Auckland airport wants more buses to beat traffic

Auckland's growing airport company wants to boost bus services before resorting to a rail link to combat the road congestion confronting passengers.

Engineering general manager Steve Reindler says extending a railway line to the airport at Mangere, from whichever direction, is "most definitely" an option for the future.

"But our studies show that the viability of rail is, at the moment, sometime off," he told the Auckland Regional Council's transport policy committee, which is considering a long-term extension to the airport.

Mr Reindler said an earlier priority for his company was to promote more bus services over more routes. The 81,000 vehicles visiting the airport daily are expected to almost double within 10 years.

"The level of bus services at the moment to the airport is astonishingly low," he said.

A consultants' report commissioned by the company identified frequent road bottlenecks on the way to and from Mangere. It also noted that buses ran to the airport from only a handful of localities and from central Auckland.

But although it prescribed more buses and cheaper taxis to ease congestion, it also urged the airport company to "future-proof" itself by including an underground railway station option in a proposed transport centre between air terminals.

Mr Reindler pointed to growth projections in airport passenger numbers, from 11 million a year now, to between 20 million and 23 million in 2024 and up to 35 million in 2050. Even these figures were "well within" the capacity of a two-runway system planned for the airport, which was spending $125 million a year on expansion.

"But the difficulty is getting to and from the airport for people and for goods," he said, noting that passengers sometimes took as long to drive from central Auckland to the airport as to fly to Wellington.

He also highlighted a need to define routes to the airport more clearly, including Neilson St in Onehunga, which the Auckland City Council intends widening to four lanes by 2009, costing $12 million, as an arterial link between the Southern and Southwestern motorways.

The council has been unable to persuade Transit New Zealand to take it over as a state highway, in which case it would be funded fully by the Government.

But Mr Reindler said Transit appeared now to be recognising the value of such an alignment.

He was non-committal when asked by council member Dianne Glenn whether his organisation might follow the lead of the airport company in Portland, Oregon, in contributing to the cost of a rapid public transit system. "You can't count us in and you can't count us out," he said. "It just depends on what may happen."