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 the light rail to Auckland airport it had promised to have completed by 2023. It wants to place nearly half underground. So as the UnCivil Servant points out in this Guest Post, it's not really a tram anymore ...

THE WORLD IS AWASH WITH with poorly thought-out light rail/tram proposals. Some even get implemented -- in places like Newcastle, Australia. Most generally prove to be eye-wateringly expensive money-pits that look nice in glossy renderings, and increase some property values for houses and apartments near stations, but have a negligible transport impact either on traffic congestion or emissions. Auckland's proposed underground light rail is one of these. 

Like most such projects, it is less about transport impacts or economics, and everything to do with ideologically-blinkered politicians ever keen to build monuments to themselves at the expense of our children and grandchildren. 

At least the proposal the Government has accepted, the Michael Wood Memorial Moneypit, is not the inanely stupid street-tram idea, so favoured by the Greens and urbanists, that would remove a great deal of existing road capacity -- that removal being a key reason that car-hating Greens and urbanists want trams so much: which is because they have worked out the main way to stop people driving is by making it much more difficult, expensive and inconvenient to do so, and putting a tram on the road a tram is among the best ways they can think of to make it more difficult, expensive and inconvenient. (It's irrelevant whether or not they or anyone else rides the tram, because its main purpose is not to move people about, but to block people moving about by car, taxi, or truck.)

So the proposal is not as bad as it could be. Indeed, it's even better than it sounds (who in their right mind would ever think of ordering up an underground tram to Mt Roskill?) It would be a piece of public transport that could actually travel quite fast, at least for the tunnelled segments -- but it's the cost to get those segments in which lies the catch: $15 billion!

$15 billion is an eye-watering amount of money. 

• $15 billion is three times the total budget to be spent on public transport by Waka Kotahi and all local authorities for the entire period of 2021-2024 across the entire country.(source NLTP 2021-2024) 
• $15 billion is nearly twice what is spent on transport by Waka Kotahi and all councils in a single year, that’s all road maintenance and construction, all bus and train subsidies, everything. 
• $15 billion is is 23x the cost of building Auckland's Harbour Bridge in today’s money (and don’t forget, Auckland Harbour Bridge was funded by borrowing, and then tolls that paid off the debt).

By comparison, the Waterview Tunnel on SH20 was only $1.7 billion. The sum of $15 billion (almost certainly a gross underestimate) will make even the outrageously wasteful City Rail Link (CRL) cost of around $4.5 billion look like an economical option.

Indeed, $15 billion makes this the most extensive transport project in the country’s history. (By comparison, $115 billion in today's money is what the New Zealand govt paid for the entirety of the Second World War!) Dreamed up on what seems the back of an ill-suited envelope by an ill-informed committee. It will lose money as well, as there is no way the fares collected will ever recover even half the costs of operating it.

IT WAS ORIGINALLY PROPOSED as a way to address two problems:

• demand exceeding capacity on bus routes along Dominion Road; and
• bus overcrowding in downtown Auckland.

It is a very expensive way to fix these two problems -- if indeed it ever will.

Conceived originally to fix these two problems, the "solution" has grown as inexorably as the ego of a newly-elected politician. Politicians love big, flash exciting mega-projects, and (combined with an almost fetishised ideological love-affair that urbanists and city planners have with trams), Auckland's light-rail "solution" has grown like moss, slowly absorbing and taking over more-and-more budget.

Just like the highway planners they criticise, the public transport-planners extrapolate growth in demand to be endless -- so they think they need to plan for ever-expanding capacity for their preferred transport mode. The time and willingness people have to travel within cities however is not endless and, as the pandemic has demonstrated, there is not endless demand for bus trips on this corridor. 

Indeed, there are far more cost-effective ways to increase bus capacity, such as 

• more extensive bus priority lanes and priority at traffic lights 
• pricing peak-time bus travel so that there is actually net revenue from a highly-used service that can be used to pay for more capacity. 

Furthermore, the downtown Auckland bus-overcrowding issue seems to have largely disappeared, in part because there is so much roadspace taken up by building CRL, and in part because Auckland Council has been removing cars and drivers from more and more streetspace by making driving difficult in its own way, such that this simply isn’t an issue anymore (and it isn’t an issue anyway, as trams' capacity on streets is only marginally more than having multiple buses).

I'VE REFERRED TO IT before as the Auckland Tram, but the tunnelled, grade-separated version proposed by Grant Robertson and Michael Wood (and paid for your children and grand-children) really is “light rail”; it is what in Brussels is called “Pre-Metro” -- a scaled-down metro train that doesn’t resemble the slow trams seen in Melbourne and Sydney so much as an underground-lite. This annoys the Green Party supporting urbanists who WANT slow trams to get in the way of cars, but it should annoy everyone who thinks $15 billion can be better spent elsewhere.

So what will it do? The Government press release is informative in what it doesn't say as much as what it does. Significantly for example, it doesn’t mention the cost.

Here's what it does mention:

• Auckland’s growing population will mean they need some way to get around ...  a lot of them, apparently, from the apartments along Sandringham Rd or in Onehunga or Mangere Bridge whose residents will want to travel to the CBD, or the airport, or places in between 
• without this light metro, Auckland will be gridlocked ... even though there is nowhere in the world in which building a light metro line has relieved gridlock; it might take a few buses off Sandringham Road and Dominion Road, but that’s it
• 12,000 cars will be taken off the road ... but where and over what period? total cars in a day, on what roads? Some short sections of motorway have over 100,000 vehicles a day passing over; around 35 million vehicle-kilometres are travelled on an average (pre-pandemic) day by motor vehicle on Auckland’s roads -- so at best this $15 billion boondoggle will reduce traffic by just  0.03% 
• 97,000 new jobs will be created by 2051... by whom? how? Not from the construction or operation of the light metro. Does that take into account the higher taxes on properties along the route? Would the jobs have been created anyway? We are left to guess.
• it will halve travel time for SOME people to and from the airport ... it doesn't say who those people are -- and, frankly, unless you live next to a station on the route, particularly at the southern end, it wont be fast because it will stop many, many times before arriving at your destination

So that's what it says on the tin. Here are some information we're left to work out for ourselves:

• the capital cost or the annual subsidy needed, compared to how much subsidy current services need to keep running
• expected demand, and the proportion of light metro capacity expecting to be utilised at peak (and off-peak times)
• where the people living along the light metro line are expected to be working, or getting educated? (only 1 in 8 jobs in Auckland is in the CBD, and if you add the airport and Mangere, then the line serves only 1 in 7 potential jobs of people who live along it)
• the actual travel-time impacts on existing road traffic, including freight.
• why it isn't connecting either to Britomart, or to the new and also-very-expensice underground train set whose construction is currently disrupting much of the inner-city's life?
• why the Government is proposing light-rail through a tunnel to the North Shore now, instead of heavy rail connecting it to the City Rail Link under construction, so that people from the North Shore might get a train to say Newmarket, Henderson, new Lynn, Sylvia Park, Manukau, Papakura, or Onehunga -- instead of a light metro to that place on almost nobody's list of preferred destinations: Mt Roskill.

Perhaps a clue to that last question is that the chosen route puts it in the electorates of both the Minister of Transport and the Prime Minister ... which we're sure can only be an enormous coincidence.

What’s pretty clear is that this is a huuuge project, with a very long lead time, poorly thought through, that will in no way be even begun in the next two years. Not a chance. So there's still time to get back to problem definition and analysis... What’s the project trying to do? Which people is is trying to move? Do you want value of money, or a sea of big-spending Keynesian helicopter money? Does the city really need another multi-billion dollar monument? 

Even supporters of public transport are left wondering what's going on here. Imagine, for example, if even a tenth of the budget proposed here was spent on upgrading bus services in Auckland! But, of course, that wouldn't proved any sort of ribbon-cutting moment for a politician would it.

Let's Get Wellington Moving is more about the opposite, explains The UnCivil Servant in this guest post. In a city, and a country, in which we have a crisis of unaffordable housing, these people are essentially just telling we peasants: 'Let Them Eat Monuments.' Expensive ones ...

Let’s get Wellington moving by removing 'Let's Get Wellington Moving'

by The UnCivil Servant

A RUNNING JOKE AROUND Wellington is the organisation for activist bureaucrats Let’s Get Wellington Moving (LGWM). A running joke, because it is a symbol for how bureaucracy barely let's anything move at all. 

The last National Government foolishly set it up to try to get agreement with local government on fixing transport problems in Wellington. Labour however has since changed its objectives, and painted a wide band of Green all over it. So now it isn’t really much about transport at all.

When set up the organisation's primary objectives were stated as:

to develop a transport system that:

Enhances the liveability of the central city
Provides more efficient and reliable access for users
Reduces reliance on private vehicle travel
Improves safety for all users
Is adaptable to disruptions and future uncertainty

Now, the objectives for Let's Get Wellington Moving barely mention movement, and nothing at all about "developing a transport system":

Our programme objectives [they now say] are:

greater liveability, including enhanced urban amenity and enables urban development outcomes
more efficient and reliable access
reduced carbon emissions by increasing mode shift away from reliance on private vehicles
improved safety for all users, and
resilience and adaptability to disruptions and future uncertainty.

The upshot of this capitulation to blancmange is that LGWM is now less about transport and more about enabling intensification for housing development, and reducing carbon emissions. In fact, almost all about carbon emissions. Note: not noxious emissions like particulates (many of which come from vehicles, and actually DO affect health), but climate change. This ignores that nothing LGWM can do will actually impede or affect that in any case because of the Emissions Trading Scheme (which caps total emissions from transport). 

It is also single-mindedly focused on reducing emissions solely by mode shift. Not by travelling less, not by moving to electric or hybrid vehicles, or by reducing traffic congestion to waste less fuel. LGWM is instead now almost solely focussed on enabling more housing (on one corridor), and on making peasants like you drive less by using public transport more.

While politicians, including the expert on (abolishing car) parking Julie Anne-Genter, might be obsessed with the idea that people need to drive less, and that big expensive public-transport projects are needed to enable more housing, this is demonstrably nonsense. LGWM already notes in its reports that 16% fewer people commute by car into central Wellington in the morning peak in 2017 than in 2000, although 12% more people are travelling there at that time. So there is already a decline in car travel into central Wellington by commuters.

So there isn't a problem of more and more people commuting by car into central Wellington. What there is (about which Genter and LGWM seem entirely oblivious) is a growth in traffic seeking to bypass the city. 

Around a third of all traffic heading into Wellington city is seeking to bypass it. The people bypassing the city are coming to and from the airport, hospital, and the eastern/southern suburbs, and heading to and from the northern/western suburbs, the Hutt Valley, Porirua, Kapiti and beyond. 

THIS -- THE LACK OF ANY GENUINE BYPASS --  is the source of the single biggest transport problem in Wellington. This is blatantly obvious to anyone who isn’t blinded by the Green (and now Labour) Party’s trendy North American urbanist blinkers. These people trying to bypass central Wellington quite simply are not going to change onto trams and buses to double their travel time, and no amount of Neo-urbanist hand-waving will make them. 

The problem is easy to identify: Wellington’s urban motorway ends abruptly at Te Aro at one end, and at the other end, SH1 from the airport stalls at the bottleneck of Mt Victoria Tunnel, with one lane in each direction. This causes congestion all day long and on weekends as well. Plus between 15-40% of traffic along Wellington’s waterfront is travelling to avoid that congestion, according to LGWM, that’s traffic that helps separate Wellington city from its harbour.

The latest draft strategy released by LGWM indicates how it isn’t that interested in fixing that problem. Instead, like Minister Michael Wood, it is hooked on a tram line -- after dumping an earlier proposal from the city to the Airport, the tram fetish this time focusses on a linefrom the city to Island Bay.

However, the putative Island Bay tram isn’t about addressing a transport problem either. There is no transport problem from Island Bay at present that a tram line will fix -- no problem of overcrowded buses, no congestion at bottlenecks fivable by tram. No, the tram line is all about housing. LGWM thinks that without a tram line to Island Bay that could cost $2.2 billion, there won't be enough intensive housing development along the corridor. 

That's $2.2 billion (plus fuck-ups) to solve a non-problem. After all, it's not lack of tram lines that is causing a shortage of intensive house building!

This policy of LGWM is straight out of the North American urbanist planner playbook, which calls for more "PT" (public transport) to induce more high-density housing. A policy that  has had the same success in addressing housing shortages and traffic issues there (i.e., virtually  none) as it would in Wellington. 

At least Treasury and the Ministry of Transport have been on the ball, advising Ministers that any mass transit proposal for Wellington will only produce “secondary” transport benefits that are "insufficient to justify them on their own." In other words, it’s a boondoggle: the costs to taxpayers for these transportation white elephants far exceeding any alleged "economic benefits" from improving mobility. It's a money pit, but a totem for politicians to show off -- a monument-building vanity project.

In a city, and a country, in which we have a crisis of unaffordable housing, these people are essential telling we peasants: 'Let Them Eat Monuments.'

Of course, the argument that you need a tram line to intensify housing is rubbish, as demonstrated by the latest inspired announcement to abolish the need for a resource consent to build a three-storey residential development in major cities. Assuming the rule change works, and it encourages more intensive housing development in Wellington, the idea it will not happen first in Mt Victoria, Mt Cook and Newtown, close to the CBD rather than Island Bay is rather fanciful. Being that close to the CBD encourages walking and cycling and hopping on one of the multiple bus routes that already pass by on the way from the suburbs. 

The tram is a massive boondoggle that neither enables nor is necessary for housing development. It's a fetish of Green activists; it is not rational economics.

AH, BUT WHAT ABOUT EMISSIONS? Minister Michael Wood is particularly keen on cutting emissions, but Island Bay already has a preponderance of electric buses that go some way to do that. 

And it’s particularly ludicrous to talk about spending $2.2 billion on a tram line, when both the Government and the Greater Wellington Regional Council baulked at spending just $53 million to replace some of the infrastructure to keep Wellington’s city-wide trolley-bus network moving. A network that went from Karori to Island Bay to Miramar to Aro Valley to Kingston to Seatoun to Lyall Bay. Anyway, only an idiot, or an MP, thinks any of this will reduce emissions. (But perhaps I repeat myself.)

"But, but..." you say, "aren’t they proposing a second Mt Victoria Tunnel too? ... and doing something called 'grade-separation' at the Basin Reserve?" Sure they are, but the proposals for the second tunnel are ludicrous. One is to build a new tunnel, or to convert the existing tunnel for walking and cycling only. Another is to build a new tunnel, but with one lane each way for buses – when today virtually NO buses go through Mt Victoria Tunnel, because there is already a one-way bus tunnel just to the north that bypasses the congestion. So all of the proposals essentially keep the current road capacity and do nothing at all about the bottleneck. This is straight out of the Green Party “building new road capacity is bad” school of thinking, on the basis people might have the audacity to drive (even with an electric car). One has to suspect the proposals are designed to just be dumped for being uneconomic, because they won't encourage housing, won't reduce emissions, nor encourage people to shift modes.

WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF WELLINGTON you ask? That's certainly a fairer question. Wellingtonians in the western and northern suburbs could certainly be excused for wondering why LGWM has nothing for them. Karori, for example, has a highly-congested tunnel and bus route about which LGWM is studious silent. However, you should stop thinking LGWM's sporadic but well-funded campaigns are really about transport anymore, because they ain’t. What they are is a crusade by activist Ministers and car-hating planners to justify building an expensive shiny new tram line, one that they can claim as theirs -- a monument to their egos -- pouring billions of unnecessary dollars into one lone corridor in a city that has had widespread and ongoing issues with throttled roads, cancelled bus services and, of course, a crumbling water infrastructure.

Meanwhile, LGWM embarrasses itself by its recent focus on “projects” that are nothing more than micro-management tinkering. Its main website notes one of its great successes as …. lowering the speed limit in central Wellington to 30 km/h. For a large intergovernmental project team meant to be focused on major strategic policy ("delivering a shared vision for Wellington" their website grandly proclaims) to be left instead to be noodling around with lowering speed limits is both embarrassing and ludicrous. Which is precisely what LGWM has become. 

Indeed, their proposal to install a pedestrian crossing and lower the speed limit on a four-lane stretch of state highway along which there is zero property access, has seen some call it Let’s Get Wellington Stopping.

They are a joke. But an expensive well-connected one.

If we want to ever get Wellington moving, a first step must be to remove Let's Get Wellington Moving. It must be stopped.

Thereafter, Waka Kotahi should be directed to finish SH1 in Wellington with a second Terrace Tunnel and Mt Victoria Tunnel; to trench the highway under Te Aro; and to grade separate at the Basin Reserve. Wellington City Council should put in place bus-priority measures at strategic points across the network, and this entire folly of a programme dreamed up by LGWM should be ended. All of this for much less than what LGWM is proposing.

Now about Michael Wood’s other tram proposal….

* * * * 

The UnCivil Servant is neither civil nor servile. He is not however entirely unfamiliar with the civil service.