Yesterday was a busy day for transport news. Alongside Gerry Brownlee’s strange airport escapade, Labour Transport Spokesman Phil Twyford dropped a bit of a bombshell in relation to the possible acceleration of the Additional Waitemata Habour Crossing (AWHC) project as well as the exclusion of the project’s rail component:

Labour Transport spokesperson Phil Twyford says it has been leaked to him that John Key will rule out a rail option when announcing an accelerated timeframe for Auckland’s $5 billion second harbour crossing next month.

“I understand the Government’s plan is for a roads-only option which would be a giant wasted opportunity to connect rail to the North Shore and link it up with the City Rail Link and the rest of the regional rail network,” says Mr Twyford.

“Aucklanders want their cars but they also realise it is past time to start investing in a modern public transport network. We’ve seen that in recent polls.

“This Government has not initiated a single new public transport infrastructure project in Auckland since it came to office.

“They announced an $800 million transport package for Auckland in the Budget but there wasn’t one public transport project in it. They even rejected officials’ advice to extend the wildly successful Northern Busway.

“If National goes ahead with the second harbour crossing but doesn’t include rail, it would be a major blunder on a par with National’s decision to build the first harbour bridge on the cheap, with clip-ons needed shortly after,” says Phil Twyford.

There’s been no confirmation of the announcement by the government. The Campaign for Better Transport’s media release in response highlights a number of the concerns we’ve had about this project over the past months and years:

The Campaign for Better Transport said today that the Government’s idea of an additional road only Waitemata Harbour Crossing hasn’t been thought through.

“We all know that the Northern Motorway and approaches are notoriously congested at peak times, so local support probably stems from the belief that this congestion will somehow be solved,” said spokesperson Cameron Pitches.

“However, the net effect of a road only crossing will be that in the morning peak, the Auckland CBD will be flooded with thousands of extra single occupant cars looking for a car park. The Central Motorway Junction will also be a bottleneck without more lanes, but there is no room for more.

“And in the evening peak the already congested Northern Motorway will grind to a halt, as six lanes converge into three.”

Mr Pitches says a far better solution would be a rail only crossing that would extend from the City Rail Link to Albany on the North Shore.

“The Northern Busway is enormously popular and is a great example of a system that can carry far more people at peak times than single occupant cars. High capacity rail would be the logical next step.”

Mr Pitches said that a recent report identified that the cost of a rail link connecting the City Rail Link to Albany on the North Shore would be about $2.5bn.

“It is clear that the Government’s proposal and any alternatives have not been through Treasury’s better business case process.  There is no urgency with the project either as the yet to be completed Western Ring Route is designed to reduce traffic volumes on the bridge,” said Mr Pitches.

The Goverment is yet to make an official announcement on how a new crossing would be funded, but Mr Pitches suspects it would have to be tolled due to the multi-billion dollar cost of the project.

“The Government also needs to be honest and reveal how much the toll will be for the new crossing, and if the current Harbour Bridge will be tolled as well.”

“It just makes no sense.  The Government has just been caught out not doing a comprehensive assessment of alternatives for the Basin Reserve.  You would think they would want to avoid making the same mistake twice,” concludes Mr Pitches.

Our most comprehensive criticism of the project is in a recent post here, with a quick summary being that it seems Auckland’s most expensive ever proposed project is likely to make things worse for traffic rather than better, particularly by feeding thousands more cars into a city centre that can’t cope with any more of them.

If it does get announced as speculated would Len Brown be brave enough to say no to it ? Given his previous comments I don’t think so. Let’s hope the announcement – if there even is one – only relates to progressing route protection for the project, which was already announced last year by the Prime Minister.

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73 comments

    1. Because fiscal conservatism – or austerity as it is popularly known – was only ever meant to be applied to those who already had very little: social programmes, women’s refuge, beneficiaries. Projects like the stupid second harbour crossing are government sanctioned corporate welfare for infrastructure monopolies and the financial capital that will make a killing from the inevitable tolls. Oh yes, and Aucklanders will be asked to stump up about $5 billion to fund this (look for a motorway charge coming your way soon). How many schools and health services could that fund?

    2. It’s crony capitalism when it is designed to dump workforces in one central location, whether by train or motorway.

      Frank Lloyd Wright was a true egalitarian when it came to transport planning; look at the transport infrastructure for his “Broadacre City”. Not a highway to be seen anywhere – but not a rail based PT system either. He wrote and spoke screeds against the grab for unearned income by the owners of centrally located property. He correctly said that the natural trend was always for dispersion of employment and that this should be planned for. He opposed “city centre first” planning that stood athwart this natural and beneficial process. He saw the connection between this, and the democratisation of ownership of decent homes.

      It is a pity that so many other beautiful people don’t have the same insight.

      1. Sorry but you are quite wrong on Broadacre city. FLW assumed a motorway network on a huge five mile grid. He noted that parents would use 200mph cars to take their children to school, while businessmen would naturally use automated private helicopters to travel the huge distances to workplaces.

        His was a scheme of decentralised living space for aesthetic reasons, resting on the back of personal resource consumption of mythical scale.

        Enough space age fantasy, meanwhile back in reality….

  1. When the lanes are configured for rush hour, there are five lanes in the busy direction over the harbour bridge. I assume that is the most lanes of anywhere in NZ’s road network. How on earth can it be a bottleneck? 30 seconds thought shows the stupidity of this idea.

    1. It is a bottleneck because it is the only route for large numbers of vehicles that otherwise, if there was no water body needing to be bridged, could be using any number of alternative routes. The famous systems analyst Cesare Marchetti has been writing for decades on the systemic under-estimating of demand for new bridges and tunnels that are the sole time-saving route.

      If Auckland was where Palmerston North is, this sort of problem would not exist. There are around a dozen alternative routes from Feilding to Palmerston North, for example.

      1. There’s also more cars using the bridge each day than there are in Palmerston North in total. Auckland isn’t where Palmerston North is for good reason.

        What a ridiculous statement.

        1. All right, all right; there is no lack of cities around the world that are NOT built on narrow isthmuses, and that do NOT have chokepoints in their travel, and that DO have a dozen or more alternative routes to get from almost any one spot in the urban area, to another.

          These cities have an inherent advantage for their productivity and hence competitiveness, and national economies that have more of these cities, have an inherent competitive advantage over economies that do not.

          I don’t see what is stupid about knowing this, or knowing that the only way you can reduce the competitive disadvantage of the city on the isthmus, is by providing more routes, which is superior to having just one and constantly expanding its capacity. Worse still, is spending your budget on a transport system that restricts options of trip destination still further. This is just a “big property” rentier benefit scheme.

          NZ already has a ridiculous amount of tall-building CBD floor space for an economy that is essentially Kentucky in the South Pacific. You can literally guesstimate how much of a crony capitalist, rentier economy an economy is, by its ratio of CBD floor space to its GDP. NZ, I suggest, is one of the world’s worst.

      1. mfwic. No there isn’t. It’s very rare to see any significant slowdown in the non-busy direction over the harbour bridge at rush hour.And

        1. Balls. There is always a slow down except in school holidays, but now a lot of the queueing is shifted to the on-ramps where they hold the demand back.

        2. So what, this idea that unless all vehicles are moving at maximum speed at all times the sky is about to burst into flames is nonsense.

          A little slow down, a decision to take the bus or ferry, to delay the trip to a time of lower demand…. are these really higher costs than a multi-billion dollar engineering intervention?

          Especially one that will just shift the delay a little further along, and generate all sorts of unwanted other effects, like incentivising more people to take their vehicles into the city where we don’t want any more.

          The time value of car trips are almost certainly overstated in the self serving models designed by Motordom. Very few vehicles are ambulances.

          The problem is telling people they can expect free flow at all times, so they leave everything to the last minute, this isn’t efficiency, it is a culture of impatience.

        3. Balls – I travel over the bridge at peak hour every day against the flow and the bridge is almost never the cause of delay.

          When you look at the lane configuration of the Northern motorway on the north side of the bridge you get:

          South bound morning peak: 3 lanes Northern side – 5 on bridge
          North bound morning peak: 3 bridge – 4 on northern (bridge = bottle neck)

          South bound afternoon peak – 3 northern – 3 on bridge
          North bound afternoon peak – 5 bridge – 4 on northern

          In only one of those four scenarios the bridge is the constraint, and in my experience it never causes more than a very minor delay.

        4. Yes Patrick only a few people will die in ambulances and they all had something wrong with them anyway! And as for the rest well there lives dont really matter because they decided live outside the CBD and they probably dont even support the same political party as you. Hell if they didnt pay so much of our taxes they would have any use at all.

        5. The bridge isn’t the problem. It’s Northcote Rd, Onewa Rd etc on ramps. A tunnel will do absolutely nothing for this apart from trying to feed more cars, quicker into the southern motorway bottleneck. Don’t believe me? Look up the NZTA traffic counts.

        6. I travel to work twice a week contraflow on the harbour bridge, and travel to my parent’s/ the sailing club twice a week at peak. I have had one trip this year averaging less than 50km/h over the bridge. The consraint is at Greville/Constellation both ways, Esmonde merging going South and Tristam North Bound. It seems that those most vocal about bridge delays are also the least knowledgable and experienced.

        7. In the 2012 evening peak there were 1839 vehicles per lane northbound and 1803 vehicles per lane southbound. But the growth in the “non”-peak direction has been growing a hell of a lot faster. And for the reverse direction the bottleneck is the bridge itself not the connections.

        8. Yes exactly the growth occurs where there is supply. Time to understand that supply is the key driver of demand. Build those extra lanes and more will drive. Only in a world where ever more driving is the aim is this anywhere near a good thing. FFS.

        9. Maybe mfwic makes a fair point in that the bridge bottleneck is concealed by the onramps being blocked. Try getting onto the motorway at Esmonde Road on a Tuesday morning for example if you feel like a 30 to 45 minute wait … this is the bottleneck at work. It’s real, but not seen since it has been moved out to the feeder roads.

        10. Ok, so let’s accept that the bridge isn’t currently a bottleneck because demand is managed at the offramps. Seems reasonable because I can remember when the bridge was a mess before the on ramp lights (though the St Marys Bay work and the Vic Park tunnel helped too, I guess).

          Here’s my question though: how will duplicating the bridge as road only alleviate traffic congestion? Are we going to duplicate the entire motorway system as well? Where will the cars go once they’ve made it across this new bridge? (and why do we need three road only bridges across the harbour?)

          Patrick, +1 on your ‘culture of impatience’ comment. Worst aspect of NZ, IMO. We’re yokels still really, and hate having to share space or wait on someone else.

        11. Supply rationing is intelligently used elsewhere on the network; ever wondered why there is still just two lanes each way at Mt Wellington on SH1? Yes it’s to ration traffic further north, it could be expensively widened there but what would that achieve? More sudden infarctions further along.

          NZTA are about to see major cases of this once all the multi billion dollar work on SH16 and 20 are open; the CMJ is now going to get huge swamps of vehicles that are currently rationed down the relatively narrow 16.

          While the WRR will move some through traffic off SH1 and the CMJ (their models say 10%, which is huge as the numbers here are high), it will also bust the current rationing effect south from 16 & add new traffic from the Waterview connect of SH20 into the CMJ and SH1.

          Given how congestion works, rationing on freeways is sensible; speeding clumps of traffic to bottlenecks is the worst outcome. We are going to have more sections of 100kph only to get drivers more efficiently to total standstill. Especially at the CMJ, and probably after the coming work north of the bridge there too. Traffic steadily moving at 80k or even slower is both more efficient and less stressful than very fast sections then total standstill.

          This is very poor spending. Unless of course the aim is simply to build the political case for the next massive roading project, so after the daft harbour crossing duplication, is it double stacking the entire CMJ?

        12. 2km on the entire Northern Motorway not free flow against the peak? Better spend $5b.

      1. One is worth doing too, happily the one they are doing. In fact it should have done before the first harbour crossing!

  2. I agree with this:

    “…….Auckland’s most expensive ever proposed project is likely to make things worse for traffic rather than better, particularly by feeding thousands more cars into a city centre that can’t cope with any more of them……”

    Cities need transport networks that serve dispersed trip destinations. Funneling all travel to and through a single major centre is straight-out crony capitalism, and that is what I accuse both the National Party and the Labour Party of. The former wants to dump cars in Auckland CBD to keep the property portfolios over-valued, and Labour wants to pay people to ride a train to the CBD instead of driving a car to somewhere else (“somewhere else” is where 85% of the workforce already is).

    I have already told Phil Twyford that Auckland would really benefit from a second harbour crossing as far away from the current one as possible. Auckland’s employment is dispersed, so it is pointless to have a major choke point in inbound traffic from the north, when it is all going to fan out to multiple destinations anyway once it is across the harbour. It would be far better to take as much as possible of the traffic from the north onto a completely alternative path to connect to a faster route bypassing the city centre, to get to the locations of employment that are not right in the CBD.

    I also said that I believed that Auckland’s congestion delays could be improved more easily than Wellington’s, because Auckland had more potential for the city centre being bypassed by a de facto ringroad type system.

    If you are prepared to leave traffic congestion in place just to increase PT mode share, you shoot your local economy in the foot. PT riders cannot possibly be covering the region and increasing productivity like workers who go to anywhere from anywhere by car.

    But if you have to have PT, the advantage buses have over a rail based system is that they can pick up riders on multiple feeder routes and then just drive onto an express busway; and at the other end, they can fan out to a range of destinations in the city. At least one transfer is avoided, and this is very important.

    It would make sense to utilise the busway idea with smaller vehicles like vans, so that there can be more origins and destinations served. Instead of one large bus departing from each of half a dozen northern nodes, all heading for one CBD destination, there should be four vans heading for different destinations on the city side of the harbour bridge.

    Their fares need to be cheap, and in fact well-utilised vans could better the existing costs of providing the service. It is basically true that if there were not regulations granting monopolies on routes, owner-operator van drivers would probably carry people for no higher a fare in spite of no subsidy, or may well successfully charge a bit higher fare for going closer to their rider’s trip origins and destinations.

    People happily pay $15+ to ride the unsubsidised “Valley to Airport Flyer” in Wellington – if the GWRC had set up such a service, they would be trying to keep fares to half this price, at ratepayers expense. It is about identification of niche travel needs and then providing value in a transport service. Making “mass”, large-vehicle, fixed-route PT the “end in itself” in the existence of cities and their planning, is madness.

    1. “I have already told Phil Twyford that Auckland would really benefit from a second harbour crossing as far away from the current one as possible. Auckland’s employment is dispersed, so it is pointless to have a major choke point in inbound traffic from the north, when it is all going to fan out to multiple destinations anyway once it is across the harbour. It would be far better to take as much as possible of the traffic from the north onto a completely alternative path to connect to a faster route bypassing the city centre, to get to the locations of employment that are not right in the CBD.”

      Something like say, the Western Ring Route, which will be complete in a couple of years? It’s an alternative to crossing the Harbour Bridge and fits your criteria for being as far from the current bridge as possible. Or are you proposing a tunnel from Devonport to um.. St Heliers? Half Moon Bay?

      1. Yes, exactly, but the more routes the better. I really meant “crossing the harbour” a bit further away from the existing bridge. It would be great if something could be done to the East, to duplicate the effect of the Western Ring Route on the West of Auckland.

        But the other angle is that it is likely to be cheaper to plan for a shift in the focus of urban economic activity away from where it is already built out, geographically difficult, and cost-ineffective to expand infrastructure capacity, to where it can be done cheaply on greenfields. This can take the pressure off the existing choked-up spots.

        There is excellent stuff on this in the work of Alain Bertaud, Shlomo Angel, Alex Anas and the colleagues of all of them. New York’s city fathers laid out the famous grid network of roads on Manhattan in 1811. They didn’t have a clue what was going to end up there. A lot of it might have been lifestyle blocks had history gone in a completely different direction. I say that is what we need to plan on the flat land near Auckland. Some spot might turn out to be a “twin city”, like St Paul is to Minneapolis or Fort Worth is to Dallas. If you try to prescriptively plan it, it is actually less likely to happen because the land owners will hold out and price-gouge. Unless you get the balls to do compulsory acquisition.

        1. So you want to plan something but not prescriptively plan something? What is your *actual* plan here?

        2. Auckland is already moving west – thanks to current development patterns and the downgrading of the Auckland plan. The second harbour crossing motorway is exactly where it needs to be for that.

        3. Conan; exactly. Plan infrastructure networks well in advance, impose rights of way and even acquire the land; but don’t prescribe land use from the outset. Wait and see what starts happening first. Allow splatter. Then the best uses of the remaining, fragmented land, become clearer, both to the private sector, and to government.

          New agglomerations of specific type, like Silicon Valley, have maximum opportunity to form because there is still space and the cost of land is still low. The cost of doing “catch-up” with infrastructure is much lower if you laid out the grid in the first place, and temptation should be resisted, to allow rights of way to be built over even if it is not clear that the capacity is going to be required in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile it is nice to have the de facto boulevards with wide green verges and trees.

          But it is far more unlikely that the space “won’t ever be needed” than that it “will be”. This is the crux of the problem – planners in the past seldom saw any further ahead than their society’s current stage of economic development.

    2. @ Phil Hayward: “Making “mass”, large-vehicle, fixed-route PT the “end in itself” in the existence of cities and their planning, is madness.”

      Phil, you just don’t get it, do you? The reality is that large-vehicle, fixed-route PT works! And it works best if it is high-quality and on rails. Why do you think that 15,000 people use rail for 2 journeys every day on a typical Wellington weekday? Many of those people have cars but prefer to leave them at home. Their way of avoiding (and not adding to) congestion, if you like. You can wax all you like about the inefficiencies of fixed route systems and the utopia of go-everywhere, free-flow highways, but people still choose to use a good rail service. They want it. They support it. They leave their cars for it. This is happening Phil. It is not just theoretical.

      In Auckland, rail-use has rocketed up since the opening of Britomart, because this unlocked a latent transport-demand that was stymied before. The CRL will unlock a vast amount more, and so will pretty much any other rail development in the rail-less wilderness which still typifies much of Auckland. Wellington’s patronage-growth has levelled because the bureaucrats in charge of transport fail to appreciate how much more demand remains to be unlocked by extending rail over the corridor they are so keen to build a motorway on.

      Sure, rail services are subsidised, but so is car-use, particularly once you count all the externalities it imposes and all the incidentals it demands. And there are two main reasons why urban rail tends to be expensive. One is the requirement to cater for high but short-duration peaks, and this requirement affects the efficiency of road transport also. The other as I think I have said to you before, is the societal insistence that rail must be an order of magnitude safer than road. This hugely increases the relative cost, but is somewhat incidental to the actual costs of the mode. If the playing-field was truly level, and if more attempt was made to tap into the demand, we would see rail use boom even in our little cities.

      1. That’s actually an interesting point.

        The public would never accept 308 deaths in a year (as there were in 2012 – http://www.transport.govt.nz/research/roadcrashstatistics/motorvehiclecrashesinnewzealand/motor-vehicle-crashes-in-new-zealand-2012/) on the public transport network – even if it carried 80+% of trips. That would be a PR disaster and people would lose faith in the system.

        It is big news if one train or bus crashes but 308 people dying in a year on the roads doesn’t even make page 3. Cost of doing business.

  3. I pull my hair out. Not a single lesson learnt from the mistakes of the 1950’s and the building of the Harbour Bridge. What idiots or maybe not… Are there certain blind trusts that will do well out or this contract? Its the only logic I can think of that would make this stupidity a go, even if its mired in corruption!

    1. Of course we could have gone with rail and a had a city about a third to a half the population Auckland is now, sort of like Wellington.

        1. Yea sure Wellington grew by about 2.3 times from 1945 to 2013. (the areas of the 4 cities was had around (173,500 in 1945 and around 401,900 in 2013) while in the same period Auckland urban areas grew by around 5.3 times. Why would that have been do you think? Probably because someone built a motorway system and CMJ that allowed people to make use of the flat land in Auckland that was further out for housing and jobs and allowed the CBD to have high rise buildings accessed by motorways. Auckland is where it is today because of those decisions, had someone made different choices then the result would have been different too. It is naive to think Auckland would be even close to what it is today if the motorway system hadn’t happened. If our history had been different then our present would be different.

        2. Good grief mofo, talk about confusing correlation with causality…. Here’s another one: throughout the second half of the twentieth century population changes in cities correlates most strongly with higher local temperatures, especially higher mean winter temps. In other words people shifted to places with nicer weather. This means south in the USA and north in NZ. This also coincides with the spread of aircon…. Motorways didn’t cause the fact of Auckland’s growth but they sure as hell shaped where it went.

        3. It amazes me that you think that had those in power insisted on a rail based city that the people would still have come to Auckland rather than Tauranga or Whangarei (both quite warm places- you should buy a car and visit them sometime). Auckland is only what it is because of the choices that were made. Different choices- different result, that is how history works. The car allowed large tracts of Auckland to be used at very low cost. If they had gone with any other option the costs would have been higher so many people would have gone elsewhere.

        4. I’m delighted you’re amazed. But you make the same willfully nonsensical argument that anyone who opposes a motorway only solution to urban form is proposing an no-car city. That is not and has never been the only alternative to only building motorways and nothing else. There are plenty of cities with more than one transport system and therefore less monotonic growth patterns.

          Your claim that Whangarei or Tauranga could have grown instead of Auckland if we hadn’t all but destroyed the old inner city with motorways is absurd.

        5. Well the people who came here who wouldn’t have been able to afford it had we used rail would have gone somewhere. It’s anyones guess where, I am assuming another port city would have built the roads and enjoyed the growth. As you keep saying land use and transport are linked. People vote with their feet Patrick.

        6. > I am assuming another port city would have built the roads and enjoyed the growth.

          The central government built the motorways. It’s a little odd to imagine a scenario where the central government chose not to build motorways in Auckland, far and away our largest city, but that they would build motorways in Whangarei or Tauranga, and also build rail in Auckland, too.

          There’s no possible way the tiny provincial councils of the time could have afforded to build their own motorways instead, either. Tauranga and Whangarei both had populations of a little over 10,000 when the motorways were first being built – Auckland had about 300,000. That was the main reason Auckland grew – it was already the main centre!

        7. Well exactly but the mind game put up often on this website is that Auckland could have had a rail system instead of a road based network. My point is that would impact on not just the shape of Auckland but the scale of Auckland. Had people gone to the barricades to prevent roads from the 1950’s on then the growth would have somewhere else. The huge land areas that cheap motorcars allowed to develop in Auckland would not have happened. Some would have gone to higher densities near rail but at a higher price. The balance would not have stayed/wouldn’t have come in the first place. The idea that Auckland could have had a rail system without the road system we got, and still have the population we got is just stupid. Remember land use and transport are connected.

        8. “Well exactly but the mind game put up often on this website is that Auckland could have had a rail system instead of a road based network”

          As well as I think you’ll find. We seem to have just ended up with the road network. Time for some balancing.

        9. Well imagine what you like but other than Venice there is no city any where without roads, and that’s certainly not the alternative anyone on this site suggests as a possible pattern for Auckland.

          We do advocate now that we are where we are, after 60 years of nothing but road building, that the best way to get balance back is to focus ongoing investment into the missing modes. It will come at the next turn of the political wheel, this current supernova of m’way construction will implode soon enough on its own contradictions.

          Anyway, what about alternative pasts then? Well the obvious one is that AK could have actually done what De Leuw Cather advised and built a Rapid Transit Network, and a city bypass, basically the WRR, and not rammed all traffic through the centre of the city, first. This would have set up a different pattern of development. Then it is also likely that the trams network could have been kept and updated…. There are all sorts of possible scenarios. Places like the south east could have actually saved transit corridors, Robbie’s Rail could have been built….

          There is no inevitability about urban m’ways, Vancouver turned them down, and the big Australian cities have nothing like the CMJ cutting off their traditional hearts.

          There is aboslutely no reason to believe this would have negatively affected Auckland’s growth, for a start it won’t have had to suffer three decades of decline in the city centre. There would many thousands more people living in now desirable additional Ponsonbys close to town, paying huge rates to the local authority. These people would have to have been accommodated out in dormitory suburbs on the fringes and services would not have to have been built out to them when we did.

        1. Except Vancouver doesn’t have a Tauranga nearby. Vancouver is located as far south on the west coast as you can go. The choice for the people there is like it or lump it. Planners love that kind of city.

        2. They have Victoria, which has roughly three times as many people in its urban area as Tauranga does..

        3. They do and it would be a lovely place to retire to. But Vancouver existed as the place to get the logs out and as the railhead for the Canadian Pacific. Victoria could never be a substitute.

  4. Think you’ll find the government decided last year to complete Waterview, then move on to the harbour crossing, then do the CRL last. They did hint at this at the time of the harbour crossing and CRL announcement, and gave a timing for the CRL (2020) but remained somewhat vague on the timing of the harbour crossing. Probably decided then to keep it for the election run up.

    Don’t look to Len Brown to say no, he has no say in state highway projects, and besides he’s the government’s partner in crime. Elected on the promise of three big rail projects, then dumped two and failed to start the third, whilst coming up with a huge list of roading projects he wants. Len’s actions have been fully in line with government policy. Moot point though, he’s gone at the next election, and will be exiting without any of his rail projects under construction, to go into the history books beside Robbies rapid rail system as a nice idea that never flew.

  5. If they just did the numbers on moving people rather than vehicles, they’d see problem is a lot smaller and the future proof solution is obvious; CRL and rail to the Shore.

    1. Why is “moving people” at a PUBLIC cost of around 40 cents per person km and higher, superior to providing surfaces on which people will pay their OWN 40 cents a km cost of ownership and operation of “rolling stock”, and which once built, is there forever and it is all “payback”?

      Imagine if the ancient Romans had spent all their public finances on moving people around in large ox-drawn carts instead of laying paved surfaces.

      1. All payback? We spend about half our transport budget on maintaining and repairing roads… And with the National party sucking up funds for the RONS, we can’t even afford to maintain and repair the local roads and non-RONS state highways well..

      2. Hang on, we’re talking about five billion of public money here Phil. The interest bill alone comes in at $750,000 a day. That’s a subsidy of about 500c per person-km on the cost of capital alone. Let’s not talk subsidy when the topic of conversation is multi billion expenditure on motorways.

  6. Jeff H, I agree. Unfortunately the Government (and NZTA) only cares about building roads, and AT only cares about public transport for the former ACC area, so our hopes of getting rail to the Shore are receding fast. It amounts to a joint commitment by NZTA and AT to at least 20 more years of irresponsible and expensive carbon-based transport.

    What’s to be done when both our transport agencies are so hopeless?

    1. All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

  7. Just a thought, did Phil Twyford think his statement would make more people vote Labour? I mean how would that work? Did he think claiming National would do a new bridge would make a lot of people abandon National and vote for his party? Surely the road haters already dont support National and maybe a few undecided who live on the shore might swap to National. Does anyone understand his thinking?

    1. Perhaps he’s simply letting people know their intent? You know, as a public service? He is a public servant after all.

      (Yeah, I don’t believe this either – Labour’s problem atm is they’ve shed a shitload of support, mostly to undecided and National. Some of these will not bother voting, and some might be swayed by arguments that National is wasteful).

  8. So, you build a tunnel. What are you then going to do with the southern motorway? That’s the biggest bottleneck. This isn’t fixable with more roads. It just isn’t.

  9. The biggest issue will be containing the costs once the third Harbour crossing is started. For example all of the NS approaches will need major upgrades as that is where the bottlenecks on NS exist. Underwater tunnels have a habit of the costs blowing out (eg Boston Big Dig). New off-ramps into the CBD will need to be added to accommodate the additional traffic. Roads in the CBD will need to be added to accommodate the additional traffic. The whole central motorway junction will need to be upgraded otherwise it will all bottleneck at Fanshaw street. The clip-on will still need to replaced or strengthened (again) regardless of the outcome. A few decades worth of work (and crippling debt/toll charging for us all) by which time self driving EVs would have sorted out peak time congestion for us(Nissan to launch one in 2018).

    1. Nup, just don’t waste any of this money on a truly pointless project, and all of the additional work you mention.

      Note too that not only do road tunnels have huge operating costs but that the old Harbour bridge will become the Auckland Ratepayers’ financial burden if the State Highway classification is moved to a new route…. just like we are now going to get the badly designed existing SH1 north once they duplicate that to look after and have to make safe.

      There is no free lunch here for Auckland.

  10. This is just parlour politics. It’s a promise the Nats won’t have to keep in this term nor the next. Meanwhile it lets them push their meme that the Lab/Greens are anti everything, anti progress and impractical. Because to the uninformed it seems to make sense – isn’t the bridge falling down? Sydney had a tunnel – we must need one too.

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