by Gareth Hughes
New research just out shows the majority of Aucklanders want the new link to the North Shore to include rail. The UMR research found 79% favour the inclusion of rail.
Like Jarbury, I’m not sure that another road link will be needed at all, given that oil prices are going to stay high, and traffic volumes on the Harbour Bridge have already been falling for the past few years.
But if another link is needed and the money is available to invest in an expensive and long-lived infrastructure project, it makes more sense to link up the North with the rest of Auckland’s fast-growing rail network.
At the moment the NZTA is treating rail as an option – one of those ‘nice to have’s’ in Bill English’s language, not an integral option. Ultimately I don’t care if it’s a tunnel or a bridge as long as it has rail. Rail-only would be the most economic option!
Obviously the North Shore Busway is working well but we need to start thinking now for rail in the future to accommodate Auckland’s growth and prepare for an oil-constrained future.
The key project before a rail link North or South to the Airport, of course is the CBD Rail Loop which would transform Britomart’s and the wider Auckland rail networks capacity. It would also revitalise the CBD by encouraging more jobs and residents to locate around the 3 proposed new inner city stations. The Government should start funding for the CBD rail project in May’s Budget (it can be spread over ten years) so Auckland can get moving, and build on the highest public transport patronage in decades to eventually get rail north.
Published in Environment & Resource Management by Gareth Hughes on Mon, April 4th, 2011
Tags: auckland harbour bridge, rail, second waitemata crossing, transport
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on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Not just that, but also to accommodate the fact that the Fanshawe Street bus lanes will probably hit capacity around 2019 – and once it hits capacity, then you have problems.
Whilst that is possible, the station infrastructure for Auckland has not been designed for 300m long trains (that would be roughly a twelve car set assuming that each three car EMU was around 72m long). The other issue of course is that such operations would overwhelm the CBD Loop not long after a North Shore Line opened, basically leading us back to square one.
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BUt where is the evidence that Central Auckland is going to increase its population over the next thirty years?
If it does it will be against the trend where central cities are losing population while the inner and outer suburbs are where growth is taking place.
And we need to ask why a North Shore CBD rail link would be justified when the rail tunnel from New Jersey to Manhattan Island has just been abandoned because the costs were spiralling out of control.
Finally, one should not make infrastructure investment decisions on the basis of opinion polls – especially when the options are assumed to be cost free.
What a train can carry is a totally irrelevant statistic. It is what a mode does carry that counts – and the key figure is the whole of day loading. Auckland is a tiny town and the whole of day loadings will be miniscule and easily beaten by private vehicles. A car is always 25% loaded.
And no matter what happens to oil prices we are not going to abandon the point to point efficiency and convenience of private vehicles. Oil is simply the most convenient and cheapest energy source. It’s cheaper to replace a fleet that reform our cities – which won’t deliver different outcomes anyhow. But how quickly can you change the land use transport network/patters in the whole of Auckland? (Unless the Luftwaffe is there to do your bidding?)
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The evidence for increased trip demand (population has nothing to do with it) is the strain that is starting to show in the Auckland Public Transport system. Next to no capacity increases on the Southern Line courtesy of Western Line bias over the last five years has meant that crowding has started becoming a problem. Mount Eden Road services are so packed that people wanting to board at the top end of Symonds Street sometimes have to wait for several buses to come by. Ritchies is seeking Auckland Transport permission to put more services on the Northern Express (to be honest, that is the one idiotic element of it – if the operator sees demand spiralling out of control, then clearly more services are needed).
At current levels, the top end of Symonds Street would have hit capacity by 2014, the middle portion by 2019, with Fanshawe Street and Albert Street hitting capacity at that same time.
Owen, Auckland has already gone against the trend. Twenty years ago, there were no apartment buildings in the Auckland CBD – now there are at least a dozen with more on the way (that is once the recession is over).
Of course, overall trip demand to the CBD has been increasing. The actual number of CBD jobs has been increasing, and the University of Auckland has twice the number of students that it did twenty years ago.
Owen, how many north/south and east/west corridors does Manhattan Island have? How many north/south and east/west CBD corridors does Auckland have?
Wrong, the critical figure is maximum demand. If you have 12,000 people wanting to use a corridor in a given hour, then logic would suggest that you provide a mode that can accommodate 12,000 people – not a mode that can accommodate only 6,000 people.
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The Sydney Harbour bridge has a roadway, train-track & walkway.. options, instead of just a road for cars, trucks & buses.. time for the city planners to broaden their horizons ? maybe they could add-on, not build another bridge or tunnel ?? kia-ora
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Oh yes & Sydney has 3-4 times the population of Auckland !!
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In saying that Zedd, when the Sydney Harbour Bridge was built, Sydney had about 1.5 million people.
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