As I have mentioned before, Waterview is a roading project that I do support, unlike many of the dubious roading projects both nationally, and locally. Whether you like it or not, it is under construction and in time is likely to have a massive impact on the city and as discussed previously, in some ways it will probably even be useful for the CRL. At $1.4 billion the project is dubbed the most expensive roading project ever undertaken in New Zealand and the NZTA have released some images of progress so far on the project. While the majority of the project is actually underground where it won’t be seen, the sections above ground help to show just how massive the project is.
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In the second and third shots you can see the narrow underpass through the road bridge built for the rail line designated along this route [or rather the motorway is being built on a rail designation]. Three things about this:
1. Yay! great to see a little bit of future proofing by NZTA. Multi-modal, even.
2. It is a very clear reminder of how much less invasive urban rail systems are compared to motorways, not only in terms of just how much land they swallow but also how the severance they create is gentler and easier to bridge or otherwise mitigate.
3. We need to get that CRL built so cheap and useful additions to the rail network can be added like this Mt Roskill Line. It will take a lot of pressure off the Dominion Rd buses by offering a faster and higher quality ride into and through the city [with the CRL] and expand the reach and utility of the WesternLine [and frequency].
Otherwise, good to see the last piece of the Auckland Urban Motorway puzzle underway; we can now turn our attention to investing in the missing modes that Auckland so desperately needs.
I should add that in the fourth shot down you can see where the Owairaka Station is planned to be; to the right of the bridge near the top of the picture, right next to the little group of shops; exactly where you want Transit stations; where people are, at community centres. I’m pretty sure it’s that long gable roofed building parallel to the new works that AC have bought for this [can anyone confirm?].
Although motorways do take up way more space than rail, in terms of severance they are about the same. In fact in some cases rail could be worse as you can’t seamlessly jump on and off it as part of your greater journey.
I think there is little difference between the invasiveness of motorways & railways. In both cases you can’t cross them without special pedestrian infrustructure (compared to arterial roads that you can cross. Yes motorways are wider & look worse on satellite pictures but on the ground they have same invasiveness (is that a word?)
But it is cheaper to bridge a railway than a motorway just because of the width. Also, motorways cause greater local air pollution.
Railways are also a lot quieter, and attract people to walk around the neighborhoods leading to all sorts of other positive impacts to the areas they serve. Not to mention that they’re quite easily undergrounded without the need for massive exhaust vents.
Yes railways are quieter as they carry less traffic, however try living next to one you will find they are much more disruptive.
As for generating random wanderers of the street? Can’t say I’ve heard or seen witnessed that before. Sounds like a bit of a crime issue.
Frank and Flake not the same. Width matters enormously when it comes to severance, narrower barriers can be way more frequently bridged at little cost, narrower routes can slipped into cuttings, elevated easier, or concealed in tunnels much easier and cheaper.
Those rare and expensive footbridges over our motorways are windswept and unpleasant to use. Distance does matter, narrower roads cause less difficulty than wider ones, it’s not just what the mode is. In other places with more train use big areas of track also cause worse severance, than simple twin track lines like most of ours.
Clearly this is true; a river is more of a barrier than a stream.
One only has to experience and think of the Sea to Sky ‘bridge’ leading from Wellington City’s Civic Square to the Waterfront to know and understand immediately the critical dimension of width of structures that bridge severances.
If that where really the case Patrick, why do we have so few crossings of our railway network. Intact almost all the crossings are road crossings and very few are ped only, other than the occasional level crossing which they are progressively removing due to their danger.
You can’t “jump on” a motorway unless you’re in a car, just as you can’t “jump on” a train unless you’re not in one. It’s interesting how much people merge their own identity with their cars when they talk. People say things like “where are we parked?”. Well, we’re not parked, we’re walking around looking for the car that one of us owns.
Interesting that you call it a ‘narrow’ underpass for the railway Patrick, when in fact it is 17m wide. That is wide enough to take four tracks. Perhaps an indictment of the very land-inefficient nature of motorways, when a four track railway looks narrow in comparison.
I don’t think that is enough for 4 tracks, I remember seeing a comment when looking at info about the Manukau Harbour crossing that the minimum width for a two track line was something like 9m.
Also it appears that there has been no bridge built at Richardson Rd. Most likely that will have to be built separately when ever a rail line goes through. The Maioro St bridge was designed as part of the previous motorway extension but since then Kiwirail have been very adverse to actual future proofing. I remember reading that the NZTA offered to even build the rail formation at the same time while the machinery was onsite and Kiwirail turned it down.
Presumably there was going to be some cost associated with doing the formation for Kiwirail, and that is most likely money they don’t have to be spent on future proofing Auckland no matter how logical it is. Their mandate is merely to cut costs and make as much money as possible and developing Auckland’s rail network doesn’t fall within that very narrow definition.
As has been observed here before the current board and management, presumably under instruction from the road lobby government are clearly all about dismantling the rail rail network not adding to it.
IMO the railway that the govt has closed isn’t really needed.
Ahh so thats why they got the new trains and have put all this money into making rail profitable. It’s all part of an evil plan to get rail out of NZ. They are most cunning indeed.
Snow flake, your optimism is heartening, but not convincing. The government only put ANY money into new trains because the backlash from Auckland regarding their broken promises and on kicking our wishes into the dirt quite so obviously would have been just a bit too much even for “we know best” National.
Yes they are actively dismantling most of the legacy network but leaving a rump because it is very profitably used by a few key exporters (the profit being the users, not KR mostly) notably frontera. KR is simply a logistics company and needs to have the responsibility for the network removed from their care, they have no view beyond the next quarterly report.
That is fine for the short term and this focus is probably helping lead to a rise in rail freight but it is no way for a country to understand value or otherwise in its infrastructure. If we were to close every road that didn’t make a ‘profit’ virtually every rural road would be abandoned. It is dumb short term thinking and we will as a nation regret it.
ONTRACK should be merged with NZTA and KR should pay for line access and not have responsibility for maintenance nor network planning. Even sell the thing then, so long as we’re not selling the land and the tracks, like our roads these are national assets and are of national significance, to borrow a pompous phrase.
But a four track line isn’t twice as wide as a two trak line. Kiwi rail standards translate to about 3.2m per track, plus a further 1m clearance from any fixed structure on each side (including walls, signals and traction masts).
So through a tunnel or underpass a bare minimum of about 9m is right for a twin track line, although on a regular stretch you’d want about 12m width to easiy accommodate poles and signals and the like.
On a four track line, 15m would be the bare minimum to pass through a structure, while the open corridor should be more like 18 to 20m.
Yes just because you can build something now is no reason to put it ahead of the various other projects you have that are in need.
If they had paid for the extra cost hear they may have well delayed other more important projects by 10 years or so.
At $1.4 billion Waterview seems like a bargain to me.
My main concern is somewhat peripheral to the project itself and relates to the fact we have not gained agreement on the strategic direction for tolling/road pricing in Auckland. From where I’m sitting, the Western Ring Route makes most sense if – when it is finished – we subsequently put a $2 electronic toll back onto the Harbour Bridge. Our two north-south highway routes would then start to work as a system, with as much traffic as possible diverted away from the congested central motorway junction and instead onto the much longer but less congested bypass.
So while it’s a useful project, I fear we’re not able to make maximum advantage of the opportunities that it creates because we have not considered what it means for pricing of the wider network.
Sure the harbour bridge, but also the inner Northwestern, and the inner Southern.
It’s actually a much better alternative to spaghetti junction for west to south traffic than north to south. No point encouraging people off the bridge while letting them run through the CMJ in other directions unpriced.
foreshore
But Stu it isn’t 1.4bill this doesn’t include all the associated widening on SH16, construction of SH18. A total that Matt calculated to be more like 4bil. There’s also widening to come on most of SH 20, no doub,t to add to the work already done. This is how they do it, bite by bite. Each piece causing the ‘need’ for the next. Rinse and repeat.
Actually Patrick. The widening if SH 16 and building SH18 comes in under $600 million so the total cost is more like $2 billion.
Of course if your so happy to include others costs on motorway projects why don’t you do the same with the CRL. I don’t see you claiming the total cost for the CRL being in the range of $10-20 billion.
Because the quoted cost of the CBD rail link already includes the cost of more trains, removal of level crossings, double tracking the Onehunga line etc. The actual cost of the tunnel itself is significantly lower than the figure in the media. So yes either we compare like with like or we make it clear what that price actually includes. And it certainly is fair to add in all of the SH16 costs as most of them are needed simply because of all the extra traffic the Waterview tunnel will generate.
burned snowflake, burned.
Where was the burn Stu? Patrick was referring to all the past projects needed to make the waterview project as well as future projects to further enhance it.
To do the same for the CRL you would need to use the $3 billion price tag and then include all the existing railway lines and their upgrades. Hence the $10-20 billion cost.
For waterview you could just spend the $1.4 on the tunnel and still have a somewhat useful project even if there were no other motorways.
Well, that’s not quite right snow flake. The nice tunnel would take you to where without the rest of the SH20 extension to Onehunga?
Where to you get the $10-20b cost from. The CRL is $1.8b, electrification is $1b, project DART was $600m, Britomart was $200m. There are a few other smaller things but all up the rail network has cost about $4b which is about the same as the WRR in total will cost.
Matt, he’s lumping the cost of constructing all lines of the existing rail network in with the CRL to try and make some spurious comparison, but without lumping in the cost of all existing parts of the motorways system the comparison is just that.
I’d certainly not agree that waterview would be a somewhat useful project even if there were no other motorways, given that the northern end only connects to the existing motorway it would be impossible to use for any purpose. Another useless comparison.
Nick, as you well know you can make pretty much any trip you like by using the local road network. There is no requirement to use long sections of motorway and this is seen quite often with people jumping on and using small sections and then jumping off again.
Now as to what benefit the CRL would have if it wasn’t connected to a railway network I don’t know. I’m sure you will say its huge however.
So let me get this straight Bryce.
You’ve never ventured any further from your house than the driveway as that would require you to go onto a different type of road, something for which you and Nick seem to believe is completely impossible?
How very strange.
I can’t understand what Snow Flake is trying to say here, can anyone else understand it?
Given you seems to turn off all logic and cognitive thought when you are scarred about a weakness in rail being mentioned I will slow it down for you.
So first you have a city full of roads so you can get from A to B.
Now if you made 100m of this into a different type of road, lets say a motorway. You don’t need to change the entire road network into motorways or overly a new network.
At least now I know why you hate roads so much as you clearly don’t know how to use them. I suggest you get out there and explore the world.
Sorry, I still can’t follow the point of what you’re trying to say or the relevance to the discussion. My bad, apparently it’s because I’m scarred and I hate roads?
I’m lost. I think snowflake is comparing a residential road to a $2b project with tunnels? There were already roads to Mt Roskill I thought so why would you build $2b worth of tunnels just to access this suburb? Maybe I was wrong but I’m sure that my parents used these old 2 lane roads to get to and from their house in Mt Roskill 40 years ago. Did someone dig them up?
Bryce, I wasn’t comparing the tunnels to local roads but rather a road project to the CRL.
If you were wanting to compare the tunnels to the local roads however, you would probably triple your average travel speed along the route so you have a benefit right there. Add to that you would have less traffic on those old local roads making them nicer to live by.
Actually Bryce I was comparing the pricing of the motorway tunnels to the pricing of the CRL. Quite clearly written at the top.
If you were wanthing to compare the performance of the tunnels and the existing local road however you would be traveling about 3 times faster on average in the tunnel.
The $4b figure was Matt’s estimate (from memory) for the WRR project from Manukau to SH1 at Constellation.
Not sure why you say the vast majority is underground, if you look at those images you can see how very large the above ground section is from Maiora Rd to the tunnel portal, the underground portion is really only a small portion.
The underground section is about 2.5km, the aboveground portion about 1.5km. So maybe not “the vast majority”, but neither “only a small portion”!
On the last photo, what is the linear structure on the far side of the trench? The structure with two tiers of vertical columns, or things that look like columns.
Those be retaining walls good sir. As you go north the quality of rock improves which is why the walls get smaller.
That looks like good progress for six months, they may finish ahead of schedule like they have on other projects
yes I agree. No doubt helped by the long spell of fine summer weather?
They said as much, yes. Pumping and all got a lot easier too, I understand. They are way below the normal water table, and the trench of course also collects a lot of surface water…
Yes, it’s great to see progress here but pity the poor users of the North Western Motorway. They have been suffering the shambles of the Lincoln Rd rework for two years and the three men & a dog working on it are said to be going for it for another two years. Then there will be a couple of years of shambles as they tie the knots together at Waterview followed by further shambles while the Causeway gets widened. And it’s not like the long suffering North Westerner can get out of the system by jumping on a train unless they live well down towards Hendo or catching a bus as they almost all run on the NW m’way. It’s enough to make you want to move away for ten years, maybe that’s the plan. I just think think these projects could have been planned and co-ordinated better and even wonder if the 10 years of disruption before it’s all in place was included in the Cost Benefit analysis. Or maybe this is just the impact of carving things into smaller projects to hide the overall cost. (oh, I forgot Royal Rd is going to be played around with also – there’s another couple of years of pain)
A perfect reason for North Westerners to take the ferry instead.
That Richardson Rd rail bridge should be built now. Once the motorway is built there won’t be much space to work in or divert the road. Surely as part of using & moving the rail corridor, NZTA should not be preventing future construcion or making it prohibitively expensive? Where are the plans for how the rail will be developed, after the motorway is built? This planning should have been done, and should be public information.
Meanwhile in London: http://www.christianwolmar.co.uk/2013/04/boris-cycle-plan-fact-or-fiction/
A lane is to be removed from general traffic on the Westway and repurposed for cycling…..
We can but look on and dream of such schemes for NZ but while 0.7 – 1% of the transport budget is left for cycling and walking it isn’t going to happen.
Anyone know if there are any public viewpoints where much can be seen?
There is a viewing area on Methuen Rd about number 108.
The draft urban design documentation clearly shows provision for rail under Richardson Rd bridge, ref pg 5-6
http://www.nzta.govt.nz/projects/wrr/docs/201003-ud-maioro.pdf
Given this appears to be the most up to date design information on the website, why is the actual construction completely different?
Zoom in on the photo on this doc for reference, look at the support area for the northern end of the bridge
http://www.nzta.govt.nz/projects/waterviewconnection/docs/cu-20130222.pdf