Posts by Joshua Arbury
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Good points Matthew, I think the airport company has considered that rail to the airport was out in the never never, and therefore it wasn't very useful promoting it too much (I think they were worried about getting slapped with the bill).
Now that the ARC has made it a high priority, and they no longer have to focus their energies on getting the roading links improved (as they're just about done with that) airport rail has come back onto their agenda.
Which means that hopefully they will be supportive of efforts to finalise the designation for this critical transport project ASAP.
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Thanks Ross. Your Waitakeres bypass could work, if only there was flat land out that way and not... the Waitakeres!
Anyway, I actually think that we're jumping the gun on the need for another harbour crossing. I have read the traffic assessments for the Victoria Park Tunnel project and they detail that the Harbour Bridge actually runs under capacity because of bottlenecks elsewhere in the motorway network (like Victoria Park). Furthermore, the Northern Busway is a fantastic new piece of infrastructure that should mean that rail is not necessary on the North Shore for at least another 20 years or so.
Which leaves the walking and cycling issue - although I think NZTA and GetAcross are actually sorting that out and it might be possible to attach a pedestrian/cycling way to the bridge after all.
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OK here I am to offer a few reasons why one might not want to build it:
1) It would result in the current Harbour Bridge being removed. While it sure isn't perfect, it is an icon for Auckland I must say the city would feel pretty strange without it.
2) Urban amenity effects on Tank Farm. Do we really want a 10 lane wide motorway running through the heart of this new area? It seems like this is a part of the city that will be completely awesome in 10-20 years time, do we really want to screw it up by slapping a motorway down the middle of it?
3) Ship clearance - the bridge would have to be pretty high I think to cope with the ships that currently port at the Chelsea sugar factory. I guess that doesn't have to be a show-stopper, and different ships could be used for that factory, but in any case the bridge is probably going to have to be quite high up.
4).... which means it would be damn difficult to get a railway line from Britomart up to the bridge. I'm thinking that at a 1:50 grade the line would have to be rising for about 1.5km to get from 8m below ground level to 20m above ground level. Do we really want an elevated railway line cutting through the middle of our city between Britomart and this bridge?
So yeah..... those are my criticisms of it. But it's certainly an interesting idea. Ngati Whatua might have something to say about the land that's currently used for the St Mary's bay bit of motorway.
As far as I know, the current NZTA plan is to build a road tunnel and a rail tunnel. Once they are built the existing clip-ons would be used for pedestrians and cyclists, with the four middle lanes being for local traffic linking to Ponsonby and Fanshawe Street. However, that current plan does come at a cost of around $3.7-$4.1 billion. Ouch.
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Sacha, the Waterview motorway doesn't actually involve any land set aside for motorway purposes. The Allan Wood Reserve section largely goes through a railway corridor - talk about the ultimate metaphor for Joyce's entire transport policy, using a railway designation for a motorway.
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Mrs Skin, yeah that is somewhat of an issue - although in the case of the Eastern Motorway and the Victoria Park Tunnel it wasn't land directly being taken - but rather effects on their views that were most debated.
Anyway, I think it's a side issue too. The bigger issue is Joyce spending a huge amount of money on roading projects without proper economic justification while public transport has to scrimp around for every dollar it can find.
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Those are good points Matthew, although I don't think Joyce is alone in that matter. Call me cynical, but I really only think the previous Labour government (and this National govt) only found the extra dough for tunnelling under Victoria Park because it's close to the rich suburbs of St Mary's Bay, Ponsonby etc.
By contrast, with the Highbrook interchange near East Tamaki we saw the "Wymondley" area get totally gutted, with some of their school and a whole pile of houses being taken. Same process at Waterview - let's tunnel underneath the richer Avondale heights but take houses from around poorer Hendon Ave.
And lastly, let's not forget the Eastern Motorway debacle. I think that if that had affected the views of Mt Roskill or Otahuhu, rather than Remuera and Orakei, it probably would have been built.
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There is also the issue of integrating with land-use planning to take into account. Over the last decade Auckland has specifically focused on an urban growth strategy to intensify the city - particular along and around the rail corridor. The CBD rail tunnel & electrification work with these plans - extension of the motorway network work against them (as they encourage people to live further away).
Furthermore, car-dependency and simply building more roads and motorways ultimately destroys cities. Some time have a look at Kansas City's downtown on google earth, certainly a scary sight. Although to be honest our CBD is just as ring-fenced with motorways - cutting it off form the surrounding area.
Ultimately, there's an inherent conflict between the quality of a place and shifting people through the place. To create the best cities we need to balance that conflict and manage it carefully. However, over the past few decades, and into the future if Joyce gets his way, we will continue to destroy 'the place' in order to get people around. Public transport is far better at addressing this conflict, as high-quality spaces can be created yet a lot of people can still pass through them via public transport (light-rail being a classic example).
Considering that Joyce always justifies his motorway building projects by stating that they will contribute to increasing wealth and economic growth, it's kind of ironic that road-building lowers property values while public transport projects increase them.
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Not sure about the exact figure.
I'm guessing this report has done the rounds of this blog: http://www.bettertransport.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/electrification-report.pdf
Not sure what the shortfall is, but $100 million is a pretty good guess in terms of what we need extra to do electrification properly and not the half-arse job that seems likely.
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The money they're going to spend on the scoping project would pay about 2/3 of the cost of an integrated ticketing solution, including the running costs for at least a couple of years.
Yup - $100 million for scoping and property acquisition without the tiniest bit of economic justification. I have dug a bit deeper to figure out when this whole Puhoi-Wellsford nonsense began, and it really only appeared after Joyce got stuck in traffic to open the Orewa-Puhoi motorway back in January this year.
I can just imagine him sitting in the traffic jam (which only happened once, because everyone was nosey) thinking "right, I have the power, I'm gonna fix this!" And, sadly, that's about the level of analysis that was used to justify this $100 million being spent.
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Glad to be mentioned on here with my blog. The Puhoi-Wellsford motorway is surely a joke - the road has an average flow of around 10,000-15,000 vehicles. That's about the same as the Kingsland end of Sandringham Road.
In terms of working out what it's cost benefit ratio might be, the Waterview Connection was justified in that it (supposedly) saves around 90,000 vehicles a day 15 minutes per trip. By contrast, the Puhoi-Wellsford link might save 5-10 minutes per trip for a maximum of 15,000 vehicles a day.
Waterview will cost $1.4 billion, Puhoi-Wellsford is budgeted at over $2 billion......
.... hmmm... and I thought the justification for the Waterview Connection was dodgy!