Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown (right), with Minister for Auckland Simeon Brown (left) and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. Auckland Council's infrastructure priorities do not align particularly closely with the Government's. Photo / Alex Burton
This is a transcript of Simon Wilson’s weekly newsletter, Love this City — exploring the ideas and events, the reality and the potential of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. To sign up, click here, select Love this City and save your preferences.
There were shocks this week when Auckland Council approved a list of major long-term infrastructure priorities.
The first was cost: the council heard from officials that the indicative cost of its seven priorities for big new spending over the next 30 years is $150 billion. That suggests the nationwide figure of $210b used by the Government may be far too low.
They’re not saying they will spend that much money, but they are flagging the issue to the Government.
The second shock was that the council’s priorities were described very differently from the Government’s.
In transport, remember, the Government is focused on “Roads of National Significance” (Rons). Auckland Rons include:
But none of these Rons aligns with the council’s own priorities, which focus squarely on public transport (see “Rapid transit priorities” below) and flood management.
A third surprise came in relation to a new Waitematā harbour crossing, which is not on the council’s priority list.
The Government wants to build a new road crossing under (or possibly over) the harbour. Infrastructure and Transport Minister Chris Bishop announced at the Investment Summit just yesterday that “over the next 12 months, starting in the coming days, we’ll undertake geotechnical, environmental, and utilities investigations”, aiming to decide on a bridge or tunnel “in the middle of next year”. Labour has responded saying it supports this.
It’s a bit weird. Those investigations have been done over and over in recent decades and they’re ongoing. Mayor Wayne Brown told council this week, “I know NZTA [the Transport Agency] is working on it.”
Brown then said something quite startling: “But for some reason they’ve been told not to deal with council.”
He didn’t elaborate, but he did say such a crossing would be bigger than everything else and should be on the council’s list.
This was also startling, because having raised it, he made no attempt to make it happen. Nor, I’m advised, did he propose adding the harbour crossing when they workshopped the whole proposal last week. Nobody suggested it.
Brown also didn’t say if he was thinking of the NZTA project, which will probably involve tunnels near the existing bridge, or his own preference for a new bridge from Meola Reef at Westmere to Kauri Point near Birkenhead — which does not seem to have council support.
The council has prepared its list for Te Waihanga, the independent Infrastructure Commission, which the Government has charged with delivering a 30-year infrastructure plan.
Projects in that plan must be unfunded: it’s a forward list, not an in-progress list. They must also be nationally significant, aligned with “national objectives” and represent good value for money.
Top of the council’s list is growth infrastructure across the whole city. This reinforces its desire that housing and commercial projects should progress only when the transport, water and other services are properly planned, especially because council cannot pay for all those things itself.
The next four priorities all address transport. The council believes the key to managing traffic congestion is better public transport. To that end, its priorities are:
The other two priorities relate to flooding. The council wants to:
Three other projects were explicitly rejected from the list, although they could be introduced later. They are: developing the waterfront, other aspects of climate adaptation and emissions reduction, and stadium network improvements.
It was also suggested that KiwiRail will include the replacement of level crossings and extra rail lines for freight in its own submission to Te Waihanga.
What’s the biggest event staged each year at the Aotea Centre? My guess is it’s not a music event, or a conference, but the Auckland Writers Festival, held in May.
Last year, AWF sold 85,000 tickets and hosted 6000 school kids, and this year, it will have 170 sessions featuring 220 participants, a quarter of them free, spread through six different venues in the complex and in others around town. Many of the sessions will sell out, and in past years, I’ve seen signing queues snake out the doors, down the steps and across Aotea Square.
The 2025 festival programme has just been announced. Leading the international lineup is Samantha Harvey, whose “pastoral novel set in space”, Orbital, won last year’s Booker Prize. She’s joined by the Australian writer Trent Dalton, back after his wildly popular visit last year.
There’s an impressive list of veterans, including thriller writer Sir Ian Rankin, the Nigerian novelist and activist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (We Should All Be Feminists, Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah), the political philosopher A.C. Grayling, Ireland’s Colm Tóibín, whose latest novel Long Island is the sequel to his earlier Brooklyn, which became a film starring Saoirse Ronan, and Alan Hollinghurst, whose achingly beautiful prose explores the politics and social pressures of being gay in Britain last century.
The strong local list is led by Catherine Chidgey, probably not accompanied by Tama the magpie, and also includes Gavin Bishop, Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku, Becky Manawatu, Monty Soutar, Tina Makereti, Damien Wilkins and Dame Fiona Kidman.
Anika Moa will do a session in which she’ll be given a line and a musical genre and will write a waiata, from scratch, with the audience’s help, in a single hour.
It’s not all about the big names, though. Festival regulars often talk about the opportunity to discover new writers. Last year, they sold 11,000 books.
There are specially curated Māori and Pasifika programmes, family-focused fun, theatre, film, music and late-night shows, street events and an expanded series of activities in Aotea Square.
Also, there’s a Nordic theme: seven writers will represent, including Lars Mytting, whose book Norwegian Wood is not about the Beatles song or the Murakami novel: it’s a global bestseller on how to chop, store, burn and generally revere wood. I’ll be interviewing him and if we run out of things to say we’ll have a wood-chopping contest.
“Auckland Transport wants to axe all parking on one of the city’s busiest roads!” shrieked the headline. I exaggerate, there was no exclamation mark. But the intent was clear: we were supposed to be shocked.
But why? This is exactly what should happen. It fits directly with the council’s desire to make the existing network as efficient as possible (see above). One of the oddities of Auckland is that although we have far more traffic than the streets can cope with, somehow there are still many arterial roads where parking is allowed to disrupt the flow.
The road in question this time is Onewa Rd, which snakes down from Birkenhead to join the motorway just north of the harbour bridge, carrying 30,000 vehicles a day.
There’s a T3 lane, used by buses and private vehicles with three or more people in them, but it’s interrupted by intermittent car parks. As a result, traffic has to merge, there are bottlenecks and drivers get frustrated. There were 140 crashes in the four years to 2023, a ridiculously high number.
AT wants to remove the car parks, thus making the T3 lane fully efficient. It also proposes to convert the footpaths to shared pathways, divided between pedestrians and cyclists.
Smoother traffic flow and more safety for pedestrians and cyclists, including the school kids attending Northcote College.
The proposal is supported by the local councillor, Richard Hills, and the local MP, Dan Bidois. Hills is Labour, Bidois is National. Cheers to them both.
Onewa Rd is a good case study in what transport planning needs to work well.
The T3 lane has been in place since 1982. The bus service has built up, especially with the double-deckers of the last 10 years, to the point where 65% to 70% of morning commuters on that road are in the T3 lane. That’s 3 million passenger trips a year. The Northern Busway, running alongside the motorway, carries 7.5 million trips.
In the council’s new infrastructure priority list, what does “expanding the rapid transit network” include?
Currently, that network comprises the existing rail lines and the Northern Busway. There are seven more routes the council would like to add. Although on most of them it has expressed no preference for busway, light rail or heavy rail, all could be fast-tracked for construction. They are:
“Does this list have ‘shovel-ready’ vibes?” asked councillor Josephine Bartley.
“It very much has shovel-ready vibes,” said council official Greer Lees. “However, it’s not a process where we might get money at the end of it.”
That brought a laugh, but the point was plain. Long-term planning has to start somewhere, and these projects are feasible. If they’re adopted into Te Waihanga’s 30-year programme, it will then be up to the Government of the day which of them to approve and whether to allocate funds.
But will they be adopted into the programme? Quite possibly not. The Government has been supportive of a couple of them, but it has also made it clear it wants those Rons to come first.
Council will debate the list again in April.
The blue-green programme at council is led by the Healthy Waters team, which is responsible for stormwater management.
One of its biggest and most controversial projects is a plan to convert the Takapuna Golf Course into a flood-retention area. This will involve halving the course from 18 holes to nine, extending the wetland areas and creating other recreational facilities.
The golfers are not happy. Stephen Dowd from the golf club acknowledges that “courses around the world are incorporating the latest flood-mitigation mechanisms into their design”, but he thinks there are “alternative design options” that would allow the water catchment to be integrated into the existing course layout.
Tom Mansell, the council’s head of sustainable partnerships (healthy waters and flood resilience), says 10 hectares of residential land and several roadways are at risk and using the golf course is “the most effective short-term solution to reduce flooding in the Wairau catchment”. Two people died there in one of the worst-affected areas in the January 2023 floods.
The new plan is a proposal only at this stage. The council wants community input, and even if approved, the changes will not happen for several years. There’s no budget for it.
This is a massively important test case, and it’s critical they get it right. In the balance: a serious need to manage floodwater, diverse recreational interests, established land use, local biodiversity, community relations, the credibility of the council and good use of ratepayers’ money.
Extinction Rebellion, as they do from time to time, turned up at a council meeting this week. They’re endlessly polite and also desperate.
Spokeswoman Caril Cowan reminded the council it had declared a climate emergency in 2019 and, although a lot had been done, it was not nearly enough.
While the council works away at its blue-green flood-management projects, she suggested they should also:
She was thanked for her contribution.
And supercharge it. Auckland architect and property developer Graeme Scott wrote to Minister of Housing Chris Bishop recently. He’d read my report of Bishop’s speech to the Committee for Auckland, in which Bishop declared himself a fan of density and a “proud urbanist”.
“The urban design community has waited a long time for a minister to speak with such understanding of what it is that makes cities so successful in lifting productivity,” wrote Scott.
“Your point regarding large-city productivity was underscored by last week’s Economic Quarterly from Auckland Council.” As Scott noted, the council’s chief economist, Gary Blick, reported that Auckland’s productivity is now 15% higher than the rest of the country, but it’s not enough.
“Primary cities in prosperous small-to-medium size economies typically have a premium that is a quarter to a third higher than their national average.”
Auckland’s doing well, but not as well as it should be doing.
“As you commented,” wrote Scott, “the key to innovation and economic growth is making it easier for smart people to connect with each other and generate better ways of doing things. This is what cities facilitate, and denser cities facilitate even better ... However, increasing density comes with risks and costs which need careful consideration. It has to be done well.”
Scott’s point was that the cities which achieve this — like Bishop, he cited Copenhagen, Stockholm, Singapore and Vancouver — do so because they have “strong and enduring urban design teams that keep the overall city vision intact through the short-term political cycles”.
That’s not happening in Auckland, where we have “strong negative tendencies in the opposite direction”. Scott named:
Scott said the Auckland Unitary Plan had featured “some quite good urban design thinking” developed in the Auckland Design Office, before it was shut down. Former mayor Phil Goff did that, exposing his disappointing lack not just of aesthetic appreciation, but of a cultural, social, environmental and economic understanding of how cities can prosper.
Scott had a suggestion: “Auckland Council should be empowered and funded to develop a new overall vision for the future, with the specific goal of improving productivity. This should be a multi-year project, independent of political cycles, based on the thinking behind the Unitary Plan, but also covering transport planning and green space provisions”.
He said productivity is of such national importance, “leaving the shape of future Auckland to planners, lawyers and developers is not going to get us to where we need to be”.
I agree. Now that Mayor Brown and the council have decided to strip the semi-independent “council-controlled organisations” of most of their planning functions, and bring it all in-house, is this an idea whose time has come?
“I will be pleased to comment further if that’s helpful,” Scott added, helpfully.
Three picks from Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival
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Terry Weston said the cash was from work, ACC payouts, a bike sale and gambling.