The cost of light rail projects are silly numbers, especially for a country this size.
OPINION
If there is a change of government in a couple of months’ time, surely one of the least-lamented demises that will accompany it will be the magical mystery tour that has been light rail in this country. And what a mystical trip to Neverland it has been.
Light rail to Mt Roskill was originally announced as a centrepiece policy of the 2016 Mt Roskill byelection by then Labour leader Andrew Little, where it was spruiked as a way to link the transport-impoverished people of the affected electorate to the Auckland CBD.
In 2017, shiny new Labour leader Jacinda Ardern made it her first signature policy announcement that light rail would run from the Auckland CBD to Auckland airport, (via Mt Roskill). The first stage would be completed by 2021.
Seemingly oblivious to the new Waterview tunnel, she announced the trip would shave a goodly number of minutes off the trip to the airport, unfortunately using travel times that pre-dated the tunnel’s opening not long before.
Those savings have subsequently been deep-sixed, in favour of the “experience” of travelling by tram to the airport.
In the six years that have passed since, the tortuous path of Auckland light rail has been remarkably reminiscent of that old Wombles song Underground, overground, wombling free.
As we approach the 2023 election, sightings of actual light rail vehicles have been non-existent. Indeed, none have been ordered and no tracks have been laid. However, terabytes of data and thousands of people hours have been used up in discussions about how light rail might eventually be built, so that’s something.
And it’s not just in Auckland where the light rail fantasy has taken hold. The mandarins in charge have visited a giant and complicated joke on the people of Wellington with their long-running farce called Let’s Get Wellington Moving.
This is an ironically named and thinly disguised attempt by the Greens and some Labour leftists to supplant sensible extensions to the existing road, rail and bus networks with a shiny new expensive light rail line from their CBD out to the airport. Unsurprisingly, the long-suffering folk of our capital city have seen no progress either.
Even in Christchurch, there are those who are working to get light rail on the agenda, partly on the grounds that if it’s good enough for Auckland and Wellington, then why not Christchurch? It’s a fair question, but truly, you are not missing anything.
You have to hand it to the boffins at the light rail companies and their sales reps. They have done a great job over recent years of making old-fashioned trams look futuristic and cool.
Nothing says European sophistication quite like a hulking great bullet-train shaped tram crawling majestically down your main street, and countries around the world have been falling over themselves to sign up for them.
The only difficulty is that they are very, very expensive compared to the alternatives, and create a powerful level of disruption of roads and associated underground services while they are built — which tends to blow budgets with monotonous regularity.
Google “light rail” for any Australian state capital that has one and the cost overruns are legendary. And that’s even before you allow for the peculiarly Auckland obsession with placing light rail projects underground, which is even more expensive.
People say that it’s the same with roading projects, but the well-publicised roading cost overruns in this country were largely self-inflicted as a result of long Covid shutdowns and rampant inflation.
Roading projects generally have a far better track record. They are just easier to build, and more flexible to use, than light rail.
Light rail is designed for densely populated cities in wealthy countries and currently, sadly, we are neither. We’ve been racking up debt in recent times like there is no tomorrow, and even Auckland’s population density is like that of a big suburb in Melbourne or Sydney. Its total population makes it only the fifth largest Australasian city.
A useful cautionary tale is Brazil, which nearly bankrupted itself building new light rail and also heavy rail lines in even quite small capital cities around the country last decade in celebration of hosting the World Cup and the Olympics. Many of the lines have ended up as expensive white elephants.
But wait, there is more. In a breathtaking display of totally unwarranted self-confidence last weekend, the Labour Party announced that having failed to significantly advance any of their current light rail projects, they would nevertheless announce another one.
There will, apparently, now be a 21km light rail tunnel from Wynyard Point in central Auckland, winding up through a number of stops on the North Shore all the way to Albany. Well, it’s aspirational I suppose.
It’s certainly dumb politics. It is beyond me why you would make an announcement less than three months out from an election that does nothing but underline the failures of all your previous announcements in the same portfolio.
Leaving that aside, the big problem with all this transport fantasising is the price tag.
Light rail on the Auckland isthmus is currently budgeted to cost a whopping $15 billion, but Treasury thinks it could be $30b. Light rail across the harbour and up the Shore is apparently another $20b-30b. The light rail plans in Wellington are so far going to cost $7.4b and will likely grow to double that. These are silly numbers in a country and economy the size of New Zealand.
I actually don’t know why they stopped there. It’s all imaginary, so why not announce light rail to Pakuranga, Manurewa and Ōtara at the same time? What have those suburbs done to offend the mythical light rail gods? And why doesn’t New Plymouth get light rail? It would be great to see one of those trams heading down Devon St.
My father’s generation has a saying about a person having “champagne tastes on a beer budget”. When it comes to transport, the left has Dom Perignon tastes on a carrot juice budget.
With their latest pipe dream announcement, light rail has become such a caricature, it’s like the monorail episode on The Simpsons.
The sooner we bin this unrealistic obsession with trams and get on with building some transport projects which have a snowball’s chance of being afforded, and which leverage off our existing networks and projects like Auckland’s CBD rail link, the better.
We could at least save the hundreds of millions being spent dreaming up schemes which will never happen, and spend them on something useful instead.
Steven Joyce is a former National Minister of Finance and Minister of Transport. He is director at Joyce Advisory.
Summer questions with Andrew Low.