Rudman's City: Light rail's set to keep that blood boiling

By BRIAN RUDMAN

If your blood boils each time you see a new telecommunications or stormwater trench being dug in downtown Auckland, then be very afraid of what light rail could do to your health.

Instead of the current few weeks of inconvenience, laying train tracks up Queen St and beyond could means months, maybe years, of heart-threatening frustration.

This was Mayor Christine Fletcher's cheery prediction on her return from a recent fact-finding junket around Europe.

Stopovers included Strasbourg in France and Saarbruecken in Germany, both cities now going through the throes of installing rapid transport systems through their busiest streets.

"Two years in the making and they are still having major, major dislocations" says Mrs Fletcher. She added that the battle in Auckland "will be getting support for perhaps two years of construction when the streets are dug up to get the rapid transit system in."

Mrs Fletcher's strangely pessimistic prediction - she is a fan of light rail after all - came just before the Christmas break. Perhaps it was jet-lag. If she'd waited until after the post-Christmas invasion of the Queen St valley by the various layers of fibre-optic cable, maybe she would have come to a more optimistic conclusion. Because as far as I can work out, that exercise as gone off remarkably smoothly, thanks in part, to the co-ordinating skills of the council officials involved.

With a bit of organisation, surely light rail could be just as trouble free.

But back to the current road works.

To me it seems crazy that the city is to gain three new fibre-optic cable networks when one would surely suffice.

But whether we like it or not, any utility company has the statutory right, after giving due notice to the council, to dig up the city streets. This summer, three competing outfits wanted to take on Queen St.

Concerned at the pre-Christmas water pipe renewal chaos in High St, council officials persuaded the telecommunication companies to hold off until December 27 when the city emptied for the summer holidays.

The companies also agreed to lay extra empty ducts alongside their new cables, to save having to dig the inner city streets up again if new cabling is needed.

Des Hughes, Auckland City's manager of utility relationships, says anyone wanting to install another network will have to buy access to one of these spare ducts from the company concerned.

As for disruption, he's optimistic that by next Monday, most of Queen St will be cleared and the footpath paving stones reinstated.

But it is a shame the replacement bitumen on other footpaths and roadways isn't being restored to a similar pristine state. Part of the problem lies with the council's rules. These allow a variation of up to 5 mm between the two surfaces. This mightn't sound much, but combine it with the hump or hollow that often follows and it's one more obstacle this pedestrian doesn't need.

Still, the big environmental worry when it comes to the new fibre-optic highways is not the temporary disruption to inner city streets, it is TelstraSaturn's plans to darken suburban streets, hanging heavy black cables from the lamp posts. When this will happen is anyone's guess.

In October they were talking of February. As I wrote at the time, this was but a pipedream. Corporate communications manager Quentin Bright is now talking of lodging a resource consent application with the next two months.

Then will come a tussle with city officials, who say the district scheme no longer allows new telecommunications cables above ground.

Let's hope they're right.

To catch sight of such a permanent blot on the landscape each morning ... now that would certainly make my blood boil.