The Government has chosen its preferred option for a new mass transit service from the city centre to Māngere. It's a light rail line that will run in tunnels all the way from Wynyard Quarter to Mt Roskill.
Opinion by Thomas Coughlan
Thomas Coughlan, Deputy Political Editor at the New Zealand Herald, loves applying a political lens to people's stories and explaining the way things like transport and finance touch our lives.
Early works on Auckland Light Rail will begin today, with the drilling of core samples along the proposed route.
For something that doesn’t exist yet - the project has certainly been on a journey from an early proposal by Auckland Transport in 2015 ... to becoming the first href="https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/jacinda-ardern-outlines-labours-light-rail-plan-for-auckland/OJI3ZYHSTKU3LTJRGP3L3IZBDQ/" target="_blank">campaign promise of Labour Leader Jacinda Ardern two years later.
(That promise, lest you have forgotten, was to have the first section of the rail line to Mt Roskill by the end of 2021)
Cue the election, the Super Fund, a pandemic, NZ First, another election, another working group and you get to the present - National transport spokesman Simeon Brown asking Michael Wood in Parliament on Wednesday whether “early works” would begin this year as promised.
It was a bullish response from a minister who has faced pressure around the project since Ardern, then the prime minister, announced a reprioritisation agenda last year (perhaps too bullish - the early works are just some drilling for geotechnical work).
Ardern, and her successor, Chris Hipkins, were keen to streamline the Government’s agenda, shifting focus to “bread and butter” issues.
Light rail fit the bill for reprioritisation: it’s expensive, complicated, and it won’t make a tangible difference to people’s lives until the distant future.
Light rail fit the bill politically too. City Rail Link disruption on Albert St and Wayne Brown’s angst over road cones has diminished the Government’s appetite for disruptive infrastructure construction in Auckland.
A side note on this - while there seems to be a broad political consensus on the need to close the infrastructure deficit, particularly in areas like transport, there appears to be a diminished appetite to hold the collective nose and stomach disruption that comes with construction. Pro-infrastructure politicians need to ask themselves how they let that happen and failed to make the case for short-term pain and long-term gain.
Michael Wood’s response over light rail was succinct. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Regardless, light rail survived the policy purge. The Prime Minister’s statement this week, setting out the agenda for the year committed to “progressing” with the project - as good a commitment as you’re likely to get for a multi-year, multi-billion dollar project.
It has not killed speculation the project might be axed. With the Government facing the cost of the cyclone rebuild killing the project, would free up billions of dollars in capital expenditure and construction labour that could go elsewhere.
The Government has an elegant off-ramp too. Last year, it agreed to get around the table with the Auckland Mayor to discuss an integrated Auckland transport plan, answering questions like what to do with light rail and the mayor’s ambition to shift the port.
The group could mutually agree to axe the current light rail plan in favour of something else, saving the Government from an unseemly U-turn.
Another possibility is the paring back of the current proposal with an estimated cost of $14.6b to nearly $30b to a somewhat more modest option costing $9b.
The more expensive option tunnels underground, meaning less disruption to cars on the surface - an idea championed by Ardern.
Would Hipkins do this? His instincts around avoiding an inevitable political spat pitting motorists against public transport users are probably not all that different to Ardern’s.
Then again, he’s just been handed a multi-billion cyclone bill. Perhaps he has no choice but to cut his cloth.
Perhaps the cost of the plan is the wrong thing to look at. The Government said last year it was looking at funding and finance tools for mass rapid transit projects like Auckland light rail and rapid transit schemes in Wellington and Christchurch.
This could take the form of targeted rates or value uplift. Some Government funding might be required, but these funding schemes would lift a portion of that off the Government balance sheet, leaving the cost to the Crown less significant than were it to fund the lot itself.
Another thing to consider is what would happen to the Government’s broader agenda for the light rail corridor were the project to be axed.
One of the criticisms of the project is that the Government has attached too many ancillary schemes to it, turning an already significant transport project into a housing and urban renewal scheme.
Paradoxically, this acts as something of a protection of the scheme. Axing it could cause other dominoes to tumble.
But this is easily overstated. Much of the urban renewal unlocked by the scheme should happen anyway thanks to other Government policies.
The NPS-UD, the Government’s tentpole urban densification policy, requires councils to allow housing of at least six stories within a walkable catchment of rapid transit.
The current bus frequency along Dominion Rd would, by the letter of that document, qualify for densification, even without light rail. It’s not (inexplicably) although that’s not to say it won’t be included once the appeals process on NPS-UD plan changes wraps up.
Light rail would, however, strengthen the Government’s position if it wants to force densification in that area as those changes are litigated.
The Government’s reprioritisation agenda has, thus far, been far smaller than signalled. Only the TVNZ-RNZ merger and biofuels mandate are gone for good, the social unemployment insurance scheme and hate speech laws have been put in the freezer, for potential post-election defrosting.
It’s worth considering light rail alongside these. The media merger could be axed without much fuss and with an immediate cost benefit to the Government.
Light rail is far more difficult to undo.
That doesn’t make it impossible to axe (there’s a good argument for sending some of the construction staff to help with the Hawke’s Bay rebuild) - it just makes it less likely.
If there’s any lesson to be drawn from it, it’s for Hipkins to draw down the curtain on the reprioritisation programme to shift attention from what the Government might not do, to what it will.
