An article in today’s NZ Herald confirms some of the fears that I’ve had for a while now: that the Manukau Rail Link will not be completed in July this year – as originally planned – but rather delayed a massive seven months until February next year.
Manukau’s new $98 million rail link faces a seven-month delay because Auckland Transport says it and KiwiRail are too busy to open it on time.
Although work is well advanced on laying tracks over a 2km route from the main trunk line to a 300m trench in central Manukau, the council-controlled body says it has too much other work to complete a new below-ground station by July, as hoped earlier.
Auckland Transport’s latest opening date for the station, which it announced yesterday, is February.
That is despite strong support for the project by Auckland Mayor Len Brown, who lobbied hard for KiwiRail to get cracking on it during his term as Manukau’s mayor.
The stated reason for this delay is really bizarre – that the agencies involved are simply too busy to finish it in time. I mean when do we ever hear NZTA give the “we’re too busy” excuse to defend delays to one of their motorway projects. If I were Len Brown I would be pretty annoyed about this – as the project is meant to create a big new transport hub in South Auckland, having most buses in the area feed into the railway station, allowing people to transfer onto the train for a much faster and more pleasant journey than they currently get.
Auckland Transport have offered a bit more of an explanation about the delay that “we’re too busy” – in this media release.
In line with the completion of additional work around the network, the timeline for opening Manukau train station has been amended by Auckland Transport to be integrated with electrification of the rail line prior to new electric trains being bought into service.
The new station is on track to open in February 2012. The opening of the new line will coincide with the introduction of a network wide timetable change which includes six trains an hour at peak time on the Western Line.
This excuse doesn’t really make much sense to me either. Why haven’t KiwiRail been doing all the electrification works on this line in the past few months while it’s been shut? That would have been the perfect opportunity to put up the poles, even to string up the wires and undertake all the necessary signalling works – I mean it’s not like building the Manukau Rail spur started yesterday.
In September last year the Onehunga train station opened – over a year late compared to its original timeframe. The main cause for the delay was ARTA endlessly postponing getting around to actually building the station – as the tracks were installed close to a year before opening date from memory. It took some seriously stern words from then ARC Chairman Mike Lee to get the Onehunga Line opened as early as it was – I suspect without his intervention we’d probably still be waiting.
Later on in today’s Herald article, Auckland Transport try to say that the delays for Manukau have nothing to do with a lack of trains.
Auckland Transport spokeswoman Sharon Hunter denied that not enough trains would have been available to open the new branch line on time, as she acknowledged bloggers had suggested on a transport-related website. “There’s plenty of trains.”
But Auckland Council transport committee chairman Mike Lee said only four more refurbished carriages and a diesel train due to arrive in the next few weeks were on order to tide Aucklanders over before electric multiple units (EMUs) start arriving in 2013.
I can’t recall exactly what operating patterns were supposed to serve the Manukau Line, but I think originally the idea was to have all Eastern Line trains terminating there, with all Southern Line train running from either Pukekohe or Papakura to Britomart via Newmarket. That would have simplified the operating patterns of system enormously, but meant that some people may have had to transfer service (for example if you wanted to go from south of Manukau to a station on the Eastern Line, or from Manukau to Newmarket). In any case, the Manukau trains were likely to be made up from existing ‘short-running’ services that operate between Otahuhu and Britomart being extended down to Manukau – something that would have required extra trains that I think we simply don’t have at the moment.
Furthermore, Auckland Transport have continued to make a commitment to boosting Western Line peak frequencies to a train every 10 minutes in February next year – as well as committing to operating more trains with six carriages. Once again I don’t see where the trains or the carriages are going to come from – if there are only four more refurbished carriages (my understanding is that there are actually five carriages available – 4 SA carriages and one SX carriage for all you train nerds out there). Are we going to reduce the number of spare sets – which will mean less maintenance and a higher chance of breakdowns?
In short, I suspect that a lack of trains has a lot to do with the proposed delays to the opening of this line (although I would love someone from Auckland Transport to explain how they plan to operate 10 minute Western Line peak frequencies and have more six carriage trains and operate the Manukau Line without boosting rolling stock numbers).
But if we put that issue aside for a moment, the real question I want an answer to is why our motorway project always seem to finish ahead of time, yet our rail projects end up being delayed for months or even (as in the case of the Onehunga Line) well over a year. If we have a look at motorway projects being completed in the near future, there’s a real trend of them being completed well ahead of time:
Victoria Park Tunnel – tunnel will be open to traffic by November and the whole project completed by February, around a year in advance of the original schedule.
Hobsonville Motorway – project due for completion in September, around six months ahead of schedule.
The Newmarket Viaduct replacement project also seems to be proceeding ahead of schedule, with the fourth southbound lane opening last week.
It’s difficult to understand why motorway projects can proceed so quickly and often finish ahead of schedule, but for rail projects all we get are more and more delays. Perhaps the most logical reason for the problems that rail projects face is the split in responsibilities between KiwiRail and Auckland Transport – whereas for motorway projects NZTA is the only agency involved and therefore things seem to run much more smoothly. I also wonder whether NZTA simply has better project managers – perhaps KiwiRail and Auckland Transport should do some homework into why NZTA manages to get projects completed on time, when they struggle so badly.
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I think this problem is inherent to a system that is tightly integrated and centrally managed. The roading system is decentralised, robust, and the various components are provided and supported by a variety of self-interested suppliers. If government built a new road and the government-managed project included procurement of motor vehicles, customisation of those vehicles so that they operated only on that road using unique fuel and a unique road-vehicle interface, and construction of fuel stations and refineries then that project would be bound to be late.
Instead we have vehicles procured by their owners from a car company that needs to sell cars to make a profit. Oil companies sell petrol and diesel that can be used by just about every vehicle and they need to keep up a regular supply or they’ll go bankrupt. And vehicles themselves will run pretty much anywhere including motorways, local roads, and dirt tracks and which are generally able to divert around points of failure. It’s a very robust architecture.
Fire in the belly’s the phrase that comes to mind.
Let’s give Auckland Transport and Kiwirail a break. You don’t have to train the users of the motorway in operation of the motorway. Perhaps the delay wasn’t very well explained. We’re opening the first new branch line constructed in Auckland, since the Westfield Deviation was opened in 1930. This means that all agencies concerned have to proceed cautiously (almost literally, in the signalling sense) in commissioning such a line. Rushing a commissioning and screwing it up could mean that someone ends up very red-faced. And remember, you have far more labour involved in the day to day operation of a commuter railway line than in the operation of a motorway. The branch still requires staff trained in the operation of the signals (train control), station operations (train managers, ticket office, passenger operators), and of course route knowledge for locomotive engineers. Then there’s the timetabling. Oh help us!
Onehunga’s delay was due to buracracy involved with platform lengths – something that should never have been a problem in the first place – we should have had a 4-6 car-length platform from the start, but NIMBYs slowed that down, not Kiwirail, not Veolia.
Manukau’s delay was inevitable from the start – we’re fast approaching a global event that will see the spotlight on Auckland’s (and New Zealand’s) public transport network(s). Do we rush the commissioning of a line and stumble whilst the media is around us, or wait until the heat is off us?
“I mean when do we ever hear NZTA give the “we’re too busy” excuse to defend delays to one of their motorway projects.”
Happens all the time in Canterbury, usually with projects delayed by years rather than months. Perhaps Transit in Auckland is a special case and you should be measuring Kiwirail’s project performance against Transit’s performance on projects outside of Auckland.
I wonder if perhaps it is because NZTA is absolutely sloshing around in money to finish the RoNS and so they just have numbers of staff to do it? Whereas I know that Kiwirail is working in a seriously tight budget to get electrification finished…
I do know of high levels of staffing on NZTA (from a family member who has worked on a couple). Whether this is to do with budget or management, I don’t know. (It is obviously not completely independent of the former, and I would guess that AT/Kiwirail have tight staffing budgets by necessity, but there’s no way for me to be sure of this).
AT says in its board reports that it still understaffed by quite a bit compared to what it was designed to have by the ATA.
AT is very much understaffed – which I suspect is both about having lost too many staff during the reorganisation, as well as (possibly?) being underfunded. Don’t know about AT.
And NZTA? Well, they have tons and tons of money, so it’s relatively easy to throw money and resources around. But to their credit, they also seem to be a well-oiled machine. Sad that it’s a machine that is so single-minded about more single-occupancy car concrete. That kind of attitude in rail transport and we’d be the envy of the rail world in a decade.
Sorry, that first paragraph’s last sentence was supposed to mean I don’t know about KiwiRail staffing levels.
But of course they’ve also had a lot of recent practice, NZTA and it’s partners ought to be extremely polished at road building – that’s all they’ve been doing like mad for decades. We are going to have to relearn how to build and run rail and other transit all over again, something of a lost art in Auckland over the last auto dependent years. And look at this, it’s not just peak oil but peak cars; for the world in total and interestingly in Australia in particular, 2004 was the year of peak cars. We haven’t had that number on the roads since, despite the numbers they’re buying in China!:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2011/3206293.htm
No wonder the growth even on auto-dependent NZ’s State Highways is stagnant. We should build for the future not the past.
Patrick – in fairness to AT, they have (and still are) just gone through a major reorganisation, that was more recent, and much more massive than what created NZTA out of Transit and parts of the MOT.
agreed, nothing in my post knocking AT, just pointing out how practiced NZTA ought to be [and are] at whacking out motorways…