Stadium Strategy un-strategic on transport

There’s been quite a bit of news in the last week or so about council CCO, Regional Facilities Auckland (RFA) and their stadium strategy. RFA is the body who manage most of Auckland’s stadiums and other facilities such as the Art Gallery, the Zoo and MOTAT.

The strategy is trying to address the fact that Auckland has three major stadiums – Eden Park, Mt Smart and North Harbour (QBE Stadium) – all of which are underutilised and face financial pressures as a result. Mt Smart and QBE Stadium are also owned by the council meaning any shortfalls as a result of those financial pressures directly affect ratepayers. In summary the strategy is

• The Warriors would have to move from Mt Smart to QBE stadium which would basically become the default venue of most small to medium sized games for the rectangle field codes
• Move Cricket from Eden Park to Western Springs
• Speedway would move from Western Springs to Mt Smart
• Eden Park would basically only be be used for large sporting events such as rugby tests or shorter format cricket international tests. Technically Eden Park won’t come under the Stadium Strategy due to the ownership situation

Most of the noise about the strategy of late has revolved around the Warriors being forced out of Mt Smart when their current contract expires in 2018. I personally think that moving the Warriors to QBE stadium is a bad decision and if the information from the club about the process is true, it paints RFA’s approach in very bad light.

But what I want to talk about is a part of the discussion that hasn’t really been discussed, how the strategy affects transport.

Firstly QBE stadium. Put simply, it’s a real pain to get to, as being right on the northern edge of the urban area it means almost everyone converges on it from the south in one of two directions, Albany Highway or SH1 (via Albany Expressway or Oteha Valley Rd). To make matters worse all approach roads converge on and are affected by a single intersection. At times of events, especially large ones, this generally means traffic chaos which is further multiplied by people searching for parking. This is something I experienced first hand during the Rugby World Cup where I remember it took what felt like close to an hour either side of the game to move a few km’s. Let’s not forget that in the case of the Warriors, many fans come from well south of the harbour and as such a move to Albany would see them having to travel much further to attend games.

Unfortunately PT options aren’t any better. The Albany Busway station is over 1km away through a currently barren landscape and even during the RWC when PT use was heavily encouraged and a lot of special services put on, only around 30% of people used it. As a comparison for large events at Eden Park sometimes over 50% will arrive using PT (although much less for some games). All of this is important as the council have set a target of doubling the number of PT trips from 70 million to 140 million by 2022 and special events have potentially a large role in helping to achieve that.

Overall it seems like moving all smaller games to QBE is likely to mean very little opportunities for any real change in travel habits. This is a shame as it seems that events provide one of the better opportunities to get people who don’t normally use PT to try it.

Before we start getting comments about the Waterfront Stadium the former government suggested for the RWC, it’s perhaps worth pointing out that it too would likely have suffered from some of the issue of being too big for most games. Also sorting out the issues surrounding too many stadiums is one of the reasons why RFA exists in the first place.

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