by Gareth Hughes
The New Zealand Transport Agency is consulting on the proposed Puhoi to Wellsford “Holiday Highway.” It got that affectionate name because Transport Minister Steven Joyce has his holiday home up there and it’s only really busy on public holidays, when Aucklanders flee the city north.
I urge you to make a submission, because if there was a poster-boy for motorway madness, or a clearer example of Steven Joyce’s big gamble, this is it.
It is part of the $11 billion, seven Roads of National (Party) Significance gamble announced last year and on this one section of motorway alone Joyce, will pour away$1.7 billion of our national wealth. As I asked him in Question Time, why are we are spending so much money on this road even though it has a benefit-cost ratio of only 0.8, which means that the Government is not even expecting to get an economic return from it?
$1.7 B is a massive amount of money and I’m concerned that this road wastes a huge chunk of our scarce transport resources not according to a rigorous assessment of the economic benefits, but rather, according to a misguided belief that building expensive infrastructure for high carbon, land hungry, job poor, imported cars and trucks is somehow good for the economy.
Coupled with the possible closure of the main trunk rail line north of Auckland, which will see more trucks on State Highway 1 and Northland’s roads the agenda is clear – this is a road of trucking significance.
I hope you can make a submission (you can make one here) and demonstrate to the Government Kiwis want real transport choices not just more white-elephant motorways. NZTA aren’t really asking people to say whether they actually want a highway or not – instead all the questions are about how it should be designed but I think it’s important to get as many people as possible to make submissions saying there’s better ways to invest our transport dollars.
You may want to point out connecting Whangarei’s Port to the main trunk line and encouraging more freight to use the rail along with State Highway One upgrades like safety improvements and a Warkworth bypass would be a better way to invest our transport budget.
I’d love to read your submission if you would like to forward it on to me – gareth.hughes[at] parliament.govt.nz
Published in Environment & Resource Management by Gareth Hughes on Tue, June 29th, 2010
Tags: steven joyce, transport
More posts by Gareth Hughes | more about Gareth Hughes
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
The New Zealand Transport Agency has kindly provided us with traffic data on the State Highway system going back to 1975, which can be found here – http://www.nzta.govt.nz/resources/state-highway-traffic-volumes/ . When you look at the data, you notice that State Highway 1 between Wellsford and Warkworth has an AADT of over 10,000 at its quietest point; while the AADT of State Highway 1 between Warkworth and Puhoi has an AADT of over 16,000 at its quietest point. This is similar to the figures that State Highway 1 south of Auckland had prior to the construction of the Waikato Expressway, and what the same State Highway north of Auckland had prior to the construction of the Albany to Puhoi Motorway. The fact of the matter is that it is only a matter of time before State Highway 1 north of Auckland becomes saturated.
And for that matter, you already have problems – try being stuck behind a truck on that road; generally speaking, you have to wait for the overtaking lane before you can safely overtake the truck and because of the number of vehicles that build up behind it, you might wait three or four overtaking lanes before you can actually pass that truck.
We also have the problem that Wellsford to Puhoi happens to be one of the most dangerous roads in the country, and probably one of the most dangerous primary routes. Between 2002 and 2006, 20 people died and 42 were injured on that section of road, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that horror record has gotten worse since then (if I remember correctly, there were six deaths on that road in 2009). I am old enough to remember when State Highway One south of Auckland was lined with crosses, and since that road was improved over half a decade ago, you have noticed that the number of fatalities has dropped to the point where it is non-existent.
No matter how much you hope, the railway will not compete. Currently, a truck can do Auckland to Whangarei in three hours, while the train takes seven. Even if you brought the line up to standard, it would still take five. The only way you could get the rail service to compete with trucking was if you realigned the railway line to go through Auckland’s North Shore and while I hope that it does happen one day, both you and I know that it would cost a fortune.
Ultimately, it is only a matter of time before State Highway 1 between Warkworth and Puhoi needs upgrading to dual carriageway standard, and you might as well have the line on the map ready for when the road is needed to Wellsford.
Finally, just before anyone accuses me of anything, I am of the view that we really need to ramp up our transport investment – while our neighbours and other countries overseas were investing in improved transport systems, we were flushing our funds down the toilet investing in methanol plants – we have a twenty year transport infrastructure deficit to catch up.
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Steven Joyce’s 38km motorway is nothing but a giant monument to himself. The particularly frustrating part about it is that the $1.6 billion (or whatever) this project will eat is desperately needed for other transport projects in Auckland: for example the CBD rail tunnel.
John-ston’s “yes we need to build the holiday highway, and a four-track CBD tunnel, and rail to the airport, and everything and we need it now” is of course correct in some respects, but completely and utterly unrealistic. There is only a certain amount of money available and we need to spend it as wisely as we can. The holiday highway is not a wise spend of those frugal funds.
The somewhat disturbing thing about the holiday highway is that it will mean the existing road is unlikely to be upgraded – I mean, why would you waste the money on upgrading a road that you’re going to bypass in the relatively near future? And that is the problem, because the most dangerous stretch of road (Dome Valley) desperately needs a full safety upgrade NOW, but won’t have its motorway upgrade completed until 2022. That’s another 12 years of 3-4 people dying on that stretch of road each year – a total of 30-40 needless deaths thanks to Mr Joyce and his monument building obsession.
So as I said earlier, the sensible option is clearly to spend a decent amount of money on a safety upgrade to SH1 right now. Median barriers, side barriers, extending passing lanes, ease a few nasty curves and so forth. Also, bypass Warworth to solve the worst of the congestion.
That ought to solve 90% of the problem for around 10% of the cost. It wouldn’t build Mr Joyce a monument though.
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Why is there only a certain amount of money available? Two reasons really; reason one is that our country’s economic growth has been stunted for the best part of forty years. The second reason is that we don’t have politicians who know the meaning of investment – I have quoted this before, and I’ll quote it again – the Queensland State Government are planning to spend A$85 billion on transport for South-East Queensland over the next twenty years. Even if a government were willing to put $50 billion into Auckland transport until 2026, you would see that a lot of things would get achieved.
We have to play catch up if we are going to be able to compete with the Australian centres, and even then I am not sure whether or not we will ever be able to catch up. I am more and more of the view that Muldoon’s investment in methanol plants was not only a waste of money, but meant that we fell behind, not only in the economic stakes, but also in infrastructure investment.
It will not solve the problem, it will simply delay it. A two-lane road starts hitting saturation point at around the 20,000 vehicles per day mark, and Warkworth to Puhoi is not far off that mark. I don’t think we can avoid the fact that there is a need for four-lanes to at least Warkworth, and you might as well make it a dual carriageway road to modern standards while you are at it. Also, if you are planning a route, you might as well at the very least prepare it as far as Wellsford.
Better known as the Auckland CBD rollercoaster.
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we don’t have politicians who know the meaning of investment. That is the problem with this project. As Jarbury points out the most urgent problems can be solved with *much* less money. Have you heard of “opportunity cost”?
As for the 3 hour/7 hour difference between rail and road. By that reasoning there is *no* excuse for sending logs by truck. That is a failure of regulation and imagination. Logging companies are externalising their costs onto the taxpayer because rail pays more of the real costs of shipping logs than road transport does (you and I pick up that tab).
peace
W
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The top half of the North Island is an economic region which needs high quality connectivity and mobility.
The three port cities – Whangarei, Auckland and Tauranga should be regarded as the points of an economic triangle.
The Auckland Whangarei rail line is a born loser.
Northland is a massive tourist destination. You call the road a holiday highway – some of us call it a tourist highway.
and there is massive road transport between the cities along the route and we are combining tourists and road freight on a low quality highway. Tourists deaths on our highways are not a good look.
The UK studies strongly suggest we should turn the rail link bed into a truck and bus highway and leave the existing road to light vehicles. The trucks can be electronically conveyed and be controlled through one way lanes in tunnels and bridges. The extra time is more than compensated for by the lower fuel use on level grades and with only one driver for say six trucks.
HIghly efficient because trucks can leave a factory, drive to the convoy point, the driver goes home making deliveries on an incoming truck, the convoy driver takes over, and then trucks are dispersed using local drivers along the way.
No train can compete with this system on any measure.
Tourists one route, freight on another. Cannot beat it.
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Secondly, why on earth would touriss care about saving 10 minutes off their travel time? Don’t they come to NZ to find interesting scenix roads, rather than straight highways in their homelands?
John-ston, we don’t have the money because we don’t have pixies at the bottom of the garden making it for us.
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The economic study found that virtually all the inter-city rail should be turned into bus-truck lanes.
However, they ran into the problem that large corporations and public departments share one failing – they are committed to their hardware rather than their service.
The transistor was invented in 1955.. There were ten top manufacturers of vacuum tubes at the time.
Twenty years later there were ten top manufacturers of transistors and vacuum tubes were virtually out of production. However, only one of the top ten vacuum tube manufacturers of 1955 were on the top ten list of manufacturers of transistors (or LSIs) in 1985. That single exception was Texas Instruments and they had specialised in making “acorn” vacuum tubes for the space industry and so had a strong focus on miniaturisation. I have mentioned the UK study to rail operators here and is like suggesting they sell their daughters into prostitution. They are focused on their hardware not their service.
And yes, tourists are not interested in maximum travel speed and are looking at the scenery, which is another reason to separate them from heavy trucks etc
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If the topic interests you read my 1995 paper on Tribal Marketing given to the AGM of Quest in Florida in 1995.
Ten years later the turntable manufacturers at least had learned the lesson and switched from turntables to CD players without blinking because they realised there were in the home entertainment business – not the turntable business.
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Jarbs, we don’t have the money because we have such a terrible economy. In Brisbane, the Clem7 tunnel opened in this year, and that cost A$3.2 billion. In Sydney, the Epping to Chatswood railway line opened in last year and that cost A$2.3 billion. If we are arguing over spending $4 billion on two pieces of infrastructure, then it is clear that something is significantly wrong with this place economically.
If we want to compete with the Australian centres, then we are going to need their quality of infrastructure.
Bliss, I have heard of opportunity cost, however, in this instance, if we are having to pick between two $2 billion projects, then something is wrong. If Auckland were an Australian centre, both projects would be constructed and probably something else thrown in for good measure (before anyone screams blue murder, I don’t think that Auckland should be an Australian centre – I was just making an observation). Also, we have fallen behind significantly in the infrastructure stakes because we had a Prime Minister who thought constructing methanol plants was a good idea.
The North Auckland Line was not a born loser, and was definitely useful at the time it was constructed. The main problem is that the alignment ceased to be competitive in the 1960s after the opening of the Auckland Harbour Bridge and only remained in contention because of the distance rules in place at the time. As an interesting aside, if we actually had politicians who knew the meaning of investment, then we might have had rail as part of the Auckland Harbour Bridge and the situation might be different today – instead we had a piece of infrastructure that ceased to be adequate a mere seven years after it was built (compared with its inspiration, the Sydney Harbour Bridge which remained adequate until the 1980s).
Actually, there is a perfectly good excuse in that instance – the Whangarei and Kinleith trains do not integrate all that well, and it can take up to 24 hours for a log to get from Whangarei through to Kinleith.
And what about the fact that Warkworth to Puhoi is rapidly approaching saturation point? Traffic on that road has gone up by 60% in the last decade and a bit.
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JOhn ston
Yes, rail was a viable and essential part of our transport network when it was built.
I meant to say “the proposed upgrading of the Whangarei Auckland lines is a born loser.”
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I’ve been doing some work into economic appraisal, and so talking about benefit/cost ratios in the NZTA context is rather fanciful, especially for a political party that so vehemently opposed using economic efficiency to ration transport spending over the years.
Quite simply the Greens don’t like benefit/cost analysis applied to railways or public transport the same as it is applied to roads.
However, the Greens are quite happy to use it when it makes a road project look lousy, but apply the SAME assumptions to a rail project and it’s not a winner.
The better analysis is to take the capital costs of the proposed motorway and depreciate over the life of the assets – some like land and earthworks should be spread over a very long period (say 90 years), whilst others have shorter depreciated lives. The revenue from the future road users (whether tolled or not, it still generates fuel tax and RUC) should be analysed to determine if it will pay for the improvements, and then economic analysis as to the net benefits/costs of the project.
I would say that taking into account the likely accident savings over the long term, and demand growth, it will probably be worth building at some point. The question is when.
Jarbury makes a good point, indirectly, it may be better to do parts of the upgrade now (Warkworth bypass), and plan for a larger scale increase. I suspect there are better road projects than this one.
However, the railway is a red herring. It should be run into the ground and closed. It has no future, except perhaps as a scenic cycleway. I suspect even Owen’s plan for a truckway would cost too much as the traffic density isn’t sufficient.
So the Greens could get what they want if they advocate transport funding based on revenue derived from users and economic efficiency. However, this would kill off many silly rail related projects as well because it would be about demand and pricing driving supply, not the wishful thinking of planners.
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Liberty, your economic analysis misses indirect benefits though. For public transport, NZTA calculates a pretty hefty benefit to road users from each additional PT trip – therefore it makes economic sense for road users to subsidise PT.
Similarly, getting a few hundred trucks off SH1 and onto the North Auckland line is going to have some pretty major benefits for road users, as it seems Owen recognises (though he’d rather it was a truckway, but let’s put that issue aside for a minute). The point is that economic benefits may well be maximised by road users subsidising the North Auckland Line, because the benefits to the road user may be greater than the subsidy.
I don’t know the exact data of course, but from looking at PT passenger data in Auckland it would seem that road users get around $3-4 in benefit from each dollar spent on PT subsidies, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see road users subsidising the NAL making good economic sense.
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Jarbs, don’t forget that the alignment of the North Auckland Line is not all that encouraging for its use. If you had the option of a truck shipping your goods in three hours, or the train taking five, which option would you take? A lot of businesses would take the faster option.
Really, if the North Auckland Line is going to be competitive with State Highway One, then you need a realignment to a high speed route through the North Shore – no level of improvements can fix the fact that the North Auckland Line between Auckland and Whangarei is about forty kilometres longer than State Highway One between those two centres.
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John-ston, you’re like a damn broken record on that one. Please go do some research into how much difference that 2 hour differential makes before mentioning it again. Please, for my sanity.
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Something that might be of use for you to remember – freight trains between Auckland and Christchurch take about two hours longer now than they did back in the 1990s. In that time, the market share of rail on that corridor dropped from 60% to 20%. A few hours can make the difference between a booming rail line and a route that is deserted.
Much of the freight that did exist on the North Auckland Line was switched over to barges in the late 1990s, so even then, the lions share of Auckland to Whangarei freight was done by truck.
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Jarbury
What counts to the freight mover is the time from point of origin to the final destination.
So as well as the difference in travel time between Auckland and Whangarei (whatever that means) think about the difference in travel time between the small factory in the Whau valley and the Warehouse in Kerikeri.
The modal changes take time and cost real money.
The Waterview connection will further advantage road transport because freight and passengers south of Auckland will be able to skirt the high congestion area of the CBD. This is why our 1965 plans for the network had that bypass route completed by 1985.
Once that route is in place and if land use changes are allowed to flow to where they want rather than where Dense Thinking says they should go, then employment etc will boom in West and North West Auckland and the demand for an additional crossing serving the CBD will almost certainly disappear.
We have to stop channelling all our north south traffic through the congested down town area.
If cities are allowed to churn congestion is largely self solving. HIgher densities increase congestion which decreases mobility which reduces employment opportunities and generates far more greenhouse gases than low congestion free flowing highways.
The average each way trip to work in Hong Kong is close to one hour.
The US low density cities have the lowest trip to work times (all cities over 500,000). Even New York manages a shorter trip to work time than any major cities outside of the US.
85 % of European trips are by private car. In the US its 95%. Not a great difference.
And in Europe the gas costs 7 – 10 dollars a gallon. Who loves the car the most?
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Owen, I would point out that journey to work times are not always a good measure. The video that you posted on the other post showed Sydney and Paris having a similar journey to work time, yet the average City Rail commuter travels nearly twenty kilometres to get to work, while the average Metro (I am lumping all of them together, so that includes the likes of the London Undergound, New York Subway, &c.) commuter travels around six kilometres to get to work.
You need to factor in both journey to work times and distance travelled. In a place such as Sydney, where you have a million people living in the Parramatta/Penrith/Richmond/Fairfield area, you are going to have massive journey to work times.
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I do not think time is actually the problem as most trucking is done overnight or over the day on a schedule. Most of us in business in Northland expect goods take around a day or a overnight to get here by truck. 8 to 12 hours.
I have a slightly different take on transport. Commuter travel which is most of our private travel can be easily replaced by electric cars and a good commuter system if the political will is there.
Leisure travel cannot be so easily replaced by sustainable means.
However there is an argument for improving intercity highways to make freight and leisure travel more efficient. The bypass has taken a 5th off the fuel bill for an Auckland Whangarei truck. (20% reduction in emissions) At the same time replacing commuter travel with electric cars (charged by, mostly, night time spinning reserve) and decent public transport would cut emissions and cost of commuting. (Rapid rail along motorway corridors). Buses which run largely empty during the day are not actually reducing emissions. A lease model would work for supply of electric cars so commuters do not have to own two cars. As a commuter electric cars can be simple low speed models.
Freight is a problem because we have a low population density so there are no easy answers. Replacing overnight trucking with a ro-ro ship service between Auckland and Whangarei is an obvious means of cutting emissions and costs. We had a lot of buy in from local trucking firms and business when we floated the idea. Rail needs to up its game in terms of efficiency and reliability to be a contender. The Government owning the tracks and allowing anyone to run rolling stock would help. Some things do work better with competition!
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I meant to add that efficient low speed electric cars built of composites is an opportunity for NZ to be leader. We already lead in composite technology and original engineering solutions.
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Kerry
Aluminium is a resource we can work with as well. Even better than composites in a number of ways – almost infinitely recyclable.
BJ
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True, but aluminium is rather resource hungry to produce and recycle. . I was at Waikato university last year where they are doing excellent research into sustainable composites. Flax as a fibre and vegetable based resins for instance.
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OUr opportunity in electric cars is not just with the composite technology.
Dr John Boys at Auckland university is also the world leader on non contact electric charging of vehicles. This means you can simply park your car over a plate (say by a parking metre) and it will charge or you can drive over a cable underground which either powers your car or charges its battery. This system is operating in factories all over the world.
But also there is a breakthrough in nano technology and enzyme technologies that promise to dramatically increase the energy density of lithium batteries.
The Dutch enzyme technology uses enzymes for organisms that grow in compost heaps and so work at higher than ambient temperatures. Well Roy Daniels and Hugh Morgan at Waikato have been researching the organisms and their enzymes that thrive in the boiling pools of Rotorua. I hope they get together.
For the enzymes look here:
http://www.dsm.com/en_US/html/media/press_releases/29_10_dsm_announces_breakthrough_in_technology_for_second_generation_biofuels.htm
And for nanotechnology look here:
Yesterday MIT scientists announced a breakthrough in the application of
> carbon nanotube technology to lithium-ion batteries. The MIT
> lithium-ion/nanotube technology doubles energy density and greatly increases
> energy delivery rate for small device battery applications. Further R&D
> will be directed toward scaling the technology toward larger scale
> applications such as automotive lithium-ion battery sets currently used in
> the Tesla roadster and slated for use in the Chevy Volt and the Fiskcar
> sedan. The article can be seen at:
> http://www.greenmuze.com/climate/energy/2761-mit-nanotube-batteries-.html
>
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Kerry
We have the electricity. The bauxite is readily available and we have the facility to produce the stuff here. Exporting it for someone else to turn it into fry-pans or fighter planes is the only other use for it. One cannot make a composite fry-pan.
It is NOT resource hungry in terms of recycling. Melting the scrap is much cheaper than separating it from its oxide in the first place. Throwing away an aluminium can is the nearest thing to sinful that I can imagine.
Problem with aluminium is that it is subject to fatigue and that is not a good look in an automobile frame.
I’m glad we’re still doing research. I’d probably start with bamboo, but it isn’t that important, both tracks need to be followed. It is important to retain the ability to make and use aluminium, and it is better used, and recycled, here than overseas. The metals are important to our civilization… even if they are a non-renewable. As Sapient observes, pure sustainability is not actually possible. We must do the best we can, and we must escape from the bottom of this gravity well before we use up everything we can reach.
respectfully
BJ
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