Nick here. From Brisbane, if you want bus in Class A right of way (absolute and total priority just like rail) it is going to cost more or less the same as rail. Brisbane busway costs easily $100 million to $200 million per kilometre. That’s not to say the Busways were somehow the wrong decision for Brisbane- certainly not, all other rail options would have serious issues if implemented (or attempted to).
Bus lanes are great and cheap to do. They should be done. You can paint them overnight. However, patronage will build and you’ll also need a longer term solution. That’s where rail fits into the picture here I think.
So by all means, paint those bus lanes!
Oh, one other thing. I have done a crude analysis of data from Dr Paul Mees book Transport For Suburbia… I can find NO correlation between population level and transit mode share.
Look up “Rennes Metro”- There you have a city of 200 000+ people with a metro system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennes
Nice video, but will National do anything about it? Almost certainly not. Sorry to be a downer, but only a Labour/Greens combination is even going to consider big rail projects.
I was there all day as well. It was a great presentation, only 10 years late. I think Brown’s not pushing for the future but remeding the past.
gianfranco? err what’s the future then: 1960s motorways? Or are you thinking flying cars or something? What do you mean?
He has a point, what Brown is pushing was the future back in the late 70s when the Australian capitals started building their rail tunnels etc… we’ve got a few decades to catch up before we can really talk about the future!
Of corse it should have all been done years ago, but it’s never too late to start doing the right thing though and we only have the future to alter….
And National is doing everything it can to not build it? But build more roads in the time of increasing fuel prices? What is the reason for this? It’s plain stupid.
”many people will still live a long distance from the Station for it to be convenient”
So What?
Ricardo – in South London there is bugger all tube stations. I live nearly a mile away from the nearest overground train station. This is where feeder buses come in. I can either walk there in 15mins or bus there in 3 🙂
(also a lot of people CYCLE to train stations these days and leave their bikes at the station)
On the edges of Greater London some stations have park and ride.
No reason Auckland can’t copy this plan.
C’mon Auckland Transport, proper integrated transport system please!
And yes this all should’ve been done 30 years ago, but its never too late! (just a lot more expensive)
Looks like the Herald has lurched from one side of the debate to the other.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=10715086
Herald on Sunday has a different editor.
Looks like they have copied something I sent them, but more on that shortly 🙂
Well it’s even better that they have taken bits of what you said and turned it into the HoS opinion.
The tide is turning?
I’m not complaining as the main message is the same and whole point was to get across the idea that we need a change of thinking