Dialogue: Reality check for Queen St temple

By JOHN ROUGHAN

John Robertson, chairman of Infrastructure Auckland, looked a trifle shaken on Wednesday when he faced the press. He need not have been.

He was presenting us with the first attempt we have seen in 10 years of the Britomart saga to put the project in some sort of financial perspective.

If he was shaken it was probably because just as his board was about to decide its contribution to the Auckland City Council's grand central station, Christine Fletcher's people swept their application off the table, muttered a legal threat and said they would be back next week.

The extraordinary thing was that the council had evidently never expected that the officers of Infrastructure Auckland would try to evaluate Britomart in proportion to the other 58 railway stations mooted for the region's whole, dubious public transport plan.

How, you might wonder, did Mrs Fletcher's advisers imagine it would be assessed? In splendid isolation? Quite possibly. The long tale of Britomart has been a case study at every turn of how not to make public investments.

It began, we now scarcely remember, with the perfectly sensible, practical and modest aim of extending the railway a few hundred metres to the bottom of Queen St.

But nothing remains very modest, practical or sensible when Auckland local body planners and architects sit down to discuss it. Under Mayor Les Mills they came up with a multi-storey subterranean rail and bus terminal, carpark and retail complex, to be financed by a young Colombo Plan entrepreneur who would build 11 office towers above.

Mrs Fletcher's "rethink" has scaled everything down and somehow made it more expensive - $250 million all up.

It has been renamed the Waitemata Waterfront Interchange, a tautology also now infecting sporting references to substitutes. The council abbreviates it to WWI, which is appropriate. It was about the time of the Great War that railway stations were last built on this scale.

Beyond that, it is hard to find out much detail. Down at the abandoned Central Post Office, which is to be the station entrance, the lobby is given over to audio visual displays of the regional transport plan.

There are videos of the mayor walking about and talking of visions, and representations of light rail in virtual reality. But there are no models of the latest Britomart design, not even an artist's impression. There are draftsmen's drawings, if you ask for them, but nobody down there seems sure which of them is preferred.

The advisers to Infrastructure Auckland obviously encountered similar problems. They have told the board there were "no robust" figures for the likely patronage of the whole regional rail scheme.

"Furthermore, patronage for passenger transport in Auckland has been sporadic at best and the proposed modal share targets for the regional land transport strategy over the next 20 years are very optimistic."

The patronage claimed for the Britomart terminal on its own was also optimistic, they said, "when the eventuality and timing of related projects are unknown."

The best they could do was work out the likely cost of all the proposed stations, electrified tracks and signals and allocate them a proportionate share of the $410 million the Infrastructure board has earmarked for the rail scheme.

On that basis, they concluded, WWI was going to be "disproportionately expensive."

The problem of Britomart remains the same as it was: it arises from a vision no wider than a few blocks either side of Queen St. Just about all the planners, politicians - and now the boosters and business backers of Britomart II - spend their days in the central business district. They constantly forget that the vast majority of Aucklanders do not.

In fact, many of the region's residents have no reason to come near the city centre and no wish to. That is a matter of natural concern to Queen St traders who style themselves "Heart of the City." But it is not a reason to spend $1.3 billion on a centrally focused public transport system and $250 million on a downtown terminal alone.

When the fund was set up three years ago from the profits of regional services, its legislative brief was to help to improve transport and stormwater disposal.

Auckland's ageing drains are a far more urgent need. But as the man who made the regional services solvent, Chris Russell, used to say: "Politicians prefer their monuments above ground." So the lion's share is going to the trains.

The lion's share is nowhere near the $1 billion of assets that Infrastructure Auckland holds, because the same politicians lack the courage to let the board sell its only real earner, the port.

They know a sale would be in the interests of both the port, which, like any company would prefer commercial investors, and the fund, which has already lost value from its dependence on a single investment.

There should be a railway terminal at the bottom of Queen St. It should have been built there 90 years ago. But each time they go to design it, they try to impose too much on a city that has a healthy disregard of planning - and looks better for it.

Who, for example, really needs an underground concourse between the Ferry Building and the CPO so that the supposed throngs of transferring passengers need not cross Queen Elizabeth Square?

That square already testifies to the council's civic design. Its only human touches are the food kiosks that came in, uninvited, some years after it opened. The council planners tried to evict them but relented under popular pressure.

Now it is a railway terminal we are talking about, not a temple to the central business district. Give Infrastructure Auckland credit for bringing things back to Earth. Next week they must keep their nerve.