This is a guest post from Sydney reader Nik Clement

After 2 years in Auckland I moved back to Sydney just over a year ago. While in Auckland, I went to the opening of Puhinui station and used it a fair bit, living in Manukau Central and being able to walk to Puhinui station, more often taking the Airport Link to meet up with both Southern Line, Eastern Line or Southern Express Rail buses, during periods of track maintenance, which happened frequently. My time in Auckland was great, the freedom of working from home and not owning a car made a number of my friends look at me like I was a little strange.

When the Metro extension opened a few weeks ago I started thinking about what would actually be of interest to Greater Auckland readers and what hadn’t already been said. In this post I’d like to discuss how it compares to CRL and Auckland in general, as the videos I’ve seen on social media are great, but don’t provide a lot of context.

The metro extension is from Chatswood to Sydenham

Sydney is a lot like Auckland, a harbour, a bridge, some ferries, some hospitals, some airports (one main one and some others for general aviation or defence), some industrial and some malls/retail. The general areas, North Shore, Western suburbs, Eastern Suburbs and South are roughly analogous. The Sydney basin is about 3 times as big in terms of land area and population. Things in Sydney are just bigger.

What does it connect?

The stations themselves are not islands and the things around them provide the context for why they are where they are and the communities that they support. I’ve listed the stations from North to South.

  • Chatswood – This is the end of the previous section of the Metro. To me it’s like a metropolitan centre, with some offices and a mall and some other shops, effectively like Takapuna, but a fair bit bigger, the mall being more the size of Albany. There are also similarities to Newmarket.
  • Crows Nest – This is within walking distance of the St Leonards station, with its Transit Oriented Development (TOD) and one of Sydney’s major Hospitals (Royal North Shore). Around Crows Nest station itself is a bit of TOD, some retail and restaurants, to me it’s similar to Ponsonby or Newtown, if they had stations.
  • Victoria Cross – This is a short walk to the current North Sydney station, along with the associated office buildings surrounding the area. The CBD has started spreading across the bridge to North Sydney as land values forced businesses to think about rent costs and location, prior to COVID. I think of it like Smales Farm, if it was a train station rather than a bus station. This also has similarities to Newmarket.
  • Barangaroo – This is at the Northern end of the Barangaroo precinct with the wharf and the pathway to Wynyard, along with the restaurants and office buildings all to the south. This is similar to Britomart station.
  • Martin Place – This is a CBD station that interchanges with one line, the T4 that goes from Bondi to the south, splitting at Sutherland, with one branch heading to Cronulla and the other to Waterfall, which is effectively the edge of Sydney at the south. It is like what I think Te Waihorotiu station will be like.
  • Gadigal – Another CBD station, a short walk to Town Hall station, which is one of the big three stations in Sydney. I think of it like what Te Waihorotiu station will be.
  • Central – Central station is situated at the southern edge of the CBD and is one of the big three stations, connecting to both Light Rail corridors and plenty of Bus connectivity, including the frequent services to Canberra. It also caters to Regional and Intercity rail from the terminating platforms (1-13). The footprint of this station is big, when the rail replacement buses for the Inner West line are running, they start from stops inside the perimeter of the station. To me it is like taking the Wellington Central station and adding Newmarket station to it.
  • Waterloo – This station is to the south of Redfern, the third of the big three stations in Sydney. Urban renewal is gentrifying this once rundown and fairly industrial part of the city, with low rise apartments (up to about 6 stories), with height limits imposed due to the proximity of Sydney Airport. I struggle to come up with a comparative place in Auckland where TOD has actually taken hold, maybe Mt Eden when the redevelopment starts after CRL construction finishes.
  • Sydenham – This is the end of this stage of the Metro extension. This station is surrounded by a mix of light industrial and some retail, more like factory shops than malls. It is the closest station to the Tempe IKEA. I think of this like Penrose, primarily for the junction components and the industrial.
View from outside Barangaroo station looking south – Nik Clement

What is impressive

There are two things that I think are impressive.

  • The first is the speed, by building a separated network, you can get to Sydenham to Central in about 5 minutes, or Barangaroo in about 10 minutes. Barangaroo and Martin Place are important because they are the closest to Wynyard, which is where most of the buses that go to the North Shore pass through, making it a key mode interchange point.
  • The second is the scale of the stations, they are designed to load and unload large volumes of people. I took the following photo at Central, you’ll notice there are three escalator banks, each with three in each bank, with current off peak headways of 10 minutes, they may not be needed, but in 20 years, will it be enough?
Metro Platforms at Central Station – Nik Clement

What isn’t so great?

The ride quality says 40 year old tracks that riders of Auckland’s under maintained network would feel right at home with, rather than brand new track built to the latest standards of international best practice. I sat at end of a carriage and it jumped around enough that it was distracting.

Whats next

There are three extensions to the network currently underway:

  • Southwest – Sydenham to Bankstown. This is the conversion of some existing passenger lines to use metro trains. Most of the stops are suburbs, housing and some shops. Bankstown is an urban centre, with Otahuhu being what I think of, having an airport and a hospital close but not within walking distance and a sizeable bus interchange collocated.
  • West -City to Westmead. This is a relief line that will speed up travel between the city centre and the second centre of Parramatta, with the end point being Westmead, which has one of the big four hospitals as its main attraction.
  • Western Sydney Airport Line. This connects the under construction Western Sydney Airport to the main western rail line at St Mary’s. For me this is like a first stage of a bigger plan. I compare it to building a new airport at Waimauku or Kaukapakapa, building the transit solution to be fantastic new metro, then connecting that metro to the existing system at a station like Ranui or Sturges Road. The travel time is going to make passenger flights to the new airport a bit of a time sink, so it might not have the widest reach possible at first.
The currently planned and potential future metro lines

These are interesting and necessary projects, although City to Westmead and the airport line will be using different power systems (25kv AC v 1500v DC) to the existing metro line. To form the circle around the city that current maps beg to create, would be an expensive challenge.

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36 comments

  1. You Sydneysiders think that’s cool, well we got a $20 a week tax cut instead of infrastructure like this. Any day now I expect plane loads of Aussies to come over to A̶o̶t̶e̶a̶r̶o̶a̶ New Zealand to also enjoy the $20 in cold hard cash (assuming they can find a job that pays enough to receive it).

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        3. Grant that is a great video, it makes a lot of sense.
          It seemed like the only real advantage of PPPs is that a private company will make more efficient design decisions given the chance to do so. Of course a private company could instead be engaged to just do the design without the government forcing a bad design (e.g. government choosing LR over metro).

        4. “a private company will make more efficient design decisions given the chance to do so”

          The opposite in practice. Any incentive they have to be efficient on operations and maintenance is far offset by the lending partners incentive to make the capital project as massive and inefficient as possible, so that they can lend as much money as possible to a government at guaranteed rates of return.

        5. Watch that video link I posted. I think the public component can design the stations for example so they are not over the top in terms of scope and cost. Then the private will build it as efficiently as possible.

        6. That’s just normal though, client designs and lets a construction contract. Construction company tries to do it a quickly as the can for the fixed fee and then shift as much as possible to variations for more money.

          A PPP doesn’t change that, except they benefit double from variations because they lend the extra money for it too.

  2. CLR is really more like the Sydney City Circle than the Metro, -linking up historic network rather than creating an additional one. Interestingly the CRL is arriving when Auckland has pretty much a similar population to Sydney did when that was completed in 1956.

    The glaring deficiency is the lack of a rail harbour crossing, which Sydney has had since the bridge opened in 1932, and in how widespread the Sydney suburban and ex-urban rail network is in general compared to AKL’s.

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    1. Sydney city circle only took until 1956 to complete because of the great depression and ww2, it was planned to have been finished in the 1930s same with the eastern suburbs line (finished 1979 to a different alignment) and the southern suburbs line (finished 1999 as a completely different project via the airport). The northern beaches line also planned then has never been finished, there was also a second city circle planned that didn’t happen, and metro west being built now is basically the other project approved at the time that never got built via the inner west.

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  3. The third main is getting some use as a test track trying out some of the new units between Puhinui and Papatoetoe stations.
    Meanwhile Middlemore is progressing. It will be good to see how the third main and the Pukekohe electrification are bedded into the network.

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  4. Auckland had an opportunity to build a metro style spine with ALR (and which should have been renamed Auckland Metro). It could have delivered similar benefits and enough capacity to last well into the future. It would have been the sort of thing other transport modes could have connected with, such as cross-town buses or trams / articulated buses. It is interesting seeing Sydney forge ahead with this infrastructure while we flounder further behind. Isthmus rapid transit is going to be decades away in Auckland and by the time it’s looked at again, it will be even more expensive and challenging to build.

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    1. Sydney forged ahead with it when it started to run into capacity constraints with the original lines through the CBD.

      This is what we should be doing in 30 years when the CRL starts to hit these constraints.

      There were a number of things that killed ALR, but one of them was that we were going to duplicate the CRL almost immediately after building it.

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    2. Yes Sam, but only in a parallel universe where such a grandiose scheme had a chance of actually proceeding. The political naivety of proposing such a bold plan while the currently biggest ever and similar kind of project is still underway, still in the awkward phase of disrupting, having cost increases, and of course being unproven (cos not yet open), and in the same city, was impressive indeed.

      I do wish the political reality was such that there was cross party consensus on the need for top order transit systems in our one city of scale (and appropriately sized ones for our other cities too). The understanding of the economic and social value of same and therefore the will to find the money, and sustain the investments required.

      But alas…

      Post CRL, assuming AT and KR can actually run it well, we will get another chance. Let’s deploy a lot more cunning, practicality, and openness next time.

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      1. Had Labour made it metro a lot more voters would have got on board with it and National might have found it harder to cut. People have used metro overseas and know its great, but LR is associated with slow trams.

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        1. Well it was made into a Metro, but the detail was kept secret, and was still called Light Rail, none of which was wise. Is pretty clear the scale became both unbelievable, and too easy to attack by their opponents.

          We are all the losers here.

      2. Hard to honestly see a way forward for isthmus & southwestern RTN that isn’t going to have a lot of caveats now.

        KiwiRail wants the Avondale-Southdown line, but I fear using it for an airport line would have subpar frequencies. Heavy rail from Onehunga involves closing and rebuilding the existing branch and doesn’t address the Isthmus. Heavy rail from Puhinui does nothing for the Isthmus OR Mangere, and any heavy rail option is likely going to be as expensive as the ALR plan was.

        Light rail’s name has been tarnished by how it was mismanaged, and by using existing road space it goes against the current govt’s “more lanes, cars are oppressed” culture war. NACT would really have to noticeably fuck up traffic to get public opinion to swing back in favour of at-grade modern trams

        Metro would be seen more favourably than surface or tunnelled light rail, but again; super expensive and either geotechnically challenging (if tunnelled) or a NIMBY hot potato (if elevated)

        So we’re either going to need to figure out how to convince the NZ public that we need to either cough up for an ‘ideal’ transit solution or make compromises on speed and capacity

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        1. Great post, 100% agree. I think the only option that will get traction now is a much better electrified bus system, such as extending the NEX to airport via Dominion Road with 24×7 bus lanes. Which may well be the best bang for buck solution anyway.

        2. If the ‘trackless tram’ trial on the northern busway works out, the lowest hanging fruit might be convincing the tarmac huffers that driverless buses actually need a dedicated right-of-way and can’t just magically coexist with general traffic

        3. The Avondale southdown line is good for passengers and also useful for freight. It’s underrated. And importantly it’s more achievable. needs to be seen as just one step of a bigger plan though , rather than seeing it as the perfect answer.

        4. MRB my questions with the ASL as the basis for an airport heavy rail link are that it creates a situation where Grafton may no longer be connected to a CRL bound line. Two lines out the Maungawhau end (to Swanson and the Airport) interlined with the two out the Quay Park end (to Pukekohe via Parnell, and Manukau). Yes, the Central Connector BRT serves Grafton and the hospital better, yes you could still have the Crosstown-Onehunga rail service pattern through Grafton, and yes you could add a third South-East operating pattern through the CRL (though this would cap peak frequencies at no more than 10 minutes which i see as undesirable, 10 minutes should be minimum offpeak frequency)

          Speaking of frequency KiwiRail’s intent seems to be only allowing a 15 minute Henderson-Glen Innes service on the ASL if built, in the

          My other concern with the ASL is that the current designation does not interchange with Onehunga or Te Papapa stations at all, and we would just end up having 3 transit stations in Onehunga all a 5-10 minutes walk apart. Not good for connectivity and transfers. I would prefer consolidation at one hub at least for passenger. The 2008 Beca report into southwestern rapid transit posited building the existing ASL alignment for freight, and also a SH20-parallelling alignment between Mt Roskill and Onehunga for passenger service; meeting with the Onehunga line and Airport rail at the current station.

        5. I’ve said plenty of times on here so won’t blabber on to much. But my favored running pattern with the asl is to connect it straight into the eastern line on one end and have it turn back at avondale to the crl and then back down the eastern line to run an isthmus circle line. Swanson through crl to southern line and pukekohe. And Managawhau to onehunga then airport and through to manukau branch.

        6. Manukau and the Airport not connected to central Auckland? Yeah, nah, I have my reservations about that. They’re major destinations and should be connected to the City Rail Link.

          Circle lines – good in theory, but I hope in your plan you’d be willing to stump up the extra billions to quadruple track the ASL, the Western Line, and the Eastern Line. Everyone cites the Yamanote line as a successful loop service but fails to mention that it has its own pair of tracks separate from other passenger and freight services.

          My ideal network would be Swanson to Airport via CRL; Onehunga to Manukau via Avondale, CRL, and Panmure; Pukekohe to Otahuhu via Newmarket, CRL, and Panmure; each running at 6-8TPH at peak. Alternatively a two line system Swanson to Airport and Pukekohe to Manukau both via the CRL, where each line could do 9-12TPH at peak.

          Then a 4TPH crosstown service from Henderson to Manukau via the ASL and Onehunga; plus express trains to Pukekohe and Pokeno terminating at Britomart.

        7. There is such a thing as a good transfer with any of these running pattern ideas. So as long as frequency is not killed with weird patterns to give one seat rides I’m happy.

        8. True, I think potential operational concerns and passenger demand needs to be factored into operating patterns though. Transferring to get from the city, or a current eastern line station, to Manukau which was the 7th busiest train station in Auckland in 2019, seems like a stretch to me

        9. Going a bit further the manukau, airport, onehunga, mangawhau line woils ne the omr to carry on to the north shore. How or when that would happen im not sure. But step by step. Nothing will be perfect initially. Also the asl /isthmus circle line can carry on through avondale through the park to unitec station then pt chev, zoo, grey lynn and them motorwya back to crl.
          Also freight wont be an issue on the asl as it would be a few trains per day which can just run off peak.

        11. KiwiRail’s plans from the Auckland Rail Programme Business Case specify 2 freight services per hour with a path width of 15 minutes; and the speculative Avondale-Airport heavy rail pattern from the ALR appendices also limited ASL passenger service to 4TPH at peak and 2TPH off-peak. So not “a few trains a day off-peak.”

          However to be fair, the same plan also specifies 2 freight services per hour with a path width of 10 minutes further along the Western Line, even when there’s all-day 12 trains per hour as far as Henderson and 8 trains per hour out to Swanson. Maybe it’s an error, maybe it’s optimistic – the report doesn’t exactly go into detail, it’s just a label on diagrams.

          A North Shore rail link, second (and third?) city rail tunnels, and Northwestern Motorway heavy rail seem like very expensive items on your wish list with long construction times, and something that would take decades, just saying. I don’t know if it would pose any cost advantages at this point over something like light metro, cost or capacity wise.

          Yes, nothing will be perfect initially but I still disagree with your idea to sever major destinations like Manukau or the Airport from the central city without a transfer; and my preference would be to shift that transfer to the crosstown journeys that your loop line tries to cater for with a single seat trip.

        12. Very optimistic for freight. Before the nal was shut due to the landslides, it ran one freight return service per day leaving auckland at 0500 (before suburban trains started) and returned into auckland around midnight (after suburban trains had largely finished) .
          If we imagine that northport grows to be like the port of tga, then, at its busiest pot ran 14 trains (7 returns) per day between tga and southdown , so roughly 1 train per 3.5 hours in each direction.
          So i dont believe there is a requirement initially to make the asl 4 tracks. 2 will suffice.

          A couple of things about the cbd. I think eventually they will have to separate things out more in the cbd anyway in the future. The crl is ok but doesnt really create the metro lines/separation we need. Id like them to make more use of grafton gully.
          Also id say that sometimes its better to build a strategic network in the best location and allow the city to develop around it over the next few decades rather than trying to bring the rail lines close to existing built up areas.

        13. Just going by what KiwiRail’s plans say.

          I agree with seperated lines under/through the central city; if not that they have to be heavy rail. ALR were onto something with the east-west tunnel under Wellesley Street between Wynyard Quarter and the universities; i think there ought have been the scope to have a hospital station as well across grafton gully

          Not sure I fully agree on your last point; yes public transit shapes cities but at the same time severing the ‘second CBD’ from the first – not to mention the Eastern Line stations it currently is linked to – before a new city link is constructed doesn’t sit right with me.

          To be fair and self-critical I find it easier to conceptualise short-to-medium term rail operating patterns than the long term ones. There was a good fantasy map on reddit recently that posited an alternate 2025 where failed proposals like Onehunga-Airport rail and the western half of the ASL as far as Hillsborough Rd were built.

        14. In terms of severing the second cbd from the first, i dont mind it. Its a temporary solution until perhaps some north shore connection is made.

          Manukau loses connection to the easterm line but gains connection to the airport, onehunga and newmarket, then maybe as a future thing take grafton station through park ave behind the hospital with a station there, over grafton gully to have a nice terminal station near Wellesley y/symonds st?. Thats as central city as anything else. I guess we wont know until they decide how and where they want to go over the harbour.

          The benefit of running that pattern i think is it manages to separate the manukau branch from the southern line. (but with a transfer station at puhinui or around there) Thus reducing wasted services and congestion near westfield and making it more metro like.

          Lastly back to the original point of the asl being built, and running as part of a circle line,
          circle lines are more useful than only having linear radial lines by creating networks rather than all lines leading to one point and then coming back out again. I think auckland has a great opportunity to define its network by building it. Hope they take it. I remember living near the circle line in seoul, and its brilliant. Instead of the cbd being defined by the couple of sq km around queen st, the circle line will come to define the centre of auckland, and living anywhere on the circle line will be akin to living with the connectivity of the cbd.

        15. Still disagree on your Manukau routing or forcing passengers to transfer to get to Sylvia Park-Orakei stations and the city centre.

          Airport to Manukau already has an RTN allocated – the Airport to Botany rapid transit corridor will be very good as an orbital route – or radial, if you’re counting Manukau as a city centre and transit hub of its own – and with tunnelling northeast from Manukau train station technically and economically challenging a busway or light rail solution is best for that corridor.

          A circuitous routing seems indirect for citybound passengers from Wesley, Mt Roskill, and Hillsborough; perhaps via the inner Western Line would be time-competitive to optimised BRT/LRT along Sandringham/Dominion/Mt Eden Rds, but something that has to run up to Pt Chev and then head citybound via the motorway corridor is excessive to me. (Similar reason for my hesitancy with airport heavy rail from Avondale, it’s even more indirect than the ALR Sandringham Rd route and would be 5+ minutes slower than an Onehunga line extension from downtown to Mangere & the Airport)

          I really don’t think there is any disadvantage to transfers between high-frequency services; else the hub and spoke bus network revamps wouldn’t have been so successful; and I personally would not mind having to change trains on a crosstown journey that you want your circle line to cater to.

          Suppose we have to agree to disagree. Whatever best meets demand patterns and guarantees 10-minute off-peak service at every station, I guess.

  5. Everyone raves about the Sydney rail project but they seem to have missed a couple of important points .First it was 5 years late being delivered and cot twice the original price which seems to be common with PPP projects .For example here Transmission Gully and the holiday hiway north of Auckland both were late delivery and had to be propped up by government even though they were essentially private owned roads

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