Auckland paralyzed by damaged bridge

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#2568970 21-Sep-2020 09:02

Most cities in the world would have put in another 1 or 2 harbor crossings years ago . Just look at Europe , Asia and North America. They just get on and do it but not NZ. Takes years and millions of dollars for reports , meetings and at the end it may get built by 2050 if the wind blows in the right direction. Don't expect another crossing anytime soon just election promises..

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Old3eyes

1101

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#2568971 21-Sep-2020 09:02

One reason another crossing was never built, is that a separate motorway would be needed for it.
Otherwise its moving the bottleneck from one point to another.

The bridge wasnt the big bottleneck , its the motorways that were originally just 2 lanes (and still are 2 lanes in some parts leading to the bridge).
We do need some redundancy though .

Ak couldnt even built the cycle underpass .
Years of planning and consents , how many hundreds of thousands of $ spent and that isnt anywhere near started
If we cant even add the cycleway underneath, the chances of building another bridge or tunnel are ZERO

GV27

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#2568974 21-Sep-2020 09:08

1101:

Years of planning and consents , how many hundreds of thousands of $ spent and that isnt anywhere near started
If we cant even add the cycleway underneath, the chances of building another bridge or tunnel are ZERO

The cycleway is being added, it just costs $300m now.

MikeAqua

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#2568986 21-Sep-2020 09:39

eracode:

Correct - it’s called Northland.

As a regular visitor (pre-COVID) to Auckland, and Northland. I always take SH16 and either turn off onto SH18 or stay on SH16 all the way to Wellsford - depending on what googles says is fastest.

Mike

old3eyes

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#2569021 21-Sep-2020 10:43

GV27:

1101:

Years of planning and consents , how many hundreds of thousands of $ spent and that isnt anywhere near started
If we cant even add the cycleway underneath, the chances of building another bridge or tunnel are ZERO

The cycleway is being added, it just costs $300m now.

Most likely $600 mil by the time it's finished that is if they can steal the little old ladies houses over the north shore for the access way.

Regards,

Old3eyes

antonknee

1133 posts

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#2569022 21-Sep-2020 10:45

1101:
One reason another crossing was never built, is that a separate motorway would be needed for it.
Otherwise its moving the bottleneck from one point to another.

The bridge wasnt the big bottleneck , its the motorways that were originally just 2 lanes (and still are 2 lanes in some parts leading to the bridge).
We do need some redundancy though .

Ak couldnt even built the cycle underpass .
Years of planning and consents , how many hundreds of thousands of $ spent and that isnt anywhere near started
If we cant even add the cycleway underneath, the chances of building another bridge or tunnel are ZERO

Wasn’t SkyPath held up by NIMBYs?

You’re quite right the bottle neck is often not the bridge itself. What exactly do people intend to do with all the extra traffic another crossing would add to the city centre? It can’t go anywhere once it crosses your new crossing...

antonknee

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#2569023 21-Sep-2020 10:48

eracode: Would have been good if the money that’s been sunk (literally) into Auckland’s City Rail Link had been put towards a new harbour crossing.

One of these things help reduce traffic and sustainably move thousands of people, the other doesn’t. One of these things is much cheaper than the other. One of these things provides more in benefits than it costs, the other produces negative benefits for each dollar invested into it (not that it’s been looked at for a while).

Give me the CRL any day over not really necessary third Waitemata crossing.

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GV27

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#2569028 21-Sep-2020 10:53

antonknee:
eracode: Would have been good if the money that’s been sunk (literally) into Auckland’s City Rail Link had been put towards a new harbour crossing.

One of these things help reduce traffic and sustainably move thousands of people, the other doesn’t. One of these things is much cheaper than the other. One of these things provides more in benefits than it costs, the other produces negative benefits for each dollar invested into it (not that it’s been looked at for a while).

Give me the CRL any day over not really necessary third Waitemata crossing.

The North Shore is very good at putting their hand out for things. They've had a busway for a decade longer than anyone else, but there's still people who insist the Shore should be given heavy rail as a matter of urgency, despite there being no real logical case for it.

The most cost-effective solution is and always will be a Light Rail bridge, to connect with the Northern Busway which needs to be upgraded anyway. Plus it would play nice with the rest of the Light Rail network Auckland badly needs.

trig42

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#2569055 21-Sep-2020 11:09

antonknee:
1101:

One reason another crossing was never built, is that a separate motorway would be needed for it.
Otherwise its moving the bottleneck from one point to another.

The bridge wasnt the big bottleneck , its the motorways that were originally just 2 lanes (and still are 2 lanes in some parts leading to the bridge).
We do need some redundancy though .

Ak couldnt even built the cycle underpass .
Years of planning and consents , how many hundreds of thousands of $ spent and that isnt anywhere near started
If we cant even add the cycleway underneath, the chances of building another bridge or tunnel are ZERO

Wasn’t SkyPath held up by NIMBYs?

You’re quite right the bottle neck is often not the bridge itself. What exactly do people intend to do with all the extra traffic another crossing would add to the city centre? It can’t go anywhere once it crosses your new crossing...

This.

Another crossing would be a nice to have, but the fact is, the bridge (when all 8 lanes are working) is not the choke point.

Another crossing IMO should be built, but it should be for public transport (be that buses, or light rail). I think there was a proposal for a tunnel from the corner at Esmonde Road through to the Wynyard quarter area for North Shore light rail or buses (the busway works really well, until the buses have to go on normal roads).

Or, another traffic crossing, but only for travel into the CBD. If you want to go further south, use the current bridge, and close the offramps into the CBD (or the new crossing joins south of the CBD and the current crossing does public transport and cars into the CBD and terminates at the port (via spaghetti junction port link).

eracode

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#2569059 21-Sep-2020 11:16

antonknee:
eracode: Would have been good if the money that’s been sunk (literally) into Auckland’s City Rail Link had been put towards a new harbour crossing.

One of these things help reduce traffic and sustainably move thousands of people, the other doesn’t. One of these things is much cheaper than the other. One of these things provides more in benefits than it costs, the other produces negative benefits for each dollar invested into it (not that it’s been looked at for a while).

Do you have evidence or stats or sources for these cost/benefit assertions? I feel CRL is extremely expensive for what it will achieve - but I don’t have evidence or stats or sources for saying that.

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Benoire

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#2569062 21-Sep-2020 11:22

eracode:

Do you have evidence or stats or sources for these cost/benefit assertions? I feel CRL is extremely expensive for what it will achieve - but I don’t have evidence or stats or sources for saying that.

They'll either be on the CRL site or somewhere in the notice of requirement docs, but effectively the project was assessed using a WEB based approach rather than the traditional BCR; WEB stands for wider economic benefits and BCR is benefit cost ratio. WEB approaches consider transformative change and aglomeration derived outcomes that BCRs struggle with, especially when at hte time the NZTA EEM was very poor dealing with anything that wasn't a road based travel time saving. CRL is positively huge for west, south and east auckland by increasing frequency on the network to 5 minutes each all direcitons and removing the bottleneck that is the parnel tunnel.

I live near new lynn and the time taken from new lynn to aoeta will be in the region of 25 minutes during peak time, so travel time by bus to work will be ~50 minutes door to door rather than the 1 hour and 1/2.

elpenguino

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#2569064 21-Sep-2020 11:23

One thing that no one has mentioned is why this particular truck got blown over. I would expect, bearing the consequences of the incident in mind, that the police will be looking at the driver's behaviour to assess whether he/she was careless/reckless in driving their vehicle over the bridge that day.

Driving large, flat-sided vehicles in very windy conditions over an exposed crossing is not wise, especially when the vehicle is not loaded. I haven't seen any comment from the media about whether this particular vehicle was loaded or not.

It would appear it's not required to drive a container ship into the bridge to cause widespread disruption, although that would be a way more interesting movie plot.

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1101

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#2569065 21-Sep-2020 11:25

antonknee:

Wasn’t SkyPath held up by NIMBYs?

yes. They had to buy some of the nearby houses .
I bought a house next to a bridge. But now I dont want the chance of people looking into my house from that Bridge .

I'd bet it was held up more by the usual endless committees & red tape though .
And the skypath wont be used much in winter (rain & wind) , so why bother with something only good for pleasant days .

Scott3

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#2569066 21-Sep-2020 11:26

For everybody lamenting the lack of additional harbor crossings (in addition to the existing two)

Note the following:

It is basically not viable to have n+1 redundancy for capacity of the roading network in any large city in the world. Basically any major city in the world there isn't enough space of money to build enough capacity for peak time (without congestion charges), let alone having a lot of standby capacity.
We spent big bucks finishing the western ring route just a few years ago, in order to add resilience to our roading network. Obviously this is not sized to replace the capacity of the harbour bridge, but it does mean that even in the even the bridge is closed, we have 6 lanes of motorway traffic crossing the waitamata. (In addition to SH16 that goes around the harbor). While less convenient & congested it's not like north auckland and northland are cut off from the rest of NZ.
The number of people heading from the shore into the CBD in morning peak (7am to 9am) via the bridge in cars has remained at roughly 20,000 for 25 years. Flat trend shows little growth needs to be catered for. (while the flat growth is partially due to the road being full, the absence of excessive traffic build up in normal times shows we are coping OK)
The massive success of the northern busway means the volume of people crossing the bridge by bus has significantly increased in this time (From about 4000 to 11,000). In short the northern busway has prevented the need to spend billions on a new road crossing for capacity reasons.
The bridge itself when fully operational is not a significant bottleneck. Any additional road crossing would just cause traffic to pile up at other bottle necks, in a need massive capacity increases at both side's that is. I'm not sure if there is that much will to run more lanes through spaghetti junction, and the CBD is pritty much at it's limit for handeling cars.

A 2019 paper published by the New Zealand Transport Agency said that with private vehicle crossings static due to congestion on feeder roads and with the rise in public transport crossings, it would make more sense to drop the road-plus-rail proposal and build a rail crossing only. With freight volume and number of trucks rising, heavy rail might be justifiable, rather than a light rail passenger service

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12210993

It is correct that foreseeable situations (Ship Crash etc) could take out the entire bridge, but the low odds of such events needs to be balanced with the extremely high cost of an additional crossings (Cira $4b for road and rail).

Should be noted that it is more cost effective to do road & rail in separate tunnels rather than combined tunnels. As such a road tunnel is not needed to build at the same time as rail tunnels etc.

Also, with regards to transport there are a lot of other issues that would cause major pain that are widely ignored. Our oil supply chain is one. A major incident at the refinery, or the Wiri terminal would cause major issues.

eracode:

Perhaps that’s part of the problem right there - everyone wants the solution but no-one wants to pay for it.

Would have been good if the money that’s been sunk (literally) into Auckland’s City Rail Link had been put towards a new harbour crossing.

Cost Benefit ratio of the CRL is comfortably greater than one. Cost benefit ratio of a third (road) harbor crossing is well below one.

GV27

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#2569128 21-Sep-2020 12:00

Scott3:

A 2019 paper published by the New Zealand Transport Agency said that with private vehicle crossings static due to congestion on feeder roads and with the rise in public transport crossings, it would make more sense to drop the road-plus-rail proposal and build a rail crossing only. With freight volume and number of trucks rising, heavy rail might be justifiable, rather than a light rail passenger service

Except the connection to the North Auckland Line is the Western line, which will be far cheaper to respec for highbox containers than it will be to connect the Shore to Heavy Rail - and that's not allowing for the fact there's almost no heavy industry on the Shore that could justify it having a heavy rail connection to begin with, or the space it will take to connect with the Southern side of the Harbour given that freight probably won't play nicely with the CRL and would diminish commuter rail capacity if it did. Plus, depot space on the Nothern side of the bridge is hard to come by - you'd just be localising truck movements within the North Shore itself - so likely not a massive reduction in trucks, just on the existing bridge itself.

For what will by definition be a mostly commuter service, Light Rail is the most cost-effective option.

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