While the council and government battle over when the CRL, a project that will create transformational change in the city, the NZTA is pushing on with building a motorway on the edge of town. The NZTA has just announced that an alliance of companies are about to spend $17.5 million on getting the preparation done so that the agency can start the process to obtain consent later this year. Here is the press release:
The NZ Transport Agency has taken the next step towards construction of the Pūhoi to Warkworth section of the Ara Tūhono – Pūhoi to Wellsford Road of National Significance by naming a special alliance that will prepare the NZTA’s case for the consents its needs for the new highway.
The Further North Alliance, which includes both engineering consultants and lawyers, will support the NZTA’s application to the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) for the Notice of Requirement to obtain the necessary land.
The NZTA plans to lodge its Notice of Requirement with the EPA in the third quarter of this calendar year, and is seeking to be ready to start construction on the Pūhoi to Warkworth section as early as the end of 2014, subject to property purchase and funding.
The NZTA’s Regional Director for Auckland and Northland, Stephen Town, says alliances to construct projects are common but this is the Transport Agency’s first planning alliance and the $17.5m contract is a sensible option.
“The alliance reflects the ambitious timetable we have set for this project, and It makes good sense to have our specialists working together in a team rather than as individual companies. The combined experience and expertise of the Further North Alliance will help us meet our timetable for a very complex project and at the best possible price.”
The planning alliance comprises Sinclair Knight Merz (SKM) and GHD, who are both engineering consultants the legal firm Chapman Tripp, and the NZTA.
Further geotechnical investigations are already underway between Pūhoi and Warkworth and the Alliance thanks property owners for their co-operation and patience with the on-site teams. A range of environmental specialists are also walking the entire alignment for initial surveying with sampling scheduled to take place in coming weeks.
There is this little note for editors
The four-lane, 38-kilometre Ara Tūhono – Pūhoi to Wellsford RoNS is crucial to supporting growth in Northland and improving transport links between economic centres in the Northland, Auckland and Waikato/Bay of Plenty regions.
Ara Tūhono – Pūhoi to Wellsford is part of the NZTA’s roads of national significance programme (RoNS for short), which represents one of New Zealand’s biggest ever infrastructure investments. Once completed, the seven RoNS routes will reduce congestion in and around our five largest metropolitan areas, and will move people and freight between and within these centres more safely and efficiently.
This route will only really help congestion problems that exist at holiday times, when everyone tries to leave the city at the same time. The rest of the year it will allow vehicles to get from Warkworth, or further north to the congestion on the Northern Motorway a little bit easier so far from easing congestion this will likely add to it. And here is the statement from the minister, Gerry Brownlee.
Transport Minister Gerry Brownlee is welcoming the creation of a new planning alliance which marks another step forward in the process to construct the 18km Puhoi to Warkworth section of the 38km Ara Tuhono – Puhoi to Wellsford Road of National Significance.
“The value, innovation and flexibility of the alliance approach, bringing together companies with different engineering and other skills working together as one team, has already been demonstrated in the construction of large projects which this Government has prioritised and progressed,” Mr Brownlee says.
“Auckland’s Victoria Park Tunnel is a great example – where the innovation of the alliance approach combined to construct a much improved highway and preserve the city’s heritage – a project that came in early and under budget.
“The Government welcomes the decision to extend the alliance concept for the first time to the planning process of a project to improve transport connections between Northland and Auckland, and the rest of New Zealand.”
The planning alliance, to be known as the Further North Alliance, comprises engineering firms Sinclair Knight Merz and GHD, legal firm Chapman Tripp, and the NZ Transport Agency.
The new highway between Puhoi and Warkworth is the first stage of a four-lane motorway project that will eventually extend to Wellsford, replacing the existing State Highway 1 and expected to cost around $1 billion to construct.
“This project was identified by the Government as one of seven Roads of National Significance, to help stimulate economic development in Northland, and provide a safer and more reliable transport connection between Northland and Auckland and into Waikato and the Bay of Plenty,” Mr Brownlee says.
“Northland is blessed with great agricultural, mineral, tourism and other resources but has been starved of proper infrastructure investment for too long, something this Government is addressing.
“Northland’s economy currently accounts for just 2.5 per cent of GDP, even though the region has 3.8 per cent of New Zealand’s population.
“Investment in new highway infrastructure through the Roads of National Significance programme will help Northland’s economy to grow, rather than simply responding to growth.
“Investment and innovation go hand in hand to ensure projects of this scale and importance are delivered successfully,” Mr Brownlee says.
One thing that I always find really odd is just who this project is meant to benefit. As Brownlee, and his colleagues like to tell us, it is about unlocking Northland. Yet the road doesn’t even go into Northland, it stops well short of the border. Yet oddly, because the road itself sits within the Auckland region, it gets added on to all of our plans, whether we want it or not. If we really wanted to spend money on improving transport in Northland then spending the $1 billion that is planned for just this section alone on upgrading and even sealing some roads actually within Northland would likely have a far more positive impact. This was even acknowledged in some OIA documents I received last year.
We also learned last year that to get the time savings promised on the route, vehicles would need to be travelling at speeds of up to 250kph. What is particularly interesting is there is still no mention about any intention to build the section from Warkworth to Wellsford. We have learnt in the past that the terrain though there is particularly challenging plus has extremely low usage by vehicles currently. I wonder when they will finally tell us they are dropping that section?
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Also of interest is that Northland isn’t growing very much at all. Stats NZ projections show Northland’s population growing by 0.5% a year over the next 20 years, significantly slower than Auckland, the Waikato and BOP. And below the NZ average of 0.9% a year.
http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/population/estimates_and_projections/SubnationalPopulationProjections_HOTP0631UpdateOct12/Tables.aspx
It’s pretty tricky to justify this project as being for Northland’s benefit. Rural northern Auckland, maybe, but not Northland.
This project will not help Northland, well except for some and only during the construction phase. The most likely outcomes from this project is an emptying out of local employment in Rodney as local small and medium businesses are opened up to competition with the Big Smoke, stop offs will be reduced as travellers are ‘captured’ by the separated motorway, local communities bypassed. Meh. Its only really about land speculation on the Rodney coast and the fillip to the GDP figures while construction is underway.
Is that what happened to the Northshore when they built the harbour bridge? I think not. I think the project has some very clear benefits to northland, it’s more a question of if it’s worth the cost at this stage.
The harbour bridge provided a land based connection that didn’t exist before. This is where the primary benefit from the investment was. There is already a connection from Auckland to northland. There will be minimal additional benefit. The bc has been massaged to justify the unjustifiable it does not stack up
Before the harbour bridge they already had a land based connection to the shore the issue was that it was long and slow, much like the current road heading north.
Except this road will pretty much follow the existing SH1. Quite different to the harbour bridge example.
The difference really is how great the time savings are. This road will probably only save about 10 minutes in normal traffic, and up to 30 minutes on the worst few days of the year. Contrasted to the HB which would have saved closer to 3/4 and hour on the trip to Takapuna.
However the real difference is to do with percentage changes. From Whangarei (i.e. Northland) to Auckland this road will give less than a 10% travel time saving. However the HB would have given around a 70% time saving from Takapuna to the CBD.
Anna is right. Pu-ford is not the Harbour Bridge of our times. Here: http://greaterakl.wpengine.com/2012/09/03/can-these-rons-make-a-right/
I wasn’t suggesting that this one project would bring about the same rapid change that the harbour bridge did, I was more contending your claim that such a project will bring about mass unemployment.
When the harbour bridge was built for about $5 billion in today’s money it did not result in all the shops on the Northshore closing and moving south as you suggest but rather there was a massive boom of growth. So the reverse of what you claim.
@snow flake If the North Shore had been a CBD stye area at the time I’m sure the AHB could have had some negative impact on jobs up there. In terms of this project, I don’t think it alone will make any noticeable difference to either Auckland or Northland’s economy. Continual motorway extension, however, will eventually effect both – great work force for Auckland and quicker/cheaper freight movement out of Northland.
You just need to look at Whangaparoa really to see how places can grow when the quaility of transport provided to them improves.
If the motorway still stopped at Takapuna I doubt it would be anything like what it is today.
@snow flake re: Whangaparoa
Agreed, but that’s only because the motorway puts Whangaparoa / Silverdale (what it leverage’s off) well less than an hour from the CBD. Whangerei could only be anywhere near that close if HSR was built, which is many years off.
Snowflake, I assume you are being figurative with your figure of about $5 billion? The cost of £7,515,800 in 1959 to build the four lane bridge equates to approximately $320 million today.
Nick, I think we all know that there is no way we could possibly but an 8 lane steel arch/truss bridge and do all that reclamation at either end for $300 million.
I was clearly referring to how much it would cost to build today, as in pretty much what I said.
Hamish, thats sort of my point, once you have a good connection north people could choose to live in Orewa and work up north rather than having to travel south and tax the already over loaded road network.
Keep in mind I’m not saying northland will turn into the next Qatar with this one little bit if road, just that it will bring benefits rather than the mass unemployment suggested.
I agree with you there, to build such a bridge today would cost several billion dollars. But naturally that’s not the same as what it did actually cost to build in today’s dollars. I do think it is an important distinction to make, if only to point out that it costs a lot more (in real terms) to build things these days than it did decades ago.
At some point we have to consider not funding projects because they are simply too expensive, or rather reconsider our decision making processes for evaluating value, which haven’t changed much since the days when projects costs a tenth of what they do now in real terms. That goes for all major construction projects, I wince a little when I hear people saying we should just build the CRL already because it’s been planned since the 1930s, or the same about the eastern motorway from the 50s, or whatever. Economically things are very different from when those projects were proposed and it’s certainly not so straightforward as “just get on with it”. If the CRL cost $200 million we’d be digging it right now and the benefit to cost ratio would be huge, but it costs more like two billion so there are some very hard questions to ask.
Likewise with these RoNS, they seem to be based on half century old decision processes basically if you want economic development, build a new highway to massively improve access capacity… Thats not such a bad strategy when such highways were cheap, except these days that new highway costs ten times what it might have and we can’t afford that approach.
It’s pretty fair that the CRL has received so much scrutiny, it’s a very expensive project. I just wish all these other very expensive projects had the same.
Inflation adjusted transport projects always seem way out of scale with what we build today. One thing I would be interested to find out is how much it would actually cost to build the current motorway system we have if we were doing it today vs the rail network.
The city would be a very different place if it hadn’t been built back then, but for simple arguments sake real would win out easily as it’s already there.
If rail wasn’t there either then we would probably be like Adelaide with massive arterial roads and even more buses.
Oh I realise that and the point wasn’t about arguing the merits of them vs rail but more just interested to know just how much we have invested (and for rail I was referring to the entire rail network, not just specific projects). The point was it is just very hard to see just what we have invested.
I wasn’t arguing the merits either.
If we had neither of the two today I’d say the motorway would cost some $20 billion and the rail system some $10 billion.
The issue with such a question would be what would be in the land that these things currently sit in. Would it be empty grass fields or a bunch if houses.
Once they drop Warkworth to Wellsford, we can get to the heart of the matter.
Goodbye ‘Holiday Highway’ and ‘Puford’, hello Porkworth.
That low growth is only because they measure the official economy, if you include the black market and drug related economy in those numbers, I suspect the region may turn into NZ’s top performer.
Now, if they legalised that market, then you’d have many major agricultural businesses in Northland overnight, commodity dairy and timber products be damned.
And all that (inevitable) tax would pay for the RoNS and the rest several times over.
Then the so-called Holiday Highway, could eventually become the main way to speed fresh Dope supplies to the ever growing Auckland market,
Nice trolling, but dope can be transported much more sustainably by rail – so I vote that we dicth the Holiday Highway, and instead upgrade the North Auckland Line, so all that good weed can be transported right into the heart of K’Road via the new CRL station.
Motorway gets unlimited funding without any real analysis of its purpose, any PT project gets starved of funds and spends years going through re-analysis after re-analysis. Welcome to New Zealand better known as 1950s USA.
As you guys well know, state highways have a rather solid and self sustaining funding steam. PT projects however use a self depleting funding stream, on so although PT projects have clear benefits they have no real way to pay themselves in the current funding structure. If you could change that then the playing field would become much more level.
“state highways have a rather solid and self sustaining funding steam” Where did you find that Tui billboard?
It’s been a bit flakey rather than solid lately with the changes in vkt and fuel tax revenues. Also its not quite fair to say self sustaining when we are talking about the RoNS, but maybe the pre-RoNS level of spending.
Agreed, it would be a rather tall order to keep spending at the current rate but they already have the mechanisms to do so if they wanted to.
PT projects aren’t in the same boat however. You can hardly keep boosting the rates or ticket prices to cover increasing costs.
“PT projects aren’t in the same boat however. You can hardly keep boosting the rates or ticket prices to cover increasing costs.”
PT projects are also paid for in large part by NZTA subsidies and funding, just like state highways (or even local roads, in fact). NZTA has all the ability to massively increase PT investment. Or they would have, if we didn’t have a Ministry of Transport which hated the idea.
That money that NZTA has however came directly from taxing road users. Hence why I said at the start that PT funding is self depleting.
Only self-sustaining if you don’t count the pollution costs.
Nope, even if you count all the money paid out by NZTA for pollution costs its still self sustaining. If they were to put apollution tax onto fuel that would be self sustaining as well.
Yes as you point out all us city dwellers are paying for rural users to get a 10 minute faster trip from Warkworth to Puhoi- big time! Meanwhile my local roads crumble because council does not want to raise rates.
Perhaps I should purchase a holiday house. Only then would I get any value for my petrol taxes that I am forced to pay.
What city are you dwelling in to have crumbling roads? Is this somewhere overseas?
My old mans street on the Shore is crumbling. They did a shitty hot mix slurry job last year that is falling apart, but consider it adequate so it’s not getting redone despite chunks coming away.
You need to drive down Wolverton Rd or Great North Rd in Avondale in the morning. They are major arterial rds still in the same condition as a residential street. Meanwhile we are building double lane separated grade highways from nowhere to nowhere with everybody’s petrol excise money. We also pay our petrol excise to support a roads bureaucracy in Wellington who control the motorways in AKL but don’t even consider the local road network (which is funded out of rates). Don’t even get me started on the insanity of roads funding in this country.
About 50% of local road funding is dispersed to councils by NZTA from petrol tax and RUC, the other half comes from rates alone.
Oh and while we’re on the topic lets not forget this: http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/6169204/Auckland-ratepayers-pick-up-multi-million-dollar-shortfall
I went down great north road just a few weeks ago. It seemed fine to me and showed obvious signs of having large amounts of money spent on it in the past.
The massive investment in state highway improvement te has come at the expense of publi. Transport caped, operations and maintenance. Low priority areas. (As in not Auckland, Hamilton and chch are not getting the same level of attention. NZTA have reduced Maintenance and ops budgets despite mouthi g off about the need to optimise . It is only a matter of time before serious problems begin to emerge on these lesser priority roads
What street is that Nick R?
From my own limited knowledge of the reading network a lot of focus has been made to the standard of the arterial roads in Auckland, particularly the western areas. The reality is that there is not enough money to maintain local roads to he same level as state highways without increasing tax and rates etc.
This blog is becoming more politics and less reality.
Pretty sure Brownlee was asked about Warkworth to Wellsford in parliament last year and he said it was still happening.
As another commenter once pointed out, in 1978 the motorway stopped at Tristram Ave, in 1984 it got to Sunset Rd. The steady extension north of the motorway hasn’t stopped Northland’s economy from shrinking. Where’s the proof that this additional extension will reverse a rot that three-and-a-half decades of road building hasn’t?
Well, you just gotta try it – the projects keep getting more expensive, so it HAS to work some day.
Another bunch of consultants clipping the ticket. I have been intimately involved with this project from the wrong end as the propsed motorway goes straight through my house. The key phrase here is “subject to property purchase and funding”.
Everyone knows that they are trying to get the project through the EPA and get the consents issued before the election in 2014, so that the Labour Party would find it difficult to can the project when (if?) they come to power.
Just about everything is wrong with this project. It certainly does not address the “connectivity with Northland” as it goes no-where near it. The continuation of the route beyond Warkworth is in doubt because NZTA have admitted that they are struggling to find a route through the Dome Valley. My feeling is that it will never be extended to Wellsford. They are not addressing the problem of the dangerous sections of the current SH1 at Dome Valley and the Brenderwyns. It does nothing to bring extra employment to towns such as Warkworth and Wellsford, in fact it will probably have the exact opposite effect as workers and shoppers will travel to N Shore and Auckland for supplies and employment. It drains the roading budget for Northland (the roads, mainly due to huge numbers of logging trucks travelling within the region are in a shocking state of disrepair).
The ironic thing is that NZTA just do not have any funds for property purchase to secure the route (I have been in painful and protracted negotations with them and they continually plead poverty) but they can afford to spend $17.5m on another alliance.
So you’re saying that because this project is in reality “subject to property purchase and funding” that it may in fact not go ahead even with a change of govt in 2014? The only money that would be spent thus would be the $17.4 mil on ‘preliminaries’ ie; consultants fees?
“but they can afford to spend $17.5m on another alliance”
In the sum of the NZTA’s budgeting, 17.5 million is chickenshit. Just ONE of the many interchanges they are currently re-building around the country costs anything from 50-200 million each (Papakura, Lincoln Road, Te Atatu, Pt Chev, St Lukes come to mind in Auckland alone as CONFIRMED or already STARTED projects, with others like Greville Road and Constellation Drive and upgrades to SH20-SH1 and Takanini also on the wishlists).
So I am not too worried about 17.5 million on some further work. It is big money, but not in the big scheme of what they are doing to our country. The real big costs will be land purchase (thankfully, those costs can be partly reversed by selling it off again once they can the project) and the real big, big one: construction. We won’t get to the latter for many many years yet, and Labour can can this project any time before the diggers start – if they manage to win. Nobody will make a fuss about it except some construction companies who should know better (its not like Labour will divert the transport money thus saved to buying glass pearls – they will pay for some other transport infrastructure instead).
But all that may still be too late for you and your house, Bob Scott – unless you stay staunch and not just give in to be rid of the frustration and uncertainty and agree to sell. Even if you don’t sell, in a few years you may be forced to sell.
Another bunch of consultants clipping the ticket…… Thats quite an emotive and derogatory comment, who do you expect to actually do the design and investigation work?
The Labour Party pushed the motorway through Manukau, Mt Roskill, Greenhithe & Upper Harbour. The Labour Party is responsible for reconfiguring the Central Motorway Junction and Duplicating the Onehunga Motorway bridge. The Labour party extended the northern motorway to Puhoi and was responsible for reintroducing tolling. History says the Labour party will not “can” extending the motorway north of Puhoi.
Labour Party policy, however, says that they will (search for “Wellsford”).
And I think that Orewa – Puhoi was a far less controversial project. It cut a huge amount of travel time off , by making the route much more direct and made Orewa a much nicer place. Also note that neither Phil Twyford nor Iain Lees-Galloway were MPs at the time.
I believe the travel time savings for both projects are similar actually, around ten minutes but heavily escalating in traffic/holiday periods.
The difference is that P2W costs about 5 times a much, and as you say does nothing to take cars out of urban areas (compared to a Warkworth bypass by itself).
My extimate as someone who uses this route to surf is that it saved 10 minutes on rroad speed, and a further 10-15 on congestion.
Also, what is past is past. National is spending our money on motorways NOW and show no intention to slow down beyond the impacts of the fact that they are running out of money.
surely Anthony you meant to say that Transit NZ/NZTA “pushed the motorway through Manukau, Mt Roskill, Greenhithe & Upper Harbour” while there was a Labour government? Political parties seek office rather than building motorways.
Pretty much everyone agreed that the WRR project needed to be done. That is vastly different to the Puford road.
Surely the Northland economy would be improved far more cheaply and more usefully by connecting Marsden Point to the rail network with a rail spur? Such a link might also assist travel times by taking trucks off SH1, also improving safety on the road.
Link to a very interesting report. Hint: Far more beneficial than the proposed motorway.
http://www.bettertransport.org.nz/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=791&start=80#p132165
Do we really think this will do much for Northland, I mean Northland only starts 10km north of Wellsford, let alone Warkworth, and really doesn’t get up to much until you’re a further 20km past that.
I would expect to see land use and economic changes in the northern parts of Auckland, particularly the Warkworth, Matakana Omaha area. That would get subdivided and developed and the like. But actually Northland? Not so sure. I think it’s more a case of Auckland’s economic sphere extending further north. Whether that comes at the expense of future growth in the actual northland economy I don’t know.
I think the biggest mistruth of the whole project is selling it as being about the Northland economy, it isn’t, its about the Auckland economy.
Absolutely, and that’s kind of the point I was trying to make with my initial comment. And I don’t agree with Patrick’s implication that the project’s benefits will be negative. Although I’m sure they are outweighed by the costs. But it would boost growth in Warkworth and related areas, areas which the Auckland Plan is expecting to grow significantly anyway. While there will be (many) more people commuting from there to Aucks, there will also be more local employment. But yeah, it’s about northern Auckland not Northland.
John certainly the vast claims about the RoNS in general and this one in particular are preposterous in terms of the cost and completely unexamined. And i do agree that there will be changes in economic activity because of this road but just that they are not by any means garunteed to be positive for either Rodney or Northland. Why? Because a faster connection on the periphery of a major centre tends to encourage services based in that centre to reach further into the countryside rather than stimulate business for rural based ones. In other words what agglomeration effects may accrue are likely to be to Auckland’s benefit, not Northland’s or even Rodney’s.
Northland is not the winner here. Except, as I say, for those who get work or contracts during construction, or is holding subdividable coastal property east of Warkworth. And I am writing this from Omaha; pretty much the whole reason for the road and a good example of what I’m talking about. More Auckland based tradies will be working here more easily and competitively after this road is in…. The justifications for the RoNS are not fact based at all.
Gotta remember that somehow this will improve education in Northland as well 🙂
Anthony mentioned motorways the Labour party built/extended. These were all in bulit up areas. Bar the 3,500 people in Warkworth and 1,800 in Wellsford the proposed Puhoi -Wellsford highway is basically a motorway thru a lowly populated area going to a lowly populated rural area.
(Suggest you have a look at a map with the terrain showing.Warkworth to Wellsford is a rugged hilly area with very few people).
Oliver 10% reduction due the proposed highway could be seen as optimisitc. In my 1.3 Litre 1994 Toyota Corolla I take 30-35 minutes to get from Wellsford to the Johnson Tunnels in a 150 minute trip from Whangarei to Auckland CBD.
“in a 150 minute trip from Whangarei to Auckland CBD”
It’s about 125km in a straight line. The fact that you average about 50km/hr for an intercity trip pretty much seals the deal. You can’t run a modern economy at Model T speeds.
Is there any other million person city in the developed world where motorways terminate before the outskirts of the city, and then traffic potters along at speeds of 50km/hr? I can’t think of any examples. Everyone loves Vancouver, and that city is connected to the rest of Canada via a motorway thousands of kilometers long. You see stacked motorway interchanges in the Rockies at Banff. They’d laugh at you if you suggested the Trans-Canada should narrow to a 1-lane-each-way road on the outskirts of Vancouver. With a passing lane every few kilometers so that people can go mad, and forcing vehicles down the high street of every small town and settlement between Vancouver and the Atlantic Ocean.
Yes we surely need straighter, flatter inter-city roads here in NZ, especially in the North Island. Mosts especially crazy perhaps is the lack of a continuous dual lane motorway between Auckland and Hamilton. surely that’s nigher priority than PW?
Comparisons with other countries are often very instructive. What I would say thinking about Canada out of Vancouver or for example places in Europe that are roughly speaking geographically similar to Auckland – Whangarei i.e. hilly coastal routes out of main centres towards is that while they generally have flatter, straighter, wider roads (with plenty of tunnels and viaducts if necessary) they all have better railways too (also with plenty of tunnels and viaducts) that usually run alongside ..and those typically take a decent proportion of freight and/or passenger traffic off the roads. Around much of the North Island here this just isn’t the case.. on the contrary we have been closing rail routes e.g. Rotorua, Gisborne.
So the problem as ever is one of opportunity cost of (transport) capital. Crazily, the playing field is about as level as SH1 up the Brynderwyns.
The trip does not take 150 minutes, I have done Albany to Whangarei in under 90 minutes several times.
We could also take that sum for PUFORD and use it to be rid of some hills and bends to Whangarei but keep it at 2 lanes. That would help travel times.
Just bypassing Warkworth and Wellsford and Kaiwaka would make quite a significant difference to travel times to Whangarei.
There were plenty of other motorway works that occurreed or were initiated while Labour was in government, sections of SH1 between Auckland & Hamilton for instance. Saying that the government has no influence or control over the NZTA is wrong. Winston was elected on the Tauranga bridge motorway, it got built and there are no tolls. Recall the many years of uncertainty over SH20 Avondale/Waterview passing through Helen Clarks electorate. And the political speeches and propaganda around any proposed road, sod turning, construction & opening.
Labour party policy changes with the weather & which of its factions are steering the ship at the time. GST, retirement age, foreign ownership of land, foreshore & seabed, capital gains tax etc.
Compare this with the certainty that can be expected from the Greens & Julie Anne Genter pushing back on the construction of dumb roads. While they couldn’t be trusted not to do a deal, because of the cost & poor BCR even ACT & the Conservatives are more likely than Labour to resist construction.
Perhaps a better way to look at it would be the proportion of GDP spent on each piece of infrastructure. One assumes that things like the main trunk rail lines and the great south road would have consumed a massive proportion of the GDP in the early decades of the colony.
Fuel and Road User Excise only contribute 40-60% of the revenue necessary to build and maintain ALL ROADs. The ramainder comes from Rate Payers. And infact a dissproportianate amount of the funding is channelled into state highways rather than local roads. So yes taxes from road users pay most the State highways, but these taxed road users actually spend more time on local roads that are subsided by rate payers.
Doesn’t seem very self sustaining to me. but maybe its my socialist tinted glasses getting in the way.
What part of it isn’t self sustaining? The more people that drive or use roads by some other means the more money roads get, right now the way PT funding works the more people that use it the less money it gets.
So people are driving less yet we are getting $14B in new highways? How is that going to be paid for?
Through those various fuel tax increases that have been going on for the last decade.
There is a vicious circle of diminishing returns going on here. Higher taxes and rego mean higher fuel prices and hence less fuel consumed. Less fuel consumption means less money for highways. On top of that people are moving to more fuel efficient cars so on and so on.
50% of roads are subsidized so they are Definatley not sustainable.
Until the mid 1920’s roads were totally paid for by local road boards – ratepayers. The government then began introducing the beginnings of the RUC’s to increase the rate of roading, and thus began the shift to socializing the cost of roads.
I think your confusing subsidised with paid for.
Unless somehow you have managed to get a property with road access such as a small island your rates will being paying for the very services provided to you such as a functioning road network.
But havent you just expounded one of the great benefits of PT? The more people use it the less money it costs per person to run as a full electric train and a half full electric train cost the same in operating costs. I guess there is more wear and tear on seats and ticketing equipment but that is relatively minor.
Roads are the opposite. The more people use them the more money we need to spend.
So you are arguing in support of PT? I assume not but that is how I would interpret your comment.
Goosoid, you know was well as I do that PT does not work that way, if it did all we would ever need is one train or bus and everyone would just wait their turn.
And yes I sort of are arguing for PT, right now it has no means to fund itself other than rates and ticket fares which makes it near impossible to build things like the CRL withouthhandouts.
Sorry, no I dont know that. I dont understand your point re needing only one train/bus. That is about frequency, not the capacity of the PT vehicle.
It is well accepted that one of the great benefits of PT (especially with its own ROW) is that it is so easily scaleable. Again, a full train/bus adds no more strain to the PT ROW than a half full bus or train.
Roads are not like that as the more users the maore physical space has to be accomodated for as each car takes so much space. That is why we have to keep widening roads and adding lanes to motorways/bridges.
Goosoid, there are very few PT systems in the world that run with high frequencies despite having pitiful patronage.
Much like a road people don’t like to travel on services that are at capacity, few people would be happy waiting 20mins for a bus only to find they have to stand when it comes and so if you want to maintain high levels of patronage you need to provide capacity well in excess of demand.
If you look at the Auckland rail network it’s only busy for 1 hour at each end of the day. If capacity of the trains was the only issue we wouldn’t care about the CRL as people could just pack in tighter or wait there turn. That is not how PT works however and is why we need to spend $2-3b so that we can run more trains in excess of demand.
Roads on the other hand are very seldom designed to run at peak performance all day and it is naturally accepted that they will reach capacity for up to 4 hours a day.
“there are very few PT systems in the world that run with high frequencies despite having pitiful patronage.” – Agreed, and there are very few well patronised PT systems in the world that have pitiful frequency, exactly why we need the CRL so we can increase frequency ACROSS THE NETWORK, not just to the CBD (sorry for the shouting caps but I really want that to emphasise that point).
“Much like a road people don’t like to travel on services that are at capacity, few people would be happy waiting 20mins for a bus only to find they have to stand when it comes and so if you want to maintain high levels of patronage you need to provide capacity well in excess of demand.” – Sorry, I completely disagree. Have you ever been on a London tube or the Prague mtero at 8am? Have you ever tried to get a bus in central London on a week day? Packed to the rafters. People all over the world use PT even when it is at peak capacity because it is just so much better than travelling by car.
“If you look at the Auckland rail network it’s only busy for 1 hour at each end of the day. If capacity of the trains was the only issue we wouldn’t care about the CRL as people could just pack in tighter or wait there turn. That is not how PT works however and is why we need to spend $2-3b so that we can run more trains in excess of demand.” – No again I completely disagree. I think the situation is almost the same for roads and PT in regards to servicing the peak. As far as Auckland only being busy for a couple of hours each day, yes but that is also true for the motorway. The trains would be busier all day if there was high frequency all day which is what the CRL will deliver. PT all over the world has shown the truth of “build it and they will come” – that is also true for roads but to the detriment of everyone as we then need to keep building to service the induced demand.
“Roads on the other hand are very seldom designed to run at peak performance all day and it is naturally accepted that they will reach capacity for up to 4 hours a day.” – Again I disagree. Motorways in particular are always built to cater to the peak. The P2W motorway will basically deal with a few days of peak a year.
I just wonder have you ever lived in a real transit city? Its just that you seem to think that the way Auckland currently works is some kind of innate characteristic of PT. It is not, it is just that we havent invested in it for 60 years and so it is crap. In cities where the PT works really well, and most importantly frequently and reliably, all the things you say about PT are completely reversed.
My opinions on PT are based on what PT could be based on my experiences in good PT cities (London (though I question the quality of its PT), Prague (same population as NZ) and Bucharest (which is really ramping up its investment in PT)). For me Copenhagen is the nirvana we should aim for with an equal modal share between cycling, PT and car use.
Goosoid as you quite rightly point out those places with good PT and mode share split have got their through continued expenditure and improvement. This is what I have been saying all along.
If the cost of providing PT only increased marginally with increased patronage that would imply we would still have a massive amount of rail usage today without the ongoing upgrades.
If the cost of increased patronage was so low London wouldn’t be needing to spend £16b increased on the cross rail project.
Well I have seen evidence in the form of research papers and posts on this blog saying that expenditure per person drops dramatically as patronage rises, even with no further investment. Obviously there will be increased expenditure as opex but not capex. This is the opposite of roads.
Things like Cross Rail are to provide a whole new ROW for transport, so more like building the WRR in Auckland. It is not to expand capacity on existing lines. My point is there is little need to do that once a line is double tracked as trains can just increase frequency.
I am sorry you cant see the benefits of PT as you are obviously an intelligent person. Maybe you have never seen PT working well and so like most Aucklanders just assume it cant. I have however used good PT day in, day out to travel all over cities (not just to the CBD) and it creates a far more accessible and enjoyable city than Auckland. I hope one day you can appreciate that too.
Well of course on this blog you will find all sorts if biased search.
Certainly as you get more passengers on your bus the cheaper it will be to run that bus on a per person basis. The thing is that while that it happening the quality of your bus service is reducing and so more people are turned away.
If you want to continue to get more people using your buses you will need to get more buses. And as you get more buses you will need to start upgrading roads or building some more.
This is just like a road. You could just let more people drive on the road and do nothing to support it, however you will ultimately start turning people away as congestion increases.
The difference with roads however is, the more people that drive the more money you get to build and upgrade them. With PT, the more that use it the less people drive meaning less money is generated to subsidise the PT system.
But at the same time the more people who take PT the higher the ticket revenue, in some cases it is self sustaining too. The NEX for example. The investment in the busway has turned loss making subsidized buses into a commercial service where ticket sales more than cover the cost of operation. In that case subsidies (mostly from rates actually) don’t come into it, and the more patronage the greater the user pays profitability.
Sorry snow flake that last sentence is not at all rational. Ie the more people that drive on roads the more money you make compared to the more people that use pt, the less earned in fuel excise. Firstly. Leaving aside the spurious economic growth clap trap, the primary reason we I vest I. Transport is to enable people to be mobile and live work and play. We can enable this to occur in the most let effective way by using what we have more efficiently. This means making the most out of what we have. For roading this means getting more people into fewer vehicles which will therefore negate the need for more roads supporting public transport is a way of getting the eat use possible from these roads. There may be less fuel excise, but the level of subsidy required for pt should be either reduced or zero. Building g roading capacity has never worked as a long term solution. It never will as we can never provide the capacity needed for us l to do as we want in our own cars. I don’t understand if we all have the shared goal of seeing the system improve that funding for pt is regarded as a “handout” whilst for roads it is seen as legitimate. The premise I guess is influenced by the principle of hypothecation? Perhaps it is time to rethink some of these principles because s ow flake probably things such as decking vkt, more efficient vehicles and t
Our descent into the fifth economic cycle mean that fuel excise is not the dead cert that it on e was. A fact that MOT and NZTA are already grappling with
Sorry – Prague has the same population roughly as Auckland, not NZ.