Auckland's demand for costly infrastructure 'scary'

2:00pm

The debate raging in Auckland, about a proposed new eastern expressway estimated to cost more than $1 billion, highlights the city's insatiable demands for new infrastructure as it increasingly dominates the rest of the country.

Altogether around $4 billion in road projects and $1 billion for public transport infrastructure in the next decade is proposed in the draft Auckland Regional Land Transport Strategy.

Those sort of figures strike Canterbury Employers' Chamber of Commerce chief executive Peter Townsend as "scary".

He is no enemy of Auckland, believing this country needs a city with a level of international presence, but worries too little strategic thinking is going into decisions about such big spending.

In the future a giant supercity was inevitable resulting from the melding together of Auckland, Tauranga and Hamilton, he said.

"If you're going to spend a thousand million dollars on a road, maybe someone should be thinking about some of those big picture issues."

It could also make sense for some growth pressure to be taken off Auckland and moved into the Bay of Plenty and Waikato regions, Mr Townsend said.

He suggested it could be worth looking at the development of fast train links between Auckland and Tauranga and Hamilton.

"From my perspective it would make a huge amount of sense to be living in the Bay of Plenty or the Waikato and being able to hop on to a fast train and get into Auckland in 30 minutes."

In support of Mr Townsend's megacity contention, the combined population of the Auckland, Waikato and Bay of Plenty regions is already above 1.8 million, more than 46 per cent of the country's population. Statistics New Zealand projects that within 20 years it could be heading towards 2.3 million and account for more than half the people in the country.

Such figures would suggest the $400 to $500 million plan for a continuous four lane highway from Auckland to Cambridge, would be of strategic importance to the country as a whole.

Highways agency Transit New Zealand confidently predicts such a road would "drastically" reduce the number of fatal and serious injury crashes on a route already subject to congestion in some places.

Putting the so-called Waikato Expressway in place requires the development of 95km of road south of Mercer. About a fifth of the job is under way now, but there are no firm indications on when any of the other stages in the project might start.

Deciding what to do about the huge demands made by Auckland is complicated by projections which see the population of the region growing from around 1.2 million now to two million by the middle of the century.

At the same time as it is expected to grow in absolute terms, Auckland is also expected to have an increasing proportion of the national population. From around 31 per cent now to nearly 36 per cent in 20 years time.

It is partly to cater for the expected growth, not just the existing population, that the proposed infrastructure bill for Auckland is so huge.

And as its population grows, the aim is to have the Auckland metropolitan area change to fit the form favoured by many city planners around the world, with limited new greenfield development and intensification along some transport corridors and around transport nodes, such as railway stations.

In the process Auckland becomes more like many international cities, and less like the thinly spread town it used to be with homes splayed around estuaries and coastlines.

Most official discussion so far appears to have been about coping with the expected growth, with little thought going into whether such growth is a good thing, or whether it might be a good idea to try to share at least some of it around.

But at least some change of emphasis could be on the way with the decision by Jim Anderton, the minister in charge of regional and economic development, to immerse himself in the issues confronting Auckland.

He would be looking at the city's development, its problems and opportunities, and how decisions were made about infrastructure investments, Mr Anderton said.

While he did have qualms about Auckland's dominance over the rest of the country, it was not something he could wave a magic wand at.

"During the '80s and '90s, I would say, we virtually forced people to go to Auckland if they wanted to stay in New Zealand, because that was the place head offices shifted to, where job opportunities in the finance sector and all the rest of it were," he said.

"I don't think it's good for New Zealand if Auckland was growing because no one saw a future for themselves anywhere else, because that means you're wasting the resource base, the competitive advantage, and the social infrastructure investments in other regions."

The country needed to get the best out of every region, Mr Anderton said.

Work was now being done on regional development strategies that would help immigrants to this country have a wider choice of places to live and work than just Auckland, where most of them settled now.

Changing lifestyles in the United States could be pointing to yet more factors that need to be taken into account.

Commentators are now starting to question whether most of the talk during the 1990s about an urban renaissance in the US was little more than hype.

Among those casting doubts is leading academic Joel Kotkin, author of the influential book The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution is Reshaping the American Landscape.

He points to figures which show that for the first time since early last century, more whites live in the quasi-rural countryside outside metropolitan areas than live in core urban areas.

It was increasingly clear that many professionals and entrepreneurs preferred to locate themselves outside major metropolitan areas, he said.

The cutting edge of the economy, the technology industry, was largely suburban, and by the end of the 1990s much of the tech expansion was taking place in even more distant locations such as Boise, Idaho, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

In what he describes as the "de-clustering of America", Mr Kotkin said major firms now scattered the majority of their top research and development facilities across many locations.

It would be foolish to accept the now-fashionable assumption most high-end workers wanted to live in big, hip, cities, particularly once they reached their 30s and started having kids.

While "Internet Economy" content companies often did employ young, single workers looking for a hip urban experience, a growing number of businesses, led by CEOs seeking a remote but wired escape, were moving to the country, he said.

Those developments would not surprise Canterbury's Mr Townsend who said Christchurch employers were not having to pay top rates to attract workers with high technology skills because of a trade-off between earnings and lifestyle.

Ward Friesen, senior lecturer in the Auckland University Department of Geography, expected the growth of Auckland to continue, with the only possible brake being an anti-immigration government.

Mr Friesen said small countries, in particular, tended to have so-called primate cities which dominated the rest of the country.

With the next largest metropolitan areas in this country having only a third to a quarter of its population, Auckland tended to attract a big proportion of the high level service industries, such as business consulting and banking, he said.

Larry Murphy, another senior lecturer in the geography department, said a certain lifestyle and buzz was wanted in a city and if it was too small it could be seen as a bit of a backwater.

"Some form of growth is useful. A lot of the growth is migration, and if that migration can tap into new innovative business groups then I think that's positive for the economy," he said.

Meanwhile, there's always the issue of geology for decision makers to keep in mind when contemplating the growing economic dominance of Auckland.

Only four months ago the Auckland Regional Council felt moved to remind Aucklanders they lived in a city built on volcanoes and another one could develop any time.

- NZPA

Further reading
Feature: Getting Auckland moving

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