What Auckland could learn from Sydney in harbour crossing debate – The Front Page

Auckland has debated for decades what shape a new harbour crossing should take. Photo / Dean Purcell

The Government and Auckland Council are being urged to follow Sydney’s lead in solving the city’s harbour crossing conundrum.

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown has laid out his vision for the crossing, pitching a new bridge connecting Meola Reef in Pt Chevalier to Kauri Pt on the North Shore.

Brown said it would cost less than 8% of the cost of a tunnel, which Labour proposed before last year’s election, before National scrapped it.

NZ Herald senior writer Simon Wilson told The Front Page that the engineering, environmental and cultural challenges combined made it unlikely the proposal would gain steam.

While this is just the latest proposal to tackle the decades-long discussion around a new crossing across the Waitematā, to ease congestion on the harbour bridge, Wilson said concerns over the cost continue to hold up the project.

“A few years ago, the figure of $15 billion was suggested for a tunnel, but it’s probably many times more than that now, maybe over $50 billion. More significantly a business case came back suggesting it would return 20 cents on every dollar. Now that’s appalling. That’s not the recipe with which you want to build major infrastructure.”

Wilson said the key to getting big projects like this off the ground was having cross party support – which was difficult when politics were involved.

“Neither National nor Labour have a good track record on this. They’ve both cancelled each other’s projects the first chance they got during the last two changes of government.”

Recently, Sydney opened one stage of its new rapid transit train line, including two tunnels that run underneath the city’s harbour. Estimates are that 200,000 people a day are using the new line, which took seven years to build.

Wilson said the project had a cross party accord between the main Labor and Liberal parties, which meant that it maintained support across successive governments, even when concerns were raised about cost.

“We have got ourselves into an appalling mess with infrastructure in this country and we see it everywhere from the state of our hospital buildings to the roads and the railway, the Cook Strait ferries, the lack of wind farms and solar, because of party bickering” he said.

National had proposed a bipartisan framework, but on the condition that it would build roads, which was a “crazy” way to approach it, Wilson said.

“Cross party accords aren’t just about requiring the opposition to sign up to your ideas. They’re about compromise and meeting in the middle,” he said.

Wilson said it’s well known that if you build more roads, you have more cars on them, but rapid transit was something worth shouting about, even if there some resistance to it when it was rolled out for buses on the North Shore.

“The Northern Busway was opened in 2008. Before it opened, everybody on the Shore said, we don’t catch buses. Now on the harbour bridge during morning peak time, something over 40% of all commuters are riding on a bus,” he said.

Rapid transit in Auckland sees buses using dedicated corridors on the Northern Motorway that are separated from other traffic.

Wilson said this formula should have been copied in other parts of the city already.

“It’s really interesting that during the period between 2008 and now, the North Shore population has grown by 40%, but there are not significantly more cars on the bridge. It’s because that growth has been catered for by public transport.”

Listen to the full episode to hear more from about the potential solutions to Auckland’s harbour crossing problem.

The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am.

The podcast is presented by Susie Nordqvist, a former presenter and producer for TVNZ and Newshub. She began her career as a newspaper reporter and was a finalist for best newsreader at this year’s NZ Radio & Podcast Awards for her work at Newstalk ZB.

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