It's not really the Auckland Tram anymore, is it ...

Late last week, the government announced its new plan to spend billions of dollars on a light rail to Auckland Airport, which it has promised to complete by 2023. He wants to put about half of it underground. From that moment on, as the non-public official points out in this guest post , it is no longer a tram ...

The world is full of well thought out railway / tram proposals. Some even show up, in places like Newcastle, Australia. They usually appear to be very expensive remover, look good in shiny layouts, add some property value to homes and apartments near train stations, but have minimal impact on transportation, both traffic jams and exhaust fumes. The subway offered by Auckland is one of them.

Like most of these projects, it is not about transport or economic impact, and it has everything to do with ideologically closed politicians, who are sometimes eager to build monuments for themselves at the expense of their children and grandchildren.

At least the government's proposal, Michael Wood's Memorial Money Pit, is not such a stupid idea of ​​street trams, so valued by environmentalists and urban planners, that it takes so much capacity off existing streets - this elimination is essential. The reason environmentalists and urbanites who hate cars are so fond of trams is because they have found that the primary way to stop people from driving is to make it much harder, more expensive and cheaper, more convenient and tram down the street make. Trams are one of the best ways they can think of to make things harder, more expensive and more uncomfortable. (It does not matter if someone else takes the tram, because its main purpose is not to transport people, but to prevent people from traveling by car, taxi or truck.)

So the tip is not as bad as it could be. Actually, it's better than it sounds (who in their right mind thinks of ordering an underground tram to Mount Roskill?) Would be some public transportation that can travel fast enough, at least for the tunnel segments - but it is the cost of putting those discs in it is the problem: $ 15 billion!

$ 15 billion is an incredible amount.

• $ 15 billion is three times the total budget that will be spent on public transportation by Waka Kutahi and all local authorities for the entire 2021-2024 period across the country. (Source NLTP 2021-2024)
• $ 15 billion is almost double what Waka Kotahi spends in a year on transportation and all municipalities - road maintenance and construction, all bus and train subsidies, everything.
• $ 15 billion is 23 times what it would cost to build Auckland Harbor Bridge today (and remember, Auckland Harbor Bridge was financed by borrowing and then paying taxes).

In comparison, the Waterview tunnel in SH20 cost only $ 1.7 billion. The $ 15 billion (almost certainly an overall underestimation) will make the rising cost of the City Rail Link (CRL) of about $ 4.5 billion seem like a cheap option.

In fact, $ 15 billion makes it the largest transportation project in the country's history. (By comparison, $ 115 billion in cash today is what the New Zealand government paid for the entire WWII!) Dream of appearing on the back of an inappropriate envelope of a fraudulent commission. You will also lose money as there is no way for the fees charged to offset even half of your operating costs.

It was initially proposed as a way to solve two problems:

• Overcomes the demand for capacity on bus routes along Dominion Road; And the
• Bus congestion in central Auckland.

This is a very expensive way to solve both of these problems, if it really happens.

Originally designed to solve these two problems, the "solution" inevitably grew as the newly elected politician's ego grew. Politicians love big, exciting projects, and (with an almost ideological romance of planners and planners with trams), Auckland Rail's "solution" has grown like a seaweed, slowly absorbing and absorbing more and more revenue.

Like the highway planners they criticize, public transportation planners believe that the growth in demand is endless, and therefore they believe that they need to plan more and more capacity for their preferred mode of transportation. However, the time and willingness of people to move through cities is not unlimited, and as the pandemic has shown, there are no endless requests for bus travel in this corridor.

In fact, there are cheaper ways to increase bus capacity, for example

• Wider priority bus lanes and traffic light features
• Peak price of the bus ride, to have a net income from a widely used service that can be used to increase capacity.

Moreover, it appears that the bus congestion problem in central Auckland has disappeared significantly, partly because so much road space has been taken up by the CRL construction, and partly because the Auckland council has removed cars and drivers from more and more roads. makes the race difficult. So, in its own way, it is no longer a problem (which is not a problem anyway, since trams have slightly more capacity than most buses).

I mentioned it earlier as the Auckland tram, but the graded version of the tunnel, proposed by Grant Robertson and Michael Wood (and paid for by children and grandchildren) is indeed a "light rail"; This is what Brussels calls "pre-metro" - a small subway train that looks less like the slow tram of Melbourne and Sydney than the light rail. This irritates the Green Party, which supports planners who want slow-moving trams to block cars, but should worry anyone who thinks $ 15 billion could be better spent elsewhere.

So what are you going to do ? The government's press release is instructive in what it does not say as much as it does. It is noteworthy that it does not mention the cost, for example.

This is what it says:

• Auckland's growing population means they need a way to get around ... many of them are probably flats along Sandringham Road, Onyonga or Manger Bridge, which residents will want to travel to the CBD, the airport or elsewhere. between
• Without this light rail, Auckland would be stranded ... even if there is no place in the world where the construction of a light rail would have alleviated the situation; It may take a few buses from Sandringham Road and Dominion Road, but that's about it
• 12,000 cars will leave the road , but where and when? Total number of cars in one day, on which roads? Some short stretches of highway have more than 100,000 vehicles a day; On average, about 35 million kilometers a day are driven on Auckland's roads (pre-pandemic), so at best that $ 15 billion will reduce traffic by only 0.03%.
• 97 000 new jobs will be created by 2051 ... by whom? It also does not build or operate the light rail. Does that mean more property taxes on the road? Were the jobs created anyway? It remains for us to guess.
• It will halve some people's travel time to and from the airport ... no mention of who those people are - and honestly, if you do not live near a stop on your route, especially at the southern tip, you will not be do not rush because you will stop several times before reaching your destination

This is what's on the cans. Here is some information we need to process ourselves:

• The cost of capital or annual support required, compared to the amount of support that current services must continue to operate
• Expected demand and percentage of light rail capacity that will be used during peak hours (and off-peak hours).
• Where should people who live along the subway line work or learn? (Only 1 in 8 jobs in Auckland is in the CBD, and if you add the airport and Eat in, the line only serves 1 potential job out of 7 for the people who live there)
• Effect of actual travel time on current road traffic, including cargo.
• Why not Britomart or the new series of high-cost subways, the construction of which is now destroying most of city life?
• Because the government is now proposing the light rail that runs through the north coast tunnel, rather than the heavy rail that connects it to the urban rail network that is under construction, so that people on the north coast can catch a train to get there, says Newmarket, Henderson, New Lane, Sylvia Park, Manukau or Papakura or Onehunga - Instead of an easy subway ride so far on almost everyone's favorite destination list: Roskill Mountain.

Perhaps the key to this last question is that the path chosen places him in both the constituency of the Minister of Transport and the Prime Minister ... We are sure it can only be a great coincidence.

What is absolutely clear is that this is an amazing project, long to complete , poorly thought out, and that it will in no way even begin in the next two years. There is no possibility. So there is still time to go back to the definition and analysis of the problem ... what is the project trying to do? Who are the people trying to move? Good value for money or a sea of ​​high cost Keynesian helicopters? Does the city really need another multi-billion dollar memorial?

Even public transportation promoters wonder what is happening here. For example, imagine spending a tenth of the budget proposed here on improving bus services in Auckland! But this, of course, will not be a ribbon-cutting time for any politician.

Content Copyright PC.BlogSpot.Com © Permission to repost with links and features is granted.