Just as people from all around the south of England think nothing of jumping aboard a train to go to London for a day’s shopping, or to catch a show or a concert, Auckland, as New Zealand’s equivalent for entertainment, shopping and just about everything else, should be making it as easy as possible for our Waikato cuzzies to do the same.

Talk about trying to board the train after it leaves the station. For nigh on 100 years, efforts to build a commuter train service in Auckland have been stalled by squabbling politicians, local and national.

Think of a figure, double it, add your age and subtract the number of eels in Oakley Creek: that, it seems, is as good a guess as any for the price of completing the Waterview Connection.

I’m not surprised Transport Minister Steven Joyce and the NZ Transport Agency waited until the eve of the Christmas exodus to sneak out the highly embarrassing news that a tunnel was, after all, the most cost-effective and environmentally sensitive way to join State Highway 20 up to the Northwestern Motorway at Waterview.

Figures for the first five months of operation of the Northern Gateway Toll Road, to June 30, reveal that, on average, it cost $1.29 in transaction costs to collect each $2 car toll.

For those paying by phone, it would have been cheaper to have waved them through for free. Each $2 phone payment cost $2.70 to administer.

I wonder if Steven Joyce will now move to close down the toll operation, as clearly it isn’t making much of a profit, let alone a contribution to the Northern Gateway road.

As well they might, because under the legislation establishing the system, the Government agreed that $1.13 of the $2 collected was to go towards paying for the motorway, 65c was for transaction charges and 22c would go in GST.

In its operating report, the Transport Agency says: “This means we can claim only up $0.65 from each toll to cover our operational costs.”

To make up the difference between the 65c permitted transaction costs and the actual figure of $1.29, the agency has had to dig into its own pocket.

This must also mean the death knell for the ridiculous Puhoi to Wellsford road widening project.

The Government’s antipathy to embracing new Auckland public transport projects has made the debate over a rail link to Auckland International Airport rather academic.

Which makes it rather surprising that the airport company should be so sensitive about a recent Metro article’s passing mention that it opposed such a link.

Mr Joyce now seems to be deliberately taunting Aucklanders, promising all will be well, while slowly and publicly plucking the wheels off the trains, one by one.

He seemed to be deliberately mischievous last weekend when, while enthusing about roads, he told the Weekend Herald that “rail projects are [important] as well, but with the urban ones we need to know the impact on land-use planning in Auckland.”

He complained “there’s no business case or plans which says, ‘here’s where we’re going to put the two million people we’re told are going to live in Auckland in 22 years’.”

Whatever else Auckland local government can be criticised for, a failure to prepare reports is not one of them.

Read the rest of the article here.

When the new Government pulled the plug on the regional fuel tax six months ago, killing Auckland’s ability to buy itself a modern, electrified rapid-rail system, Transport Minister Steven Joyce told Aucklanders not to fret. He would come up with alternative funding arrangements.

Then in late May, after a trip to Australia, he returned full of the wonders of using a public-private partnership to buy the rolling stock.

He added that the PPP was not the only option being juggled by the Government and once more patted us on the head and said not to worry, electric rail was still on track for completion in 2013.

Reports now leaking out of Wellington paint a dispiriting picture of the alternatives being considered.

They suggest that far from being driven by a desire to create a first-world rapid-rail system such as any other city city of a similar size enjoys, the major driving force for this minister is a desire to meet the deadline as cheaply and Third Worldly as he can get away with.

Last December, after the passage of legislation supporting a regional fuel tax, the Auckland Regional Council called for expressions of interest internationally for the purchase of 140 electric rail cars.

A short list of seven suppliers had been selected at the time the Government’s action forced the process to be put on hold.

Industry sources suggest the Government now wants to almost halve the size of the new rail fleet to 75 and to make up the difference by collecting up all the second-hand electric locomotives that can be found around the country, giving them a lick of paint and an oil change, and pressing them into service dragging Auckland’s existing fleet of tarted-up old carriages.

Apparently a stockpile of retired electric locomotives in Palmerston North is being eyed up.

As well, some main trunk freight locomotives will become surplus to requirements, once the recently ordered fleet of 20 new freight locomotives arrives from China.

One report suggests more carriages may have to be bought.

Instead of the trains being short and swift and new, they will, because of the heavy freight locomotives pulling them, be long and slow to accelerate.

Another worry is the possibility that to save more money, the resurrected Onehunga branch line will not be electrified – a diesel shuttle will run back and forth instead – and the planned Parnell station will be shelved.

On Friday, Auckland Regional Council chairman Mike Lee said Aucklanders were running out of patience.

“We need those electric trains and we need to move now,” he said.

“We’re fed up with second-best for Auckland. We’ve had it since the 1950s, and this is going to be the end of it. We’re not going to meekly bow down and accept it.”

He called on Prime Minister John Key to tell his minister “to give at least as much commitment to mass transit in Auckland as you are to the holiday highways to the north of Auckland”.

An industry insider says that if money is the problem, Mr Joyce should do what the manager of any business-car fleet does, and approach the seven preferred tenderers with a lease-and-maintain deal instead of the original outright purchase proposition.

That way Aucklanders would get a new train fleet, not the Heath Robinson arrangement the Government is flirting with, and a guarantee of it being maintained. After 10 years or whatever, they could be replaced or kept on at a suitably adjusted price.

Buying this way would be more expensive than cash up front, but cheaper than a PPP scheme.

The advantage of a lease-and-maintain deal to a cash-strapped Government is that payments would be drip-fed. Also, the costs would be kept off the Government’s balance sheet, out of sight of the beady-eyed accountants from the international credit agencies.

Early this month, Finance Minister Bill English was bemoaning that it would take at least five years to catch up with Australia in infrastructure.

He told the Herald his advisers point to the economic benefits of getting infrastructure built to the right standards on time and to cost.

What better project to put this message into practice than Auckland’s long delayed rapid-rail system.

The talk of removing the red fence also distracts from the real barrier separating the city from the surf, and that’s the bus station that has occupied lower Queen St since July 2003, when Mayor John Banks drove down Queen St in a horse-drawn carriage to open the new transport complex…

On a fine summer’s day it could be jam-packed with people and pigeons. On a bleak winter’s day it was forbidding. But at least it was a pedestrian-friendly link between the city and the water. Not any more.. Now, from morning until late at night, this one-time people place is dominated by the throbbing of bus engines and the choking stink of diesel fumes. Up the side alleys it’s the same. Along Customs St and up Albert St and beyond the pattern is repeated.

For waiting passengers and passers-by alike, the noise and fume pollution are infuriating.

There seems no quick solution, but until we reclaim this bottom portion of Queen St for the people, all the grand talk of a continuous link between the wharf and Auckland’s main street is just bunkum.

One answer would be to insist that only electric buses be allowed in the inner-city canyons. That would eliminate noise and pollution problems.

He’s right about the noise and pollution, but it isn’t clear if his referring to trolley buses, some new fangled battery powered buses or hybrids which so far have proven to be expensive to operate and somewhat unreliable.  And a number of the buses arriving at downtown Auckland have travelled long distances, which may be unachievable for electric buses.  Of course there are other options that could be looked at – electric trams for inner city services being the most obvious.  Also natural gas powered buses are used extensively in Brisbane – I’m not sure why they aren’t in use here either.

That contract is running months behind deadline and the New South Wales Premier is very grumpy. The Sydney tender process proper started in August 2004, presumably after months of intricate, contract design work. The successful consortium was finally announced in November 2006.

Hailed as Australia’s biggest PPP scheme, the Reliance Rail consortium agreed to deliver 626 carriages within six years, the first to start appearing in 2010. The deal included a 30-year maintenance contract. The NSW Government says it’s worth $3.6 billion, however the Sydney Morning Herald last month calculated the true figure, once financing costs and the bill for maintenance over 30 years are included, at $9.5 billion. Nearly a third of that figure will go in interest payments and the like.

The full article here is well worth a read.  I’ve also resurrected an article from way back in 2002 by John Shaw, former board member of Transit, on the folly of public private partnerships.

Each time I write in praise of public transport, I end up having to eat my words. On Monday I was lauding the increased patronage figures in Auckland but by 8.15 on Wednesday night, I didn’t care whether I ever saw another commuter bus in my life. Mainly because, for the past hour, I hadn’t…

The electronic helper kept reassuring me 005 was DLY until just before 7.30 when it just disappeared. The next Link was now 28 minutes away – so much for the 15-minute gap – and the rain had taken a break, so I started walking, muttering like a crazy man about lying real-time indicator boards.

This has been my experience of late with this service as well.  I actually went as far as phoning the Maxx complaint number – 3666 400, but the operator convinced me that I had merely just missed my bus. There is nothing, I repeat nothing, more frustrating than waiting at a bus stop for a bus that never turns up.

It will be great if ARTA could respond to 1) why there was a delay and 2) what the plan is for the dodgy indicator boards.