Auckland Harbour second crossing: Matthew Hooton - Labour doubles down on light rail

OPINION

If Labour’s response to Christopher Luxon’s successful education policy last week is $25 billion-plus for new Waitematā harbour crossings, then Aucklanders will be hoping he’s working hard on his health offering.

National has no room to oppose the overall thrust of Chris Hipkins’ bold harbour-crossing move.

In 2020, then-opposition leader Judith Collins and transport spokesperson Chris Bishop announced National’s plan for the next harbour crossing to be a tunnel or tunnels; that they should be for road, rail and “new public transport technologies”; and that construction work would begin by 2028. National said the new crossings would be tolled, but existing ones not. (I remember all this, since I wrote her speech.)

In fact, Collins was even more ambitious. She promised to extend commuter rail to Pōkeno, beginning in 2024, and to improve the rail networks connecting Auckland, Whangārei, Hamilton and Tauranga.

Those four cities, plus Marsden Point and Katikati, would also be connected by four-lane expressways to be completed in the 2030s, including tolled tunnels under the Brynderwyns and Kaimais.

Collins claimed the cost would be around $17 billion but the Herald’s Simon Wilson pointed out that everyone knows such projects always cost twice as much as promised. Like others, he criticised National for fiscal irresponsibility, saying it was promising to waste money on expensive ways of doing things that didn’t need doing, or were already being done more cheaply. He suggested $35b as a more realistic cost for Collins’ promises to Auckland.

In fact, automatically doubling official cost estimates for major infrastructure projects may not be quite right.

In 2012, Oxford University Business School’s BT Centre for Major Programme Management published a study of over 800 major projects, reporting that the average cost overrun for rail projects outside northwestern Europe is “only” 44 per cent, and 75 per cent for tunnels.

Of course, New Zealand seems particularly bad at it. When Prime Minister John Key announced his Government’s support for Auckland’s City Rail Link (CRL) in 2016, he said it would cost $2.5b. It was also meant to be finished about now. The latest estimate is $5.5b - a 120 per cent blowout - with no opening date in sight.

Jacinda Ardern’s promised Auckland Light Rail (ALR) project from the central city to the airport is worse. When the new opposition leader announced it along with a list of other ambitious projects in 2017, she said stage one to Mt Roskill would be finished by 2021 and the whole project by 2027. Even better news was that Labour said its whole Auckland transport package would cost just $3.3b more over 20 years than already budgeted in the Auckland Transport Alignment Plan (ATAP), or less than $200 million extra a year.

Six years on, no substantive work has begun. Last year, Treasury estimated ALR from the central city to the airport would cost up to $29.2b, nearly 10 times as much as Ardern indicated for her whole policy. Given New Zealand’s record, it’s only prudent to use the official maximum cost estimate as the unofficial minimum.

Still, it’s easy to be cynical. The January floods and Cyclone Gabrielle prove Collins was right on the money with her promised four-lane expressways and rail networks connecting Auckland, Whangārei, Hamilton and Tauranga.

Similarly, the now-bipartisan commitment to getting construction work under way on the Waitematā harbour crossings by the end of this decade is fantastic news. Hopefully, it will extend to the intercity expressway and rail networks Collins proposed, which are now even more obviously needed.

It’s not like New Zealand has a record of moving too quickly on infrastructure. People mocked National’s Maurice Williamson, Gerry Brownlee and Steven Joyce for their apparent obsessions with fast-tracking the Waikato Expressway and ultra-fast broadband, against all official advice. In retrospect, the Key Government is more legitimately criticised for not being bold or fast enough.

What matters now is delivery, cost control and mode flexibility.

Rod Emmerson's view following the announcement of the harbour crossing.

Transport Minister Michael Wood is a light rail ultra. Despite scepticism higher up in the Beehive, Wood has managed not just to keep his cherished ALR out of Hipkins’ policy bonfires, but won Cabinet agreement to put light rail at the heart of yesterday’s plan. In essence, Labour has decided not to connect the North Shore to the existing rail network and half-completed CRL, but to ALR, if and when it gets under way.

The problem is that there’s no assurance of that. Despite Ardern’s bold promises six years ago and Phil Twyford’s and Wood’s unflinching support ever since, Labour hasn’t yet managed to write a business case for the project. National remains committed to scrapping it.

This doesn’t doom yesterday’s bipartisanship on the harbour crossing, but it does mean Wood and transport agencies have a responsibility to maintain flexibility in their plans. Even if Labour survives this October, the chances of winning a fourth term are low, and construction will not have begun. It needs to be possible for a National Government — or a Labour one — to decide it prefers to get the maximum benefit from CRL by connecting it to the new harbour crossing, as it has been designed to do.

There may also be the new technologies Collins spoke about, such as so-called “trackless trams” that deliver the same benefits as light rail but aren’t limited to a fixed route.

On cost and delivery, Simon Wilson’s 2017 rule of thumb, the 2012 Oxford study and the CRL and ALR cost debacles suggest the $25b estimated cost of yesterday’s scenario one should be at least doubled to $50b.

With CRL, network improvements to allow one train to show up every two minutes, ALR and yesterday’s announcements. the Government is now committed to spending something approaching $100b on Auckland roads and public transport in the next couple of decades.

There’s no possibility of Auckland Council coming up with more than a tiny fraction of that, so taxpayers will need to pretty much fund the lot. It’s not clear how taxpayers south of the Bombay Hills feel about that.

As importantly, the existing governance structures and management systems for CRL and ALR have self-evidently failed, given the delays and cost blowouts. With no one held responsible, there is no reason to suggest anything better with the harbour crossings.

If Labour and National want taxpayers to get behind their promises, they will need to explain exactly how they will stop history from repeating itself, and who will be responsible — and how they will pay — if it all goes wrong.

- Matthew Hooton has previously worked for the National and Act parties, and the Mayor of Auckland, including on the recent transition and some of the transport issues mentioned in this column. These views are his own.