Comparing the City Rail Link with Puhoi-Wellsford

Interest in comparing the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” with the City Rail Link has, unsurprisingly, risen in the past few weeks with Labour and now the Greens both promising to scrap the Puhoi-Wellsford road to help pay for the rail project. The debate is obviously causing a bit of consternation with the government, as David Farrar’s Kiwiblog has weighed into the debate with an interestingly well researched post on comparing the two projects:

Labour and the Greens refer to the the proposed Puhoi to Wellsford SH1 upgrade as the Holiday Highway. They would have people think it is a little used road, that only gets a bit crowded on Friday nights. In fact it is far more than that.

The road between Puhoi and Wellsford is part of SH1. As a two lane road, motorists will know that traffic flows at the speed of the slowest vehicle on it. We must be one of the only countries in the world that doesn’t have at least two lanes each way on our major highway.

That road actually has more people use it every day, than use the entire train network in Auckland. Around 28,000 people a day use that highway, and 27,000 use Auckland trains (UPDATE: In recent months this has increased to 33,000). Is Labour really claiming 28,000 people a day are off on holiday?

I don’t think anyone quite knows the comparison of how many people use the Puhoi-Wellsford section of State Highway 1 with the Auckland rail network. Are we measuring the number of people travelling along any part of the network during an average weekday, an average day including weekends, the busiest day of the year? Are we comparing the busiest part of the rail network with the busiest part of the state highway? It’s hard to tell. But anyway, I think the debate over “which has more people” is somewhat irrelevant to the question of which is a better project. Most busy arterial roads in Auckland have many more vehicles travelling along them each day than the Puhoi-Wellsford road, and we’re not exactly proposing to spend $1.7 billion on each of those roads.

The real question of which project we should proceed with comes down to three key issues in my opinion:

• Which one provides a greater benefit?
• Can the benefits of either project be realised through a cheaper alternative?
• How does the project align with land-use/economic development strategies?

Debate over the “amount of benefit” each project will provide is, somewhat unfortunately, not the objective process that we might wish it was. Different assumptions can lead to vastly differently results – as I highlighted recently in this post. Change a discount ratio so it favours long-term projects more, and all of a sudden your cost-benefit ratio changes enormously – as best illustrated by comparing the City Rail Link’s “benefit stream” under the UK and NZ systems: Looking at the Puhoi-Wellsford project, we also see debate over the cost-benefit ratio, depending on which costing is used and how many years the project’s benefits are measuring over. The table below, from an independent report into the BCR’s of the various RoNS projects, gives Puhoi-Wellsford a pretty low 0.4:

One argument for the Puhoi-Wellsford road that’s often put forward relates to benefits the project will bring to Northland. At a “quick glance” level I can sort of see where the thinking is coming from – reinforcing the link between Auckland and the north should provide some benefits to the economy of what is a poor part of NZ. The Kiwiblog post picks up on this matter:

Now I am not sure about you, but I don’t think many people go to Wellsford for their holidays. Those driving north to holiday have generally left SH1 well before Wellsford. So why is the Govt looking to make it two lanes each way, instead of single lane? Three reasons.

• Better connectivity between the main producing activities in Northland, particularly dairying, forestry and mining, and the major markets for these activities in areas lying to the south of the region and overseas accessed by the ports at Auckland and Tauranga.
• Reducing the costs of commodities transported to Northland from the south for consumption or for input to the manufacturing industries in the area, so making Northland a more attractive place to live and to develop employment activities.
• Making tourist destinations in Northland more accessible to the large market and population in the Auckland region.

This is all about economic growth for Northland. Northland is one of the poorest areas of New Zealand, despite having significant resources. One of the reasons for that is the woeful transport links.

However, if you look into the details it just becomes a bit hard to believe that slicing 10 minutes off the trip along a section of road that doesn’t even touch Northland will revolutionise their economy. But I might just be biased in that view, so I took a read through the 2008 Business Case prepared for the project to see what it said about “Regional Economic Impact”: So while the project will obviously have some benefit, NZTA’s own assessment suggested that these regional economic issues were unlikely to make a significant contribution to the viability for constructing the project. Furthermore, NZTA’s assessment noted that improving rail connections to Marsden Point port would actually reduce traffic pressure on the road, potentially leading to a decline in traffic interactions with Auckland.

On the second matter, whether the benefits of either project can be achieved through a cheaper project, this is a fundamental difference between the project in my opinion. Well, actually not just my opinion – also the opinion of Martin Gummer: former head of transport funding agency, Transfund:

This is one big difference between the projects. The CBD rail loop is an all or nothing project. A loop that stops halfway is not a loop but a dead-end – or loopy.

The holiday highway, however, has a lower cost alternative – improvements to the existing road, that could defer replacement for a further 20-30 years. Corners could be smoothed, alignments improved, maybe a short bypass built around Warkworth, and three- or four-lane sections with a central wire barrier built in the Dome Valley.

This is essentially the point of Operation Lifesaver: try to solve 90% of the problems that exist along the road between Puhoi and Wellsford for 10% (of 20%) of the cost. I don’t exactly know which projects would help achieve this, how much a Warkworth bypass would cost, exactly which sections of road are most dangerous and require immediate upgrades – but I’m sure with a few hundred million to play with along this section of road we could achieve a pretty large chunk of the full highway’s benefits. We could even build the Warkworth bypass in such a way as it could be incorporated into a full highway at some point in the future, if/when it’s needed.

As Mr Gummer points out, it’s more difficult to do the City Rail Link in stages and more difficult to achieve its benefits by anything other than the full blown project. Sure, we can add more bus lanes in the city centre, we can run more trains direct from west-south, but with rail patronage constantly growing at around 20% a year, plus with no room to build more roads in the city centre (or anywhere much in Auckland) those solutions are only going to last so long.

On the final matter, alignment with land-use plans and economic strategies, I think it’s fair to say that the City Rail Link sits at the very core of pretty much every plan and strategy Auckland Council has come up with over the past year. In fact the City Centre Master Plan is nigh on impossible to implement without the rail project. Puhoi-Wellsford is being somewhat tacked onto the Auckland Spatial Plan, but certainly doesn’t seem to be as central to any economic strategy or land-use plan as the CRL. One might also think that improving access to the city’s core may have a bigger impact on economic growth than making it a few minutes faster to get out of the city.

Overall I find myself pretty convinced that the City Rail Link is a better project for the government to spend money on.

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