Brian Rudman: Transport gurus can't see the rails for the visions

Maybe if the bureaucrats and politicians stopped having so many visions about how to solve the transport crisis and just kick-started a few bulldozers into action, we'd begin to get somewhere.

This week there's lots of wailing about a $1 billion budgetary shortfall in Land Transport New Zealand's 10-year construction vision. Wouldn't it make more sense to celebrate the $21 billion they say is available and start spending it? These budgetary wishlists are always exercises in make-believe anyway - particularly in the realms of civil engineering.

Yesterday I was flicking through my Auckland rail files and came across the following exercise in fantasy. Dated as recently as August 2002, it should have all concerned blushing very brightly.

Entitled, "The Auckland Regional Rail Project", the authors proudly declared: "The region's vision for the rail project is to have modern trains running to modern stations every 10 minutes, by 2006." This exercise in fantasy included 25-30 new trains, double-tracking of the western line, upgraded signalling ... blah de blah.

Nearly three months into 2006 and there's not a new train in sight. Indeed, we're still debating who will pay for them and whether they will be electric or diesel or powered by rubber bands. As for double-tracking, only a small section between Boston Rd and Morningside is finished. Now the line upgrade is stalled, after its takeover by government agency On Track.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world moves on. Take the Onehunga branch line, which, despite the lack of enthusiasm by the region's rail bureaucrats, both Auckland City and Auckland regional politicians want re-opened. Last year the ARC and ACC included the reopening of the Onehunga line as a goal in their respective annual plans.

A fine vision, but now Auckland City must back it with action. Since September it has been sitting on an application for resource consent to build 203 apartments on the Onehunga Mall property earmarked by rail enthusiasts as the ideal site for a new train station.

Presently occupied by a building supplies merchant, the former railways land was sold off in the great privatisation excesses of the late 1980s-early 1990s. Near the abandoned rail line, alongside the main street and just across the road from a bus terminus, it is the obvious station site. But in all the visioning, no one thought to secure it for this purpose.

The owner wants to build a multi-use development of up to five levels, consisting of five blocks and a two-level carpark. The planners have requested a traffic report from the applicants. Then the politicians will have to decide whether it will be rubber-stamped unnotified or put out for public consultation. We can only hope the politicians, and the planners advising them, are aware of the new statutory requirements placed upon them by the Local Government (Auckland) Amendment Act 2004.

One of the two main purposes of that act is "to require Auckland local authorities ... to integrate the land transport and land use provisions" of policy statements and plans "prepared under the Resource Management Act".

It's a requirement that could have been written to cover the present situation.

An obvious compromise would be an arrangement with the developer to build an integrated development combining the rail station with the apartment project. But what should be obvious is that this crucial transport site cannot be let slide out of public reach while the transport gurus sit around having visions.

The confusing thing is that in all their visioning, the Onehunga branch line has never captured the rail planners' imagination. Perhaps the problem is that it's just too cheap and obvious for them.

But even in recommending no further investigations into the project in a feasibility report to the ARC in April 2004, the boffins had to admit the existing line, Auckland's first rail line, could be brought back to life, with three new stations installed, for a capital cost between $3.5 million and $10.7 million.

They conceded it would be possible to run a two-trains-an-hour service, taking just over 19 minutes to get from Onehunga to the Britomart station downtown. With the gentrifying of Onehunga increasing apace and road congestion growing by the day, re-opening this unused transport corridor seems a no-brainer. It would be a disaster if that penny dropped after the station site got covered by apartments.