Brian Rudman: Squabbles keeping rail options out of reach

Elena Trout is no wimp. She builds roads through mountains and drives bulldozers across estuaries before breakfast.

A civil engineer, she's spent more than 20 years, according to her last employer's website, "developing and managing technical organisations as well as complex and diverse capital projects".

She survived the petrochemical industry and masterminded the completion of the Albany-Puhoi motorway.

But just three weeks in the bearpit of Auckland local body politics and she's screaming to be let out. And who can blame her?

Mrs Trout was recently appointed director of the regional rail project. This followed a report by consultants Sir Ron Carter and Bill Grieve severely criticising the chaos they had found surrounding the stalled rapid transport project.

In a brief moment of peace, the two main warring parties, the regional council on one side and the Auckland Regional Transport Network (ARTNL), which is the creature of the local territorial councils, agreed to jointly appoint an overall director of the project.

Mrs Trout's appointment seems to have been the final, gritted-teeth act of co-operation. Peace in our time and all that hogwash.

Now it's back to the fisticuffs. At last week's ARC's passenger transport committee, Mrs Trout declared she had the support of the ARC but not of ARTNL, and that until she did, "the project office cannot proceed".

Unfortunately the sceptics, of which I was one, who did not believe the Carter-engineered ceasefire would last, have been proven right. ARTNL, the new boy on the block, with a new and feisty chief executive in former Transfund head Martin Gummer, has decided to go flex its muscles.

ARTNL is supposed to provide and look after the infrastructure of the rail network - stations, rolling stock (perhaps), tracks - that sort of thing. Not content with this role, it has decided to get involved in the selection of a new operator of the train system - the ARC's role - by refusing to agree to the ARC's proposed selection process.

This veto has caused the government funder, Transfund, to back off endorsing the proposal also. It sensibly wants some signs of peace in Auckland before it agrees to hand over any money.

ARTNL says that only when it agrees to the ARC's long-term business plan for the rail project will it lift the veto. With the business plan not likely before early April, and current train operator Tranz Rail wanting out, at the latest by early next year, time to get a new operator in place is fast running out.

ARTNL's muscle-flexing is only the half of it. The politicians are at it again as well. The ink seemed hardly dry on an agreed plan for what sort of rolling stock would run on Auckland's rails when the old battles broke out again over light rail versus heavy rail, electric versus diesel.

And for a bit of light relief, even the old fantasy about running buses down the rail corridor has been dusted off again - apparently from Mr Gummer and Infrastructure Auckland's Richard Maher.

The agreed plan was for heavy diesel trains on the southern tracks with a mix of heavy and light rail out west. There was also a yet-to-be-agreed inner-city mode. The politicians are about to relitigate the whole issue in upcoming workshops.

If that's not enough, there's also a body called the Political Sounding Board, made up of representative politicians and "facilitated" by one-time senior Labour politician David Caygill, which is looking into - you might have guessed - regional transport governance issues.

It started last November to consider nine transport governance options and has since narrowed the options down to two.

The study was initiated because, according to a recent ARC report, "the Auckland region has an agreed regional land transport strategy, but its implementation is slow and difficult. In part, this is because of the complex governance arrangements in Auckland - particularly for passenger transport".

The only good news on the public transport scene is that despite the political brawling, ever-suffering ratepayers are catching the buses and trains in growing numbers.

Think how much better it could be if the politicians began working together.