Auckland paralyzed by damaged bridge

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#2569275 21-Sep-2020 13:23

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.

Yes - the NZTA’s preliminary business case for AWHC indicates a BCR of 0.4.

The CRL is between 1.1 and 2.3 depending on what’s taken into account. I believe the consensus is it’s around 1.6. This is per the business case again (can be found on AT’s website).

antonknee

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#2569277 21-Sep-2020 13:26

Probably worth mentioning a low BCR doesn’t outright mean something shouldn’t be done - but it does indicate the decision needs to be made carefully.

Very easy to say it takes me too long to drive to the city - they should put in another bridge. These things are not that simple.

Also - had to laugh at the person driving from Albany to Highbrook everyday having a whinge in a vox pop on 1 News. Why do people insist on living so far away from where they work? If you do choose to love your life that way, you have no right to complain about travel time.

GV27

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#2569289 21-Sep-2020 13:47

antonknee:

If you do choose to love your life that way, you have no right to complain about travel time.

I guess I'd be wary about assuming everyone has the means and opportunities to change jobs every time they moved houses, or move houses every time they change jobs, and how much control they have over when they might have to do those things.

mattwnz

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#2569340 21-Sep-2020 14:14

NZ hasn't tended to invest in infrastructure to support the population growth and increasing people coming into NZ like we have. oO it is not just houses that we didn't have enough of. So we have decades of catchup to pay for. The main benefit NZers who own homes have had, is increasing house prices, but that isn't a good thing. It has been obvious for decades that Auckland has needed another crossing. Infact the original harbour bridge was too low a capacity not that long after it was built, so it needed the nippon clipons, which ironically are now the only part of the bridge able to be used. .

tripp

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#2569344 21-Sep-2020 14:32

Took me an hour this morning from Albany to city leaving around 5.25. Was a dead stop at before the bridge and that took about 20/25 minutes.

The thing that gets me is I saw no less than 8 big trucks (big truck + trailers) while i was in the left lane, all going up to the bridge in the right hand lane and then waiting till the last minute to move over the 2 left lanes (clip on). This forced cars etc to have to wait and give room to them.

It would have been a lot better to say that all fright trucks need to go around the west motorway if they are traveling pass the city. They also need to look at closing lanes down and not wait till the very start of the bridge to do it. You just get those awful people that jump to the right hand lane, zoom up to the end then force there way in and forcing everyone else to stop to let them in.

Scott3

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#2570350 21-Sep-2020 15:17

tripp:

Took me an hour this morning from Albany to city leaving around 5.25. Was a dead stop at before the bridge and that took about 20/25 minutes.

The thing that gets me is I saw no less than 8 big trucks (big truck + trailers) while i was in the left lane, all going up to the bridge in the right hand lane and then waiting till the last minute to move over the 2 left lanes (clip on). This forced cars etc to have to wait and give room to them.

It would have been a lot better to say that all fright trucks need to go around the west motorway if they are traveling pass the city. They also need to look at closing lanes down and not wait till the very start of the bridge to do it. You just get those awful people that jump to the right hand lane, zoom up to the end then force there way in and forcing everyone else to stop to let them in.

Regarding the lanes being closed late, my understanding is that this is best practice, and that in times of congestion the intent is that traffic queues in all lanes, waiting to merge until the the merge point marked out with signs / cones etc.

By distributing the queue over more lanes the length of the queue is shorter, hence holding up less vehicles going to places other than the harbor bridge.

Apparently going around the western ring route adds about $40 in extra expenses for a big truck, so the industry won't be keen on that. Also road freight is seen as some kind of sacred cow in NZ, and there is no way they are getting prioritized lower than private cars. I spend a bit of time in manila, Philippines. They have a truck ban (6am-10am, 5pm - 10pm every day except Sunday and holidays) on many key road's, which is quite a different approach to ours in NZ.

Should note that there are going to be some changes to the road configuration in the lead up to the bridge to enable bus priority. Sounds like one lane of motorway will be changed to a bus only lane, meaning that buses can get right to the bridge before merging with general traffic. This will result in altered merge points, and a longer (but faster moving in latter stages) queue.

Probiably the biggest thing that could be done for traffic flow is to install hording to block rubberneckers sight lines to the work area. We could also consider having such hording installed on the median barriers of key motorways permanently, meaning when there is a crash only that side of the motorway is affected. (currently both sides slow dramatically due to rubbernecking in the unaffected side of the road)

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RunningMan

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#2570351 21-Sep-2020 15:19

elpenguino:

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.

This appears to be a very sudden and significant increase in wind speed, not something I imagine a truck driver could forecast from their cab.

Communications meteorologist Lewis Ferris said the wind was gusting at just over 60km/h when it suddenly doubled in strength to 120km/h for a matter of minutes.

"They doubled in strength as that front passed over across the Harbour Bridge but then about five minutes after that the wind dropped right off as it turned around to the south-west," he said.

"It's a very rare occurrence. In the last 10 years the Harbour Bridge has only recorded comparable speeds just once.

source

antonknee

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#2570352 21-Sep-2020 15:22

GV27:

antonknee:

If you do choose to love your life that way, you have no right to complain about travel time.

I guess I'd be wary about assuming everyone has the means and opportunities to change jobs every time they moved houses, or move houses every time they change jobs, and how much control they have over when they might have to do those things.

Note use of the word "choose". I quite agree you don't always control every aspect of your life. Eg as a renter in Auckland, I've moved house every year (not by choice) but only changed my employer once (although one of those employers has moved offices during that time too). I have always tried to be handy to my workplace though, either a short drive or latterly a short bus/train ride.

Commuting from just about literally the two furthest away points (the only way it could be worse is if it was Orewa to Papakura) is definitely an edge case.

SirHumphreyAppleby

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#2570395 21-Sep-2020 15:33

RunningMan:

Communications meteorologist Lewis Ferris said the wind was gusting at just over 60km/h when it suddenly doubled in strength to 120km/h for a matter of minutes.

I wouldn't trust a meteorologist who thinks 120m^s is twice as strong as 60m^s.

wellygary

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#2571395 21-Sep-2020 15:56

GV27:

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

The definition of light rail is extremely wide,

and from the Mt Roskill- Airport debacle its clear that the government now favours more heavy "metro" type - Canada Sky train, etc, as opposed to an on street light "street car" type - Melbourne/Sydney/Europe etc...

surfisup1000

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#2571422 21-Sep-2020 16:39

Dingbatt:

I will be interested to see what the repair looks like.

Just how much the art of structural engineering for bridges has changed in the last 60 years? Or will they put an over-engineered patch on it while they come up with a permanent solution?
And on top of all that, there is obviously a vulnerability in the structure of the bridge to damage from high sided vehicles. So will we see more protection being retrofitted?

I guess the driver of the truck will be glad they weren’t in a clip-on lane, otherwise they might have had a bit more (sea)water on the windscreen than the wipers could cope with!

The state of engineering has gone backward as it is far more expensive to build anything today than in the past. Even accounting for inflation .

Although, I suspect NZ engineers are particularly poor at delivering good value.

Look at the price of building an underground tunnel in Iceland, vs in New Zealand, for example.

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Benoire

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#2571426 21-Sep-2020 16:56

surfisup1000:

The state of engineering has gone backward as it is far more expensive to build anything today than in the past. Even accounting for inflation .

Although, I suspect NZ engineers are particularly poor at delivering good value.

Look at the price of building an underground tunnel in Iceland, vs in New Zealand, for example.

There is an element of quality within the consultancy market which does create intresting price problems but some of the main issues is the cost of materials and labour. When I left London in 2010, I had just completed a 2km full road rebuild in central london to full structural AC quality (UK Standard approach) for ~$400k alongside a major national rail station... I did 300m of the same type of road cosntruction here and it was $1m for the materials alone. NZ is remote and relies on imported products predominately and is paying through the nose for it, local supply will not really make it any cheaper due to the volume of use.

BillyAnderson

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#2571478 21-Sep-2020 17:24

GV27:

Why? The CRL is needed to improve capacity on the rail network, which serves the South, West and East. There's more to Auckland than just the North Shore.

They can't even manage to properly run the toy train system they've currently got (it's closed yet again for a week for "urgent repairs"), let alone keep trying to add more to it. They would be better off disbanding Auckland's trains and converting the rail corridors to bus lanes instead ... which would also mean less need for many of the bus lanes on the busy normal roads and allow more easily flowing car traffic.

BillyAnderson

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#2571479 21-Sep-2020 17:25

old3eyes:

Most cities in the world would have put in another 1 or 2 harbor crossings years ago .

Most of those "most cities in the world" have a far high population and a far greater population density. Auckland has a piddly population (by world standards) and is spread out across a massive area (long, but narrow). It really doesn't have enough people to be able to be compared to all these other big cities, let alone run a well functioning, high use public transport system. It isn't helped by funnelling all traffic through the CBD - to get from the north shore to the east, for example, means you have to go to the CBD and then get another bus out again, which means it takes much longer than necessary, but the population simply can't support a bus doing that route on one go.

BillyAnderson

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#2571481 21-Sep-2020 17:25

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.

Yep. Except in the case of an accident, the Bridge itself is rarely a problem. The problem is the motorways leading to and from the Bridge that are the problem, partly due to impatient idiots continually changing lanes to try to get ahead by a few seconds (which they can't really do on the Bridge). It's also not helped by the bad design of the motorway itself, which in some places has an on-ramp that is it's own lane and then becomes an off-ramp-only at the very next exit, meaning all those cars who want to continue on are forced to change lanes relatively quickly. Another bad design is again the funnelling of all traffic to the CBD when much of the people don't even want to go there - they're going out east, west, north, or south.

Unless it is to be a replacement for the current Bridge, building a new crossing (it's is not the "second", it's the third!) right next to the existing Bridge and connecting it at both ends to the same heavily congested motorway system is simply a waste of time and money that will achieve absolutely nothing. The only really sensible option for a third crossing would be in the east, from Devonport (with appropriate new motorway roading) to the eastern side of the CBD and the eastern highways ... but you'll never get the Devonportonians to agree to it.

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