Hot on the heels of National’s transport policy comes the release of Labour’s transport policy for Auckland.
The cornerstone of the policy is to cancel the $1.7 billion “holiday highway” Road of National Significance and replace it with a $320 million dollar package of safety and capacity upgrades to the corridor based on the “Operation Lifesaver” proposal developed by Admin and the Campaign for Better Transport.
The real star of this policy is that the savings from not building the new motorway will be used to fund 50% of the City Rail Link, in line with Mayor Brown’s plan to split the cost of the project between central government and Auckland Council.
Labour claims this proposal for upgrading SH1 to Wellsford and paying for half the City Rail Link will cost less than National’s plan for just the road corridor alone.
This seems to be a thoroughly sensible transport policy for the Auckland region. The city get the rapid transit revolution it so desperately needs yet SH1 north of the city also receives a staged upgrade years before any new motorway could be built, all for a slightly cheaper price.
An excerpt from the press release:
Labour will cancel the “holiday highway‟ to fund Auckland‟s essential City Rail Link.
Aucklanders are overwhelmingly in favour of the rail link proposal.
The Government invested significant resources into restructuringAucklandgovernance so thatAucklandwould speak with one voice. Now it has and Aucklanders are saying loud and clear they want this rail link in order to unclog the roads.
Unlike National, Labour is listening.
We are committing to central government’s half of the bargain.
Labour will partner with the Auckland Council to give Aucklanders the world-class transport system they deserve.
Labour will provide funding of $1.2 billion from the Land Transport Fund for the rail link — half the proposed cost — on the understanding that the Auckland Council is responsible for funding the other half.
Labour will fund the $1.2 billion by cancelling National‟s plan to construct the new so-called “holiday highway‟ between Puhoi and Wellsford.
Labour supports the so-called “Operation Lifesaver‟ improvements to the existing Puhoi to Wellsford road rather than the gold-plated option.
This alternative, which includes a Warkworth bypass, would fix the crash black spots and traffic bottlenecks at a cost of $320 million, delivering most of the benefits more quickly and cheaply than building an entire new highway.
The combined costs of “Operation Lifesaver‟ and our contribution to the Auckland Rail Loop comes to $1.6 billion, less than the $1.7 billion Steven Joyce has already budgeted for the “holiday highway‟.
It also seems Labour have started to think logically about more efficient ways to move freight by rail and sea, and it sounds like they will not be afraid to de-hypothecate National Land Transport funding to make it available across all classes of transport.
Putting the Roads of National Significance on the block is a good idea too, some are a plain loopy, but aspects of these corridors may indeed be worthwhile. Getting a fresh look at what the priorities are and how they should be built might just get a lot more value out of these roads sooner (rather than simply saying they need to be built as full motorways regardless of the cost, ill effects or the time it takes to plan, consent and build the monsters).
The press release continues with other policies for Auckland:
Other elements of Labour’s Transport policy include:
- Tagging funding from the National Land Transport Programme to facilitate an increase in coastal shipping so that at least 30 per cent of inter-regional freight is carried by sea by 2040
- Committing to reduce transport emissions by 40 per cent by 2040.
- To urgently investigate the viability of upgrading the rail link directly into the Auckland container port
- Promoting walking and cycling as credible active transport‟ options;
- Keeping New Zealand’s rail in public hands, and investing in maintaining and modernising KiwiRail as a viable and sustainable transport solution;
- Engaging with the working group on establishing aHamiltontoAucklandcommuter rail service;
- Re-evaluating which roads of national significance make sense. Labour disagrees with four more projects being added to the existing list;
- Investigating and prioritising improvements to the “East-West‟ corridor proposal inAuckland;
- Setting ambitious new road safety targets.
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Well they have certainly come a long way from Cullen saying “buses need roads too”.
Nice, much better than Joyce’s.
Do the Greens have a transport policy?
The real flaw in our voting system (and that of probably most of the world) is that we the general public have to vote for parties on an all or nothing basis so while some policies may be good others are really bad (not that I have a solution to this problem).
That’s the bugger of it Matt, if only we could somehow vote separately on transport policy, fiscal policy, education, health, environment etc. Perhaps some sort of Swiss influenced direct democracy model, or regular referenda on major policy decisions.
Hence the argument to give more power to local government in transport matters. Or join National and try to change their transport policy from within?
The Auckland party?
Great to see this project making it into the election debate, and good on Labour for backing it.
Of course it was no surprise to see Mr Joyce on 6pm news with his usual quote that the holiday highway takes more people each day than the whole Auckland rail system “and it carries freight!”
I posted this on AKTNZ.co.nz, but he’s moderating me now. 🙁
The Herald are reporting it. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10762688
Can I congratulate AKT, http://greaterakl.wpengine.com/, and all the commenters on both (except for tbird) for steering public policy in the right direction?
Well done everyone.
And thanks to the Greens and to Labour for listening.
And a big raspberry for John Key’s hopelessly out of touch Nationals.
For the record, Jon at AKT isn’t moderating me, and will publish anything I say (no matter how daft).
And I still think, he, Admin here, and all the commenters deserve a bit of credit for promoting Auckland’s CBD rail loop and the further revitalisation of Auckland’s rail network. When rail trips have done a Perth and hit 50 or 60 million per annum in 10 years time then I hope the historians give some credit too.
Agreed, holiday highway needs to be cancelled…a bypass past Wellsford and Warkworth would be fine.
Note Joyce blatantly lying now about the Holiday Highway having more passengers than the Auckland rail system. May have been half true a couple of years ago, but especially with the recent figures this is now a obvious lie.
What are the current figures?
At 10.3m trips per year the AK rail network carries about 28k people per day however that includes weekends (which AT indicate is about 25k for the two days) and almost about a months of shutdowns at at Christmas along with probably that amount again of weekend and other public holiday shutdowns. AT have indicated that normal weekday patronage is about 41k trips.
I can’t remember the exact figure quoted for P2W in the past but it was something like 19k vehicles and based on an average occupancy of 1.4 people it is around 27k people per day.
I calculated several months ago that, based on a conservative loss of 35 travel days to the shutdowns and the public holidays where no trains run, the average daily occupancy was over 30k pax/day. We’re well past that now, and patronage is still growing like crazy.
Someone needs to call Joyce on this nonsense, and soon.
So we’re probably looking at 35-40,000 rail trips on a normal weekday?
AT’s 41k average would be consistent with my calculations, and my working was very much back-of-a-napkin stuff. Took me five minutes, and was far from comprehensive in determining how many days in the previous year had been lost to shutdowns.
Yes, the actual vehicle numbers are 17,000 Puhoi to Warkworth, but amazingly only 9,000 Warkworth to Wellsford. So the inference there is that either Warkworth is the destination/start point or that almost 50% of the traffic starts or terminates from points near to Warkworth, eg Omaha, Snells Beach etc. This just shows that by using Puhoi to Wellsford as an entity the figures can be manipulated to prove the governments flawed case. Of course we all know that Warkworth to Wellsford wont be completed until 2032 EVEN IF they find a route through the Dome Valley which NZTA have admitted is proving problematical at present.
Agreed Bob, but its also worth noting that NZTA estimates that approx 1,000 heavy vehicles per day either will or are using SH1 and the new mway. If Labour follows through with its plan to encourage more freight to move via sea and train then that 1,000 heavy vehicles per day will likely reduce – thus reducing even more the need for a state of the art high speed motorway which, at current time of thinking, is only planned for Puhoi to Warkworth. However, cancelling this motorway (which I think is the only right and proper thing to do given the state of the nation) will not please the developers planning large scale housing developments in the Warkworth environs. We are already seeing real estate agents advertising properties that will be near “the new motorway on ramp”!
Watcher, one of the key differences between Labour and National is that the latter develop (thanks, I’ll be here all week) their policies based on what’s best for their corporate donors. In the case of land-use and transport policies, on what’s best for the RTF and the property development sector. Labour, at least on paper, develop policy based on what’s best for workers at the bottom of the heap.
Labour doesn’t develop its policy on what’s best for workers at the bottom of the heap, it also does what is best for its donors of which a large number are unions. Unions don’t automatically mean looking after workers either, I am personally aware of a number of situations where union leaders work against the their workers best interests to further their own needs.
I did say “at least on paper”. Even on paper National’s policies are entirely based on what’s best for any given business sector associated with a particular policy.
So there we go it is a lie.
Hi Matt – sorry, did I lead you to believe that I support National? Well, in the past I did but no more. And its not just because of the Holiday Highway. I watched the opening salvos from both National and Labour on TV the other night. National was all about one man – John Key. Labour was all about a team of passionate people who has people up front and centre of their focus. You could say that labour is a all about a social democracy whereas National appear to be more of a Corporate democracy. I agree – we need to stop this “trickle down” thinking of National – it hasn’t worked and we need to start building on what has made NZ great in the past – its people.
Watcher Wrong Matt, I’m Handlebars Matt. You want Sunset Clouds Matt. Unless you want Matt L. If you think that’s confusing there were 9 Matthews on my Year 9 Aussie rules footy team. 6 of them played in the 6 back positions.
Its a good name isn’t it 🙂
I was just making a general observation about the parties’ titular motivations. National is much more open about where its allegiances lie, but those allegiances are very far removed from being of clear benefit to those members of society who reside at and below the median.
I don’t like most of Labour’s policies (plus they are so similar to National it doesn’t matter), and I vowed once to never vote for Labour, but this may be just enough for me to change my vote.
Party Vote Green 😛
Seriously, though, read their policy briefs and you might find yourself pleasantly surprised by what they actually stand for, as opposed to what National and the media have lead you to believe are their policies.
On transport labour got it right this time. No way that I would vote for them though. Way to many other things I don’t like.
What I do think is that its important for this site not to be all in agreement with labours policy because then it ends up being limited in reach and scope.
many national politicians have driven rail service questions in Auckland and its them that need to speak out against Joyce. They must know that the holiday highway is a very expensive piece of infrastructure.
Auckland and NZ suffers from lack of competition when it comes to the building sector. When a certain motorway was built a few years ago, the company building brought in swiss and Norwegian workers for tunneling. the two most expensive and highest paid workers in the world. if you have that budget something is wrong whats even more disturbing is that after speaking to the Norwegians they said they could do the same job, with Norwegians only for 60% of the cost our beloved building company charges.
Let me restate this we speak about the worlds most expensive employees being flown in from Europe and living in NZ while working.
they had a ball but I was pissed off because I pay the taxes for this and this is not the way it should be.
I would have liked to see Labour’s policy talk in a bit more detail about giving more power to local governments and also more freedom to shift around money within the NLTF. Nothing’s perfect of course.
Compared to National, Labour’s transport policy is entirely sensible, grounded in reality and more beneficial to Auckland. For those 3 reasons alone, it doesn’t stand a chance.
Yes excellent, now Labour has its transport policy sorted out. Although Clark / Cullen generally did a good job in most areas they really failed in terms of transport policy.
I’m still confused about who to give my party vote to, but I know one thing-
I’m changing my name to Matt..