In another sign the City Rail Link is getting ever closer, Auckland Transport have also produced this information highlighting the impacts the construction will have on the surrounding area for users. There are a couple of significant impacts with the two biggest being:
- Rail users understandably won’t be able to use the front entrance to Britomart while it is being dug up. Instead they’ll need to use the back entrance (eastern side) or the one under the EY/Westpac buildings.
- Bus operations will have to move off Albert St meaning one of the busiest bus corridors will have to be moved to other streets.
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Construction of this first stage is really starting to feel close and once that starts happening I think it will help in addressing some of those who have been fighting the project for so long.
In some other good news, at the Auckland Conversations event on Monday discussing transport, Mayor Len Brown announced that we’ve passed 13 million trips on the rail network over the last year. That is up one million trips in just 5 months. Unfortunately we don’t know the exact figures or when that 13 million was passed but it suggests patronage in February was massive and likely the highest individual month we’ve ever seen which also bodes well for the March figures. It means we’re on track to reach the governments CRL patronage target by 2017.
However unfortunately what doesn’t seem to have been disrupted is the Ministry of Transports view of the CRL as can be seen in their latest update report to the minister about it.
CBD employment
The best measure of CBD employment growth is provided by the Statistics New Zealand Business Demographics Database. The Database, which covers all of New Zealand, is published annually in early November and provides estimates of employment over the month of February in the same year.
At the time of the Prime Minister’s announcement, there were estimated to be 98,030 employees in the five Census Area Units comprising the Auckland CBD. The estimate of 98,030 employees therefore becomes the baseline for measuring the growth of the CBD and the threshold for an early consideration of the City Rail Link is 122,528 employees.
In the year to February 2014, CBD employment grew by 570 employees, a 0.6 percent increase. Since the February 2012 estimate (the baseline), CBD employment has grown by 2,720 employees or 2.8 percent.
Rail patronage
Auckland Transport’s rail patronage data for the year to December 2014 shows patronage of 12,515,329 trips. This compares to 10,610,956 trips for the previous year. This is an increase of 1,904,373 trips or 17.9 percent.
We expect to see continued strong rail patronage growth until around 2017/18, as the full electric train fleet comes into service and the new bus network is rolled out. From 2017/18, we expect the rate of patronage growth to slow.
Assessment
CBD employment is currently 100,750 employees, compared to the 25 percent growth threshold of 122,528 employees.
Rail patronage for the year to December 2014 was 12,515,329 trips compared to the threshold of 20,000,000 trips well before 2020. CBD employment levels and rail patronage are some way from reaching the thresholds set by the Government for considering an earlier business case and construction start date for the City Rail Link.
When it comes to rail patronage they have dropped the words from their August 14 update that they don’t think we’ll meet the target but they also have ignored that not only is patronage growing but that the growth rate is accelerating which I think is a pretty key fact. By the end of June – which they’ll use for the next update in August – we will probably be around 13.7 million trips, over 1 million more than in February. I wonder if they’ll still be saying we won’t reach 20 million trips early.
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I wonder if they are excluding construction workers from these numbers? There must be about 1000 in the CBD on any given weekday with all the apartments and offices etc going up. Once the enabling works start for the CRL and those 2 new office towers get underway that would likely be an additional 1000 workers. I find it hard to believe that other numbers have only gone up by a small amount with all the Wynyard quarter growth and the growth in office space occupancy to very high levels in the CBD. You don’t get that without more workers.
Also excludes a lot of other trips like the thousands of students in the city centre
The CBD employment bar was always nonsense, just a way of reinforcing the idea that the CRL is only about commuters to the city centre. The centre will experience all of the disruption and will see access there improve but as every journey to or through there starts somewhere else, and often a long long way out, emphasis on this metric is a way to wilfully misrepresent this upgrade for the entire network as just being about one part.
They should also measure retail, hospitality, and education customers.
CBD is not just about work. It is also about people to entertain and spend time.
“Construction of this first stage is really starting to feel close and once that starts happening I think it will help in addressing some of those who have been fighting the project for so long.”
The first stage is funded – nothing else is.
Not Sure there’s enough office space in the cbd anyway.
Christopher there will be. My lunch this time next year is not yet funded but it will be.
What about all the ticketing and stuff will people have to walk all the way across the station?, cant the side doors on Galway/Tyler be used?
The works happen through the whole front building – re-piling so the tunnels can go through the basement without the upper floors crumbling in 😉
Some passages might be kept free to get through the area, I guess, but probably not all the time – some periods everything will likely have to be shut.
Is AT or anyone else considering the streetscape they will leave behind? Any underground structures needed for trees, silva cells, public toilets, etc. need to be worked into the design now.
Yes that is all part of the project.
That’s an astonishing rate of growth which can only be explained by rider satisfaction with the train as a viable, or preferred, option. However, if it continues to grow at that rate, ridership can top out due to capacity limits of the current service. If that’s the case there isn’t much hope of meeting the government’s (arbitrary) ridership target.
In the *year* to February, CBD employment grew by 570 employees, but ridership on the trains alone was up by a million trips in *one month*? Something wrong here.
Anyway, already 100,000 employees downtown (that’s a lot), with indications from PT ridership that people aren’t exactly giving up on the CBD. That’s enough justification for the CRL for me. Should be for the government, too.
“Some way from reaching” some arbitrary threshold could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Probably just as well we’re not near that 25,000 more workers in the CBD target yet – imagine what the current situation with buses and trains would be like now if we had 25% more workers in downtown all trying to cram on to the already-overcrowded-to-the-max buses and trains?
Anyone know how many office workers will the Precinct tower hold?
Agreed a lot of these workers there will just move from elsewhere in the CBD mesh block zones so are already counted thus not increasing the CBD occupancy at all.
But even so it gives an idea of how much 1 new office building can add in capacity to the CBD.
As a comparision the Vero tower has a net lettable of around 40,000 sq m
Accoridng to CBRE, NZ offices average 15sqm per person, so 40K sqm could house around 2,650 staff.
So to add 25K staff to the CBD would use up the space equivlent to another 8-10 Vero buildings
Precinct say the new tower we be 37,000 m^2, maybe 2.5k people? And retail of about 20,000 m^2.
Precinct’s five downtown buildings to house roughly 10,000 people, at a density seen nowhere else in New Zealand, bang on top of the biggest Transit junction in the country.
Auckland is different; and requires different city-shaped thinking to other parts of the country. Making that Transit junction reach out better to the rest of the region is a key role of the CRL, this increases economic efficiency at so many levels. Not least of which it keeps the roads more functional.
Leyland refuses to to understand this because it doesn’t suit his ideology. Ignorable and irrelevant. Precinct’s $500mil investment in the city trumps a sad old fools prejudices.
The press release says the Precinct development “will help create jobs giving the potential for 12,000 more people to be working close to public transport at Britomart”. If true, this development alone would be half-way to the target. While there may be some initial relocation of jobs from other locations within the CBD mesh-blocks, the experience of other cities such as Melbourne is that there has been a net increase in CBD employment. As new offices have been built in Melbourne’s Docklands, other tenants have back-filled the office space these employees moved from.
The government could take a view that once space for an additional 25,000 employees is under construction, it is time to commit to the CRL. Or it could wait until the employment stats are in, by which time the trains would be seriously congested and they would be made to look foolish.
https://at.govt.nz/about-us/news-events/mayor-hails-historic-city-rail-link-development/
I’m concerned that there’s another variable not being addressed here – price. The cheaper services are, the more accessible and desirable it will be to use them, and an expensive service would price much of it’s potential growth pool out of its own market. Any price hikes in the coming years will have to be exceptionally well justified.
Other than that, the figures look good. I would be interested to see how the new rapid network effects rail ridership if buses can be redeployed as urban shuttles.
Actually I think it is time for MOT to jump through hoops, ringed with fire not the No1 project. Quickly hire 25,000 traffic engineers, then we sue their arses to pay for it. Win, win!!
I wonder where they’re planning to re-route these buses, and also the alternative location/s of the new bus stops?
Bus will have to be re-routed.
Yes that’s understandable, but I was asking where to
Im guessing that they may turn Queens Street into a 4 lane brt…however I actually have no idea
AT’s note says they will aim to move bus stops to their ultimate positions (where they’d be post the CRL dig) where possible, to minimise disruption.
Does digging up the front of Britomart mean the interior will get refreshed? That main entrance into the station is terrible, soulless, filled with useless shops, a mediocre cafe, and is very uninviting. I think it was unfortunate the building opened just before Auckland got good at designing public spaces. e.g. Wynyard, the rest of the Britomart area, shared spaces. Aotea Square’s another of these a-year-or-two-too-early spaces.
Indeed. I’m hoping that the space the cafe currently uses will become the main entrance once more.
I really wander why the Ministry of Climate Change Advancement and Petroleum don’t like this project, do they like busways or cycle with benefit cost ratios of 7 that can get 55% mode share either? It’s not their Strategic Fit. What’s Auckland’s No1 problem again? Transport. We need a Ministry of Transport!
We do indeed but instead we’ve got a Ministry of Road Transport – which makes for a grave acronym…….
lol
All I can say is if they don’t want it this much it must be pretty awesome!!!!!
Can we just cheat and refine/expand the central business district to include Ponsonby, Parnell, Eden Tce, and Newmarket? How much closer would we be?
That’s not such a bad idea really, given that Ponsonby would be within spitting distance of the K-Road station.
K Rd’s going to be my station; bike-up.
Just a thought … will this disruption where the main entrance is closed hurt patronage? It would be an unofrtunate irony if construction works for the CRL itself will cause patronage to drop below the 20mil target that “justifies” its construction in the first place…
Yes, I think this will hurt patronage, especially when this project is meant to take several years. I mean our buses are already full in the peaks, so just a bit of disruption will put PT users off. Queen St seems like AT’s only option to move buses to (and still keep people using them) and nothing moves along there except pedestrians. Goodbye double ped phase and good bye private vehicles I would presume.
Ari, actually, I think that is part of the solution, heretical as it may sound. The removal of vehicles from Queen [excepting delivery at specific times] means it is possible and desirable to cut all turning phases at Victoria, Wellesley, Shortland, Fort, Wyndam. Therefore all these intersections can change to a concurrent instead of Barnes Dances pattern. What! Yes, think about it.
With only east-west straight through traffic on the cross streets, and only north-south Transit vehicles on Queen and concurrent crossing, ie pedestrians move in the same direction as which ever vehicle traffic has a green, any pedestrian approaching an intersection will have one route available AT ALL TIMES, so if going to any two of the three possible destinations there will be no wait and only a single phase wait for the other one; ever.
Additionally both sets of vehicles, the buses or trams on Queen and the general traffic east-west traffic on Victoria and Wellesley, will also have much shorter waits between cycles as there is only ever two phases.
It is the turning phases that are delaying, low value, and dangerous to other road users. Get rid of them and the results are great for everyone; pedestrians, and especially the speed, utility, value of any Transit service on Queen. And vehicle users crossing the Queen St valley [there is no need or them to go up or down it].
I’m sure many will miss the Barnes Dance and fight for them, change is always opposed. But this would be a great improvement I reckon. Just like NYC.
I was actually thinking of the impact on rail patronage of the closure of all CPO building access to Britomart, making access to/from the trains harder. Agree on making Queen St an effective busway during construction. But we need more/bigger buses first (train passengers moving to bus routes cursed with those tiny ADL buses isn’t going to go well).
Of course the impact will only be on train users going to/from the CBD (or switching to/from a bus there). Other rail users won’t be negatively impacted (excepting events like construction work setting off the fire alarm).
As I usually switch to bus at Grafton (and later may walk to my Whitaker Place office from Parnell via the GG cycleway, depending on how well/badly they have ped access to Parnell Station) it won’t impact me much personally.
That is a good point about Parnell, it will be very useful to have it open before the Britomart disruption. But I am very concerned about the absence of a foot bridge, or at least it’s delay. While if you are arriving via NM and heading to Grafton it’ll be fine, those heading to Parnell or your return journey will be much harder to access. Some will likely dash across the tracks.
Good that AT are making their tight resources go as far as possible on station amenity, and another city access point to the rail system is long overdue, I hope funds for the overbridge can be found soon.
Western line users will continue with their creative use of Grafton as a city station by proxy, it is good that Southern liners will be getting a version of that too. Especially as the Vector curve and Britomart throat can be so slow, plus the coming distruption to ped access at Britomart
Do people who live in CBD and work at home count as working in the CBD?
As people living in centre increase this may be a factor. Is this a school in the CBD? With the population there one could be considered and this would employ 20-50 staff.
There are schools within the motorway noose (which defines the offical definition of the CBD). Two come to mind: Auckland Girls’ Grammar and ACG Senior College. Numerous language schools too, of course, plus the big pre-university foundation programmes for foreign students (ACG Norton College; Taylor’s College; ACG New Zealand International College).
Unfortunately no state coed secondary or primary or intermediate schools but given the projected population increase in the area there will be a need for them. But as with transport provision I guess our great and wise government doesn’t believe there will ever be a need because they really do not believe in cities.
I want to see a CPEng Civil Engineer sign that from MOT saying no business case yet. I’m one I say build it now let’s get moving 100%. No1 project and a no brainer on full spectrum of engineering ethics. Rail growing at 20% into a dead end st Britimart and pretty much zero bus priority or maybe 3% across all arterials if you are lucky. Downtown area on it’s own 12,000 employees in vicinity. Massive time savings in all directions in particular western line. The MOT CEO Accountant can get stuffed.
MOT/NZTA are really exposed to professional negligence when actually have no one qualified to make decisions at board level. And obviously 60% or more of their spending is actually making things worse. 7 years limit of liability is quite a few billion which I think the public of NZ should get back and stop this nonsense from.occuring and give the transport industry a wake up call!!!!