Secret railway?

File under: transport, sustainability, urbanism, Wellington

There's a tiny story on page 3 of today's Dominion Post that should be big news. The headline says Rail link to airport considered. Can this be true?!?

The Wellington City and Regional councils, together with Transit NZ, are studying ways to improve transport links between Ngauranga and the airport. If recent policy is anything to go by, you would expect this to be all about building more roads. Encouragingly, though, Transit's regional transportation manager (Eric Whitfield) is quoted as saying:

"We anticipate some sort of rail [link] will come out of consultation ... It's not just roads, we need to look at all modes of transport."

If that is the case, then some serious infrastructure development would be required, and you'd expect some mention of this in the draft 10-year plans that have recently been released for consultation by both the city council and regional council. Not a sausage. The city council's transport plan (823kB PDF) sets some modest goals for increasing the use of sustainable transport modes (they want the proportion of commuters entering the city by bus, cycle or on foot to increase from 47% now to 58% in 2016), but apart from a few more bus shelters there seems to be little infrastructural investment to help reach that target. The regional council's goals (1.7MB PDF) are even punier: maintain the proportion of journey-to-work trips made via public transport at the current 15.6% (based upon the very loaded statement that "population growth in itself is not a significant assumption for forecasting patronage growth on public transport services"). They are at least putting $500 million into upgrading infrastructure and rolling stock, but most of that appears to be just long-overdue maintenance without any real upgrade in capacity, and certainly no mention of any brand new lines. Option 3 is right to call this plan "myopic".

So where is the hard information about a rail link being "considered"? Perhaps on Transit's website? They at least have a media release about the Ngauranga to Airport study (unlike the city and regional council's sites), but there's no mention of rail and only the vaguest reference to passenger transport at all. They say that a "consultation leaflet" is available for download, but I couldn't find that either, and had to physically go to the council offices to find it. It's a thin little flyer that says it wants our input, but mentions no suggestions or options whatsoever. So, the only justification I can find for the headline is that the reporters asked Transit whether rail would be considered at all, and they didn't rule it out.

I suppose we should be glad that the powers that be are asking for our suggestions in the most general way, rather than asking us to select from a handful of options. But there's certainly no sign that they are seriously planning a city-to-airport rail link, so one wouldn't have to be too cynical to imagine that the concept will float around a bit before being discarded, and the final consultation will be a choice between two different road-widening schemes. Oh joy.

It means that it's up to us. Wellingtonians. If we're happy to let more cars clog up the city and see more neighbourhoods get torn up for motorways and "bypasses", then we just have to do nothing and the car-centric status quo will keep rolling on. Someone's bound to dig up the old cliché about "Kiwis not giving up their love affair with the car" and the "fact" that there's no demand for a world-class public transport system. But even over the last year Wellington's train patronage has increased by 7% and bus ridership by 4%, and we desparately need more capacity. Hell, even Aucklanders will use public transport if it's there! So if we want transport quality and capacity to not just keep up with demand but lead the way to the future, we need to come up with sensible, viable, concrete options and present them with clarity and force so that they can become official options for the final consultation.