Auckland's great headache

For most Aucklanders, transport is providing the key debate in the local government elections, as SIMON COLLINS reports.

Motorways or trains? That's the stark choice being offered to voters in the Auckland Regional Council elections which begin by postal ballot this weekend.

Ten of the 50 candidates, led by Auckland Chamber of Commerce chief executive Michael Barnett, are mounting a frontal attack on the outgoing council's $1.1 billion plans to upgrade the region's train services.

Instead, they want to spend about the same $1 billion on completing, within the next five years, the regional motorway network that was designed some 40 years ago. The railways would be turned into busways.

At the other extreme, 24 candidates are backing the council's plans for trains, but not some of its more controversial motorway proposals, such as a planned new eastern highway from Panmure down through Hobson Bay to Tamaki Drive. Half of these candidates oppose the planned southwestern motorway between Hillsborough and Avondale as well.

This group has no clear leader, but a guiding light is a former director of Friends of the Earth and the Campaign for Public Transport, Jack Henderson.

In between are the remaining 16 candidates, including ARC chair Philip Warren and most other sitting councillors, who endorse both more trains and more motorways, but at a more measured pace.

How voters mark their ballot papers in the next few days will determine the shape of Auckland for this century.

The issue, of course, is an old one. Historian Graham Bush has recorded that an underground rail line up Queen St to link with the existing railway at Morningside was first proposed by Railways Minister Gordon Coates in 1923.

Fifty years later in 1973, Norman Kirk's Labour Government agreed to fund the underground loop and electrification of the main line to Papakura. But this plan was dropped by Robert Muldoon's National Government in 1976.

A quarter-century on, a new opportunity for railways has opened up through a combination of worsening gridlock on the motorways, a $1 billion warchest held by Infrastructure Auckland derived mainly from port profits, another sympathetic Labour Government which is seeking to buy back public control of the region's railways, and a regional growth strategy aimed at concentrating population growth in key areas.

In 1999, the regional council adopted a transport strategy including "rapid transit" lines along the routes of the existing railways, plus a new line to run up Queen St and past the university and the hospital to Newmarket.

In July this year, the council chose the kinds of rapid transit that it wanted: a busway to be built alongside the Northern Motorway from Constellation Drive to the harbour bridge ($140 million); upgraded diesel train services on the routes south to Papakura, including a new branch to Manukau City ($384 million); electrified "light rail" running up Queen St to Newmarket and out along the existing railway west to Swanson ($520 million); plus the Britomart station on the waterfront ($120 million) and general rail improvements ($37 million).

Judging by the fact that the cost of Britomart alone is already up to $199 million, these figures may be somewhat elastic.

But the broad scale of costs is clear: the total bill of $1.2 billion is roughly comparable to the Government's total annual spending through Transfund of $950 million on roads and public transport throughout the country. (Only $189 million of this is in Auckland this year).

Ongoing subsidies would cost about $80 million a year, on top of the existing $45 million annual subsidy to buses and ferries.

Part of the subsidy would be covered by Transfund, but the rest would have to come from rates. The regional council put up its rates by 6 per cent last year, and ARC councillor Gwen Bull says rates will have to go up again.

"I think if we are upfront with the public, they will accept that," she says.

The rationale for this plan is the expected increase in the region's population from 1.2 million now to 2 million by 2050. The planners want to contain most of that increase within the existing urban boundaries because it will be both cheaper and produce less pollution if people don't have to travel long distances.

ARC transport planning manager Don Houghton says that almost doubling the population in the existing area can't be done by simply cross-leasing every section and duplicating houses uniformly across the city.

"If you make higher densities everywhere, that clogs up your suburban roads," he says. In other words, if people cluster in a few "growth nodes", no roading system will be able to cope if all the residents rely on cars for every trip. An off-road public transport system which cannot be blocked by car traffic - rail or light rail - becomes necessary.

However, the regional transport strategy is not just about public transport. It recognises that in the last century of car-driven growth, Auckland's workforce has become one of the most dispersed in the world. Only 11 per cent of the region's jobs are now in the central business district (CBD), and most of the other 89 per cent of workers will continue to need roads.

Up to 2004, the plan budgets $833 million for state highways, including: extending the Northern Motorway to Puhoi ($110 million); widening the Victoria Park viaduct ($48 million); linking the Northern and Northwestern Motorways at Spaghetti Junction ($22 million); upgrading roads to the port ($85 million); a new road off the Southern Motorway to the Waiouru Peninsula, East Tamaki ($68 million); extending the Northwestern Motorway to Brigham Creek Rd ($30 million); building a new upper harbour motorway ($140 million); and extending the Southwestern Motorway north from Hillsborough to Sandringham Rd ($57 million) and south to the Southern Motorway at Manukau City ($95 million).

Beyond 2004, the plan includes completing the southwestern link from Sandringham Rd to the Northwestern Motorway by 2009 ($72 million), and a new eastern highway from Panmure to Hobson Bay after 2010 ($158 million). Both would provide alternative routes through the Auckland isthmus, taking pressure off the central motorway spine.

The timing of these projects is determined largely by Government funding available from Transfund.

But Barnett believes the region can't wait that long. The Auckland Business Forum, which he chairs, wants the whole motorway network, including the southwestern link and the eastern highway, completed within five years.

While people can use public transport, business needs roads - to move goods from wharves and factories to customers. And costs mount for every hour spent in traffic jams.

John Hynds, of Hynds Pipe Systems, told a seminar in March that Auckland's traffic had slowed his pipe deliveries from four loads a truck a day in 1993 to 2.4 loads a day in 1999.

Based on 1993 business, that slowdown was enough to force the company into buying four new trucks and trailers worth $1 million.

The company has also opened two branches in West Auckland and the North Shore to minimise travel through Spaghetti Junction from its East Tamaki base. "That means we've got to have additional staff, additional small delivery vehicles, obviously extra stockholding and the need to double-handle this low-value product."

In 1997, Ernst & Young estimated that congestion was costing the region $755 million a year, mostly in lost time - not counting the kind of extra capital costs that Hynds faces. Hynds reckons that congestion must now be costing the region "at least $1 billion" every year.

From the business perspective, completing everything on the long-term Auckland highway programme at a total cost of $1.4 billion would quickly pay for itself. Even if all the money was borrowed at 6.5 per cent interest and depreciated at 4 per cent a year, the effective cost would be only $147 million a year, or just 0.4 per cent of Auckland's $36-billion-a-year economic output.

In contrast, the business case for a $1.1 billion investment in trains looks weak.

The regional council's own projections show that even by 2021, only 7700 passengers will enter the central business district by rail or light rail in the morning peak - fewer than 2 per cent of total commuters.

The regional council forecasts that this would have virtually no effect on road congestion. Average car speeds would increase from 38.05km/h under a "do minimum" option to just 38.18km/h.

Barnett is quick to add that he's not saying we should forget about public transport completely.

"I'm not a roadie," he says. "I'm a cyclist. I bike several hundred kilometres a week."

But he believes it would be far more cost-effective to build cycleways and busways on motorways than to build fixed rail tracks.

As the Automobile Association argues, trains may suit Wellington, where 45 per cent of the jobs are in the CBD, but Auckland needs a public transport system that can pick people up from where they live and deliver them to jobs scattered throughout the region.

"The train option will sentence commuters to continual transfers," says the AA's Mark Scott.

"Commuters will need to catch a bus from home to the station, catch a train, potentially transfer to another train, and then catch another bus from the station to work. The train option will require commuters to catch more buses than the bus option."

Henderson dismisses this as "short-termism".

"The purpose of having a rail network is to effect long-term changes in land-use patterns, so people and goods don't have to travel huge distances," he says.

You just have to think about what life would be like without motorways to see what he means. Without motorways, we would either catch trains or be forced to live closer to our jobs, because it wouldn't be worth battling through a maze of city streets to travel long distances every day.

"If you build big roads, people just travel more and more," Henderson says.

Conversely, if you build an attractive passenger rail service on a big enough scale to convince people that it will last, then they will want to live and work near the railway stations. A bus network that can disappear overnight just doesn't have the same effect.

If he's right, then the official estimate of 7700 rail commuters travelling into the CBD by 2021 may be just the beginning of a long-term change.

Don Houghton at the ARC says 7700 is just the number projected to be entering the CBD. That is 14 per cent of the 54,000 commuters entering the CBD every day now. And that leaves out people catching the train from, say, Swanson to New Lynn, or Newmarket to Manukau City.

Houghton says bus/train or bus/bus transfers are just the way large networks work, and would apply just as much to buses as to trains. The alternative is to have buses winding around every suburban street, taking much longer than feeder runs to fast trunk services.

He says Barnett's proposal to "complete the motorway network" quickly would only partially relieve congestion on existing main routes. For most people, it would still be more direct to go through Spaghetti Junction rather than take a longer route to the southwest or east.

Nevertheless, Henderson and the other three City Vision ARC candidates support finishing the Southwestern Motorway because it would provide an alternative route when the Southern Motorway is blocked by an accident, for example.

Even this is too much for Phillip Chase, a Mt Albert resident who chairs the greenbelt campaign against the southwestern route. He objects to cars speeding through peaceful reserves around the Whau River, and asks why Auckland can't be like Stockholm and do without inner-city motorways.

"All the studies overseas show that cities that develop more roads just create more congestion," he says.

"Build the public transport system and then you wouldn't need your motorways because people would be using public transport to go to work, and the arterial routes could be freed up for goods and services."

Feature: Local body elections 2001

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