At today’s Strategy and Finance committee the council agreed to bring forward some funding for the City Rail Link (CRL). Unfortunately this isn’t funding for the whole project but has been brought forward from the next financial year to keep the project going. The work it will pay for will mainly be used for reports that are needed as part of the Notice of Requirement (NOR) which is the next step in getting the tunnels designated. The rest of the money will go towards an updated business case that will respond to the feedback from the governments review last year. All up they are bringing forward $8m of spending.
Here are the key things the money will be spent on
In the current year, the project team is focusing on two key milestones for which there is insufficient funding. A breakdown of the additional funding required is attached as Appendix A.
1. Progressing the Notice of requirement (NOR). The project is working on the significant preparatory work needed to lodge the NOR. This accounts for $ 6.3 million of the additional funding required this year and is needed for things such as geotechnical surveys, utilities and buildings assessments, contaminated site reports and works, noise and vibration monitoring, and rail operations modelling.
2. Responding to Central Government’s Review of the initial business case (May 2011). This involves undertaking significant and necessary research including:
- establishing achievable growth projections for the CBD upon finalisation and adoption of the Auckland Plan and City Centre master plan,
- demonstration of commitment to resolving current CBD access issues, for example by improving bus operations and addressing capacity issues,
- evidence of rail patronage increases, particularly in the morning peak, residential intensification and CBD regeneration as a result of current investment,
- beginning implementation of large scale residential developments along the rail corridors,
- implementation of additional park and ride sites, and changes to bus feeder services.
The project team and Council are responding to all of these questions, which require significant detailed analysis. The work undertaken will also support the NOR information requirements and the funding plan required within the HOA. This accounts for $1.7 million of the additional funds required for this financial year and is needed for such things as transport planning, assessment of alternatives, legal advice and valuations
And here is a detailed breakdown of what the money will be used for.
There are some quite interesting items in here that should be extremely helpful not just for the CRL but also for other things. Pieces of work like the City Centre Future Access Study could become quite cruical bits of information as my understanding is it is looking at just how much capacity there will be in the CBD for transport. It should hopefully be able to tell us things like just how many cars and buses can move around the streets of the city and once we know what these limits are we should be able to work backwards from there.
I also suspect that due to the extra hoops that the council will have to go through to get government buy in and funding that this project will probably end up being the best researched transport project the country has ever had.
Processing...
You’re right that the City Centre Future Access Study will be critical in helping explore alternatives to the City Rail Link – inevitably proving that none of them will actually work as well as the CRL. But perhaps the process will highlight what can be done in the shorter term to alleviate some of the more immediate problems or make it clear how much bus priority would actually be needed to handle the insane number of buses predicted in most “no CRL” scenarios.
I just hope this process isn’t being rushed. I think we all know, in our heart of hearts, that this government won’t stump up any money for the CRL – no matter how good its business case is. But if the process is rushed and Auckland stuffs things up again we could well lose our most important ally in progressing the project: public opinion.
It’s a good start though 🙂
I just hope whoever does the modelling has more than the two braincells the Ministry of Transport has and realises that bus & car capacity is not unconstrained in the city centre.
I’m pretty sure that the whole point of it so the council/AT can say “we know that the streets can only handle X number of cars and Y number of buses”. After working backwards from there they should know just how many people still need to be transported to the city somehow.
And good to see there is a decent looking communications budget! We can’t do it all!
Yeah $500k communications budget. Surely some could be allocated to this fine blog?
$30K for a website and $75K on 3D visualisation will be good for adverstising the project to the public.
Look to Melbourne for how to build a political majority of rail users. Ten years ago weekend users were those who already used PT. Now the majority are PT users, with many using it to attend events and weekend activities in the city. PT performance by the previous government was seen as a factor in changing several seats. How did this change happen ? Through weekend saver tickets, combined with 20-minute train services on all lines Saturdays and Sundays. Initially this was with 3-car trains, but these became overcrowded and nearly all services are now run with 6-car trains. The next timetable has a 10-minute weekend frequency on 4 lines from 10 am to 7 pm. The total subsidy for weekend services is unchanged, but the costs are spread over more users.
How could this strategy be used in Auckland ?
1. Weekend saver tickets should be on the agenda when new bus contracts are being developed.
2. Once most of the weekend electrification rail closures are over, increase the weekend rail frequencies and offer saver tickets. This may take a couple of years planning to recruit and train sufficient drivers. There is also an “act of faith” because reducing fares initially results in less revenue until patronage increases.