On Twitter today, North Shore Councillor George Wood asked:
Its an interesting question but to me the answer is simple, the CRL. The reason for it comes down to demand. First up lets look at the the harbour bridge, the average number of vehicles crossing the harbour bridge today is less than it was in 2003 and that is showing no signs of changing.
The NZTA also now release monthly data about the bridge which goes back as far as September 2007 which enables us to have a bit closer look at what is happening.
So there are some changes but overall we are not seeing traffic anywhere near the peak of a few years ago. Of course some will argue that it is because the economy hasn’t been great but that doesn’t explain why so many people are now crossing by bus. In fact around 30% of people crossing the bridge at peak times do so via bus and this has seen the total number of people getting across the harbour continue to increase. Further if we think about the future demand for the crossing it also suggests that another crossing isn’t needed any time soon. This is because in 5 years the Waterview tunnels will be open and that will provide more options for people travelling to the shore which should help to take some of the pressure of the bridge.
So what about the CRL? We have seen patronage growth slow down in recent months however this is much more likely to be a temporary blip. As Peter mentioned the other day there continue to be a lot of issues plaguing the rail network and there is still a lot of capacity left to improve services, especially in the off peak. Sorting out these issues and the completion of electrification are likely to have huge impacts on both the perception and use of the rail network and the extra capacity electrification brings is projected to be all used up by 2021.
Things change further when you consider the cost to build each of these pieces of infrastructure, the CRL is expected to cost around $2.4b while another harbour crossing is expected to be over $5b. Without that extra demand it would be really stupid of us to even consider pushing a harbour crossing over the CRL. When it does come time to consider a new harbour crossing we should also consider prioritising a PT only crossing first. That would provide a really fast, congestion free trip across the harbour which would be very attractive and free up the existing bridge for those that choose to sit in traffic.
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I’m sure George will appreciate your efforts to answer his question ;).
I would be incredibly surprised to see another harbour crossing before 2030. The clip on issue is a red herring as it’s solved by banning trucks in those lanes, like has been done before.
Very sensible…. Build the CRL first.
Then consider a harbour crossing, and whether it be a bridge or a rail under the harbour is the question.
The CRL is essential for inter connecting any rail link over to the shore and it also speeds up the western line and frees up the Britomart problem.
Auckland voted for and gave a mandate for rail in electing its present council. so the government should be noting this public opinion.
CRD
Yeah the real question is whether a road harbour crossing is necessary or whether a much cheaper rail crossing would be sufficient.
What is the capacity of the harbour bridge at peak times? Has traffic volume growth slowed because it is at or near peak capacity?
I agree with Matt CRL before second crossing. Ultimately the main limit for rail in and out of the central city is having a dead end station at Britomart – hence the need for the central rail link.
It is easy to think the Northern bus way is as good as it is going to get. However many people on the Shore to not have an easy and simple public transport option. For example there are no direct buses at all from Takapuna to either Auckland University or Auckland Hospital. Staying late at work or socialising after work can double your trip home time as express buses stop before 7pm.
When we have 10,800 people crossing on buses per hour at peak and the bridge is still jammed then we may be able to justify spending $5 billion on a bridge.10,800 is 3 people per second so could be done by 45 people on a bus every 15 seconds. The bridge could do this.
The difficulties are going to be
1) How will the buses approach and get off the bridge and
2) Where the buses can pick up and drop off.
1) North side is Onewa Road (and possibly Stafford Rd, Northern Bus Way, and Esmond Road from Takapuna (fed via Takapuna and Devonport peninsula.
South side is Fanshawe Street and Shelley Beach Road currently. I would add Cook St, Wellesley St and look at possibility of Gillies Ave, Market Road, and Greenlane
2) North -There are numerous areas in the North as this is likely to be largely suburbia as an origin and destination.
South is where people work. Central CBD major component but need to ensure University facilities (campuses on Symonds Street, AUT, Grafton, Gilles Ave and Unitec all possible options), hospitals at Grafton, Mountain road, Ascot (Epsom), Newmarket and even St Lukes is supplied.
Yes some of this could be considered unusual and unlikely (Such as buses going straight form Onewa Road to Newmarket bypassing the CBD, but before committing to a $5 billion spend these options should at least be tried.
I have a further view which is no more road harbour crossing before the modes missing from the existing bridges are built. Walking, cycling, and an RTN route are the next cabs off the rank for the harbour.
These will be cheaper and will further postpone the need to build any hideously expensive road crossing with all of its addition dis-benefits.
It’s quite interesting when you think of it that way, we have an eight lane motorway bridge across the central harbour and a second five lane motorway bridge crossing the harbour 9km upstream.
With thirteen motorway lanes between the North Shore and the rest of Auckland, is spending four or five billion to up that to nineteen lanes really such a great priority? …well the first question is even whether that sort of expenditure is feasible whatsoever, let alone in the context of demand and benefits.
Surely we should look at improving priority for the busway first, together with a walking and cycling crossing of the inner harbour. Next on to a dedicated public transport crossing. If that still isn’t working out then maybe we can go back and add a third motorway to the North Shore. But spending multi billions to build a third motorway while buses come second fiddle to traffic congestion and you can’t even walk across the harbour bridge is just ridiculous.
Harbour crossing won’t happen and if it does it will be a rail tunnel. Why? The public have (foolishly) stated time and again the next harbour crossing must be under not over. Because a rail tunnel will eventually be required some decade for sure due to busway growth, but vehicle crossings not growing provided busway/rail can keep up with growth. A vehicle tunnel would be at least twice as expensive as a rail-only tunnel (diameter and ventilation). And the current harbour bridge is not going to fall down despite what everyone thinks engineers say it has much life yet.
Because a rail tunnel would be cheaper and provide all the same advantages as a vehicle tunnel (2nd crossing), rail it will be.
But we all know how much economics doesn’t drive decision making in govt (roads of national significance, et al).
Matt L, a graph showing (over time) the number of people crossing the bridge per day, overlaid with number by vehicle (dropping), and number by bus (rising) would be a powerful argument to show that the “capacity” of the bridge being full is not anywhere near true and not a reason to require another vehicle crossing.
The problem is we don’t really have any solid data around numbers, e.g. the we have the number of people that use the NEX services each month but they actually make up less than half of the people use the busway. There are a few morning peak numbers that are floating around but we really need more info to make it useful.
This is the best thing we have at the moment:
Because a rail tunnel would be cheaper and provide all the same advantages as a vehicle tunnel (2nd crossing), rail it will be.
You’re hilarious, really.
Please be more constructive with your comments swan, or find yourself losing the privilege.
Ok. I think a bus tunnel would be cheaper (and no tunnel cheaper still). You see, there is no heavy rail network on the shore.
Not that we need a crossing in the forseeable future.
From my point of view, George Wood’s question is about the same as “what do we do first, space exploration or dinasour cloning?”. So a difficult one to answer.
Yes I realise it’s difficult to actually get beyond mindless economic purism, but you must try.
Problem with a bus tunnel is that it’s likely to be really really expensive compared to a rail tunnel (like the CRL alternatives). Sure you don’t need to upgrade the Northern Busway, but there are ways of building rail to the Shore which don’t require replacing the busway – for a very long time.
Interestingly, Curitiba – the post-boy for BRT – is now replacing at least one of its bus lines with underground Metro rail.
“Problem with a bus tunnel is that it’s likely to be really really expensive compared to a rail tunnel (like the CRL alternatives).”
Is that a fact though? My understanding is that the CBD bus tunnel alternative was more expensive, primarily because of the busway network in they assumed would be need out into the isthmus. It is the opposite here – the busway exists, not the rail network.
Vent stacks arent that expensive. Indeed it may be that they could get away with portal emmisions with only bus traffic (i.e. a few hundred vehicles per hour as opposed to a few thousand). – particularly at the north shore end which would be next to a motorway. Fire suppression systems will be no different. So it is the same thing but cheaper
From memory the bus tunnel itself was more expensive than the CRL – let alone the other infrastructure requirements. That was due to greater width requirement (the main one) and vent stacks.
There is no reason for greater width requirements for a bus tunnel, unless you make the assumption you need 2 lanes each way (which the council did). It is a reliability decision, and there is a cost benefit analysis that needs to be done around that. But it is certainly not a requirement.
It is not clear that you need vent stacks for bus tunnels at all – good to include in a feasibility study but by no means set in stone.
Other wise, particularly for a cross harbour tunnel, bus has the massive advantage of being able to deal with steeper gradients, so the tunnel could be shorter.
Bus tunnels are wider as buses are bigger and need more space around them as they are not on guide rails. Also bus capacity is considerably lower so to do the same job as a rail tunnel it would need to be double laned to haul the same numbers. Electric trains are way safer in tunnels too. City streets cannot take many more buses, the number there is already extremely suboptimal, so there would need to be other infrastructure like city bus tunnels and stations as well, so no savings there over rail. But of course there would also be no opportunity to link and leverage off the existing untapped capacity of the current rail ROW.
“City streets cannot take many more buses, the number there is already extremely suboptimal, so there would need to be other infrastructure like city bus tunnels and stations as well, so no savings there over rail.”
Only because we are not pricing the road space properly. Buses are far more valuable users of road space than cars. Although if we were pricing the road space properly we wouldnt need the crossing anyway so it is all moot.
Just because rail has more capacity doesn’t mean we need it. There is no reason to believe we would ever need more capacity than a bus RTN can provide on the north shore.
Yes ventilaltion is very important if you have diesel buses, and would add significant cost to a bus tunnel. If your running electric buses then no worries.
electric and guidance are pretty well established technologies for buses, at it’s most basic o-bahn with trolley buses is a doddle
Steve that’s true but why introduce a new system that can’t interoperate with the existing RTN? Rail to the shore would then connect to the existing network and not just the CBD. A lot of rail hate here.
And Swan your monomaniacal praying at the user pays alter is getting truly nutty now. Pricing things and services ‘correctly’ doesn’t alter physical realities: in theory you could construct a world with perfect purity of payment, where no one paid a cent more than they personally used but a bus will still be a bus and several hundred of them on the city streets will still be horrible no matter how tidily they funding stream is.
This is like economists who seem to believe that the laws of thermodynamics can be overcome by just getting the right price for energy. Batty.
Patrick, I’m not hating, just pointing that solutions exist to some of your points
Hi Steve, sorry that was a general comment, really aimed at the fiscal obsessives who seem only able to count cost and are blind to economic value. And who seem to have endless energy for repeating this same limited world view again and again in every thread without communicating anything much except to remind us that if you ask half a question you’ll only get half an answer..
What is so batty about wanting to use price signals to guide investment? You may be interested to know it is a very widely used strategy.
See comment previous comment.
Actually the impact of the Western Ring Route on traffic volumes over the bridge will be interesting … anyone seen any traffic modelling showing the level of diversion that occurs? I can’t imagine it’s too much, but even a 5% diversion rate is a hell of a lot of vehicles.
I don’t know whether it’ll have that much impact. I struggle to imagine what type of trips that currently uses the harbour bridge will prefer the WRR once Waterview is built (as opposed to now, with SH18 completed). Airport to Albany trip perhaps? But that’d still be faster via the harbour bridge than via SH18 & SH16.
Interestingly I have another version where I stacked the traffic volume from the Upper Harbour Bridge to see how that had changed over time. There has been a bit of growth on that route but it is still less than 30k per day but even so total trips across the harbour at about the same as they were in 2003
I should take a closer look at SH18 volumes. Every time I’ve been on that new motorway (admittedly outside the peak) it’s been completely empty.
No idea what degree of modelling NZTA may have done for the Western Ring Route but I think it is a not unreasonable possibility that its completion will cause all sorts of problems for he CMJ. Because it may just much more efficiently deliver waves of traffic down SH16 as much as it offers the possibility of heading in the.other direction. There are currently constraints on SH16 that help spread the volumes arriving at the CMJ and the addition of Waterview will surely induce drivers from all along the SH20 route to also go this way.
Assuming of course that there aren’t other factors that reduce driving in general; increasing cost and viable alternatives, the CMJ is heading for frequent failure. And the CRL, by greatly improving access from and to the west, south, and the CBD completely free of the roads, is the best hope we have for helping to keep the heart of AK’s auto system functioning when added to the 3 current PT improvements of integrated fares, new bus and train network, and the EMUs.
Personally I think SH18 is an example of a “good” highway, it seems to provide an appropriate level of infrastructure given the demands. The real benefit will come if Hobsonville Road is changed to focus onto local access. Indeed, if AC/AT get Hobsonville Road right then a large part of the credit should go to SH18 for removing through traffic and allowing a more “place-based” environment on Hob Road to emerge. Fingers crossed.
pg44/98 on the SH20 traffic modelling report gives a 7% reduction in traffic through the CMJ when WRR complete. http://www.nzta.govt.nz/projects/completing-wrr/docs/docs-enquiry/application/g25-traffic-modelling-report.pdf
While the CRL should be built first followed by rail to the airport & north shore, the question asks which WILL come first AND get funding. Politically, I think it is currently more likely that a road bridge or tunnel to the shore would be built first. There is still a long way to go before a large enough portion of the public buy into rail links, particularly those on the shore who George Wood is pandering to.
There’s a circular tension in that argument … if George Wood, Brewer, and Quax stopped sniping about issues with funding (which is a red herring anyway – all Brown is doing is prudently progressing the NOR for the City Rail Link so as to protect the corridor from further encroachment, a point noticeably absent from the NZHerald’s terrible reporting on this issue in this week’s paper), and instead presented a unified front on this issue to central government, then I would have thought that the funding would be that much more likely to follow?
P.s. Agree with you on the “pandering” and thanks for the link to the WRR volumes – 7% diversion should mean considerably better flows through the CMJ at peak times, unless of course the cursed induced demand kicks in 😉
Here is the relevant passage from the above doc [Thanks Anthony], looks a little vague and hopeful to me:
From the same document:
“Other factors that may contribute to this reduction include changes in demand patterns due to effects such as assumed increases in rail and bus services, increased fuel price, increase in parking costs in the CBD, and travel demand management initiatives.”
Underlying yet again that what we invest in shapes demand.
And if the vehicle reduction doesn’t happen, can we “unbuild” the Waterview Connection?
Anthony do you think these are the same guys who modeled the SH20/SH1 Manakau junction? You only need to look at the ramp structure of the WRR/SH16 intersection to see where the traffic is expected to flow.
CRL. We don’t need a third crossing.
Not now, maybe never?
That saved a few billion- could we use that for the CRL?
It would be interesting to know the amount of lanes that Sydney has linking to the North Shore (similar issues to a central harbour bridge and bridges to the west upstream) as well as the mode share (%) between cars and the different PT options (rail, bus, ferry).
I appreciate its a much bigger city, with commuter numbers Auckland (and even, NZ) will only ever dream of. But at some stage it had to have had the same issues Auckland has now (a growing population to the north and a harbour in between).
So really, Sydney should be a kind-of model for Auckland, should it not?
KLK – Well Sydney built much of its key rail infrastructure when its population was about what Auckland’s is now in the 1930s so if we are going to emulate Sydney then we should be building the CRL 🙂
Well, yes. That was kind of my point.
They took a multi-modal approach, even with a variety of PT options. As far as I am aware, the only PT dedicated access across the harbour is via the water on a ferry. No dedicated bus lanes, no rail lines.
But I guess Auckland Council sees that. Being able to do something about it, well…
Yes this is the problem; these decisions are made by a government very greedy of its power over us down to a microscopic level. Witness the proposed local government legislation. They want to run this country like a Soviet republic, 5 year plans and all. Oh the irony.
But yes, compare the Sydney Harbour Bridge to our own; what’s missing on ours?
Beautiful towers at each end? Rail? Cycle way? Ped footway?
Yes yes yes yes.