Few Auckland commuters will benefit from an "all or nothing" approach to the Central City Rail Link project....
Other large transport infrastructure projects have had to be delivered stage by stage in the Auckland Region. For example the Northern Busway project (later stages include links to West Auckland and to Silverdale), the State Highway Project (this has been in progress for forty years with latest stages being Waterview Connection and SH20), Rail electrification (later stages will include extensions to Southern and Western lines), the Harbour Bridge (Clip-ons and extended approach road access added over the years).
While it is always cheaper to build a large piece of infrastructure in one go, the fact is that budgets usually don't permit that. It is useful to note also that communities learn as infrastructure projects are incorporated into existing urban fabric. Stage by stage incorporation - incrementalism - has its benefits. Very few projects - when all the stages are built - look the same as their initial design plans.
Infrastructure is improved if feedback and experience can inform designs of later stages. In other words there are substantial benefits to be had if infrastructure can be built in a staged manner.
The whole Central City Link project - tunnels, lines, connections and stations - comes at a significant cost. Estimates vary around $3 billion for everything - including additional trains and some rail interchanges. Many other projects and capital requirements have been incorporated into Auckland Council's new Ten Year Plan. Holding rates down has pushed significant and increasing debt out to the future. (The Draft plan has almost doubled the Treasury Management debt limit from 175% of revenue, to 275% of revenue. This has enabled the Council to adopt a ten year plan which allows council to take out substantial loans, allowing debt to treble from the present level of $4.5 billion.)
This might be called intergenerational equity, but it could also be irresponsible. Council needs to cut the coat to suit the cloth. We should not be spending more than we are earning - as a city.
The Draft Long Term Plan 2012-2022 currently calls for a massive increase in Council debt - out to almost $13 billion - which will require interest payments of $800 million/annum - over 25% of Auckland Council's rates income. Thus a quarter of rates revenue will be to service bank loans.
Consider these points in debating the merits, or not, of staging the Central City Rail Link:
1) The most important part of the project is the network capacity that will be gained through connecting Britomart through to the Railway in the vicinity of Mt Eden. This capacity increase will be significantly greater if the connection at Mt Eden is in both directions. Not just West Bound. This stage - call it stage 1 of the Central City Rail Link - is the tunnel. The existence of the tunnel alone will free up Britomart (currently an end of line constraint) and significantly increase the carrying capacity of the rail services through Auckland Central Activity District. This will lead to much higher frequencies and greater carrying capacity per hour. Even if there are no stations along the tunnel. This improvement alone will allow Auckland Transport to apply necessary improvements to other feeder parts of the network whose capacity constraints will become the new bottleneck to rail service increases.
2) Once the tunnel is built and operating, the case for stations built at strategic points along that new corridor will be huge. Land owners and public alike will call for stations, and the argument for private contributions to the cost and amenity of those stations will be huge. This is the experience of station development along Hong Kong commuter rail systems. Build the tunnel infrastructure, and development will follow. That is the appropriate sequencing. The same thing happens when a State Highway is built. There are calls for interchanges and access to the new network. Auckland Council must build the network, and that will be the trigger for next stages of development. Of course future proof planning is required for the route of the tunnel, and future proofing can be built into the tunnel itself to enable/ease the subsequent construction of stations - so that normal service is maintained.
3) The Manukau Rail spur stands as a bleak reminder of what happens when what is built is a politically motivated whole project. There it was all or nothing. And it was all built - and it is still nothing in regional terms because the fundamental need to build a network was not respected. I was part of the Auckland Study visit to Perth a few years back which was organised by Waitakere City Council as part of the due diligence for the New Lynn Station. We were exposed to the advice and wisdom of a bunch of planners and urban designers. A key take home piece of advice from integrated rail and land use planners was: "Don't build spur lines. Build continuous lines and loops." Continuity is the thing to aim for. Building Auckland's Central City Link alone delivers that enormous benefit. Stations can follow.
Council is right to pursue the City Rail Link project. Auckland has been calling for it for decades. Closing the loop will bring huge efficiencies to the rail network and further justify electrification investment. But it can reduce risk to build it in stages - the tunnel being the first stage - and may be just the step the Government needs to financially support the project.
