Super Fund bid worth wait for?
The Ministry of Transport is looking at two proposals to build Auckland’s light rail, one from the Government’s Transport Agency, NZTA, the other from the NZ Super Fund.
Both are shrouded in secrecy, although we’ve seen early versions of NZTA’s plan and Stuff published details of an early version of the Super Fund’s plan last week.
The Ministry of Transport now has the job of looking at the two plans and choosing which one to recommend to Cabinet, which will decide which one to build.
For what promises to be one of the biggest transport projects in New Zealand, very little is known for sure about the proposals.
The best way to understand what the Government wants from light rail is to look at the December 2018 proposal from the Super Fund that was leaked to Stuff and published last week.
The Super Fund says the plan has changed considerably since then, but leaked letters from NZTA’s former interim board chair Nick Rogers say the agency now believes the Super Fund’s proposal is preferred by the Government, and is what its proposal will be measured against.
With that in mind, it’s safe to assume the plans being looked at are some version of what the Super Fund put forward in December. This plan promised fast, 30-minute trips between the central city and the airport, along
a network that would eventually comprise 47 kilometres of track spread over two lines: the first from central Auckland to the airport, and the second heading northwest to Kumeu.
The fund promised a fleet of 76 cars running as two-car trams, and a peak-time frequency of one train every four minutes and an off-peak frequency of one train every 8 minutes. It promised a capacity of 4500 passengers per hour per direction, which it said could be upgraded to 18,000 ‘‘without major system upgrades’’.
This is impressive stuff transport-wise. Greater Auckland blog’s Matt Lowrie likened it to building the entire London Underground at once.
The fund’s promises are achievable because of two major departures from what had previously been signalled. First, the proposal would be mainly ‘‘grade separated’’, meaning the train
carriages would not share the road with cars. Second, it would have far fewer stations than the NZTA’s plan, allowing faster journey times.
But fewer stations came at the cost of urban regeneration, one of the aims of the project. If the train stops less, fewer people will use it as they’ll have to walk (or drive) further to get to a station. One of the goals of the project was to densify the corridor down Dominion Rd, which the Super Fund’s plan appears to put in jeopardy.
And the cost of full grade separation is more mundane: it’s exceedingly expensive. The first proposal plans to bury two stations down Queen St, and eventually send the cars on elevated rails over the suburbs of Auckland to the airport.
Now, that’s fast and efficient transport, but can Auckland – or the country – afford it?