Wellington to blame for Auckland transport fails
Auckland’s commuters are sick of the region’s fatigued train tracks and congested motorways and will be expecting action from the incoming Government, Todd Niall writes.
When North Shore resident David Bowerman found damage to the Auckland Harbour Bridge would turn his commute to chaos, he thought he had a plan B.
‘‘If I took public transport I would use the Northern Express bus, or the Birkenhead ferry, then the train. Both work well and I enjoy those,’’ said the 35-year veteran of commuting to the southern industrial belt.
He opted instead to carpool, and it was only when he arrived in Penrose that he realised plan B would not have worked.
On the first Monday after a strong wind gust tipped a truck into a bridge strut, part of Auckland’s rail network closed for four weeks for urgent repairs to badly worn tracks.
Plan B would have got him to the Britomart rail station, only to find the Southern and Onehunga rail lines were closed.
The commuting ‘‘ perfect storm’’ combined the harbour bridge’s partial closure with the unprecedented urgent repair and replacement of under-maintained rail tracks.
Further south, downtown worker
Michaela Rush had already endured weeks of disruption to her rail commute from Manurewa, after the Eastern and Manukau lines were shut suddenly on safety grounds.
‘‘At first you had to get off at Otahuhu and they’d send a rail bus to pick us up, but there were no signs or directions and it was hard to find,’’ said Rush.
‘‘It makes me wonder why things are left to get to this point, and why the closure now.’’
It took three weeks, far sooner than originally feared, for the bridge to be fully repaired, but the speed limits on trains, and rolling shutdowns for weeks on end, will last until February 2021.
You might think it is hugely embarrassing for a city about to mark 10 years since its eight councils merged into one, in an unparalleled move to get on top of Auckland’s historic and growing problems.
Except for the fact that the failures occurred in the only major elements of Auckland’s transport infrastructure that are owned, maintained and run by government entities – KiwiRail and NZTA Waka Kotahi.
KiwiRail owns and manages the Auckland Metro network, 200km of line stretching from Pukekohe in the south to Helensville in the northwest.
It charges council subsidiary Auckland Transport a fee of around $20 million a year for access for the city’s 72 electric commuter trains.
AT pulled the emergency cord in 2018 after a broken track derailed a commuter train, limiting services into Britomart, and the council agency demanded a review of the state-run rail network.
The report by consultants WPS Opus revealed historic under-maintenance across much of the network, and estimated a $200m upgrade was needed.
KiwiRail around the same time had brought in a high-tech rail inspection machine which found the network in more urgent need of repair than the consultants had indicated.
With wear and tear raising safety concerns, KiwiRail unveiled a six-month programme of speed restrictions and progressive line closures while it replaced up to 120km of rail, and repaired others.
To put that in context, KiwiRail will replace 3-4 times as much rail in Auckland over six months, as it normally replaces across the entire country in a year.
The state-owned company’s chief operating officer, Todd Moyle, who spoke to the Sunday Star-Times at the Penrose station, part-way through a four-week shutdown of that section of line, insisted gain will follow the present pain.
‘‘Not only will Auckland have the network it deserves at the end of this work, but we will have the maintenance regimes to ensure it doesn’t happen again,’’ he said.
‘‘It makes me wonder why things are left to get to this point.’’ Commuter Michaela Rush
An unknown, despite the efforts of up to 500 track workers, is understanding exactly what has caused the ‘‘ rolling contact fatigue’’, which is more than simply wear caused by wheels rolling along rails.
Rail surfaces become damaged or cracked by fatigue, which can be due to the shape of train wheels, angles of contact, or even the state of the bed the track is laid on.
KiwiRail commissioned Canadian-based SNC-Lavalin to study the issue, and it found that curiously, the cracking may not be due to increased rail traffic.
Moyle said KiwiRail had just brought in a rail-grinding machine, and the frequency of ongoing grinding could double.
The rail work – part of which is repair, and part re-configuring tracks for projects such as the third southern freight line and the $4.5 billion City Rail Link – is a nightmare for tens of thousands of commuters.
Patronage was already down due to
Covid-19, but in the week before the midSeptember Southern Line closure, 12,000 passengers passed through stations between Newmarket and Penrose, and Onehunga.
Half of those are now using replacement rail-bus services, the rest are finding other ways to travel.
‘‘I hope it’ll be over before six months, but I’m not holding my breath,’’ said Rush, whose 40-minute trip to downtown now takes an hour, with new disruption ahead as the closures move further south.
The disruption poses a long-term risk to Auckland Transport’s finances, and a jolt from its pathway of rising rail patronage – previously almost 22 million trips a year – and preparation for the 2024 completion of the downtown underground rail loop, the City Rail Link.
Any revenue loss in 2020 will be masked by a Covid-19 underwrite for public transport by NZTA, but from February, Auckland Transport will learn the impact on patronage and fare income.
While the rail chaos may be man-made, the damage to the harbour bridge was more in the ‘‘act-of-God’’ category.
On Friday, September 18, a sudden gust of wind caught a high-sided truck as it crested the bridge, tipping it into the structure and bending a strut.
The damage was significant, being the first structural blow to the 61-year-old section of State Highway 1, but also because it re-ignited calls to speed up a cross-harbour tunnel.
The alternative is the Upper Harbour Highway and the Western Ring Route, as the transport agency works on a business case for a tunnel for rapid transit and possibly road traffic.
Away from the dramatic bridge damage, and the rail chaos, West Aucklander Sam Marshall has been altering her daily routine around growing congestion between Henderson and southern Mt Wellington.
‘‘Every year it just seems to get worse, there’s more driving to uni, more high school kids in cars – every year you find it takes an extra 10 minutes,’’ said Marshall.
She travels via New Lynn, the southeastern motorway, and Onehunga to a job where she shifted her start time by an hour to 7.30am to avoid the worst.
‘‘In the morning I get up at 5.50, leave at 6.20, arrive at 7 and start at 7.30 – going home can be a nightmare, it takes one to one-and-a-half hours.’’
The longer-term future for Marshall’s trek from job-scarce West Auckland to the employment-rich south, could also be in the Government’s hands – it is sitting on a detailed report into congestion pricing.
The Sunday Star-Times understands that four years of joint work between the Government and Auckland Council has produced a proposal to charge motorists to drive on certain city routes.
The Minister of Transport, Phil Twyford, has declined to release any detail to the Sunday Star-Times.
‘‘Documents from The Congestion Question (project) will be considered for release when ready and appropriate,’’ he said.
Many regard the ambitious policy lever as essential to changing motoring habits, not just to ease transport problems, but to shift behaviour in order to reduce climatechanging emissions.
Marshall can’t see an easy alternative. ‘‘It’ll take a long time to fix – not in my lifetime.’’
Auckland can reflect on a decade of significant city- driven transport progress, from the City Rail Link which overcame lack of interest in Wellington, to the electronic fare system that should have gone nationwide, and strong patronage growth on its revived electric rail network, and Northern Busway.
But as with the rest of the country, the smooth running of its highways and rail network is down to decisions made in and around the Beehive.