Following the CRL ground breaking event last week one quote from the press releases caught my eye – and it’s something I highlighted in my post on Friday.

“Auckland Transport is forecasting in the first year of operation an 88% increase in rail passengers travelling to the city centre and a 40% increase in rail patronage across the network in the morning peak.

I fully expect the CRL is going to see huge numbers of people start using the train to get to town but an 88% increase in a single year is pretty impressive. I was interested in just what the predictions were so asked AT for some details.

They said the modelling was based on the year 2026 which is actually 2-3 years after the expect the CRL to be open (2023-24). Without the CRL they estimated there would be 13,200 trips to the city centre by rail during the two hour AM peak. With the CRL the number of people arriving at the Britomart, Aotea, K Rd stations in the AM peak is expected to be 24,100. That’s an increase of 10,900 or 83%, so not quite the 88% in the quote but fairly close (perhaps someone read the details wrong)

In addition, they said across the entire network without the CRL in 2026 there will be 24,600 trips in the AM peak but with the CRL that number will rise to 34,500 with the CRL.

What surprised me the most about these results was the modelling for 2026 without the CRL of just 13,200 trips a decade from now. To put things in perspective, recently AT told me that Britomart currently sees 10,200 people arriving in the AM peak. We know how that’s changed over time thanks to the former Screenline Survey that the ARC used to conduct – it isn’t done any more but the HOP data is able to give the information needed.

No CRL Britomart prediction

As you can see things have really taken off in the last few years thanks in large part to electrification. If current trends continue – and with all of the changes coming I expect them to for a little while yet – we could see Britomart surpassing that 13,200 figure within just a few years. If that happens it would once again highlight once again how much our transport models continue to underestimate the use of rail Auckland and could also suggest that the predictions for the CRL are undercooked too. That in turn could suggest that the benefits of the CRL are potentially much higher too.

While on the topic of trips to the city in the AM peak. It’s also worth pointing out just how significant the current numbers are. As a quick comparison Nelson St is the busiest road for traffic entering the city centre as is fed by two motorways yet despite this only around 6,000 people pass along here in the morning peak.

Nelson St road space vs cycle space

Overall in the city centre AT have said that now more people are arriving via PT in the AM peak than by private vehicles. That’s definitely changed a lot over the last 15 years as vehicle numbers have remained fairly constant while the usage of PT has soared.

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99 comments

  1. CRL will be another Britomart story.
    Its going to be a victim of its own success.

    Does anyone know if the CRL has been future-proof for any kind of light/heavy rail from the North? I dont think future-proofing is in the Auckland Transport/NZTA Dictionary.

    1. Any train from the shore won’t go in the CRL but in a new tunnel (it possibly in street if light rail). The Aotea station has been designed with piles out of the way for a potential tunnel under Wellesley St

      1. So just to get it right in my head, a potential North Shore line will be in a completely separate tunnel to the CRL but still terminate at Aotea Station and linked by various stairs/lifts etc?

        1. That is one option. As Matt said, it could also be some form of light rail, which could be on-surface from at least Wynyard Quarter, travelling to Quay Street / Britomart along Fanshawe Street (and then turn right into town along Queen Street to Dominion Road, or along Symonds Street to Manukau Road). Not really designed / decided yet – especially seeing NZTA is seemingly not very interested in a rail option across the harbour.

          Oh, and the tunnel (if in tunnel) would likely not stop at Aotea – go through the City Centre and come out somewhere on the eastern side near Parnell train station. Maybe with a new university station near Symonds or Grafton Gully. Possibly. Again, not really designed for except at very high level.

        2. Britomart was originally “future proofed” for NS rail too, and it still has undeveloped cavities either side of platforms 1 and 5 that were once intended to be the through-routes north. It’s not clear on the drawing I’ve seen what will become of those spaces post-CRL, but they may be sacrificed to reinforce for the building to go above in future. I’m sure several of the prominent CRL opponents still fantasize about those tunnels going under the harbour instead of the CRL under the city.

        3. James C, those cavities were designed as ramps to enable light rail reaching Britomart from the east to reach the surface in QE Square – if you look very carefully the entrances are visible beyond the east end of the platforms. (The best viewing point was the observation car of the Northern Explorer, unobscured by glazing.) I don’t think that they were connected with any N-S rail plans.

        4. Mike, yes I’ve seen LR tagged as the purpose of one or both of those tunnels, also BRT, but I’m 90% sure I’ve seen NS rail on a drawing or document – not sure from what stage it was and the memory is not providing the backup today, so take it as unsubstantiated until further notice. I’ve seen the tunnels close up and once again the memory is unreliable, but I recall the floor sloping downwards, although that may be an illusion relating the the absence of ballast – I don’t recall recognising any slope on CRL prep drawings. Will look at the next opportunity.

        5. James – Britomart wasn’t future proofed for NS rail, those cavities were for light rail as Mike says. What you may be thinking of is an earlier version of the CRL which had a junction under the Albert/customs intersection. That is simply not feasible as
          a) the full capacity of CRL is needed for the existing lines
          b) would’ve been expensive and difficult to build and likely ruled out development like the commercial bay tower.
          c) as a flat junction it would’ve reduced the capacity of the CRL and given Auckland already too many critical junctions, would also have likely resulted in poor reliability.

          Instead preference was changed to a perpendicular connection at Aotea under Wellesley St (a large sewer is under Victoria St so can’t go there). Since that time AT have got interested in light rail so that may not require a tunnel, at least not initially.

        6. Yeah that is very much an option, but look at those hopeless dates; post 2041!

          The Busway will be stuffed well before then, and anyway the city can’t the buses that the busway will generate even before then…. Rapid Transit needs to be the next harbour Crossing not more funnels for clogging cars.

        7. A university station serving both AUT and UAuck would be great. It would be one of the busiest stations in the entire network.

        8. North Shore rail can and should be driverless – that would be something the minister and ministry would really like, won’t they? It could be the first mass driverless technology we’re going to see in Auckland for some time yet. The technology is proven and available, it’s fast and frequent meaning greater freedom and flexibility. The whole Northern Busway (including the proposed Albany extension) is all ready for it because it’s completely separated from pedestrians and other traffic (I mean it can be very easily done). Then either bridge or rail tunnel instead of vehicle funnel (thanks Patrick) – and at Wynyard probably an elevated track via Victoria Park and then into Wellesley Street – possibly a tunnel into the hill and under Aotea Station (500m bored tunnel) and it could finish at Universities (another 500m) or Parnell (another 500m). Or elevated version all the way from Wynyard to Parnell – cheaper that way and the driverless systems can handle the grades. It has to be either elevated or underground as street-level cannot be 100% separated, thus incompatible with driverless mass transit. The gauge difference won’t matter as the driverless LTR need to be different to our current heavy system anyway. Such driverless LTR systems usually have no ugly overhead wires which must be a win-win for image conscious Aucklanders, let alone Northshorites! Also having light rail system means we’re not dependent on the Wellington’s Kiwirail operations and their politics.

      2. Not only would North Shore rail have to avoid Britomart but to be consistent with historical rail planning practice it would also be a different gauge and a different current and voltage.

        1. It really doesn’t though. Japan has a very succesful network running on meter – only their high speed lines run on standard (which arguably feeds the success of the highspeed lines, as they have no congestion problems).

          Sure, a standard rail network would be nice. But it wouldn’t be worth running two separate networks.

        2. Why? Our existing railway will be full, the next one will be separate so can be any system, in other words the most optimised one for its needs, not constrained by past decisions. Lots of cities have a number of different systems.

        3. Sure it would, there’s nothing to be lost with a new gauge for a new line, you need new trains, tracks, depots etc anyway. But you gain the ability to procure standardised vehicles and rail systems a lot cheaper than having them custom designed and built for narrow gauge.

          If we are building a new line it should be a purpose built urban rail system, not something based around legacy standards for freight tracks.

          FYI only some of Japan’s urban rail lines are narrow gauge, those based around legacy main lines, the metros and many commuter systems are mainly standard gauge or other unusual gauges.

        4. According to wiki, Japan’s railways are predominantly 3ft 6″ gauge (22,301km or 84%), with standard gauge for high speed and some suburban lines (4,251km or 16%), and less than 200km in other gauges.

        5. Why does avoiding Britomart matter, Aotea is where the action is.

          Since we wont be running freight trains on it & it will run on a separate network it doesn’t need to be the same gauge. Many countries have metro systems with different gauges & traction systems than there heavy rail network.

          Also no reason we couldn’t technically procure narrow gauge light metro trains if we wanted to be purist.

          Agree our gauge sucks, I like Indian gauge where they can double stack on basic flatcars, no well cars needed with electrification overhead. I know they wanted to try triple stacking 6.5 feet containers, not sure if they did it though. All praise Lord Dalhousie.

  2. I look at those aotea station platforms and think they look too small to cope with numbers. No safety screens for the volume of people also very dangerous. All looks undercooked.

    1. Agree.. the new stations all look undercooked. Narrow platforms, missing one entrance / exit (K Rd). Not enough of them. The trains look seriously undercooked. They’re undercooked today at peak times. Nelson St by contrast looks overcooked.

    2. Safety screens could be added easily to the design between now and then? Seeing that they will allow people to safely get much closer to the edge, the space needed for them deducated from the platform will surely still be a net space benefit, and a big safety bonus at the same time.

      But yeah, wider stations and more accesses would be good. Sadly we still operate in a “futureproof” motorways left and right and value-engineer rail – paradigm.

    3. Surely the numbers anticipated at Aotea station are no greater than the numbers using busy tube stations in London or Subway stations in New York and the majority of them don’t have platform screens. We don’t even have electrified third rails.

      1. The fact that something could be done how it used to be done is surely no reason not to do better. Such a simple (and comparatively cheap) safety improvement, with pretty much not a single downside, should be implemented!

        Additionally, apart from the safety aspect, screen doors would reduce the number of suicides on train tracks. London sees over 100 suicides in the underground a year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_on_the_London_Underground). With (even if you don’t care to much about the victims) big impacts on service reliability when it happens.

        [And for those who feel that people prone to suicide “will just do it somewhere else” if prevented to do it at rail stations, you should know that most people who unsuccessfully try to suicide eventually get better and stop attemting suicide – so its on us to do our best to prevent them from succeeding.]

        1. We need to do much better at preventing suicides in general. Way to many opportunities to go out on a particularly bad day/night with very good chance of succeeding.

        2. Screen doors at Aotea won’t protect against suicide unfortunately as there are so many other unprotected parts of our network, including all the other stations.

          They are there to stop people falling onto the tracks accidentally, which presumably has never been a significant issue on the numerous networks around the world that don’t have screen doors as they would have been istalled by now otherwise. They make me think of the pre-Hillsborough English football stadiums with the big fences.

        3. What spurious logic. Protecting the only track access in an area with 40,000 residents and 100,000 employees won’t do anything to stop suicides because there rest of the network isn’t perfect?

        4. It’s not the only access in the area you describe, there’s Britomart, K Rd, Grafton and Parnell (assuming it’s finally open by the time CRL is built) along with any bit of above ground track in the vicinity of these stations. I don’t agree there is no downside to installing these doors, from my experience they make stations feel more cramped when full and sterile when there are fewer people on the platforms.

        5. London is installing them on new stations built and looking to retrofit most of the deep tunnel lines with them. They also assist with the fire fighting strategy of stations (smoke reduction, clear evacuation routes etc) and were one of the key recommendations to arise following the Kings Cross fires.

        6. What makes you think that platform screen doors are “simple (and comparatively cheap)”? If they are, they’ll be unlike practically everything else on a modern railway!

          Whatever money it does cost, it would almost certainly be much better spent on reducing the risk from the most dangerous urban vehicles (cars and trucks), rather than from the safest ones (trains), which would make the latter more expensive and therefore less attractive.

        7. Because some glass panes and some automatic sliding doors *are* cheap compared to the cost of a station.

          They are proven, simple technology used in literally thousands of buildings across the whole AKL city centre alone. The only addition needed for that stuff to work in a rail station is a simple wind load / structural calculation, and automatics linked to train arrival. Child’s play for the relevant professionals.

          The fact that they are not in existence in older rail networks is inertia, and lack of regulatory requirement. In the absence of that, cash-strapped rail networks don’t add them. That doesn’t mean they are actually a big cost. Just a cost, and something you’d have to overcome inertia on, which, absent of regulatory requirement or new-build-opportunity or a sudden spate of deaths, nobody will.

        8. Sorry, Max, but nothing on the railway is “child’s play” (fortunately).

          What you’re talking about is introducing another set of variables into the complex bundle of systems that a modern railway represents, interfacing between many trains and many doors, with additional equipment to ensure correct operation, no wrong-side failures (any door failures on train or platform would probably require closing the platform – very disruptive), and a new means of communication between driver and platform. All perfectly possible when an overall assessment has been done to indicate that it’s worth it – have you done one?

        9. May be I am wrong, but I’m not sure that throwing more money at road transport in its present form can do much to improve its safety overall. Sure there are always local initiatives that can be effective, but road transport is inherently dangerous because it is manually-controlled by fallible human beings and because it is superimposed largely-unprotected on the environment in which fallible and vulnerable humans must be present. Road-accident statistics are no longer in decline and it seems that they might have hit a floor below which they cannot fall without some step-change. Autonomous vehicles may be such a step-change but they are a long way from taking-over just yet. The only other step-change I can envisage is a serious clamp down on the way vehicles are operated and who is allowed to operate them. This would require major political input but probably not much money.

          In my view, the best way to make roads safer is to greatly expand the coverage and usability of public transport, such that road-use declines or becomes easier to restrict on safety-grounds. Our present over-dependence on roads means that it is often difficult to ban someone or impose safe limits without upsetting the apple cart. So we just shrug and tolerate the road-toll.

        10. Two types of PSD systems

          1. The most common the trains automatically run not necessarily driverless but at least ATO so doors work with train doors automatically.

          2. Sensor activated PSD’s sensor on doors detects opening of train door, not so common however Sweden is installing then on CBD stations for Citybanan. Not as good because you rely on the drivers to stop at the right place which takes them awhile to get used to but still after the learning curve it’s fine.

        11. Dave B

          There is plenty that we can do to improve road safety. Reducing rural speeds until we can engineer up to a 100 km/h standard is the obvious one that the NZTA are about to start.

        12. Platform doors do not need to be floor-to-celing to achieve the safety benefits. Gates would do this. Making them airtight represents a step-up in specification for different objectives.

        13. In some cases thats helpful, but there are many places that run half height platform screen gates, or run the doors out doors. Hong Kong for example, the east island line has them and it’s all in the open air.

          Number one benefit is managing passenger flows and stopping people falling/intentionally jumping onto the tracks. Without doors you’ve got about a metre or so down each platform face where you’re not supposed to walk and people don’t like to stand anyway. With platform screen doors you’d effectively gain 2 x 1m x 150m = 300m2 of extra queuing/standing/walking space at the Aotea platform. That’s room for hundreds more people safely and comfortably.

      2. London tube is much older and most of the lines have separate platforms for trains in each direction with a crossover between.
        Also suicide by train is very popular in London (happens a few times every week typically resulting in massive disruption to that line… I say line because with London there are almost always multiple alternatives if a particular line has an issue. Auckland doesn’t have that luxury. Absolutely the CRL platforms should have screens to stop suicide by train or the rarer accident).
        The Aotea platforms do look to be far too narrow especially if it is planned to one day be an interchange station with a North Shore line (even if that is 20,50,80 years away it should be accommodated now because it is virtually impossible to change later).

    4. I wonder with improved signalling systems (as in major upgrade) and more train sets, platforms won’t be much of a problem as the frequency will keep them fairly squish free? I think we are used to slow timetables and people milling around for 20 mins.

  3. Nelson St is insanely wide. Haven’t driven down it lately but the last few times, outside of peak, it was ridiculous how much space there was for so few vehicles.

    I think the technical term is “@ss-about-face”. Its designed for 4 hours out of 24.

  4. For the figures without the CRL: while we may surpass them before the CRL is completed at some point we will surely hit a capacity ceiling for Britomart that will prevent further growth until after the CRL is completed? I would suspect the figures would take this into account. I would expect therefore that the figures will start to level off at some point. However once the CRL is operating then I would expect there to be huge growth in its first couple years.

    On another note, it looks like there are more cyclists in the Nelson St photo than there are cars.

    1. We can still add passengers by adding more off-peak trains. Not as good as peak capacity, but pax is pax.

      1. We’re probably not far off seeing some accelerated growth off-peak. While it seems very weather dependent, some days the peak is very “peaky’ – numbers late to rise and dropping off rapidly after. The six-car trains often only get one properly full peak run in and are luxuriously under-filled on the previous and subsequent runs. Passengers will surely get wise to this soon and adjust their travel to suit.

  5. I definitely think we will be at 13,200 well before the CRl opens. Integrated fares, new network, and new timetabling should be a huge boost.

    On another note Nelson St cycle lane really needs to be extended ASAP. It will be a glaring hole in the loop around the CBD once Quay Street is open. Then bring on Federal St cycleway!!

    1. That is now projected to start construction ~early next year, since the window to start was lost with the rescoping away from Sturdee Street to Market Street.

  6. Does the 6000 on Nelson St. include all the cyclists? They’re only tiny specs on that photo, but there looks to be almost as many people on bikes as in cars on the nearest block of that street.

    1. Not sure whether the number includes cyclists (presumably not). The daily numbers on that part of the cycleway are about 500-600, so peak flows could be about 150-200/hour? Still pretty good for an unfinished cycleway that has opened only half a year ago.

      1. ” 150-200/hour? ”

        Someone should draw this to the attention of Mike Hoskins. Perhaps he would like to do a follow up piece on the waste of money spent on the new cycle way….

        1. He’d just go out there again at 7am and wait for the gap that is statistically certain to occur. Such people wont change (until they start riding bikes themselves).

    1. Nope, because it is induced demand that is GOOD for a city centre.

      You claim double standards. Yet we always were open about it – growth in car traffic and growth in PT traffic is not of the same value/benefit for a city.

      Induced demand works for all modes. But *we* don’t want growth on all modes.

  7. So the CRL doubles capacity, but there’s expected to be an 88% increase in the first year. So the train network is again operating at capacity pretty much straight away?

    1. It boosts the number of trains through the CBD from 20ph to 48ph, but there is still a considerable amount of fat with the current capacity. The six-car sets at peak often have plenty of seats free let alone standing, and of course the three-car sets at peak that are often very full can be lengthened with future purchases. But you are right it does suggest the CRL will hit capacity at some point.

      1. Means to increase further to 60tph through the CRL are readily achievable by multiple avenues, also. There is probably already a preferred concept floating around somewhere. Additionally, the CRL allows increases in the network as a whole well above its own capacity through allowing cross-town services through the (relatively) de-clogged Newmarket junction, and it makes for more efficient use of counter-flow services, so as well as there being more space for trains on the network, there will be more capacity for flows of actual humans to interlock (sorry, can’t think of a clearer way to describe what I’m visualising).

        1. To have 60tph I guess it would be

          A) Grade seperate Quay Park junction
          B) Moving block signalling between Mt E and Quay Park Junctions

          Possibly might need to grade seperate Westfield as well for slack further down the Network.

  8. Back when the trains stopped in Beach Rd and am peak arrivals were about 800, I looked at census data for the zones around the station and came up with the interesting figure that for destinations within 5 minutes walk of the station, the rail mode share was something like 30%. Achieving that for a station at Britomart would give you 5,000 passengers in the am peak. We presented these figures to Treasury who felt they were wildly optimistic.

    1. What numbers you mean? The fact that numbers of black helicopters are up 17% since last year, and you can’t trust the government to be truthful about PT statistics?

      [Lol and apologies if you weren’t trolling]

  9. This is getting beyond a joke. We ought to just dump the transport models from the middle of last century and build new ones. The ridiculous out of date assumptions that are buried all the way through these old highway/sprawl optimised ones render them simply as junk.

    Basically talking to people inside our institutions who work with these things they can be described as ‘hating PT, especially rail’. They essentially assume that everyone will do absolutely everything to avoid using PT; they just express the beliefs and aspirations of some 1960s traffic engineers high on the new age motordom. Relegating PT as a last resort for the poor.

    They have enormous time and cost penalties for transfers, exaggerated last mile/first mile costs for PT users, yet assume that every driver parks for free exactly at their destination [ie everyone is an executive with a carpark by their desk]. In sort the models limit PT users to those you live in a station and work in another on the same line or route. Sure, they update the start point as every year their predictions are shattered by reality, but no change to the next number that’s spat out. Ridiculously low time and money costs for parking, decades out; often cheaper than now! Can’t capture value of improvements in service in PT.

    This wouldn’t matter except these lines on a page carry enormous weight in economic evaluations; yet they are just the worldview of duller auto-evangelist posters calcified into hard-to-challenge official predictions.

    The whole transport economic evaluation system is like the proverbial butcher leaning on the scales; it exaggerates the value of spending on driving, ignores the negative externalities, or worse even perverts them into benefits [carbon emissions, agglomeration benefits], and renders PT as virtually pointless by insisting no one will use it.

    Despite all recent evidence to the contrary this century. With more accurate models there would be no NW multi-billion spend without a big Rapid Transit component, the CRL would be open, LRT and a Rapid Transit Harbour crossing underway. It’s that distorting.

    1. I have said it many times before, you would be better off cutting open a bird and reading its entrails than using a transportation model. (And I used to build them)

  10. The CRL will be like the Harbour Bridge; tight from the day it opens. It will be so used that we need to be planning the next the next major RTN extensions and system immediately: Happily these are at least being discussed and analysed but the time frames are far too distant.
    AMETI
    Harbour Crossing/North Shore RTN with plenty of capacity
    Same for Mangere/Airport
    Isthmus LRT
    NW RTN

    1. Ironically these will further induce demand on the CRL! This is a major reason we should be looking at HR (or Light-Metro) to the North Shore to allow a CRL-2 to be built under the city meaning there would be more than one way to approach Aotea.

      1. Yes, already AT say they are delaying AMETI because there won’t be enough rail capacity at Panmure till the CRL is open.

        It’s going to explode.

        Perhaps the way to navigate our un-futureproof PT habit with the harbour crossing is to build a system that can upgrade from Light Rail to Light Metro over time. That seems possible as they share similar needs in terms of route geometry. Key would be to at least make platforms extendable, if not suitable for longer sets from the get-go.

        1. They could always buy more trains to make every one a six car set. That would take 2-3 years, same duration as the busway…..

        2. I wonder if the solution is to run 2 x 33.5m sets = 67m odd LRVs (Sydney new ones in order 460 capacity) on future street routes I.e Takapuna/Glenfield then for the main Silverdale/Albany/CBD route which is fully grade seperate run an extra set so 100m 690 capacity. You might get over 700 if driverless as no room needed for driving compartments.

          CRL 2 Light Rail should in my opinion link up to a future SH16/18 NW Light Rail rather than under unis to Parnell.

        3. Those high-end capacity numbers for light rail assume a fair degree of crush-loading. Ok for short journeys but longer journeys such as to the North Shore require something more civilised. Major arterial passenger-flows require heavy rail (or light-metro), and require fully-segregated rights of way. Anything over about 5,000 pax per hour per direction, and LRT in-the-street starts to overly dominate the street.

        4. Crush loading tends to only happen in the last 5-10 minutes though, not all the way along. We have to accept vehicles get full across the peak load point at peak times, it’s massively expensive to avoid it whatever your mode.

        5. Light Rail can be grade separated & indeed the Silverdale/Albany/CBD section would be.

          However light rail means we can also put two easy spurs to Glenfield or Takapuna street running. It is also easier to put on SH16.

          Crush Room possibly but remember we are talking 700 * 20 each way (You could run more but lets use this as a start) = 14000 people an hour each way.

          Remember that only 7500 vehicles cross the bridge southbound between 7-8 at present, so 14000 is a lot of capacity.

        6. Dave, there are no arterials in Auckland with anything near that level of passenger flow. Where are you thinking will be an issue?

        7. Similar things in London with Crossrail 1 which will reach capacity almost immediately from opening (despite adding 10% to total London wide capacity) so there is a strong push to advance Crossrail 2 even more rapidly.

  11. The best way to handle this is to find the figure at the end of the AT modelling period (say 2036) and use that as the figure from the day CRL opens.

    That would be congruent with the Britomart patronage modelling experience – where the numbers from the model were exceeded before the model even started modelling.

  12. Dave B (W): “In my view, the best way to make roads safer is to greatly expand the coverage and usability of public transport” – agreed, and the way to do that is not to make public transport any more expensive than it needs to be.

    But road safety improvements need not be that difficult (except politically, often) or expensive (note: I’m not saying that they’re easy or cheap!). Road-space reallocation and traffic calming, for instance, can be very effective at improving both road safety and the relative public transport offering (directly or indirectly).

  13. Probably the CRL figures assume that an extra 65% of journeys to the city will be by car across an alternative bridge crossing. If this level of vehicle increase is so, does anyone have the remotest idea what roads /streets they might use?

    1. You’re calculation doesn’t make sense. Firstly the 13,200 is the number of people using rail in the AM peak if we don’t build the CRL and even if it was the correct figure, we don’t judge projects based on how they’ll perform over a single two hour period one year after opening.

        1. I get the point you think youre making but do you realize that your calculation is based on 2 hours of current use. I.e. you’ve just demonstrated that you are very bad with logic, math etc …

        2. Again, you don’t measure the usefulness of a project based on a two hour window on one day a year after completion, that’s idiotic. Over a 40 year period – which is how long projects are assessed – it will generate or positively impact probably billions of trips. That’s not to count the billions of development it’s already helping to spawn.

        3. To white ant the project further in a nonsensical fashion, perhaps Graeme you could divide $2.5B by zero, which equals infinity. That seems like a very lot indeed. I wonder what it all means?…

          The CRL is, in fact, quite cheap. It moves the equivalent of 12 lanes of motorway traffic at peak. How much would it cost to build a new 12 lane motorway into the middle of the CBD and how much would it cost to allow that traffic to disperse and park in the CBD? Tens of billions one imagines if it costs a couple of billion to build 6 lane waterview or 6 billion to build 6 lane AWHC.
          And it’s benefits are transformatively dramatic.

        4. Plus the train passenger needs a 60% subsidy so that adds another $100K odd to the cost – well over $300K all up. Would it not be cheaper to buy each passenger a brand new bus?

        5. Graeme, since the entire cost of the CRL will be covered by just these few thousand trips, all the other millions of trips need pay nothing at all towards it. So your point is…?

    2. I wonder if it’s possible that they could build something that can be used on more than one day. I mean, if they ARE planning on only using it once, it IS a bit of a waste.

  14. ^^^ yep too true.
    The CRL uses less land, and enables ‘more land’ to be available for development / re-development.

    Roading/car transport requires land or the road, or even if it does go underground, requires land in close proximity as ‘storage’ for the 8 or so hours those vehicles aren’t in use. Imagine trying to build an underground motorway system with underground ‘stacked’ parking garages …. Whoops!!! Did I just give NZTA a new idea :/

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