On Tuesday officials from Auckland Council and Auckland Transport made an extensive presentation to the Transport Committee on the City Rail Link project – in particular on the business case review and why there are differences between their position and government’s position. Most of the media reaction from the meeting seems to, somewhat bizarrely, be about a Taniwha (by my reckoning the tunnel doesn’t pass through where the Horotiu stream ever was as Britomart’s on reclaimed land) but setting that issue aside, it’s worth reading through to get a better idea about the project – and there are also some interesting artist impressions about what the stations might look like at street level.
I won’t copy across all the words from the 40-odd pages of the presentation – but there are a number of graphics that are worth commenting on. The first is fundamental to the need for the project – and that is simply the observation that if we’re going to get more people into the city centre, there’s no ability to increase road-space (in fact it’s likely we’ll be decreasing road capacity to make a nicer city) – so the extra people will need to walk, cycle or travel by public transport:
Since 2006 the number of vehicles has declined a bit, while the number of people entering via public transport has increased. The third column is also interesting – with an absolutely massive increase in the people walking/cycling into (or within?) the city centre by 2041. It’s worth thinking about the quality of urban environment (and the level of safety for pedestrians and cyclists) which would be necessary for this to happen. It’s unlikely to involve many more on-street vehicles than we have now (and arguably might require less).
While the first step to enabling an increase in PT passengers to the CBD is obviously improvements to how the bus network operates (see here for some ideas about that), by 2041 (and probably a good while before then) the ability of the city centre to handle the number of projected people travelling by bus just simply doesn’t stack up any more:
A justifiable question about the timing of this project is probably the issue of “when does the number of buses on the streets of the city centre become unmanageable?” The answer to this is not just about absolute capacities in my opinion, but also about the quality of the urban environment and how that might be affected as bus volumes grow. The presentation says that all the major bus corridors will reach their manageable capacity before 2020, which suggests that some urgency might be necessary for advancing other ways of boosting PT capacity to the city centre.
Another interesting slide shows how most PT patronage gains over the past decade have been on the rapid transit network: the rail system plus the Northern Busway. This highlights the fact that it’s the RTN which can truly encourage people to get out of their cars because it offers a high-quality alternative that is free from congestion. To put it bluntly, unless you have to pay for parking in the CBD chances are that it’s probably cheaper and faster to drive to work in Auckland than it is to catch a normal bus that gets stuck in traffic.
It would be fascinating to see a breakdown of where patronage growth has occurred within the “Rest of PT” column above. I suspect that most of the growth has probably been on parts of the network where bus priority measures have been implemented – as well as to newly developing parts of Auckland.
Moving on to the details of the project itself, the map below shows how much of the city centre is brought within a five minute walk from one of the three additional train stations (plus Parnell’s put in there):
Both the K Road and Newton stations are going to be pretty damn deep – although by no means the deepest stations in metro systems around the world (London’s Hampstead station is 58 metres deep, Washington DC’s Forest Glen station is 60 metres deep). I’m hoping that the main entrance to Aotea station might be from Darby Street, somehow being behind the Atrium on Elliott shopping centre. This would probably give fairly level access from Queen Street along a nice shared space (which could be fully pedestrianised) past some shops and straight to the concourse level, with perhaps just a short ride down the escalators to the platforms themselves.
The artists impressions of the stations are quite interesting – with it seeming as though the current thinking is definitely based on having an actual station building rather than just access points down to a station that’s largely underground. I’m not sure how set this plan is – as it does potentially add cost and also creates a larger impact on property than would otherwise be the case.
I would be very surprised if the giant water tank that dominates the area around Newton station stayed like it is post-construction. It would become one of the most valuable pieces of land in the whole city one would think. Perhaps Watercare could construct a big office building on top of it while still keeping the water storage function?
If we move on to look at the reasons behind the differences in the business case reviews undertaken by the Ministry of Transport compared to that undertaken by Auckland Transport/Auckland Council, we see much of what I’ve been talked about over the past week – so I won’t dwell on these for too long. The table below shows the impact of different assumptions on the level of rail patronage estimated in 2041:
Looking at comparisons of the number of people on each mode in 2041 entering the city centre at peak times, it seems that MoT’s review thinks the city’s streets can handle around 5,000 more cars and 16,000 more bus passengers than they do now. Goodness knows how. Personally, I wonder whether the AC/AT review is also being overly optimistic by saying that the city’s streets can handle an extra 18,000 bus passengers in 2041, only 2,000 less than if the CRL hadn’t been constructed. The less people on the bus, the more people on the train – in all likelihood, so the benefits of the project could be boosted even further if the city’s bus capacity was actually lower than forecast:
Another slide that’s particularly noteworthy is a comparison with Perth’s rail patronage over the past 20 years. Perth is a little bigger than Auckland (population-wise) and is much lower density. Yet over the past two decades its patronage has increased from being around where Auckland’s is now to over 60 million trips a year. You can see in the graph below how big improvements to the rail network immediately led to giant increases in patronage:
While hopefully we will have sorted out the issue of how to fund the rail tunnel by the time electrification is fully implemented in late 2013 and early 2014, if not then the likely big boost in rail patronage at that point might well be the final factor that makes the project happen.
A further graph picks up on the point I was making in my post the other day about Mapnificent: that this project should bring a hugely increased number of people within a 30 minute commute of various parts of the city. As you can see the biggest jump is in accessibility to the area around the proposed Aotea Station – which would be within a 30 minute commute of nearly 400,000 people, more than double the case now:
I struggle to think of a possible roading project that could double the number of people within a 30 minute commute of the city centre, regardless of the time of day.
There’s further information on the details of where the transport benefits differed and then about wider economic benefits – but they effectively just repeat what many of my posts over the past week have talked about. But overall it is a good presentation with a lot of useful graphics illustrating how necessary the project is and what a big difference it will make to Auckland’s transport system.
Processing...
One graph I found really interesting is the one that compares our patronage with what was predicted in 2002 and again last year. We are pretty much tracking exactly on it despite many of the plans being delayed e.g. double tracking was meant to have been completed sooner, additional services were meant to have already happened, Onehunga was a year or so late, Manukau is late etc. If we continue to follow projections we will be at about 17mil by 2016. Also I assume these projections were initially made initially by the ARC using the same (or very similar) system to what is used now, the fact that they have been pretty much correct correct for so long gives credibility to the AC/AT projections meaning they are more likely to be correct than the MOT ones.
Also the Perth results are pretty impressive and I wonder if much of the patronage growth is the result in confidence that the system works i.e. people for the last few years have been hearing about issues with the network which would put some people off trying it, knowing the work is finished and everything is working well will probably drive more patronage than the actual benefits of electrification (faster journey times, nicer trains etc).
This is all good stuff – I think the buses can handle that many more people, but you’re dead right that it will mean fewer cars than we have now, not more.
I also wonder how much more feasible the City Rail Link would become with time-of-use road pricing? That could actually be the deal breaker between the project being marginal (as it is now) and highly effective.
Given that the completion date is at least 10 years away – AC and AT have enough time to set down with the MOT and work out a time-of-use road pricing scheme that can be delivered at the same time as the rail link.
Stu, I’m sure you’re right, we can flood the CBD with more buses, but as admin asks above, do we want to? I know I don’t want this kind of city. Sometimes transit planners, even ones who see the benefit of reducing the car volumes are so busy trying to be objective and even handed about mode choice that they become blind to the very real differences. A city street dominated by buses is arguably even more vile than one crushed by cars- except that it means there are even more people there to experience the degradation of their city. Every measure, air quality, congestion, kilometres of streets given over to bus stops, city full of mobile advertising hordings The only advantage buses have are short term ones, quick to implement, cheaper to deploy straight away, more flexibility, and can use some existing infrastructure for a poor to moderate service.
Auckland’s PT share is dominated by bus use because until very recently that is all we have invested in. Whenever I take the western line in I am reminded of how crippled it is by the Newmarket deviation and the hopeless approach to Britomart, it very nearly doesn’t qualify as an RTN in its current state, the CRL will be a huge transformation of this system and along with electrification and feeder systems I’m sure there will be a Perth-like jump in use of rail.
And please let’s not forget those two elephants in the room: peak oil and climate change, electric trains are our best opportunity to mitigate our exposure to these two Taniwha
Let’s also mention that we have a very good example nearby of what happens when an otherwise good PT system relies entirely on buses for the CBD: Wellington. You guys ever been in Wellington at 5:30 pm? Solid buses all the way down Lambton Quay and almost halfway out to Courtenay Place. Unbelievably slow and frustrating, which is why Mayor Wade-Brown is thinking of her own City (light) Rail Link.
Patrick – I admire your passion, but not your logic.
Even if the City Rail Link is built, buses will still carry more people than rail – even in 30 years time. That’s not to denigrate the merits of the CRL but to point out that !!!_no matter what_!!! future scenario you consider buses remain the primary public transport mode in Auckland. And for that reason we need to greatly improve the way we deliver bus infrastructure and services. It’s easy, it’s cheap, and it’ll get HEAPS of people using public transport.
Many of the problems you talk about are not a function of buses, but the way we provide them:
1. Slow boarding times – this is why we need so many bus stops. The main culprit is because our ticketing system has up until now been archaic. Plus we get people to board buses via the front door, as opposed to LRT which allows people to jump through several doors. But there’s NO reason why buses could not be boarded in a similar manner.
2. Congestion – buses contribute to congestion because we don’t provide them with priority. LRT pretty much demands it own right of way everywhere (so it does not get completely stuck). If we provided the same priority to buses in Auckland you sure as hell would not see much congestion.
3. Buses = billboards?!? Is that really mode-specific? So you’re saying the advertising paint simply slides off LRT vehicles like magic? Here’s an idea – maybe it’s just because buses are privately provided and LRT is not … so that’s a function of ownership model, not mode. Am I right?
Air quality and amenity are important – but I think new vehicle standards and the measures I outlined above will fix much of these problems. Buses stuck in traffic have much higher emissions profiles so getting the moving (and this is easier than it seems) will greatly improve air quality. Plus we can do lots of cool stuff with trolley buses (possible even as a step towards LRT) and even batteries if justified by volumes.
I have to ask why LRT advocates just ignore many of the externalities of rail? I’m living in Amsterdam and every time the LRT goes past it shakes the hell out of our apartment; buses we never ever notice. When I first arrived in Amsterdam I stayed in a hotel on a corner next to an LRT line. Every morning at 6am we would get woken up by steel-on-steel as the LRT screeched around the corner. And this is in a completely flat city!
I acknowledge that rail has some benefits, especially when tunnels are involved. But they do not amount to a “univesl solution” (cue scary music). Buses can be really really effective if delivered right. And Auckland definitely does not do it right.
But we are debating the CRL, as the MoT says it is unneeded because cars and especially buses can do the job. My point is that through a combination of having a weaker city city centre and a horrible streetscape it is possible, and that is, as you argue, logical enough, but only if that city is desirable. And it isn’t.
Also, when we have the CRL, yes there still will be lots of buses in the CBD, but hopefully not as many, and surely they will work better with the CRL taking such. Load of the heavy lifting.
Auckland never gets good bus technology we always have the worst diesel crap, and while battery buses are conceivable we won’t see them and anyway they are a poor idea compared to reticulated use of electricity.
Why compare Amsterdam’s LRT with the CRL? The billboard comment is to point out that buses are ugly, it’s minor, they could be covered in artworks, their real ugliness is how much degradation they do to the streets cape compared to how low the quality of their service.
However, we are a little at cross purposes I suspect, as I agree entirely that bus privilege and rationalisation is the low hanging fruit of the AK transit situation, but just not as an alternative to the desperately needed, long over due, and transformative investment in rail. As the MoT would have it.
NZ cities could have hybrid buses now, if they wanted them. Short term thinking means it probably won’t be a decade or so until we start to see them on the streets in any real way. Quieter, cheaper to run, massive improvements in air quality and thus less of those 400 people killed by air-pollution in Auckland annually, and about half the greenhouse gas emissions.
Despite the above benefits, it will be oil prices that tip the balance.
George we had hybrid buses for the free city buses. They broke down constantly and had to be retired from service. NZBus would need some sort of an assurance that the bugs in the system had been worked out before buying them again.
Yes we are debating the CRL – and I support it and I do not support the MOT’s perspective. But they are right in one respect: Even with the CRL there will be more buses in the CBD, so why not do that first?
The other thing I wanted to highlight was that many of the negative effects of buses can be mitigated with by the infrastructure we deliver and the system design. E.g. Britomart as a through stop rather than a terminus so we don’t have buses waiting around downtown.
And I mean infrastructure that is sensitive to urban design, not the bus superhighways that have been talked about earlier. Auckland has some of the most advanced buses in the world. And also some of the worst. But the quality of our bus fleet is improving rapidly – again, it’s a function of how much you want to spend.
With respect to LRT and buses – I mis-read your post and apologise. I interpreted your critique of buses as being tacit support for LRT, which I wanted to highlight have problems of their own! Anyway, yes I agree with you – we probably agree on 99% of the issues and that’s good enough for me! 🙂
Thanks for the nice summary. I think an added benefit of the project is that several sites around the city will become quite humanised c.f. their current state. The Symonds Street, Khyber Pass intersection, for instance, was really destroyed in the late 80’s when it was widened to the behemoth it is today. The image for the station depicts quite a large station plus bus stops, the only place this can go is if some of that roading space is reclaimed for other uses. I think there’s a great chance to completely makeover this town centre. There’s also arguably no reason why so much traffic is using this area as it’s surrounded by motorways, so we should take the opportunity to really give the space back to pedestrians and turn it back into more than just a giant intersection.
Also those station images are seriously average, and rather strange in that surely they would be better integrated into mixed use buildings rather than wasting prime inner city realestate on standalone low rise [and rather suburban looking little monopitch] structures? Especially at Aotea station [shall we renamed it Taniwha? Or perhaps the whole line could become the Taniwha line!? Something to scare Joyce with as it rises from the dead] One day there will be a tower block there and the station would be integrated into that surely…?
Whenever there is an ‘artist’s impression’ illustration, I always despair, as that artist is unlikely to be an architect.
The Aotea Station looks to be integrated into a new admin building for the council.
I imgaine you’d have a situation like Britomart’s Eastern entrance with a temporary structure until a building can be built over it.
James, Aotea Station is under Albert St at the Vic/Albert intersection. The obvious integration is with a future building on the currently vacant Royal International Hotel site, owned by a Korean developer. I expect the station to be planned to be connected to retail floors and outlets to Elliot and Darby Sts as well as western exits somewhere on Victoria St. See how central and handy even to AUT and Uni this station will be, as well as Sky City, Aotea Square, the new Art Gallery, and the growing employment in the redevelopment west of Albert . They had better plan for more volumes of riders here than Britomart can handle. The vacant site, of course now a car park, is ideal as a construction base for the tunnel and station.
The building in the background is clearly the Bledisloe building. You can also see the Civic Administration Building in the distance. I’m pretty sure that this is showing the southern entrance to the station. The station would be 200 metres stretching easily from Victoria Street to Wellesley street. This would allow it to cover both Aotea Square and Victoria Streets.
Ah, I see, that’s on the corner where there are currently low rise edwardian shops including a Glenngary…. OK, that’d work well as a southern entrance, real handy to the cultural destinations. What a great amenity that will be. Council already own this site, probably?
The Newton station is clearly on the carpark by the water reservior near The French Café. And K’rd at the top of Beresford St. Fab.
Oh, right. So the main street running through the picture is Albert and that’s Wellesley with the buses coming up from Queen Street from the left.
Yep. I work in the ASB building so I am intimately knowledgable about the area. A two hundred metre long station would be long enough for an entrance at Victoria and Wellesley Streets with maybe another off Darby/Elliot Street and possibly even one at SkyCity. What would be great would be if you extend Darby Street up as a series of steps to connect Elliot Street and Albert Street and provide the entrance to the station. If it was wide enough you could open up the side of the Atrium and what ever they put in the vacant lot and put bars, cafes and restaurants along it. I have a dream.
This highlights the fact that it’s the RTN which can truly encourage people to get out of their cars because it offers a high-quality alternative that is free from congestion. To put it bluntly, unless you have to pay for parking in the CBD chances are that it’s probably cheaper and faster to drive to work in Auckland than it is to catch a normal bus that gets stuck in traffic.
Absolutely. People will choose the best option for them. ‘best’ isn’t all about time, nor is it about price, or comfort (and safety, and environmental impact, etc etc). It’s a combination of all of these. To various extents, depending on the person and their circumstance, they’ll choose one over the other.
In the case of buses, people will choose cars until the bus services are of a sufficient quality to make them attractive, or the car experience is sufficiently bad. Rather than improving things, the mentality has in the past been to leave things at the status quo and hope that gives the best ‘value for money’ of provision, or meet some other simple quantifiable metric. There’s little attempt to actually make our lives better – surely this should be the aim of our governmnents, local and central?
I see this changing, slowly in parts, faster in others. The North Shore Bus RTN seems to have been constructed with the aim of moving people quickly and cheaply, but it’s massively improved the experience in the process, and people are realising that if you provide high quality services it’s better for everyone.
Hmmm… if Newton Station is going to be pretty much where the French Cafe and the water tank are now, then the two connections to the Western Line will pretty much run parallel with New North Road towards Kingsland, and with Mt Eden Rd towards Grafton, amirite?
I’m pretty sure the plan for the Newton station was for it to be in front of where Penny Farthings is?
If there’s going to be an entrance from Mt Eden Road, then you should be talking about a little south of there. But we’re quibbling over a few dozen metres!
My guess is the image in question is on the corner of Khyber Pass and Symonds St, so where the cycle shop is (which I would thought may have had some historic protection on it). The reality is though that because the station is 43m deep we could see multiple entrances spread out quite a bit as surely for safety reasons alone it would make sense.
No it’s cnr Mt Eden and New North, reservoir in background
Yeah, that’s the front of the Newcall building in the background, which means we must be looking north.
Yes on closer look it’s here http://bit.ly/lcXrxd -in the carpark which is located on the coner of Mt Eden Rd and New North Rd. Makes sense I guess, plenty more space here than further round on Khyber Pass.
Catch the train to The French Cafe! Cool.
@ James
I stand to be corrected but believe that Stagecoach (who were the operators at the time, ie prior to the Infratil buyout) actually didn’t purchase the hybrid buses. I understand they were bought by the ARC and Stagecoach merely operated them on an experimental basis to see if they would work under local conditions.
I don’t think it really matters who owns them. The point is that they didn’t work very well and had to pulled from service. Before we buy up a whole fleet of hybrids we would need some sort of assurance that they would work reliably. I can just imagine the Herald leaping on AUckland’s new bus fleet constantly breaking down as proof that PT doesn’t work.
Yes they were hybrids but not in the sense we think about for cars, they had a gas turbine that constantly ran and provided power to the wheels. It was the gas turbine that they had problems with so I imagine that more common hybrid technology would be ok.
The CBD link topic managed to get mentioned in a UK newspaper, please view link for more details:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/newzealand/8565102/Swamp-monster-threatens-Auckland-railway-project.html
I think with all this publicity about the CBD loop it will make it happen a lot sooner, the support for it will only get stronger, now that the world is starting to realise how far behind NZ is compared to the rest of the world that they let things like this prevent rail projects from happening.
I think Steven Joyce is a far bigger threat than the Taniwha, heck someone should stick his head on a dragon, much like the Collus of Roads picture!
‘ Ride the Taniwha line’
The Taniwha nickname should be kept for the future Auckland to hamilton trains, there are plenty of taniwha in Waikato.
what i cannot figure out is, why would these three underground stations have buildings above ground level? i mean, c’mon. wtf? surely like any other underground stations you would have various street level entrances: lifts, stairs, escalators. these have small footprints at ground level. they often fit on a footpath or squeeze between two shops. i’d imagine you would also have shops and amenities on at least one level between the surface and the platforms (presumably the same level as the card-swipe-contolled gates). but above-ground buildings? what for? they are not going to need space above ground, even cycle parking should be put underground. the land purchase cost would add to the project cost unnecessarily. what am i missing here?
Er, the above ground buildings (a) add visibility to the underground stations; (b) can be rented out to help pay for the stations and their upkeep. Britomart, our only existing underground station, has pretty big above-ground visibility.
visibility? aah, um, all i can say is, “eh?”
if the land had to be purchased to build something that is not necessary, why?
visibility just a non-issue imho. i live in tokyo, there are hundreds of underground stations and hundreds of above-ground stations. the underground stations do not have above-ground buildings to make them visible. there are signs instead. from memory, london and paris are similar.
as for Britomart, well, they run diesel trains in there. so it has to be cavernous. or else have extremely high-tech ventilation systems.
also you lease out space for shops and amenities underground. the tunnel will mostly be under roads. sorry, does not compute.
Totally agree – seems pointless.
The lost revenue from not selling the land to developers would be huge.
The K’rd and Newton station probably don’t offer too much opportunity for lease income outside of small retail cocessions, but both the Vic/Albert and Albert/Mayoral ends of the Aotea station do. In fact there may be some tricky negotiations ahead with the owner of the VicAlbert block….
Beresford Square is pretty small even a 3-4 story building would end up destroying the squre.
Once you get the huge throughput of pax daily that these stations create there should be lots of commercial opportunities. maybe even a supermarket like at Wellington Central stations.
The graph which compares RTN growth to ‘Rest of PT’ growth is quiet intersting and it show quiet effectively how speed, effciency and legibility are key factors to attacting new patrons to PT. I was just also reading “Appendix C” of the MoT review and it had a similar graph [fig 3.] which showed and compared 2001 and 2010 the growth in RTN Busway and RTN Rail usage, in effect to show how small the growth has been in rail… Wait What? Northern Busway usage in 2001?? But it was only completed in 2008. It clearly states in the paragraph above the figure that the RTN comprises of the Northern Busway and Rail. Curious.
For comparison, Melbourne’s Parliament Station is 42m deep. So Newton (43m) would feel deep, but not ridiculously so.