Posts by Matthew Poole
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By way of contrast, the 214 km Gisborne - Napier railway is at threat of closure for its inability to generate net revenue sufficient to cover the annual line maintenance and renewal cost of $2 million
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may well allow Government to leave the decision on mothballing = closure of the line to be made by KiwiRail on their own assessment of the short-medium term prospects of its profitability to them, without regard to the many wider interests, such as impact on road users including the literal impacts of death and injuries, which are routinely taken account of in the benefit-cost assessment of other transport options.If you read this Herald article I posted a page back, I get the distinct impression that if it's his decision Jim Quinn (KR CEO) won't mothball any more lines at this juncture. He'd rather rehabilitate them and get customers using them, especially given the very solid support from Fonterra to utilising rail ahead of road.
[edit] The direct quote is:
The man in charge of those decisions has already mothballed the Stratford-Okahukura line. And Napier-to-Gisborne is up in the air, says Quinn. "We'd like to keep it viable but it's got revenue just north of $600,000 and it's got a $23 million capital bill in front of it over the next 10 years."
Other lines under a cloud are Northland and the North Wairarapa line connecting Masterton to the Napier line.
"We're telling people, here's the problem and we'll try and work with them to unleash the most opportunities we can," Quinn says. "But if we're unable to close the gap, we'll move to a mothball phase."
Cutting rail back to a few profitable lines, he says, would leave him "with a business that's no more viable than I've got now but with a much reduced growth prospect".
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On the matter of pricing in road deaths, if one looks at figures from NZTA it's apparent that even a single fatality resulting from increased truck movements will cover the maintenance bill for one year. Possibly two. That's one death, which is pretty much a certainty. Only takes a "good" multiple-fatality crash involving a truck that didn't need to be on the road before the penny-pinching attitude of Joyce on matters rail becomes very, very short-sighted. Especially since road safety is also his bailiwick. I wonder if there'd be grounds to sue for failure to adequately discharge his statutory duty to road safety, along the lines of the lawsuit just brought against NIWA.
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One line mentioned as facing closure is Northland
Nnnnnnoooooooooo...........sob ...sob.
Given that reportedly a lot of the track is so under-maintained that trains are reduced to walking pace, it's not surprising. Joyce has shown consistently that he won't pay to rehabilitate rail, preferring to diminish the size and utility of the network so that Quinn is forced to play with one hand tied behind his back as he tries to grow KR's income and share of the freight market.
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Only if it links back to the Western Line, though. Otherwise it's just two tracks going to a single line that doesn't link to any other part of the network.
Or it is double tracked all the way out to Albany (long skinny loop) or forms a branched loop somewhere on the Shore (Albany & Takapuna loop).
How does that increase the number of trains on other lines that can use Britomart, though? It'd have to loop right across from Albany to join the Western Line before it creates a loop around Britomart, which is what's required, and that'd still be an extremely long trip to get back to the Western. Otherwise it's just a single line (even double-tracked it's still a single line, just as the Eastern, Western and Southern Lines are all single lines) that branches out from Britomart and connects to nowhere before coming back again.
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I think you're rather missing the point of what the tunnel will do to increase capacity. It's not that it's two more tracks away from the platforms, it's that it's a tight loop around the CBD that can feasibly be used by trains connecting to the Southern or Western Lines. -
Incidentally, does anyone know the reason why port bound trucks, rather than using the expensive motorway built for them, tend to drive up symonds St.
huh? Driving up Symonds St is driving away from the port. The hill slopes down to the water, after all.
I've seen plenty of trucks using the motorway ramps for the port. But there's a lot of industry around the inner western suburbs that's not best accessed from the motorway. Mt Roskill and Richardson Rd/Stoddard Rd, as a couple of examples. -
For the price of the $1.4 billion Waterview Connection the government could buy every household in Auckland a $2000 dishwasher.
$2000 for a dishwasher? I hope it cooks breakfast!
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Importantly for PoA though, they've opened an inland container park in Otahuhu, connected of course by rail. This is helping take some of the burden off the inner city motorway network, and improve reliability of PoA services.
Otahuhu? Don't you mean Wiri? Or is the container park separate from the inland port? As you say, it's vital that the rail link be maintained. The number of other coastal locations convenient to major roads in Auckland and convenient to rail is one: Onehunga, and it's already got a port. A smallish one, with growth constrained by surrounding geography and development. If we restrict ourselves to the east coast, I get a nice, round zero.
Could PoA be shut down, with everything handled by PoT and Onehunga? No, not really. Not without significant growth of both the above, and significant economic detriment to Auckland.
I believe Auckland's employment patterns are considerably more distributed than they were 30 years ago. There will always be a concentration in Central Auckland though, and as the city increases in size that number isn't likely to diminish.
Yes, they are, but it's also become possible for people to live and work within the same local government area, which is a big change. 30 years ago the Shore was pretty much a massive dormitory suburb for the city. Now there's significant business activity much closer to peoples' homes. Less so out west, but still a lot more economic activity than historically.
Another big change to 30 years ago is the growth of tertiary education providers. U.Auck has over 30,000 FTE students, and about half as many staff. AUTU has grown enormously from what it was as ATI, and there's now the unheard-of-30-years-ago concept of export education providers. There are at least 50,000 students centred around the CBD, which makes up for a lot of shift in economic centricity, and the CBD is now home to tens-of-thousands of people, which it wasn't even 15 years ago never mind 30. -
Excuse me it I am incorrect again, but I have always assumed that the biggest congestion problem with Auckland stemmed from the proximity of the CBD (with its rush hour) to both the port and SH1/the bridge which are vital to commerce. There are many possible solutions to this including moving jobs out of the CBD, putting in a second harbour crossing to primarily take either commercial or rush hour traffic and moving the port.
Moving the port's a non-starter. The cost of trying to find enough land to viably take over as a container park means it's never going to happen, especially given that it must, by definition, be coastal land. It must also be flat, accessible by road, and preferably able to be linked into the rail network.
Why try and move jobs out of the CBD? Move them where? That would likely make traffic problems worse, forcing people to head on cross-town trips rather than converging on a central destination, with the corresponding decrease in public transport utility and utilisation. Better to get more people going to one area, well-serviced by public transport, with all the efficiencies that attach to high-density commercial space.Reality is that trucks are not a large part of traffic on Auckland's roads during peak time. It's an inefficient use of legally-rationed driving hours to be stuck in traffic, not to mention the wear on all the drive-train components. Have you noticed how much emptier the roads are when university and school holidays are on? How much smoother traffic flows are? That really says everything that needs to be said about what the primary driver of congestion is, especially the difference when universities are operating and schools aren't.
These people cannot access rail services so will make the bigger problem worse by commuting in cars or on buses.
Buses aren't a problem, really. One bus full of passengers is 40-70 cars that aren't on the road. That's pretty efficient. If only 10% of peak-hour commuters switched to buses, even if extra buses had to be added to accommodate them, it would still be an enormous reduction in traffic. A stretch of road carrying 2000 cars an hour would be down to 1800 cars and five buses, maybe three, and 2000 cars an hour isn't very much.
[edit] Those buses would also occupy only a fraction of the space of the cars they replace, when you consider that a bus of 13m length could be carrying 70 people whose cars alone would occupy over 200m in physical length plus all the associated following distances.[/edit]Alternatively, build park-and-ride facilities. Good ones, with security. Even the shitty, insecure ones at train stations are well-used, and would be so much more attractive if people could be comfortable that they'd come back to find their car unmolested. My ex gave up on taking the train from New Lynn after her car got vandalised once and broken into twice in the space of a month, and it's a beat-up '92 Corolla.
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Tunneling westward makes sense because rail would need to follow the northern motorway and that means crossing to Birkenhead which is west of Britomart. This would double the number of tracks out of Britomart and thus double the capacity with this new capacity coming from the Northshore.
Only if it links back to the Western Line, though. Otherwise it's just two tracks going to a single line that doesn't link to any other part of the network. Which would still be an improvement on taking capacity away from existing lines, but does nothing to improve their capacity. Doubling capacity doesn't mean doubling the number of people with access to trains, it means doubling the number of trains that can use the network.
Loop lines are always more useful than branch ones. Turning the Onehunga branch into a loop that crosses to the Airport and then links to the Manukau branch would open up many options, including a train from Hamilton via the airport.
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Also on the topic of rail, and its relationship to freight, I just came across this article. There are some seriously huge numbers in there, like Fonterra saying that it's got 40k annual truck movements that aren't happening because the goods are going by rail. The scary bit is that Joyce seems to be thinking more like Dave Heatley (who thinks it would be better to shut rail down entirely than spend money trying to rehabilitate it) than like KR CEO Jim Quinn who would rather that KR be allowed to keep currently-non viable lines open and maintained so that he can try to grow business along them.
One line mentioned as facing closure is Northland, which is just stupid unless you're a trucking fan. One way to make SH1 safer is to get trucks off the road, and the way to do that is to have a functional railway. There's a lot of work required to bring the line up to scratch, but most of it is manual work that would employ dozens, if not hundreds, of people. That's a lot of new jobs, jobs that Shon Key supposedly wants to create. -
So, who is to benefit by Mr Joyce's mega trucks, it certainly will not be the majority of the population, so who is it?
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there is money and if National plays their game no doubt Big Trucking will line the coffers of the "I'm all right Jack, fuck you" Party
You answer your own question. Joyce hasn't been nicknamed the Minister for the RCF for nothing. He's so transparently in the pocket of the trucking industry that it really isn't funny. RCF have been supporters of National for a while, as witnessed by National, usually a bastion of user-pays ideology, objecting to RUC being increased to try and capture more of the costs of repairing road damage caused by trucks. Now Joyce is re-jigging RUC, and has even admitted that the permits for the 53T trucks won't cost anywhere near as much as it will cost to repair the road damage they do.
All the benefit accrues to the RCF. The general public are worse off, to the tune of increased spending on roads from the general fund that then can't be spent elsewhere, and to the tune of all the work not being funded for rail and coastal shipping development that could otherwise take millions of tonnes of freight off the roads except for final delivery, but those millions of tonnes of freight keep going by road and thus keep the members of the RCF happy. That's a whole hell of a lot of money, and their contributions to the National warchest are doubtless correspondingly large.