Dialogue: City's transport vision is wondrous indeed

By JOHN ROUGHAN

It is more than a year since the custodians of that opportune public fund Infrastructure Auckland were preparing to buy a railway, and sternly denied they were doing any such thing.

They were not "buying a railway," they were enabling Auckland local bodies to buy Tranz Rail's lease of the "corridors" through the city. At the time the distinction seemed semantic but they told me more about the corridors.

They were surprisingly wide. Wide enough for something beside the railway and for the most part they ran parallel to the Southern and Northwestern motorways. The land had to be among the richest real estate in New Zealand. How could the public lose?

On that businesslike body there might have been minds truly open to the idea that busways, even motorways, might be the better use of the corridors. Up at the Auckland Regional Council and at the city council, minds were never open.

The planners would say, if you asked, that the precise "mode" of public transport in the corridors had still to be decided. Then they would turn back to their charts and talk about trains.

Now they have completed what they call a mode evaluation. During it a bus industry representative made a compelling case, I thought, on this page one morning.

Unlike trains, he pointed out, buses can go where most people live and can take them to wherever they work. Given a clear run in the corridors they could beat the peak-hour traffic at a third of the cost ($1.08 billion at last estimate) of an upgraded railway.

He offered a more enticing form of public transport than a rail proposal which relied on feeder buses in any case. Why ask people to change vehicles when one could take them all the way in good time?

He was whistling in the wind. The train-spotters quickly found a legal barrier to buses in the corridors and their exercise came down to a choice of diesel trains or electric trains.

They chose both, diesel on the southern and eastern lines from the city to Southdown and electric "light rail" west to Swanson and in the inner city.

With overhead cables in Queen St light rail would run from the waterfront to Newmarket via the universities and the hospital.

The whole plan hinges on a terminal at Britomart, where Christine Fletcher's council, having ditched the former mayor's monster, has a proposal that will cost more and provide less. Auckland's local government is truly wondrous.

Proponents of the plan always call it their "vision," which it must be. With clear eyes they would realise it is unlikely ever to make more than a marginal improvement in Auckland's congestion.

Regional council chairman Phil Warren, already getting his excuses on the record, reminds us the plan requires more motorways too. His planners cheerfully add that it depends also on road charges and higher-density residential zoning.

You will fulfil this vision by hook or by crook. Look at the "fundamental questions" the city council posed for itself in the mode evaluation.

You might think, if you were in a position to commit $1 billion and heaven knows how much in annual subsidies to get people out of their cars, you would ask where people are going and what they might like to use instead.

The questions the visionaries asked themselves were these:

What's the best way to bring people into the central city and make it easy for them to get around once they've arrived?

How do you make the facilities of central Auckland more accessible to those who don't own a car or don't drive?

And get this one: What sort of public transport mode will funnel people to the places the council wants to see development and redevelopment happen?

This is all about what the council wants, not what is most likely to work. If they opened their eyes they would notice that a little bit of deregulation worked a treat 10 years ago.

Take the airport shuttles, as many now do. When minivans where allowed to compete with taxis and buses to Auckland Airport, they found immediate demand.

They were soon getting calls for other destinations, too, but were not allowed to provide them. Imagine if they could. An untapped dimension of public transport is right there.

Instead we are offered an old rail scheme that has been kicked about Auckland with minor variations for the past 35 years.

Each time it has appeared in full gloss, ring-bound glory, made a splash for a day or two and disappeared - because the visionaries dared not ask voters to pay it. That has been a valuable test.

This time, thanks to the previous Government's reorganisation of the region's affairs, the rail scheme could avoid the test. Our only hope rests again with a Government which has been asked to provide half the cost.

Already it is trying to renegotiate the price our Auckland impresarios were ready to pay Tranz Rail for the lease of the corridors. And this week Mrs Fletcher vented the fears of mayors that the Treasury might be bargaining too much away.

The councils want control not just of the tracks and stations but also the air space over the corridors. In their vision there are shopping centres, office blocks and apartments growing around and above the suburban terminals.

Does that sound like the original Britomart times 10? Truly it is wondrous.

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