Auckland Transport sabotages its own City Rail Link plans at Karanga-a-Hape Railway Station

Artist's impression of the Karanga-a-Hape Station on Mercury Lane, soon to be completed. This image assumes the street will carry traffic down the hill, but it will go the other way. It also seems to assume cars will park on the pedestrian area, but that seems unlikely.

This is a transcript of Simon Wilson’s weekly newsletter Love this City – exploring the ideas and events, the reality and the potential of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. To sign up, click here, select Love this City and save your preferences.

Project K to Project L

Auckland Transport has abandoned its own excellent plans for the backstreets south of Karangahape Rd, near the new Karanga-a-Hape Railway Station.

These plans - part of the City Rail Link (CRL) - even have an excellent name: Project K.

In doing this, AT has also abandoned a couple of other important things.

One is the excellent public engagement process it used to develop Project K. The other is the public support revealed in that process. It ran from two-thirds to three-quarters of all respondents. Project K is very popular.

Mayor Wayne Brown, who wants AT to get better at listening to the public, should be jumping up and down about this.

AT seems to have panicked. Senior management appear to have overruled the project development teams working on Project K and their new ideas are but a shadow of the original.

I met onsite yesterday with AT senior executive Murray Burt and two other AT managers. One thing I did like: we all turned up on bicycles. “The best way to get around the central city,” said Burt, and I agree.

The heart of the project is Mercury Lane, which leads from Karangahape Rd down past the old Mercury Theatre and the entrance to the new station. The lane comes out on Canada St, near the start of the Lightpath, Te Ara I Whiti, popularly known as the Pink Pathway.

In AT’s original 2023 plan, Mercury Lane from the station up to K Rd was to become a pedestrian mall. Public feedback was 68% in favour of this, with another 10% “mixed”, which generally meant they liked it but had some questions.

A little context. The area around the new station is underdeveloped and ripe for residential and office-block growth. And when the CRL opens next year, the trains will be able to carry 24,000 passengers an hour in both directions.

These things will turn Mercury Lane into a busy pedestrian thoroughfare. It won’t become a pedestrian street because of “planning”; it will happen anyway.

The planners’ job is to make the area safe and inviting – to help make the city a pleasure to be in – and ensure it can manage all the people coming and going on foot. This, to their credit, is exactly what AT did with Project K.

Proposed changes to other streets nearby were also designed to prioritise the pedestrian experience. Cross St, which connects Upper Queen St to Mercury Lane, right opposite the station, was to get a wider footpath and have fewer on-street car parks.

Cyclists would also be well served. A two-way cycleway and a separate footpath would replace the existing shared path on Canada St, and there would be a short cycleway on the lower part of Mercury Lane, leading to the station.

Traffic wasn’t banned, but rat running – taking backstreet shortcuts – and other forms of through traffic would be difficult.

The extensive consultation included community workshops and targeted engagement with residents, business groups and other stakeholders. This led to changes, including an agreement to install retractable bollards on Mercury Lane, to allow access to service and delivery vehicles.

Good process? Not according to a small group of residents in the George Court building on the corner, who began a campaign to overthrow the plans. Their off-street parking has egress from Mercury Lane (but also from Cross St).

At an AT board meeting in September 2023 and again in an Auckland Council meeting in November that year, they said they would challenge any closure to through traffic in court.

Extensive negotiations followed and in August 2024, AT agreed to make Mercury Lane a “shared space”. The retractable bollards would stay down for most of the time and cars would be able to drive through.

A compromise favouring the George Court residents? Not according to them. They kept the pressure on and now AT has buckled again.

This week, it revealed its new plans for the area. My site visit with Burt and his colleagues was for them to explain the new version of Project K. It was depressing.

Mercury Lane will reopen ahead of the CRL opening, with the bollards permanently down. Once the trains are running, they’ll assess whether they need to apply what they call a “modal filter”: put up the bollards to stop the cars.

But, I said, this will allow traffic to re-establish the habit of using the street, and instead of creating a welcoming environment for commuters ahead of the CRL, they’re going to set up a dangerous one.

That’s exactly the opposite of what they’re supposed to be doing.

Burt responded that shared spaces work better than that and gave the example of Federal St, by Sky City. He couldn’t have chosen anything worse. Federal St is not a proper shared space, it’s a street for cars that doesn’t have clearly marked footpaths.

There’s more. Cross St will not gain a wider footpath and will remain a principal route through the precinct. That will keep it dingy, dangerous and unwelcoming, right opposite the station.

Cross St, looking east, away from the CRL station. The view for passengers coming out of the station will now remain much like this. Photo / Simon Wilson

Canada St will keep its new cycleway, connecting to Mercury Lane and the Lightpath. That’s great. But East St will lose its bike lanes and become two-way for cars. Traffic will, in effect, be encouraged to use Canada St and East St as a rat run.

There has been no public consultation on the new plans and there are no plans to do any.

I asked Burt why they are ripping out a cycleway.

“We need the road to be two-way because there’s no other easy access for cars from K Rd heading south,” he said.

I asked why he thought that “need” even exists. Construction work has closed Mercury Lane to traffic for a few years now, and East St has been one-way north. These things have not created traffic problems.

If upper Mercury Lane never opened again, except for service and delivery, and if the other streets were given the pedestrian focus Project K once planned for them, the impact on traffic would be zero.

Burt didn’t have a response.

He did say, several times, “The central purpose is to create vastly improved walking and cycling access to the station.”

But that’s not what it looks like to me. Project K has become, primarily, a traffic plan that invites vehicles to drive through even when they have no reason to be there. But for what will soon become the vast majority of the users of those streets – the pedestrians – they’re doing less than the bare minimum.

Is it because of legal threats?

“No,” said Burt, “it’s a good plan.”

Mayor Brown might have something to say about this too. Just last month, on an unrelated matter, he said the council “should not be put off doing what we think is right by a fear of legal action”.

I wanted to ask AT’s chief executive Dean Kimpton about this. He was not available for comment.

It’s not over, though. Although construction is underway, the Waitematā Local Board ran out of time to discuss the new plan this week, and will do so next month. They can’t stop it, but they can lean on it.

The AT board and the governing body of council, though, they can blow the whistle. And they should: this failure undermines their own policies and directives.

Project K? Project L, if you ask me, and the city is the loser.

Karanga-a-Hape Station, nearing completion. The streets around it will not be much changed. Photo / Simon Wilson

Six easy ideas for Auckland Transport

It’s not easy being Auckland Transport. Someone’s always going to complain, whatever you do. At the Greater Auckland website, where they’ve been following the K Rd debacle closely, writer Connor Sharp suggested six ways AT might manage its way better through controversial proposals.

1. Senior leadership need to back their staff – and commit to progressing their mandate.
2. Run the process with a firm hand. Mitigation is fine, but destroying the core part of a project is not.
3. Stand up to bullies from the vocal minority – even in court if you have to.
4. Have the courage to speak up and communicate with the public. Tell the story of why this project is happening.
5. Stick to the plan, stick to the strategies and stick to the timeline – deliver instead of delay.
6. Disruption and turmoil are inevitable, but they’re also an opportunity to excel and go further, so do it once and do it well.

I think it’s a very good list for any public body.

Better in an emergency

If you’ve visited the Emergency Department at Auckland Hospital in recent years you may have found yourself wondering if you were in the right place. Hard to find, hard to get into, cramped and labyrinthine once you did get in, it hardly felt like an ED at all – despite the staff moving purposefully about doing obviously wonderful work.

That’s all changed. Health Minister Simeon Brown has opened a fully upgraded adult ED at the hospital: double the size, with a new reception, waiting area, clinical triage, consult rooms and staff base, improved drop off and parking areas, a new ambulance entry and new main entry facade and signage.

No word yet on new funding to staff the place.

Health Minister Simeon Brown. New ED for Auckland, but will there be more staff? Photo / Mark Mitchell

They see 80,000 patients a year at the Auckland ED, an average of 219 a day, with about 40% being serious enough to be admitted. Another 30,000 children are seen at the paediatric ED in Starship.

About 68% of adult patients are attended to within six hours. The national average is 72% and the target is 74%.

Contrary to the popular perception, Friday night drunks and Saturday sports don’t make those days the busiest of the week. That distinction belongs to Mondays.

More news about helipads

There are currently 64 helipads consented on Waiheke Island and 11 consented on Aotea/Great Barrier Island. Some people say that’s not enough; others believe it’s about 64 and 11 too many.

It’s said people don’t put in a helipad because they own a helicopter. Rather, like swimming pools and home cinemas, it’s because they add to the resale value of the bach.

The regulations governing helipads are fiendishly complicated and also out of date, at least with contemporary thinking. Ecological and cultural impacts, for example, are not well addressed. This week, Auckland Council decided it should “raise the bar” for applications for new helipads on the islands.

Frequent visitors in the sky above Waiheke. Photo / 123RF

“The impact of the noise and vibrations caused by helicopters on Māori heritage sites, ecological sites, breeding sites and nesting areas of threatened, endangered or rare species would be included in assessments of new applications for helipads,” it says.

This is a plan change under the Resource Management Act, which means members of the Hauraki Gulf Islands and wider community will be invited to submit on the proposals and there will be a public hearing.

Aotea/Great Barrier Local Board chair Izzy Fordham calls the move “a step in the right direction” but warns “there’s still a long way to go”. The entire Auckland Unitary Plan will be overhauled, starting in late 2026, and the Hauraki Gulf and helipads will be folded into that. This week’s proposal is seen as an interim step.

What’s next for the waterfront?

Eke Panuku, the council’s “placemaking” agency, has opened a “public engagement” process on the future of the central wharves. It defines these as Queens Wharf and the two finger wharves to its east, Captain Cook and Marsden, along with Hobson Wharf to the west, and the “breastworks”: the wharf area parallel to Quay St that joins the wharves together.

Public engagement is different from consultation, where the latter is a statutory process that typically asks the public what they think of a specific proposal. This exercise is more blue skies: they’re asking the public “to tell us their thoughts to feed into our planning”.

Want them to build a stage floating on the water, with a three-sided amphitheatre on the wharves, for rock concerts, opera, contests in which everyone falls in the water? Quite popular overseas.

What about an underwater restaurant? A shark tank? A Te Ao Māori showcase centre? A museum of the sea? A multisport adventure track? Canoe-style water-Ubers (I think of them as Wubers) to ferry you to Mission Bay or Takapuna?

How about they finally get rid of the near-abandoned Cloud on Queens Wharf and do something extraordinary with the space?

The cars will move off Captain Cook Wharf within a few years - and then what? Photo / Jason Oxenham

Two years ago the mayor wanted to build a seawater swimming pool on the breastworks, but since then he’s got the job done with Browny’s Pool, further to the west. At this point, all options are good and Eke Panuku wants to hear about them.

A few eyebrows have been raised about all this. Eke Panuku will disappear by the end of June, its work to be folded into the main council organisation as part of the restructure of council-controlled organisations initiated by Mayor Brown. Why’s it doing this work now?

The answer is simple enough. Eke Panuku has been charged by the council with creating a draft masterplan for the area, and to do that it is building, as asked, on the Port Precinct Framework Plan adopted by the council in April 2024.

After June, the work will continue at the council, quite probably with many of the same people running it.

A spokesperson for the agency says, “The integration of Eke Panuku into Auckland Council will have no effect on this project. The Central Wharves project will continue to be an integral part of the Auckland Council work programme to plan and enhance our waterfront within the new structure.”

The project doesn’t mean, by the way, that the imported cars that keep lining up on Captain Cook, the breastworks and the larger Bledisloe Wharf will disappear anytime soon, or possibly ever.

Vehicle imports is one of Port of Auckland’s most lucrative operations and it will hold on to it for as long as it possibly can. When the council takes control of Cook, Marsden and the breastworks, perhaps in a couple of years, the cars will be lining up on the wharves further to the east.

That’s assuming the council and the port resolve their spat about what it’s all going to cost. Someone will have to pay for Cook and Marsden to be renovated, or removed, and that’s expected to cost $70 million. Neither entity has this in their budgets.

Meanwhile, for a month from this Saturday, an AKHaveYourSay.nz website will be open to receive your great ideas and a “series of interactive family activities” exploring different options will be held on Queens Wharf.

Coming soon to Tāmaki Makaurau

Midtown street culture: There’s a street party in Midtown every month and the next, on April 17, is devoted to art, music, food and stories. It will also celebrate street culture now and from decades past, including live street painting on Elliott St and Darby St and an appreciation of street art that’s been sitting quietly, sometimes for decades, on walls in Durham Lane West and Airedale St. Included: works by Poi Ngawati, John Radford, Holly Mafaufau, Ross Liew and Otis and Dick Frizzell. Thursday April 17, 5-8pm, Elliott St, Elliott Stables, The Strand Arcade, Darby St, Durham Lane West and Airedale St.

Hidden art by John Radford in Durham Lane West.

Moana Pasifika v Blues; Blues Women v Matatū: Honestly, has rugby ever been as exciting as this? Tāmaki Makaurau’s two (!) Super Rugby Pacific teams go head to head and then it’s the final of the Aupiki contest. Saturday, April 12, 4.35pm and 7.05pm, Eden Park

Ardie Savea celebrates a Moana Pasifika win. Photo / Photosport

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