The Campaign For Better Transport

Both Brian Rudman and, perhaps surprisingly, Jeremy Sole of the New Zealand Contractors Federation are waking up to the radical changes proposed for changes to national land transport funding.

Rudman:

As Auckland Regional Transport Authority chairman Mark Ford noted, “to put it simply, where there has been investment, there has been growth on rail and bus”. These were 3.7 million trips that were not taken in a private car on our congested roads. Yet our masters still have difficulty grasping the obvious message. Provide decent, reliable public transport and people will use it. At both local and central government level, the penny doesn’t seem to have dropped.

Jeremy Sole:

There are also other concerns. While the Government is firmly committed to investment in transport infrastructure to achieve economic growth, it appears this will be subject to funding availability.

The recent $25 million a year drop in the lower threshold of the predicted spend range in the Government Policy Statement for 2010 and 2011 indicates Government’s expectation that councils will not be committing their own funds to roading projects – so not drawing down the Transport Agency funding share.

The federation’s concern has been what will happen to those funds earmarked for local projects, if they are not taken up?

The Government has recently agreed to allow unused funds to be diverted to other transport projects but the mechanism for this is not yet clear.

It is vital that local projects such as arterial roads keep rolling forward. One way to do this would be low-interest Government loans to local councils – restricted to essential infrastructure projects.

Yes. Every category of transport funding is about to be slashed apart from new state highways. We’ll post the details shortly.

Come to the official launch of the Campaign for Better Transport “Action Stations” campaign.

• When: Wednesday 20th May, 2009, 7:30am
• Where: Mt Albert Railway Station entrance
• Who: CBT representatives will introduce the campaign, but this is also your chance to meet the candidates for the upcoming Mt Albert by-election.

Action Stations is designed to ensure that Auckland’s planned public transport upgrades and improvements are guaranteed funding and proceed without delay. In particular, we want the Government to assure us that Auckland’s planned integrated ticketing, ferry terminal upgrades, rail electrification and railway station construction and improvements will all be completed as soon as possible.

Read more about Action Stations at our campaign page:

http://www.bettertransport.org.nz/campaigns/action-stations

Responding to NZTA CEO Geoff Dangerfield’s fuddy-duddy response to the May 24th protest, Bevan Woodward tells it like it is:

It’s not just about the cycleway. I’ve been campaigning for walking and cycling access on the Auckland Harbour Bridge for more than 10 years. During that time the NZ Transport Agency (and its predecessor, Transit) has strongly opposed the idea.

It has come up with all kinds of excuses, ranging from, “It’s not a priority for the region”, to “It’s too steep and windy”.

Campaigners have responded to each excuse and the Transport Agency has come back with ever grander reasons why a walkway and cycleway could not be provided. Its latest excuse is that it would significantly shorten the service life of the clip-ons, but this excuse doesn’t stack up with the facts.

The honest reason why the Transport Agency doesn’t want to provide walking and cycling access is because, fundamentally, it is a road-building organisation which thinks Auckland’s traffic problems can be solved with more and bigger roads. The Transport Agency sees pedestrians and cyclists as a hassle they could do without.

Read the rest here.

Well done to the CBT’s Jon Reeves, ably assisted by Barry Palmer and Ross Galloway:

Leading rail industry consultants have added weight to a campaign to run a commuter train between Hamilton and Auckland, saying economic benefits would “comfortably” exceed operating losses.

They predict $15.5 million over 15 years in economic benefits including reduced road congestion from a single daily return service, against an operating loss of $6.6 million.

That would give the service a benefit-cost ratio of 1.9, or an economic return of $1.90 for each $1 invested by the Government and ratepayers.

The analysis is in a preliminary business case prepared for the Environment Waikato regional council, which is being urged by campaigners including Hamilton City leaders to lease Silver Fern rail-cars being taken off the Pukekohe-Auckland commuter run at the end of next month.

Although the council omitted a Hamilton-Auckland service from its draft three-year regional land transport programme of projects for which it will seek Government subsidies, it has received 40 submissions urging it not to lose the chance to obtain the rail-cars… [more]

 It was a real last ditch effort from Jon (and a trip to Hamilton) to get the rail link into Hamilton’s plan.  Nice one.

Steven Joyce really is beginning to annoy me as Transport Minister. Not only has he trodden all over the people of Mt Albert and Waterview, in deciding to can the Waterview tunnel, but he lives in a bizarre dreamland where he thinks that funding for future transport projects should be dependent upon the current amount of people using a particular type of transport method, rather than the future trends of where the split in transport modes is going.

Now this should be a simple issue, but clearly there’s a complexity in people’s heads that enables Steven Joyce to hide behind his answer of “84% (or sometimes 86%, depending on how he feels) of Aucklanders use private cars to get to work, so that’s where most transport funding should be doing”. To clarify, I accept that most people use cars to get to work, and to get around Auckland – that’s not debated. And in fact, it’s not really surprising considering that probably around 84% (if not more) of the current transport network is pretty much dedicated to cars. The railway lines, the Northern Busway and the various bus lanes across Auckland could be considered as the only current parts of the transport system to not be dedicated to private vehicles. However, when it comes to transport funding what we’re talking about are projects for the future, not projects for the past.

I feel that a metaphor is necessary here for this to make sense. Let’s say that I run a company which sells two different products: red socks and blue socks, for example. 84% of what I sell are red socks and 16% of what I sell are blue socks. Therefore, 84% of my current machinery is dedicated to making red socks and 16% dedicated to making blue socks. Now, over the past few years my sales of red socks have been pretty constant, in fact they haven’t increased since 2004. Over that same time period my sales of blue socks have increased significantly – by around 20-30% even. Furthermore, I know that 5-10 years into the future my main ingredient for making red socks is going to increase dramatically in price, and my prices will need to go up significantly to reflect this. Therefore my likely future sales of red socks are going to stay constant or perhaps even decline. As people will still need to buy socks, blue socks will become comparatively cheaper and more popular.

Now, a few questions:

1. Over the next 5-10 years is it more likely that my sales of blue socks will increase, or my sales of red socks?
2. Given that my sales of red socks haven’t increased since 2004 and because I’m mindful of future price increases in a very important ingredient, should I build another machine that makes red socks?
3. Given the recent increase in my sales of blue socks, should I add capacity to the production of them instead?
4. Would it be wise, in a business sense, for me to focus the vast majority of the money I have to spend on capacity increases on red socks?

In case anyone got lost in the metaphor, private vehicles are red socks, public transport is blue socks. Steven Joyce is proposing to spend the vast majority of transport funds for new infrastructure on roads, even though the number of vehicles using the roads is not increasing. Meanwhile, our “growth sector” of blue socks/public transport is getting ignored and deprived of necessary funds.

Geez I thought this guy was a successful businessman. He sounds like numbskull to me.

The Herald reports that the Government has canned the Waterview tunnel, but hasn’t announced what it will be replaced with just yet.  The Transport Agency is expected to make a decision today.  The maximum budget for the project will be $1.4bn.  Act MP John Boscawen thinks the whole thing can be done for $500m, so I’d be interested to see that proposal.

We’ve (finally!) moved to a new hosting provider. If you find any issues, please let me know via the blog comments here.

Let’s just say Auckland had $2.2 billion to spend on transportation. This money is from a crown grant rather than from petrol taxes, so there’s no real bias from the school of thought that petrol tax money should be spent on roads. Therefore, all different types of transport projects could be considered equal – ie. rail versus roads.

Now let’s look at two ways in which that money could be spent:

The first option is on a cheap and nasty Waterview Connection. This open cut, fully surface level option is projected to cost almost exactly $2.2 billion. This is a total of $1.456 billion for construction costs, $290 million for SH16 upgrades and $450 million for financing costs. This option will involve the demolition of around 500 houses, the loss of a huge amount of open space in a part of Auckland that is considered to already be short of open space. Because of its high social and environmental costs, its cost-benefit ratio may be below 1. Furthermore, 73% of the benefits it will supposedly bring are  internationally criticised ‘time-savings benefits’, which don’t actually seem to exist in the longer-term. So, to conclude, for this option we get a 4.5 km motorway driven through a suburb, a huge loss of open space and all justified on fairly dodgy time savings benefits that may not even exist.

The second option, which also costs $2.2 billion, would involve a two track railway line being built from Avondale to Manukau City via Onehunga and the airport. This option would firstly involve completing the Avondale-Southdown railway line – that has been designated since the 1940s. Because of its long-running designation no houses would have to be demolished to make way for the line. Completing the Avondale-Southdown railway line would open up rail access from West Auckland to the airport and south, it would offer freight trains an alternative route through Auckland to the congested Newmarket junction, thereby over time allowing higher frequencies of passenger trains to be operated. This part of the project would cost $729 million and include four train stations – for interchanges with high frequency bus services to the city along Manukau, Dominion and Sandringham Roads.

The rail option would also involve linking the airport to the city by rail – with trains able to travel from Britomart to Onehunga, then over the Mangere Bridge to the airport. Furthermore, it would also link with the existing main trunk railway line near Manukau City. This finally creates a high quality public transport link from the city to the airport, creates an alternative  rail link between Manukau and Britomart, increasing the capacity of the Otahuhu-Wiri section of the Southern Line. It makes running inter-city trains to Britomart a possibility, and they could even go via the airport for extra connectivity.

They both cost $2.2 billion.  They both compete for the same money, a crown grant. I wonder which has the most long-term benefit for Auckland? I wonder which will be built?