The higher cost of a “cheaper” CRL

Almost two years after leaving as chief executive of City Rail Link Ltd to deliver Dublin’s MetroLink, Dr Sean Sweeny is back. And back in the news, critiquing the cost of the project he once headed.

While I get the points he’s making, and agree with some of them, his comments suggest he’s perhaps too focused on the individual project, at the expense of the massive benefits it delivers to the wider network. A case of not being able to see the rail forest for the CRL trees.

Here’s the whole interview with Katie Bradford.

The CRL-specific comments start from just after five minutes in.

Sweeney: I do believe we’re not very good at specifying the scope and I do believe in New Zealand we’re over-specifying jobs and it’s making them too expensive which means we do less of them.

Bradford: So are you saying that you think the City Rail Link was over-specified, overengineered, too expensive, basically?

Sweeney: Well, I’m not going to make any friends for saying this, but in a nutshell, yes. Uh, I’ve spent the last nearly two years spending a lot of time in Europe. I’ve spent a lot of time with the people who built the Copenhagen metros. They have been brutally disciplined about how they’ve specified scope and they’ve built very small, very affordable stations all through Copenhagen at a quarter of the cost of CRL.

Bradford: How much cheaper do you think we could have had the CRL?

Sweeney: I think we could have delivered this for half the cost, but it would have looked different.

Bradford: What would it have looked like?

Sweeney: The stations would have looked quite industrial, and they they would have been smaller, and they wouldn’t have had anywhere near the extra facilities in them.

Bradford: You were the CEO. Could you not see that those costs were too expensive? Should you have stepped in and stopped that?

Sweeney: I probably didn’t have the experience in building metro stations. Then we asked before we got re-funded. We were asked by government to look at any places we could save [and] KiwiRail were asked and they came back and said they couldn’t find anywhere to save money and I didn’t have the expertise or the background to challenge them.

If that was me now, I would I would have reacted quite differently to it. But you really need to get in when the designs are being done. When I turned up the designs were done.

This is all in the scope and the specification, and that’s with the designers and most designers like to do their last job and most of the metro people on City Rail Link, their last job was London Underground. Okay. Australia, England, Hong Kong, Singapore build the most expensive metros in the world and all those people are in the same ecosystem and we use those people.

Bradford: Why are ours so much more expensive?

Sweeney: There’s a number of things. One [is] the size: CRL has gone for nine-car trains. Copenhagen, they have three-car trains. They have uh three cars, stations 60m long. Our stations [are] 200m long. They have two escalators, one up, one down. Uh, we have between six and eight escalators depending on where you’re at.

I remember talking to one of the lead guys who designed their stations. I went to their station, said, “Where’s the toilets?” He said, “There are none.” I said, ‘Why not?’ He said, “Sean, we run trains every minute and a half. Why should we provide a toilet when you’re going to be here less than 80 seconds?

They have … a really stripped down, lean version of what you need for a metro and as a result, it’s cost a quarter of what we pay for ours.”

Bradford: So, that decision to go to the nine-car platform station, were you CEO when that decision was made? Yes. Why did you approve that decision?

Sweeney: Well, there was a bunch of work done before I arrived. It was a decision that was on the table when I arrived, but all the recommendations were nine-car. To be fair, everyone was terrified of another Auckland Harbor Bridge, and they were terrified of within two years the whole railway being over capacity and that was a genuine concern at the time. So, the decision was made to go nine-car. I now know that nine-car versus three-car probably doubles the cost. The decision really needed to be made at the beginning. It was too late when we’d done a lot of the work then.

I would now say, okay the the trains will be full at capacity. We’ll just run them more regularly. That would have been my answer now.

Bradford: So it was about future-proofing the stations. Right. Yeah that’s what it was. And so in 20 years, 30 years time, maybe people will thank you for that decision.

Sweeney: Well, okay, the flip[side] of that too is, every metro that’s successful gets too crowded. Because I’ve spent the last two years going around Europe. When your metros are super-crowded, you build more metros. That’s simply what they do.

Every metro that’s successful is busy and overcrowded, then they add more lines.

Bradford: And so, but … again, does that come back to our lack of experience here in New Zealand, because we have never built something like this before?

Sweeney: Well, as I think I said, the people who designed CRL basically based it off previous metros they done – probably Sydney, London, Singapore, Hong Kong. These are all expensive metros. We just happen to have bought an expensive metro.

From what we’ve seen via images and footage of tours currently being granted to various stakeholders (CRL/AT: call us!), the stations look fantastic. It would be useful to clarify exactly how much the artwork added to the bottom line cost of the stations. While every little bit adds up, of course, my guess is the artwork – which is spectacular – probably isn’t the part that led to the total cost being $5.5 billion.

So it seems the main cost savings Sweeny is now musing about, would have to have come from having smaller stations. He mentions Copenhagen as a model. So the question becomes: yes, small (automated) metros with high train frequencies – like Copenhagen’s – are great, but could that have worked here, and more importantly, would it have cost less?

Currently, at peak times each of Auckland’s three main lines sees a train in each direction every 10 minutes, or 6 trains an hour. When CRL opens, we’ll have…. exactly the same, but Auckland Transport says that within six months, it wants to raise this to 8 trains an hour. Almost all trains will be 6-car trains.

Now, picture a world in which CRL was built only to accommodate three-car trains. In that world, running the same level of capacity would require 12 trains per hour now, and 16 trains per hour within six months of opening. And remember, that’s on each of three lines.

So all up, you’d be needing to run 32 trains an hour through the CRL, in each direction. Just to maintain current and promised levels of service.

Would this have been possible for Auckland? Four thoughts here:

1. 1. To achieve those levels of frequency, you’d need to upgrade the signalling system. It has previously been said that the CRL will be able to handle up to 24 trains per hour per direction, so enabling even higher would require a completely new system. I don’t know how much that would cost but it’d be at least in the hundreds of millions.
   2. Next: the testing in January saw around 20 trains an hour running through the CRL. And as we know, it quickly suffered from congestion, especially at key points around the network. AT has since cut some of the complexity out of their immediate plans, but that experience highlights that to achieve even moderately higher frequencies than now, would require things like grade-separating the Westfield and Wiri junctions. Which would add a few more hundreds of millions to the bill, at the very least.
   3. Then we have the ongoing issue of level crossings. AT was initially going to run fewer trains out west, simply to avoid putting more trains through the level crossings that exist. So, going to 16 trains per hour per direction would probably mean the barrier arms would be down for so much of the time that the level crossings might as well be closed. For some crossings, that would be fine – but many others will need grade separation to maintain access, so that’s immediately a few billion more that’s needed.
   4. And there’s also the issue of freight. Put simply, at the kinds of frequencies suggested there would be no room for freight trains. So you’d need to further extend the third main line, and likely delivering at least some of the fourth main would have been required – which adds another few billion added to the tab.

So, sure: perhaps we might have been able to save a few billion on construction costs of this one project by building smaller platforms for the CRL stations.

But to compensate for the inevitable impacts, we’d have needed to spend far more than that upgrading the wider network. (Note: those projects are needed eventually, but having to spend that money upfront is a massive opportunity cost, and may even have been prohibitive to the whole project getting off the ground.)

Lastly: even if you tried the Copenhagen model, there simply wouldn’t even be much additional capacity in the system. Some of the best metros have managed to get down to a train about every 90 seconds – or 40 trains an hour – which is not much more than the 32 per hour that would needed just to run the timetable we’ll have shortly after opening.

How much could have been saved by not rebuilding the old western line platforms at Maungawhau?

What about future-proofing for 9-cars?

While I think that the idea of only building the CRL for 3-car trains wouldn’t work – or at least, would have cost far more – the future-proofing question is perhaps a more interesting discussion point.

In the future, if more capacity is needed I would certainly rather AT focused on adding that by way of more frequency before making trains longer. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it was the wrong decision to future-proof for 9-car trains.

As Sweeny himself notes in the interview, back when the design was changed to enable 9-car trains, the fear was that the capacity being added by the project wouldn’t be enough long-term. That’s because back then the rail network was growing significantly following electrification, and crucially, was exceeding ridership expectations.

What is not clear is just how much that future-proofing has cost. Back when it was announced in 2019, CRL said it would add $250 million to the cost of the project. The project subsequently increased in cost by about another billion dollars, to $5.5 billion – mostly due to the impacts of COVID. We don’t know what proportion of that additional billion is due to the future-proofing .

What we do know is it wasn’t just about 9-car trains. The future-proofing included funding the Beresford Square entrance for Karanga-a-Hape station – something that should have been part of the project all along, and will likely be the most popular (and iconic!) entrance for that station.

Where Sweeny makes sense

While I don’t agree with his comments about the CRL specifically, I do think he’s correct about how Aotearoa approaches major infrastructure projects in general.

Perhaps the best example (aside from the RoNS) is Auckland Light Rail, where a workable and essentially shovel-ready plan for surface light rail somehow blew up into building one mega underground light metro line. For the same budget, we could have had – and might already have been enjoying! – two or three surface light rail lines. Which we can all see would have been a better overall outcome for Auckland, and for the country.

I also think Sweeny’s comments about how the more escalators you have at a station, the more it will cost more to run long-term (because of maintenance, etc), are relevant to some other stations around the network. In particular, the new stations between Papakura and Pukekohe.

A glaring inconsistency

At numerous moments in the interview, Sweeney notes that we as a country only have a limited budget to be able to build things, so we need to get more out of that budget. For example:

Sweeney: I think there is there is an acknowledgement within some in the industry that we have a tendency to gold-plate projects. I’m not the only one using the word gold-plating by the way. Yeah. It’s out there.

Bradford: And and so how do we now turn around and say let’s stop gold-plating projects? Let’s go back to basics?

Sweeney: Well, it’s complicated. I mean I I’ll use the example of two stadiums. the Dunedin Stadium and the new Christchurch Stadium. The Dunedin Stadium cost a quarter of the new Christchurch Stadium. Everyone in Christchurch is incredibly proud of the new stadium. Did they need all of that for four times the cost?

I think New Zealand, where it is in the world at the moment, needs to do more Dunedin stadiums and less Christchurch. Now, everyone in Christchurch is going to hate me for saying that, but we’re not an infinitely wealthy country. It’s about spending our money wisely to do more with less.

Which is striking, because then when he’s asked about a harbour crossing, he opts for far and away the most exorbitantly expensive option.

Bradford: Do you think … based on your experience, do you have a preferred, you know, should it be a tunnel should it be a bridge?

Sweeney: So, I’ve done no detailed engineering work on this… my view is it should be a tunnel. What I’ve learned … in my last eight years [is] tunneling is getting cheaper and cheaper and safer and better, and I think we could we could do a very good solution with tunnels.

It seems at least in part as a result of Sweeney’s comments, Transport Minister Chris Bishop has launched a review of the CRL.

Bishop said in a statement to 1News on Thursday he had “a lot of respect” for former CRL boss Sean Sweeney and took his views “seriously”.

“Like everyone, I’m unhappy at the cost of CRL,” Bishop said.

“I am determined to do a post-completion full review of the project, which is something not often done in New Zealand.

“This review needs to look at the history of the project, along with the business case(s), and costings. It also needs to look at missed opportunities.

“I’ve been open about how CRL was only really ever envisaged as a transport project when it is so much more than that.”

Logically, shouldn’t we also expect an advance value-for-money review of ideas for the next harbour crossing – and the Roads of National Significance as well?

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