Dialogue: Railway system for region just an expensive toy

Phil Warren, the chairman of the Auckland Regional Council, asks "What's all the fuss over new rail network deal?"

The reason for the fuss is that the ARC and others are planning to spend $112 million on a pup. Many of us are disturbed by the shonky arguments now being presented in support of such folly.

Mr Warren is chairman - a political post - and we have no doubt that he is sincere in his beliefs and is acting on advice from his staff and their preferred consultants.

It is time he sought some truly independent advice because the arguments he has passed on do not bear the slightest scrutiny.

For example, he says: "The price tag is $112 million to buy the infrastructure that even now carries 2.5 million people a year."

No, it doesn't. The rail system provides 2.5 million trips a year for a much smaller number of people. Let's assume that most of these are commuters or are taking similar two-way trips on, say, 300 days a year. This is only about 4000 travelling on the trains each day.

Auckland's population is about 1.2 million, which means that less than 0.33 per cent of Aucklanders routinely use the existing rail service.

However, Mr Warren says the ARC plans to have 14 million passengers a year within 10 years. How will it do this? Many American cities attempt to promote rail use by prohibiting competition from buses. Is that the ARC plan?

Anyway, 14 million rides means about 24,000 two-way riders a day, which still means that only about 2 per cent of Aucklanders will be riding on the trains. And most of them will have previously been riding on the buses.

Yet we are told that we must pay through the nose for a rail system to solve Auckland's traffic congestion. We are told that it will, because the rest of us have to believe this to justify the councils slugging us for rate-funded subsidies to build the system and to keep it going. These trains are expensive playthings.

Then we get the real disinformation. Mr Warren tells us that 45,000 rail trips a day is "the equivalent of an eight-lane motorway to and from both the west and the south."

This level of use generates about 4500 trips, in both directions, in the peak hour, which means about 3500 would be travelling in one direction at peak hour.

A single motorway lane can carry about 2400 vehicles an hour. About 2.5 per cent of these will be loaded buses and the cars will be carrying, say, 1.5 passengers each. Hence the single motorway lane can carry about 7000 people an hour. This is twice the loading of the rail line which Mr Warren claims is equivalent to an eight-lane motorway.

So how do his staff come up with eight lanes of motorway when their own projections show that it will not match the performance of a single motorway lane?

Furthermore, the motorway lanes will be carrying commercial vehicles, couriers, taxis, buses, trucks, motorcycles and cars. And these vehicles will be going from point to point - which means they are taking their drivers and passengers where they want to go.

Dedicated rail lines carry commuters only and do nothing to aid the commercial traffic flows which enable the city to function and generate the commercial wealth which pays the rates for the ARC and all the other councils.

The ARC needs some new calculators.

Mr Warren's weird numbers remind me of other times when shonky figures have been used to support lost causes - the body counts of the Vietnam War, the miracles of Soviet productivity, the CIA's wildly excessive calculations of the Soviet war machine, and the claims of Mao's great leap forward.

When the Casey Jones enthusiasts start telling us that a railway line will carry as many Aucklanders as an eight-lane motorway, it's time to laugh - then to pull the plug on their grand follies.

* Owen McShane, of Kaiwaka, is a resource management consultant and former Auckland City Council transport planner.