I know and love Auckland. I lived there for two years, many of my friends live there, and I am there almost every week.
It is our capital city of growth, home to a third of New Zealand’s population and nearly 40% of our national GDP.
It has higher labour productivity than the rest of New Zealand and is incubating some of the country’s most exciting growth industries, with 116 of our top 200 tech firms calling Auckland home.
Next year is shaping up to be an exciting one. The first trains will run on the City Rail Link and the International Convention Centre will finally open its doors.
The Government is investing heavily in transport in Auckland, through new Roads of National Significance, new busways, and commuter rail. We have started serious work on an additional harbour crossing and the new Northland Expressway connecting Auckland and Northland.
These investments build on the significant progress made in recent years, particularly by National-led Governments — think of Waterview, Victoria Park Tunnel, and the starting and funding of City Rail Link.
A couple of months ago, it was my pleasure to mark the start of Auckland’s commuter network extension with the completion of the electrification of the line from Papakura to Pukekohe. Later this year, the Third Main Line rail project will conclude, helping ease congestion and enabling faster train journeys.
The growth of Auckland’s commuter rail network since the early 2000s has been remarkable, and the Government is keen to encourage that growth.
The reality is, congestion is choking Auckland.
The average Auckland commuter spends over five days in traffic each year. In 2024, the Auckland metro area had the highest congestion levels in Oceania.
This means Auckland is less productive, less accessible, and less liveable than it should be.
Congestion stifles economic growth in Auckland, with studies showing it costs us between $900 million and $1.3 billion a year. Congestion is essentially a tax on time, productivity, and growth.
And like most taxes, I’m keen to reduce it.
The Government will be progressing legislation this year to allow the introduction of time-of-use pricing on our roads.
The Government will prioritise working with Auckland Council on designing a time-of-use pricing scheme that increases productivity and reduces congestion.
Modelling has shown successful congestion charging could reduce congestion by 8% to 12% at peak times, improving travel times and efficiency significantly.
Auckland housing
Fixing our housing crisis is critical to driving economic growth in Auckland.
There is a mountain of economic evidence that cities are unparalleled engines of productivity, and the evidence shows bigger is better.
New Zealand can raise our productivity simply by allowing our towns and cities to grow up and out. We need bigger cities and, to facilitate that, we need more houses.
As our biggest city, Auckland has to be a leader in this mission.
As housing minister, I am focused on getting the fundamentals of the housing market fixed.
The Government’s Going for Housing Growth agenda involves freeing up land for development and removing unnecessary planning barriers, improving infrastructure funding and financing, and providing incentives for communities and councils to support growth.
Report after report and inquiry after inquiry has found our planning system, particularly restrictions on the supply of urban land, are at the heart of our housing affordability challenge.
Last year, Cabinet agreed to several actions it would take to free up land for development, including in Auckland.
These changes build on the existing Auckland Unitary Plan, which evidence shows has made a real difference to rental and housing affordability in Auckland.
It also builds on the National Policy Statement on Urban Development brought in by the last government, which we support.
Our infrastructure funding and financing system for housing is not fit for purpose and we have recently announced changes to make it simpler and easier to fund and finance infrastructure.
Our new flexible planning system will have a flexible funding and financing system to match. Development contributions will be replaced with a development levy system, and there will be regulatory oversight of the levies to ensure charges are fair and appropriate.
City Rail Link
Under the feet of Auckland for the better part of a decade has been the most ambitious, and one of the most expensive, projects in the city’s history. Thousands of workers have been building 3.5 kilometres of tunnel to bring Auckland’s transportation system into the 21st century.
Once open next year, City Rail Link will double Auckland’s rail capacity and reduce congestion across the city, enabling Aucklanders to get to where they want to go faster.
This will be huge for the city. The privilege of never worrying about a missed train because another is only minutes away is freeing.
I’ve been down to the new stations. Aucklanders are going to be blown away.
It is critical for the city’s future that we take advantage of the City Rail Link and ensure that the maximum benefits are felt by Aucklanders.
Transit-oriented development
I believe that to properly unlock economic growth in Auckland, we must embrace the concept of transit-oriented development adopted by the world’s best and most liveable cities.
This approach promotes compact, mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly cities, with development clustered around, and integrated with, mass transit. The idea is to have as many jobs, houses, services and amenities as possible around public transport stations.
This is not an untested theory: transit-oriented development has been adopted across the world in cities such as Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Singapore.
Cities that embrace this approach consistently outperform those that don’t across multiple metrics: they experience increases in productivity, lower unemployment, higher population growth, increased availability of homes, and more stable rents.
Are we doing all we can to take full advantage of City Rail Link?
The answer is clearly no.
The Government has kicked off a work programme to properly unlock the opportunities transit-oriented development could bring to Auckland and what actions we can take to better enable development clusters around City Rail Link stations.
Right now, Auckland Council is only required to zone six stories around rapid transit stops. We need to go much, much higher than that around the City Rail Link stations if we truly want to feel the benefits of transit-oriented development.
My aspiration is that in 10-20 years we have 10- to 20-storey apartment blocks dotting the rail line as far west as Swanson and Ranui.
Take Kingsland, for example.
Once City Rail Link opens, Kingslanders will have a 20-minute travel time saving to Aotea Station from the project.
But Kingsland’s population actually declined by 4.7% between 2019 and 2023, and while Auckland averaged 15,375 annual new builds over the past five years, Kingsland built just 22.
Kingsland is still predominantly made up of single-storey dwelling zones.
How about if our aim is to make the special character of suburbs be that they are thriving, liveable, affordable communities with access to regular and reliable public transport?
Viewshafts
One barrier to proper high-density in Auckland, including around City Rail Link stations, is undoubtedly the current settings of the 73 viewshafts that have restricted the height of the city since the early 1970s.
Some of these viewshafts don’t make a lot of sense. The Unitary Plan protects the view from the tolling booths on the North Shore so that people sitting in their cars getting ready to pay their toll for the Harbour Bridge have a nice view of Mt Eden. Of course, there has not been tolling booths on the North Shore since the mid-1980s. Forty years later, we are still protecting a view that would be considered dangerous driving to admire. A study done in 2018 looking at this one view shaft — the E10 — showed that its cost was roughly $1.4b in lost development opportunities. This is just the impact of one of the 73 viewshafts.
It is worth stressing that the cost is almost certainly much greater than $1.4b. It only includes costs to the city centre, and about half the land under E10 falls outside the city centre. So, add that on.
It doesn’t look at the positive externalities of intensification, such as agglomeration and other wider economic benefits. It doesn’t look at public land, just private, and it’s based on 2014 land values. And this is just one viewshaft. Mayor Brown and I have had discussions on this issue, and he said he is open to taking a fresh look at Auckland’s viewshaft settings in its Unitary Plan.
We are committed to trying to find a way though — alongside mana whenua — to get the balance right between economic growth, and the special role these māunga play in the unique identity of Auckland.
We are not proposing to remove these viewshafts. Rather, we are recognising that as the city changes, there will be areas where the viewshafts should change with it.
Conclusion
Auckland has a bright future. Whenever I visit Auckland, I get a palpable sense of opportunity knocking. Auckland isn’t waiting, it’s getting on with the mission of growth. It is bursting at the seams with opportunities — now, it is the responsibility of all of us to help make it happen.
●Chris Bishop is Minister for Infrastructure, Minister Responsible for RMA Reform and Minister of Transport.
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63% of commuters changed travel habits due to smart city initiative.