Fanshawe, Customs, Wellesley and Albert Sts are already carrying up to 100 buses an hour during rush hours - Symonds St has 125 an hour - and by 2021, Fanshawe and Wellesley streets will have 150 and Symonds St, 200 hour. In London, the council had to restrict buses numbers in Oxford St in 2010 when the frequency reached 160 as hour. At that stage, average speeds had dropped to 4.3km/h and it was taking 22 minutes to travel the 2.4km distance.
This is the nightmare scenario looming if the nervous Nellies in the government continue to think small and hope more buses is all Auckland needs. What the SKM report also highlights is the shortcomings of relying on the economic modelling alchemy of benefit cost ratios. According to the government formula followed by SKM, the proposed rail tunnel will return only 78c in economic benefit for every dollar spent building it. Even extending the life of the benefits to 60 years - twice the time accepted by government rules - takes predicted benefit to just $1.05.
In the Government's eyes this is an inadequate return - unless, that is, it's a proposed new highway running through National-held electorates.
Any sane bystander would say something must be wrong with a formula that suggests it is better for Aucklanders and the nation to stand aside and watch the Auckland central business district slowly die from congestive heart failure, rather than plan for a bypass operation.
The Auckland Council's chief economist, Geoff Cooper, raised this issue in these pages this month.
One suspects he must have seen an earlier copy of the SKM report before he penned his piece.
Mr Cooper said: "New Zealand policy makers have settled on some of the most short-sighted appraisal methods of the developed world".
He said that if we applied the British framework to the city rail link, the project benefits would be around six times higher and "the resulting benefit-to-cost ratio would likely stoke a great deal of public confidence".
"The hurdle for long-lasting infrastructure in New Zealand is far too high, which erodes public confidence [and] means that short-lived, piecemeal projects are usually given priority," he said.
He highlights that the reason the second harbour crossing and the rail tunnel are assessed as having such poor economic returns is that the government "guidelines for appraisal miss many of the economic benefits".
He says really big projects such as the existing harbour bridge "can fundamentally change the drivers of economic growth by creating changes in land use, enticing population inflows and generally increasing the amount of economic activity ... yet none of these benefits are considered in the economic appraisal of modern transport projects".
As for the exclusion of any economic benefit beyond 30 years, he points to Auckland's 50-year-old bridge and century-old water and rail networks and says it was lucky our forbears didn't use modern day cost benefit guidelines to decide on these projects.
How many reports will the Government demand, before the penny drops?
