Brian Rudman: Take the canary test Mr Brownlee

A sitdown on crowded, polluted Customs St will show minister why Auckland needs money for rail link urgently.

The ping-pong marathon between Transport Minister Gerry Brownlee and Auckland Mayor Len Brown over the start date for the $2.86 billion City Rail Link staggers on. This week the mayor unveiled a commissioned PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) report claiming the rail patronage and downtown employment targets set by the Government for the project were unrealistic.

It said the 20-million trip trigger point would be achievable only after full introduction of the new electric train service in 2016.

Last year, the Government said the project could start earlier than its preferred 2020 date only if patronage was on track to 20 million trips a year well before then and city centre employment was up by 25 per cent.

Mr Brown says the tunnel has to be started by 2016 to prevent crippling peak hour road congestion by 2020. And PwC says the 25 per cent employment increase is unachievable because of falling office vacancy rates and a shortage of new office space in the pipeline.

Mr Brownlee remains unmoved by the PwC arguments. So what now?

Perhaps it's time for Mr Brown to challenge the minister to the canary test. Challenge him to sit in one of the downtown Customs St bus stops at peak hour and breathe deeply of the noxious fumes.

To while away the time he could read another recent Auckland Council-commissioned report which warns that pollution at the bottom end of town nudges World Health Organisation (WHO) danger limits for nitrogen dioxide vehicle emissions.

The limits are designed to prevent respiratory and heart diseases -- ailments which, perhaps, should be added to any future cost-benefit analysis of the City Rail Link (CRL).

Sitting at his Customs St bus stop, Mr Brownlee will not only be assailed with lung-damaging air, he'll also have his ears pounded by traffic noise peaking above 120 decibels. Because it's not continuous, the latest report says, this noise is "unlikely to result in noise-induced hearing loss. It will be nonetheless unpleasant."

But the report warns him, and others, of the dangers of trying to block out the ugly sounds with the help of a portable listening device. To do that, you'd have to turn the volume of your iPod or other device up to truly dangerous levels.

The worst spots for nitrogen dioxide levels were the stops on the Britomart side of Customs St immediately to the east and west of Lower Queen St. Also floating around in high quantities are "ultrafine particles" for which there are no international standards or guidelines.

What should be alarming Aucklanders is that the longer the CRL is delayed, the more buses and cars will try to cram into this de facto, roadside main downtown bus interchange. Not only will the noise and air pollution increase in Customs St, but it will spread out along the adjacent streets as the bus depot slowly expands. Lower Queen St, Albert St, Commerce St ... the pollution will quickly spread.

Add the fumes from the expanding fleet of private cars squeezing into this increasingly congested bottleneck and the strip between the "world's greatest harbour" and the centre of "the world's most liveable city" will become, at peak hours, a fetid no-go zone.

It's ironic that the final draft of the pollution report went before the Environment, Climate Change and Natural Heritage Committee of the council this week immediately before a paper labelled "Low Carbon Auckland: A proposed action plan."

This says transport and electricity account for two-thirds of Auckland's emissions, and lists among the goals for reducing our carbon footprint, "reprioritising transport funding to support public transport" and "significant increases in the price of fuels and car parking [to] make use of public transport comparable in cost to car travel".

Unfortunately the fuel and parking cost increase is not going to happen under the present Government. Mr Brownlee and his colleagues even baulked at a regional fuel tax which would have been a modest gesture along these lines.

As Mr Brownlee and Mr Brown each wait for the other to blink first, the solution lies in that simple sentence in the middle of the low carbon action plan -- the proposal to concentrate funding, for a while at least, to support public transport.