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Strange scenes from the big transport showdown - Simon Wilson
Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown and Transport Minister Simeon Brown have announced a major shake-up to the functions of Auckland Transport. Photo / NZME
Opinion by Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
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Mayor Wayne Brown welcomed that news, saying, “This is the fundamental reset I have long advocated for. Aucklanders have become increasingly frustrated with how transport decisions are made and how little their views are taken into account.”
But on Thursday he didn’t say anything like that. It was like being in a different world.
AT’s CEO Dean Kimpton and members of his executive report to council every month. They outline progress against a range of KPIs, complete with PowerPoint, answer questions and put their work on the table for councillors to debate.
This monthly process was instigated by Mayor Brown and it works. The mayor himself, in the meetings at least, almost invariably says as much.
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Among the things AT reported this week:
- As per the KPIs, 95% of potholes are now repaired within 24 hours of being reported, if they’re on main roads, and within 48 hours on the rest. AT does not fix potholes on private property, like supermarket car parks, although people often ask it to.
- 250 intersections have been modified this year to make them more efficient for cars and buses.
- A new policy means “raised tables” to slow the traffic at pedestrian crossings and other busy spots are not being used much anymore, and “only where they meet the criteria: support from the local board, support from the community, and budget”.
- In the two weeks from November 17 there were 208,000 trips on buses, trains and ferries using “contactless” payments with an eftpos card or phone. That’s 5% of the total. There have been no significant glitches.
- 40% of fans at the recent concerts at Eden Park got there and back on buses and trains, and the network held up. That was 66,337 people for Coldplay and 24,453 people for Pearl Jam.
- Fare evasion is an issue, but at an estimated 3% it’s well below Australia’s 10%.
- AT has started a road-cone cleanup campaign. “If it’s not needed,” said CEO Dean Kimpton, “we promise to come and pick it up.” (Good to see they’re reading the Herald: I suggested that in August.)
These are all good things. Certainly the mayor seemed to think so. Despite having pronounced over and over that AT is “out of touch” and “not listening”, in the meeting he was generally positive, saying things like, “Good answer, thank you for that.”
Deputy mayor Desley Simpson does not seem impressed with the mayor’s disparagement of AT. She must have hoped Brown was listening when she told Kimpton, very pointedly, “It must be a tough time for you. But you’ve come here with some amazing highlights and I think it’s up to each and every one of us to talk about this in our communities.”
Earlier, councillor Mike Lee had criticised AT and other parts of council, saying public transport numbers have “yet to recover to pre-2019 levels” and the “blockade” of the central city is “damaging the commercial heart of Auckland”.
Councillor Julie Fairey wasn’t having it. She said, “It’s not true public transport numbers are still low. They’re back to their pre-Covid levels on the buses and ferries. They’re still down on the trains, but we know that’s not because of Auckland Transport. It’s because KiwiRail [a government agency] is rebuilding the tracks and it’s very disruptive.”
She went further. “This is the best Auckland Transport has ever been. It’s the best public transport system in Auckland we’ve ever had. It’s still not good enough, but with the CRL on the way it’s about to get a lot better.”
Like Simpson, she will have hoped the mayor as well as Lee was listening. “We should be champions of the city and the city centre.”
As for Lee and his blockade, Fairey said, “We all got here today, which suggests the city centre is not blockaded.”
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Three things to do if you make it through the blockade
- Visit the art in the underpass
If you’ve parked out the back of Q Theatre and the Basement, but not for a while, you might remember the awful empty concrete space in the underpass beneath Mayoral Drive, at the very bottom of Myers Park.
It’s been utterly, astonishingly transformed. Waimahara is an immersive art installation, hanging woven tuna (eel) pots, a light show and a sound show where things change in response to the movement of people through it.
It’s great at night but it’s pretty amazing during the day too. And nearby there’s a lovely seating area, if you want to take the weight off, and a wetland with hundreds of new plants, designed to act as a stormwater catchment.
And there’s a special treat. Sing a waiata into the specially set up microphone stand and you trigger a whole new light and sound show.
It’s all the work of artist Graham Tipene and composer Moeahi Kerehoma and was steered into existence by council project manager Michael Brown.
- Watch the ferries in the shade of the pōhutukawa
At the bottom end of Queen St you can also take the weight off at Te Wānanga, the park full of pōhutukawa that extends over the water in the ferry basin. There’s nothing like being by the water and this is a very popular, very charming space.
- Have a cocktail in the clouds
Auckland’s full of new hotels, and suddenly, it seems, there are more rooftop bars in the city than you can shake a cocktail shaker in, or something.
Queens Rooftop, at 1 Queen St (enter through the wine shop) is 21 storeys high and right there on the waterfront. The nearby Bar Albert tops that, up 38 floors in the voco Hotel building on Wyndham St, while further up again at the Sudima Hotel on Nelson St there’s the surprisingly expansive Sunset Bar. Hi-So, atop the So/ Hotel, is a smart bar that turns into a nightclub. And don’t forget the highest of them all: SkyBar, up the Sky Tower.
The CRL is good, too, or so it seems
KiwiRail fronted up for that council meeting too, to talk about the rail network and the City Rail Link. Mayor Brown had been running down the CRL just an hour earlier on radio, but in the meeting he put on an even more supportive show than he had for AT.
KiwiRail exec Jon Knight talked about the big push to finish rebuilding the network, which he described as a 10-year renewal programme they were cramming into 14 months.
As announced earlier, there will be no trains at all for most of January 2025 and 2026, with other disruptions in the months between. Get it all done now, that’s the plan, make it ready for the CRL to open in 2026.
Is it true? The Herald has reported the CRL may face delays and cost overruns, and Brown asked about it. “Just how confident are you that it won’t run late?
Knight said they had brought all the transport groups and their construction partners together, to “redo the methodology”. Then they’d had the plan independently reviewed. He called it “robust” and said he was “confident it was deliverable”.
“That’s a good answer,” said Brown.
He asked if the January 2025 work will be reviewed and if the council would be briefed.
“Yes, 100% yes,” said Knight. The reason for the full closure in January was that “we want to go hard and go early”.
“I think you’re doing the right thing,” said Brown.
How well do you know Auckland?
Auckland was named after George Eden, the first Earl of Auckland. Who was he?
A. The patron of Governor Hobson, who signed the Treaty of Waitangi.
B. Member of the British Parliament for the seat of Woodstock.
C. The First Lord of the Admiralty, three times.
D. The Governor-General of India, whose leadership in the first Anglo-Afghan war resulted in the slaughter of his entire army, bar one man, in what became known as Britain’s “greatest military humiliation of the 19th century”.
E. All of the above.
Answer at the end.
Why the hating on Auckland Transport?
Bear with me. AT’s work is tough. Investment fell behind decades ago and funding cuts have continued. That’s affected the range of services, maintenance spending and capacity for new projects. The public has many conflicting expectations, often noisily expressed, which makes it impossible to please everyone.
And yet AT has brought so much of this on itself. It has a very particular ability to annoy everyone, the result, in my view, of trying to please everyone. That, combined with the way it’s led by engineers and managerial types, rather than by leaders with a social purpose.
As Matt Lowrie at Greater Auckland has noted, the enormous irony is that the minister seems convinced AT has been building cycleways all over the city against the wishes of Aucklanders and the council itself. In fact, AT has stubbornly failed to spend the cycleway budget council has given it, and has ignored the pleas of council, over many years, to adopt a more climate-conscious programme. It’s not woke. It doesn’t even have an emissions reduction plan.
Still, it doesn’t deserve all the rubbish thrown at it. AT has nothing to do with many of the things people are upset about.
Disruption to train services? That’s KiwiRail, see above. Delays to the CRL? That’s mainly Covid, and the Government and council own that project, not AT. Public safety on the buses and trains? It’s a society-wide issue.
Fewer bus services, the unreliable app and e-signs, more enforcement of illegal parking? This year the Government scrapped the regional fuel tax, costing transport in Auckland $1.2 billion over four years, and then cut another $500 million from AT’s annual budget. AT has been instructed to look for other ways to raise money.
“Gold-plated” cycleways and speed bumps? Look past the misinformation. The usual cost of raised pedestrian crossings is $19,000-$31,000, not the half-million sometimes reported.
AT certainly could and should have built more cheap cycleways. But the few that do get built are rarely what they seem. The Meola Rd makeover, for example, has cost about $48 million, but that’s because they rebuilt the road and all the underground services on top of a swamp. The actual cycleway cost only $6 million.
And is public opinion ignored, as both the Browns claim? Do they have statistically valid examples, as opposed to grumpy reckons?
AT lowered speed limits on many Auckland streets after extensive consultation revealed two-thirds support for the programme. The street makeovers of the inner west, under way now, have the support of 50 community organisations, including residents’ and business groups and all the schools in the area.
Is it just that AT is responsible for every little thing that annoys people: this pothole, that uneven footpath, those road cones, that sneaky parking warden? Not to mention the traffic you get stuck in. None of it is good enough so something has to change.
If that’s it, could the Browns explain why moving the governance around will help?
Will the proposed new setup bring more democracy, as claimed? Minister Brown says he will empower local boards to make decisions about local issues like speed limits, parking and cycleways. That’s a great theory.
But in practice, Brown has already used his new Speed Rule, his Government Policy Statement (GPS) on Transport and funding cuts to make such local initiatives almost impossible.
The minister isn’t devolving power to the local level, he’s centralising it.
Note that he’s not proposing to let local bodies set bus fares. On the contrary, councils have been told fares must rise. Steeply.
It suits Mayor Brown to claim he’s “taking back control” as he has always promised to do. But he’s huffing in the wind. It’s the minister who’s taking control.
If the mayor was right, here’s how we’d know: the minister would allow the council to make more spending decisions. Wayne Brown always used to say that should happen, but he seems to have forgotten it now. Because it’s not happening.
The great and the green
One of the great things about this city is that there’s always more to discover. There are 4000 parks in Auckland, spread through every suburb and including 28 regional parks, a legacy of the great work done by the Auckland Regional Council and its forebears.
Eight of them have just won global Green Flag awards.
Maungawhau/Mt Eden is a winner for the second year in a row now it’s closed to traffic and has that beautiful boardwalk. The Hunua Ranges was commended as a “superb destination park” with a “very dedicated and devoted staff” and “strong community involvement in planting days and pest-control programmes”.
The Arataki Visitor Centre in the Waitakere Ranges was another repeat winner, and there are two cemeteries: Waikumete in West Auckland and North Shore Memorial Park at Schnapper Rock on the Shore.
And there are three lesser-known beauties. Omana Regional Park is a family park in Maraetai, with a shell beach, safe swimming at high tide, pōhutukawa, an intriguing pā site, a playground and walking tracks for all abilities.
Wainoni, in the bush at Greenhithe, offers sports facilities, a playground and water play area and walking paths. There’s even a resident pony club.
And Ātiu Creek Regional Park sits on the Okahukura (Taporapora) Peninsula to the eastern side of Kaipara Harbour. At 843ha it’s one of the region’s largest parks, with a working farm and extensive mature and regenerating native forest. You can walk, bike or ride a horse on the tracks, and there’s a community-run plant nursery and bookable accommodation for those who want to stay.
His kingdom for a quorum
That council meeting yesterday started late because not enough members bothered to turn up on time, so they didn’t have a quorum.
Congrats to councillors Andy Baker, Julie Fairey, Shane Henderson, Richard Hills, Kerrin Leoni, Greg Sayers, Desley Simpson, Ken Turner and Houkura’s Pongarauhine Renata. They were there when they were supposed to be.
Baker, in the chair, noted there was only one apology for absence (Angela Dalton) and one for lateness (Jo Bartley). He’s an even-tempered guy but he was exasperated.
Mayor Brown and most of the other councillors turned up eventually, but as the afternoon wore on they started drifting away. When Brown took a bathroom break, they lost the quorum again.
These are the people who think they’re ready for more governance responsibility.
Volunteers make the world go round
They’re at the museum, the zoo, the art gallery, Motat, they walk the streets downtown to offer help and advice, they make every event of every size possible, they’re in the courts, the sports clubs, every community group, they clean the beaches and plant more trees and help in hospitals and hospices. And charities would be nothing without them.
Volunteers! They make the world go round. Yesterday was International Volunteer Day. Hooray for them.
They said it
“Some people are frothing at the mouth at the prospect of charging tolls.” Councillor John Watson, on the possibility that congestion charging and a four-lane highway all the way to Whangarei could mean up to five tolls in a row.
“We’ll be meeting on December 13 to determine the tempo and cadence.” KiwiRail’s Jon Knight allows his inner bureaucrat to overwhelm a simple idea about how frequently they’ll report their progress.
This week in the Herald
Dame Theresa Gattung wrote about why the gender pay gap remains an issue for everyone.
Alwyn Poole, who probably has more experience with charter schools than anyone else in the country, is somehow at war with charter-school champion David Seymour.
In my Tuesday column I suggested the Government’s first year contained too little performance and too much performativeness, and on Wednesday I reported on lunch with Boris Johnson, who’s been out here to promote his new book.
Quiz answer
E. All of the above. Auckland’s statue used to stand in Aotea Square, but these days it’s on a landing on the external staircase at the north end of the CAB apartment building on the square.
