Today’s opening of the Hobsonville Deviation motorway has somehow led to further discussion of another road-based harbour crossing of the Waitemata. This from the NZ Herald:
The pieces of Auckland’s motorway puzzle are falling into place – and the biggest piece, a second harbour crossing, is looming large in the minds of planners…
…And the mother of all roading projects, a replacement for the Auckland Harbour Bridge, is edging closer, according to New Zealand Transport Authority Auckland state highways manager Tommy Parker.
‘The next step up in size and scale will be another harbour crossing,” he said.
I’ve stated my feelings towards another road crossing of the Waitemata Harbour many times previously. In short, if we’re clever I doubt we’ll ever need one. The two main reasons for my opinion about this is the enormous cost of another crossing ($4-5 billion) and the stagnant traffic volumes across the harbour bridge: which haven’t increased in the last five or six years. Even the claim that it’s necessary to have another crossing because the clip-ons are wearing out simply isn’t true.
But why aren’t traffic volumes across the Harbour Bridge increasing, even though the population of the North Shore clearly is? Well there are a number of reasons – firstly that there’s a lot more employment on the North Shore these days so I think many people who live on the Shore now also work on the Shore. Secondly, the Victoria Park Viaduct bottleneck probably means that at peak times it’s simply not possible to increase the number of vehicles crossing the harbour because there’s a capacity constraint further downstream. Once the Vic Park Tunnel project is completed we should see this constraint alleviated to some extent. Finally, I think we’re seeing the impact of the Northern Busway – as around 40% of people crossing the Harbour Bridge at peak times now do so on the bus. This data’s from Auckland Transport’s statement of intent:
So the argument for another road crossing seems pretty debatable. But what about rail to the North Shore? The question of when that might be necessary is something that I’ve also examined previously, with the answer to that question seemingly very dependent on the point at which we can no longer squeeze any more buses through the streets that connect the city centre with the Harbour Bridge.
The problem with North Shore Rail is what you do with the Northern Busway. We have a $300 million piece of infrastructure that does its job pretty damn well – with plenty of capacity for growth remaining within it. It would be dumb to simply replace the busway with a railway line before we’ve got full economic use out of the busway, especially as the busway has some flexibility advantages with people not having to transfer from feeder buses onto the train – they can just catch “L” shaped routes that travel around the suburbs picking up people before hitting the busway and zipping into town.
So let’s recap our situation:
- If recent trends continue, in about 10 years we’re going to really struggle to fit more buses on the streets between the Harbour Bridge and the city centre.
- We have a pretty good piece of busway infrastructure (particularly between Akoranga and Constellation stations) with plenty of spare capacity.
- Upgrading the busway to a railway line will be very expensive due to geometry/grade issues.
Adding to this thought-process of mine was the trip to Wynyard Quarter yesterday, where despite the huge number of people there on its opening day I still feel that the place is extremely isolated from the rest of the city: cut off on three sides by water and on the fourth side by the defacto motorway of Fanshawe Street. Improving access to this area will be critical in making it a success story. Obviously a first step in that process is extending the tramway loop to Britomart, which I think is likely to happen within the next couple of years once it’s figure out how to get the trams across the Viaduct Harbour. But somehow linking Wynyard into the city’s rapid transit network to a greater degree (arguably the Northern Express provides a connection with its stop at Victoria Park) seems pretty vital to the long-term success of Wynyard Quarter’s development.
So, my proposed alternative to another road based harbour crossing (which means I have around $4 billion to play with) is a railway line along this route:
In some respects this could be a first step to eventually extending the North Shore Line to Albany, alternatively it could be a long-term solution – achieving a connection to Takapuna that’s pretty impossible for anything running along a Northern Busway route. So let’s describe how things would work a bit:
- All existing bus services from north of Akoranga station feed into that station, where people transfer onto the train.
- All Onewa Road bus services feed into Onewa Station, where people transfer onto the train.
- Bus services currently travelling to Takapuna would terminate there and people travelling to the city would transfer onto the train.
- Aotea station would connect with the rest of the rail system through the City Rail Link project.
NZTA’s Waitemata Harbour Crossing study indicated that the Takapuna to Wynyard section of railway tunnel would cost around $1.5 billion. I’m thinking that the link on to Aotea Station would potentially cost no more than $500 million – so theoretically the whole project could be done for around half the price of any road crossing of the Waitemata Harbour.
The train’s high speeds (particularly on the Onewa to Wynyard section) and avoidance of any traffic congestion on the harbour bridge and on Fanshawe Street should easily make up for any waiting time in the transfer onto the train (I’m envisaging 5 minute peak frequencies and 10 minute off-peak frequencies). The speed and reliability of the train services (plus its connection to the rest of the vastly improved rail network by the time this is built) should attract a fair few people out of their cars, while under this scheme there would also be no need for any buses to cross the Harbour Bridge (except perhaps the 962 and 966 services). So a fairly decent amount of road-space should be freed up for any future general traffic growth – or to embark on a process of replacing the clip-ons should that be necessary.
So to compare this option with another road based harbour crossing, for a start this costs half as much. Secondly it shifts us away from auto-dependency by offering a really spectacularly high-quality rail option for people travelling across the Harbour. Thirdly it would almost certainly have significantly less environmental effects than any road option. And fourthly, it provides extra capacity to a mode with rapidly increasing demand, rather than one where demand is stagnant and has been so for a number of years. Plus, by not duplicating or replacing the main part of the busway (in fact the rail line could easily use the one-sided busway corridor between Akoranga and Onewa stations, or wherever it need to duck underground for the crossing, to save money on construction cost) we leverage off our existing infrastructure quite nicely – rather than creating further bottlenecks as any additional road crossing would do.
Sounds like a good idea to me – probably something to start digging in around 2020 to aim for a 2025 opening date?
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I think such a line would also be pretty popular with apartment dwellers in the innercity who would like to nip over to the shore for a swim at Takapuna.
This is clearly the most logical line to build, I also think it’s quite likely that it will – any future crossing is a few years away but which point Joyce will be gone and we’ll hopefully have a sane transport minister. Having a connection directly into Takapuna would also be a real selling point, plus as you say would enable the busway to continue to operate.
As a former inner-city apartment dweller I agree that it would be attractive. But I doubt the volumes and willingness to pay of my population segment (let’s call them “apartment surfers”) is high enough to warrant this type of infrastucture :).
So the fact a road crossing can be financed and paid for by users, but a rail crossing never could be, might cause you to think twice about it? Concern about the cost of a crossing that can be self-financed with one that would be a destruction of capital is where? Would rail demand soar to the North Shore if they paid the cost of infrastructure as road users do? Hardly a fair comparison.
The environmental arguments against road vehicles are being eroded by ever improving engines. Whatever happens technologically with engines and fuels, it will only get better. Certainly the economic viability of hybrid and fuel cell buses within 10-15 years is likely to make them a desirable option. You simply don’t remotely have enough usage over a long enough period of time for a railway to justify the extra capacity compared to an intelligently managed road.
Of course pricing the current bridge would delay any new capacity for years, and ensure the bridge was free flowing enough to allow the busway to be fully utilised and have more buses. On top of that, adding a bus-rail transfer is a negative for users since you want to kill off the option that buses might cross the bridge and not go to the CBD alone (why presume a train can replace buses, they don’t in Wellington where buses parallel rail on the Johnsonville line and to the Hutt because they serve people for whom rail doesn’t meet their needs as well as buses).
I agree. You might be interested in my “hot of the keyboard” post on road pricing, which was (ironically) written completely independently of Josh’s post.
A few points Liberty:
1) The road crossing option has a BCR of around 0.3 so is hardly a cost-effective project.
2) By environmental effects I mean the impact of the project & its construction, especially a bridge option.
3) I’m mixed about the Onewa Station idea so probably those buses would run downtown.
2. And electric propulsion over promoting driving, we urgently need to be importing less oil and using our own abundant renewable [79% in 2010], and meeting our CC promises.
3. I agree that this is probably too close to the city to make transferring that worth while, also the capacity on the bridge will be there because of the volumes using the train, space is a bit tight and walk-up very limited at Onewa because of the severing motorway. Better to use the money elsewhere.
Oooop; should read …’our own abundant renewable electricity’
@liberty – I guess it’s all how you do the maths isn’t it, as to whether you can claim people driving pay their own way.
Do we even need this? Wait for traffic levels to receed further, mark two lanes on the bridge as bus only, plus one of the lanes over the vicoria viaduct to run half the buses to Cook St. That should take care of things for ten or fifteen years.
I think we would need more then that. At this stage buses from short into CBD offer far greater flexibility then a single Aotea station. As much as I would like to see rail on the Shore I can’t see people transferring from bus to train for a 6 min ride just to walk to another number of minutes (or transfer to another bus). Also the trains would have to run with 3-4 mins frequency to make the wait bearable, but with just a few stations that might be difficult to justify.
If anything we should be looking right now at dedicated bus lanes across the bridge (that should not be that difficult to justify bearing in mind the volumes of passengers they carry) and complete right of way on the rest of the journey (both on Fanshaw St as well as north of the bridge). After the volumes start getting to a level that the busway can’t cope with – we go for the full rail solution (with more then 3 stations).
Since there will soon be 10 lanes in St Mary’s Bay it will be hard to justify why only 1 of those is for buses when they’re currently carrying more than 1/3 of all people across, I still find it quite pathetic how almost no bus priority has been included in project.
Just as a general point I am not suggesting that this would be a particularly high priority for spending $2billion in my opinion. I am more saying that it’s much much smarter to build this than a road crossing for twice the price.
I have been thinking along the same lines, this is the solution, this is plenty of space at Akoranga for a decent Perth style interchange station. It also means it can be built with no disruption to the busway’s current operation. This would come after the CRL, The Southwestern, but most importantly once we have a system and a population happily transferring. So Stu I don’t see it as being dependent on apartment dwellers at all. To have direct connections from say Manukau City or the airpot to Takapuna would be fantastic quite apart to and from the city. And it would clearly extend the life of the current bridge indefinitely. This is the Beach train. Takapuna is a destination as well as a dormitory.
The success of the CRL will make this a popular option too.
Sweet for AUT to have their two campuses connected so directly… would make them as well integrated into the network as MIT’s new Manukau campus will be.
I like the general idea of a future north shore line being built in stages and not replacing the busway.
How about an alternative where the train tunnel goes to bayswater with stops at Bayswate, Hauraki, Takapuna and then connecting to the busway at Smales Farm.
Wouldn’t better ferries, like Sydney’s serve these places better?, or feeder buses to Devonport or Akoranga Station
Can we not just run larger buses? Double-deckers down Onewa Road for example? And from Takapuna into the City? The busway has a few bridges/tunnels, but they could be sorted relatively cheaply compared to this. That way you could almost half the frequency of buses you are running on those routes.
As an aside I think this solution faces a major problem in that it’s trying to justify capital intensive infrastructure based on the patronage generated by 1.5 stations (I don’t see Onewa pulling many people). It’s a similar issue for the CRL, except that the latter has 3 full stations – even then the business case is marginal (it probably just stacks up).
Stu you’re still ignoring the bus feeder effect… Akoranga would clearly be a big transfer station, a la Perth, allowing those NS buses to run frequent local services across the area. But also, and I agree about dropping Onewa, the third station is Wynyard. Clearly in the process of becoming a big trip generator and not just on week days and not just from the Shore. And an area, as admin notes, that suffers from awkward separation especially by the eight lanes of highway to it’s south. Incidentally totally awful design for pedestrians there, a real NZTA special.
I appreciate your interrest in finding the cheapest way to move people but we must always keep an eye on the externalities that are hard to price into that equation. More and bigger buses do take up road space while moving but even more importantly degrade the streetscape that is already poor because of domination by vehicles. We are trying to build a new type of Auckland at Wynyard and flooding it and the rest of downtown with buses with undermine these efforts. Building longterm solutions that improve the quality of the built environment has hard to express numerically but significant value. This is one enormous benefit of a network of electric trains especially where they are underground, and even more critically when that network is more widespread and coordinated with other modes.
Ooops missed that station at Wynyard; that makes three ok stations then, even if you drop Onewa.
What’s this about finding a cheap solution? I just pointed out that the costs are (likely to be) high relative to the benefits, and also relative to other potential solutions. Same reason why I object to the Puhoi-Wellsford highway …
As for “flooding the city with buses” – perlease spare us the hyperbole! Edinburgh has more urban atmosphere in 1 sqm than exists in the whole of Auckland, but works just fine with double decker buses. As does Vilnius in Lithuania, again bus-only. Double deckers buses would operate at almost half the frequency, hardly flooding even if they are higher!
The question is what is the most effective PT solution for this corridor. And all I’m saying is that given the costs of tunnelling rail probably ain’t it. Happy to be proven wrong, but it takes a lot of time savings to offset $1.5 billion.
Isn’t the main benefit that we avoid spending $4 billion or more on a road crossing?
Never been to Vilnius but I do note that it has a population of around half a million, and Edinburgh has even less, and we are discussing a future system for Auckland for when the population will be over 2 million. I just know how horrible it already is in downtown AK trying to live with the quantity of buses there now and it is important that we neither strangle Ak’s ability to accommodate that growth or allow it to get even uglier than than it is now. Edinburgh is lovely and of course that is because it was largely built before the motorised vehicle existed and started to dominate all outcomes. So I couldn’t agree more, but do you think it would either work or as be able to be as lovely with buses moving another million residents around?
Urban form outcomes of transport infrastructure decisions are very important to me and my main point is that these are difficult to quantify and usually ignored remains valid.
And it is vital we stop or slow down plans for a ten lane road bridge across AK harbour as it is an unnecessary and uneconomic diversion of resources, as well as hideous, and this post presents a good argument for a clever possible future alternative, once we have extacted as much value out of the highly successful existing busway.
Nice idea Admin, but realistically the Busway should be able to cater for the North Shore just fine without a gimmicky rail line.
Also any station at Onewa will get major protests from the local residents, hence why there is no station there now.
David Hensher writes that 15km of rail is equivalent to 400km of BRT in Australia (which is probably in undeveloped areas).
Your rail link is about 7.5 km so for a far lower cost and more flexibility, why not extend the Busway to Britomart and finish the extension to Silverdale.Then and add some branch lines to Takapuna (from Akoranga), Glenfield (via Wairau), Long Bay (from Redvale), Hobsonville (from Constellation) and Whangaporoa (via Penlink).
Hensher’s calculations are so theoretical as to be meaningless.
Your proposal is interesting but crucially does not add cross-harbour capacity. My idea is to ensure we never need another road-based crossing of the harbour. Ever.
BRT, Henscher, like you it seems, only has eyes for one mode. And a fine one it is in many instances, like the existing northern busway and the one Auckland needs on the North Western motorway. However his exaggerated idea of of cost difference ain’t comparing apples with apples. Yes, bus ROW on open ground at grade though open country will be way cheaper than an underground rail line through the city, errr but an underground Busway to Britomart will save no money over a rail option and have none of the advantages. Really Henscher’s math is about as good as the Tea Party’s if he really said that.
Clearly we should give buses privilege on the new wide NZTA spectacular from the bridge and continue that right through Customs St to the Central Connecter. That is both the cheapest and best near term option. But we should also plan for the future. Both the cheapest and best long term option for an additional harbour crossing, admin argues above, are rail tunnels and keeping the existing bridge. By the way, when comparing tunnels electric rail is cheaper than buses. Narrower tunnels and much less difficulty with ventilation and security.
You will also note that admin is proposing that the busway be kept and of course that includes extension too.
I like the idea of building a rail link up the Devenport Peninsuila to Smales Farml, and upgrading the existing busway to Britomart. On the other hand this can be done in future with a metro down Dominion road
If the next constraint to hit is city bus congestion in 10 years time, I think surely there could be a lot done to improve this more cheaply than a rail link. A median fanshawe/customs busway seems a pretty good cheap option, or if you really want to spend some money, a cut and cover tunnel along a least part of the same route. A cut and cover from before Nelson St to Anzac Ave would looks like a good option to me.
It would be nice to have a once and for all solution, but that is rarely the most cost-effective answer when it comes to major transport infrastructure.
This may sound crazy, but also could we one day invent bus-trains, buses that can drive through suburban streets like buses, and then go along train tracks like trains? Save al the need for the massive switch at Akoranga
Takapuna- a PT deprived area of Auckland- give me a break!
The money would be much better spent on the PT poor areas of South and West Auckland. Stuff like a bus station at Westgate a NW busway, RTN to Flat Bush, Airport rail or bus links or the Whau River Crossing (which WCC showed would have a large positive BCR connecting the Rosebank Peninsula Industrial Area to West Auckland and port Chev). If bus links in the CBD are the problem why not just build an underground busway (like in Brisbane).
Topcat, this is raised to directly address the issue of additional harbour crossings. Not instead of anything you listed above but instead of a huge and much more expensive road crossing.
And can I repeat that underground bus stations are diesel chocked, land devouring horrors that are no cheaper than the much slimmer and more appealing rail ones. And through routing buses is the cheaper first option and will serve us for a while yet.
“And can I repeat that underground bus stations are diesel chocked, land devouring horrors that are no cheaper than the much slimmer and more appealing rail ones.”
With regards to diesel-choked, presumably this can be mitigated/engineered out. Doors that only open when the bus stops? With regard to the station cost, whilst it may be no cheaper than an equivalent rail CBD station, the cost saving comes from not having to build the-rest-of-the-corridor all the way back to Takapuna.
Except it doesn’t address the issue of capacity constraints on the Bridge… Again the point of admin’s post is to suggest a cheaper and more efficient way to relieve pressure on the bridge… whenever that may be necessary
I really like this idea – a rail only crossing to Akoranga and other stations across the harbour, being a progressive link towards a north shore line.
In the same vein, a push from Onehunga across to Mangere will provide rail to an area poorly serviced. Opening rail services across both harbours will create nodes from which further rail development can stem.
Why go to the expense of running rail all the way to Takapuna? Terminating at Onewa would be sufficient to provide a terminus with the busway. Anyone wanting to go to Takapuna could connect with a bus form there.
I think this is a good solution for the CBD bus congestion.
Having a station at Onewa also provides a good feeder.
Congestion charging would be a cheaper way to reduce peak hour traffic jams over the bridge.
If the line were built to Takapuna, how would it proceed north without a reversing manouvre?
It goes to Takapuna because that’s a major destination point currently not on the Rapid Transit Network. Plus Akoranga is a great transfer point to the existing busway. The Onewa to Takapuna section shouldn’t cost that much either, as it can use the existing busway right-of-way (with perhaps a bit of widening to fit two tracks).
Ultimately you’d probably just run the line north from Akoranga but operate some of your trains to Takapuna and some to Albany. Change at Akoranga for travel between Takapuna and Albany.
Tunnel under Anzac St wouldn’t be cheap, nor would surface rail through Tenpin Takapuna & surrounding commercial buildings, Rosmini College fields and the Lakehouse Arts centre