Brian Rudman: Transport boffins need their vision tested

The more the bureaucrats sloganise about vision, the less they seem to display. Take the idea of reviving Auckland's long-neglected rail network as part of the solution to the growing passenger transport crisis.

Certainly the travelling public have embraced the idea, crowding on to trains in record numbers since the opening of Britomart Station despite breakdowns, ignored timetables, signal failures and Monday's mysterious fumes.

In March, an all-time record of 391,000 passenger journeys took place across the Auckland rail network - well up from the 344,000 in March 2004. To the year ending June 2004, patronage was up 30 per cent.

All signs, you would think, of an idea whose time has come. Unfortunately, the Auckland Regional Council's transport and policy boffins are less easily swayed.

On Monday, policy and planning director Craig Shearer and transport planning manager Don Houghton presented the results of phases one and two of their investigation into the future rapid transit system for Auckland. Their focus was on the likely development in the next 15-30 years of the "heavy rail" network as part of a rapid transit scenario. What a wet blanket the report is.

The only positive - and that, reluctant - note in the short report was their belief that it is "highly likely" within 15 to 30 years that services could expand to beyond Swanson on the western line and Papakura on the southern line.

This is because the cost would be "relatively low" and the demand "likely to justify them". But, they hasten to add, any such service is likely "to operate at a relatively low frequency".

In other words, sometime after 2020, we may start to see a slight expansion of the existing routes. Well hallelujah to that.

The long proposed Avondale-Southdown line "is unlikely" within 15-30 years, unless freight-driven, because of high costs and "relatively modest demand projections".

The airport line is "also unlikely" this side of 30 years because of high costs, "relatively low patronage" and because it would impose "some operational and capacity impacts on the rest of the system".

As for a North Shore line - which I'd not heard of - that was, no surprise, "highly unlikely".

Another idea, tunnelling west out of Britomart and looping back to the western line, the boffins concede, "has a number of positive attributes which could support its development under certain circumstances", however "it is not possible to conclude with any confidence" that this tunnel will be constructed within 15 to 30 years.

As Mike Lee, chairman of the regional council and campaigner for the line to the airport through Onehunga, observed with a deep sigh, "How underwhelming".

This response was echoed by Campaign for Public Transport spokesman Cam Pitches, who said "there are no facts to back up" the claim the airport link will be of high cost with relatively low patronage.

He added that "presumably the ARC is relying on the same patronage modelling that failed to predict the popularity of the current rail system improvements".

Mr Pitches makes a good point. Ironically, only a month ago Mr Shearer and Peter Clark, transport evaluation team leader, reported to the same committee on how out of date the region's modelling data was, and on the urgent need to upgrade the computer programs.

The raw data comes from a household survey in 1991 "and this information will soon be increasingly obsolete and inaccurate due to rapid growth and significant changes to the land use and transport system in Auckland since 1992".

The boffins argued that unless the models "are refined and updated, the risk of poor-quality and inaccurate information produced by these models will be significant. This is a serious issue", they emphasised, as the models were the foundation of all ARC transport planning and design.

Instead of using the future tense, the above warning should have been written in the present or past tense because it seems the model is already throwing up outdated and discarded solutions.

It is weird that on Monday, before councillors voted to receive the above anti-rail report, they voted, at the behest of Mr Lee, to include in the draft regional land transport strategy "a reference to consideration of inclusion of future passenger rail services to Helensville, Onehunga and Pukekohe".

No vision or double vision. Whichever it is that the ARC is suffering from, it should get it cured and fast.