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In hindsight, I think they should have started building rail in the areas where the route etc was straightforward, while planning for the difficult bits was underway.
That way, it will be much harder to cancel a project that is already well underway.
My city (Liège, Belgium) is slowly coming out of > 5 years of badly planned tram building. Our first, small-ish line started being built before plans were finalized, due to political pressures.
So they kept hitting utilities when digging. They kept running into scheduling issues. And now it's taken over twice as long as it should have, is tens of millions over budget, and has caused numerous bankruptcies in downtown shops. The economic damage to the city from constant city-wide road closures is immeasurable.
We also have like 500 m of metro buried under one of our boulevards (I wanna say from the '90s). We do not have a metro, and never will. It's just a project that was "started" because there was a budget for it, then there wasn't a budget anymore and that was that.
So, please learn from our mistakes and do not start building trams or metros without having a fully planned out route. A half done line is insanely expensive and disruptive but absolutely no use to anyone.
Tens of millions over budget would be an absolute bargain by our standards.
I'm wondering if they should have planned to build on existing roads. They could have finished the project, then left National with the job of purchasing property to widen roads. It seems buying a 20km stretch of land to build it on would have been more expensive than building the thing, especially considering the skyrocketing Auckland house prices since the project started.
Build on the surface, with an aim to eventually underground part of the network in the future. That way, any future government would be very unwilling to remove a working service.
Was the plan to demolish a bunch of houses to build the line or something?
I'm not sure, I'm not that familiar with it so just basing it on what I'd read in the linked article. But it shows maybe 2/3rd above ground, and states it would be separate to roads for cars. I'm not sure how you could do that without buying a bunch of land (admittedly on a second reading not 20km, but over 10KM for the above ground part).
Isn't the whole advantage of light rail that you can run it along surface streets?
This is reminiscent of the the harbour cycle bridge, just a ridiculous, over the top proposal that was in no way cost effective.
I think really annoys me the number of opportunities the Ardern government missed, both in Auckland and Wellington.
I would love NZ to invest in long term infrastructure projects. These proposals seem crazy now in hindsight, but I feel it's only because to truely do something like this you probably need support across the aisle.
In hindsight, it seems obvious that they should have done what someone else suggested, lay rail over existing roads then move sections underground over time.
The harbour cycle bridge is justifiable if they also spent the same amount again on a network for the rest of Auckland.
I don't understand how they didnt even build any of the track like not even started it. Thats insane amounts or imbeslement surely.
Most of it will be design costs and early land purchases. Design is about 10-20% of construction costs which on a multi-billion dollar project adds up pretty quickly.
I was thinking the land must be super expensive. But then if they have only spend $250M, maybe they haven't bought that much? But I wonder what the new government assets look like compared to that invoice.
They bought the kiwi bacon building on new north road which on its own was $33m. Not sure what other parcels they purchased but none of the corridor is what I would call cheap.
The government has good reason to talk up the price of the project to date, but if they sell the land bought then there's a good chance of recouping a lot of that $250 million. Depending on the timing of buying the land, they might get more than $250 million for selling it 😆
Yeah, its not like it was 250m of cash spend that's now gone. At least some of that would have been asset purchases, mostly land / buildings, and going through Auckland that would have cost a bunch.
Of course much easier to oppose it on the grounds of its all money completely lost, rather than assets that could be sold to recoup a bunch of that money.
It was a huge project, and they arent linear. The spend isn't exactly proportional to the length of track.
That said, some of those costs definitely seem to be to route alterations and the decision to underground big parts of it to placate car drivers. They should've just got on with the original surface level plans and a new govt would've been faced with it partially built and would've made it far harder to just cancel.
"Embezzlement."
Not that you're gonna see this.
Ehh have to disagree on it being terrible scrapping the project. Light metro was an over-engineered solution to avoid disrupting general traffic on Dominion Rd and not having to figure out what to do with Fanshaw St.
Had AT been allowed to get on with their surface running proposal from 2017, rather than having Labour give it Waka Kotahi in 2018 to relitigate, we would have at least had something to Mt Roskill by now.
It's a remarkably similar story to Wellington's trams, or lack thereof. Strong public support for the project, promises made, and just... Nothing happened. Endless consulting, litigation, and general beaureacry, no trams, no tunnels, no bypass around the basin, nothing.
A few hundred million spent, for a handful of cycle lanes.
I think you need the nail on the head, how much of the spend was on fighting the NIMBY's. Not just in correct cost but also on delays.
Some of them had a valid point, we should have been going under the basin right from the start.
Also, their proposal for a second Terrace tunnel would still have left us with only two lanes for cars, which isn't enough for the traffic we have now, let alone thirty years in the future. And I know people will say everyone will take the bus or ride, but they just won't.
The thing is, once they started talking about underground, the whole project got so silly that it was obviously never going to happen. $30 billion for underground light rail wiggling all over the place saving very little time on the trip to the airport, it's clearly nonsense from people that are trying to get the project scrapped. So this money was genuinely and intentionally wasted by the public service and the consultants. Although the new government isn't helping since they wanted the project scrapped too.
I am not sure light rail is the right answer for a small country like NZ. I think dedicated bus roads and frequent buses are easier and cheaper to put in place and run.
I'm not sure the size of the country matters that much. 1/3 of the country live in Auckland, so the population in that one city is far higher than anywhere else in the country.
We should be comparing against similar sized cities in other countries.
As an example, Adelaide is slightly smaller in population than Auckland but has light rail. The gold coast has half Auckland's population, but has light rail. Calgary in Canada is slightly smaller in population than Auckland but has light rail.
Light rail makes sense when you need to move a lot of people over a specific section, such as to and from an airport. Anyone in Wellington knows how hard it is to get bus drivers, but light rail can carry several times the number of people per driver.
I've never read a cost/benefit analysis on a potential $30 billion to build this (as per article, they don't really know what the end cost could have been but this was quoted as a possible upper limit), it seems kinda crazy for a 20km track. But at the same time, it seems they were purchasing new land to build it. Given skyrocketing house prices in Auckland since 2017, I can see how buying people's properties could have been a hard to estimate number.
If this could have cost up to $30 billion, can we get a subway for $30 billion and avoid paying people for land?
This is way out of date but its talking about cities in Europe that both have, and don't have underground systems.
Back then Belgrade was guessed at being the largest without an underground, but they note small cities like Lausanne, 130k center, but including wider population 320k were getting a subway. Or Rennes which had a wider population of 550k at the time and had a subway system. Now, they're not digging on a volcanic field so perhaps it was easy to do, but in terms of Europe, 1.6m without an underground system of some kind is a slight aberration.
Of course, there's cities in Asia where there's 10+ million without an underground either so on pure population its not unusual at all :)
New Zealand is about the same size as Japan, it can stretch from Florida to Boston on a map.
That's something a lot of folks both in & out of NZ don't appreciate. We are very long; that's why you can wear shorts in Paihia in June while its freezing in Gore!
So geographically, in terms of sea crossings we have it easier than Japan in only having to really consider 1 - but their's are much shorter (and shallower?) crossings so they were able to bridge where we can neither bridge nor tunnel.
But also, in terms of mass transit there is absolutely no need for NZ to consider it anyway as we just don't have anything near a comparable population. So the routes we have to consider are much, much shorter and contained within distinct metropolitan areas.^1^ Where Light Rail shines is by being 3-4 times more capacity in a single unit than a bus, hopefully having much faster acceleration & deceleration and being routed ideally on an exclusive right of way.
Yeah, busways can be exclusive as well, but every bus requires a driver; and we've just been through a period of driver shortage destroying schedules around the country so its hard to see moar busses being a great long term solution.
1 Though if we could speed up regional rail^2^ there's things in the possible category like commutes from Hawkes Bay -> Wellington, Bay of Plenty -> Auckland. And in some of those areas there are routes that could probably provide a convenient railcar now - eg Waipukurau -> Napier.
2 Queensland has narrow gauge like us and with tilt technology I think was looking at getting trainsets that could go up to 170km/h. Other than that NZ would have to adjust all of our rail network to standard gauge which would also require updating all the rolling stock so with all the short term thinking in government would never be palatable.