Congestion Free Network - Part 3

This is part three of a series on the Congestion Free Network (CFN). 

For those not familiar with the plan, I go into some detail here about its origins however it is essentially of copy of Auckland Transport's (AT) "Regional Land Transport Plan" although it upgrades everything to fully grade separated busways or railways.

Given the CFN is broken down into '5 Year Plan' segments I have been looking at each one in turn. In my previous post I looked at the network as proposed by the year 2020 and found that the initial portion of the works would likely cost in the range of $7-8 billion, this is despite the plan having had only allocated some $1.3 billion for these works. I also excluded the Central Rail Link (CRL) and the additional rolling stock from the previous estimate and so we should really round off the total cost for the first 5 year CFN plan at $11 billion.

In today's post I am going to look at the works for the 2020 to 2025 plan and see how far over budget we get given the we spent all of the CFN's budget in the first 5 year plan..

CFN - 2025

CFN 2020 to 2025 Projects:

The 2020 to 2025 plan for the CFN appears to be mainly extensions to existing section of the Rapid Transit Network (RTN) rather than creating new lines and therefore we can expect this phase to be cheaper then the $11 billion spent in the fist 5 year plan.

To set the context, the CFN is a network of grade separated high speed and high frequency public transport (PT) routes similar to the northern busway or Vancouver's SkyTrain.

Vancouver Sky Train - 2015

During the previous 5 year plan the busway was extended 4km from Constellation Station up to the Albany Station to remove the segment where buses are required to drive on a congested section of the motorway network, during this 5 year plan the busway is further extended 12km north from Albany through to Silverdale. Given this section of motorway only has an AADT of 40,000 it does seem somewhat excessive do build a grade separated busway however I can only assume that the authors of the CFN are expecting large amounts of traffic growth on this route, potentially due to the Puhoi to Wellsford motorway extension. 

Another busway extension is planned to go from Westgate 7km along SH16 to Kumeu. This is another peculiar extension as currently the two-lane two-way SH16 only gets 20k vpd here, it also sits on the existing rail line and could easily be served by extending the existing rail service slightly further. Personally I can see there being some merit in extending a high quality bus serves out here as part of extending the motorway, however I would only do this once we get some more urban sprawl, something which the authors of this work are dead set against and so their justification for this route is unknown 

We get two more busway extensions as part of the plan, a 6km extension to Howick and another 6km extension to the airport. We also get the Onehunga Rail Line extended 9km to the airport. All 3 of these make perfect sense and would be quite useful if there were here today for us to use, in particular the busway to Howick which is one of the most deprived parts of the city when it comes to PT.

The plan also adds a ferry to Northcote, Birkenhead, Beachhaven and Hobsonville. I'm not too sure how they plan it implement a fast and frequent ferry service as ferries are generally slow and their high capacity inherently means low frequency. Ferries are also pretty poor when it comes to CO2 commissions being about the same as a car on a per km rate, they usually offset this by taking much shorter routes however the route shown is no shorter than travelling by road

CFN 2020 to 2025 Costing:

The CFN website has the following costings for these projects:

1. Northern Busway Extension = $300 million (12km)
2. Western Busway Extenstion = $150 million (7km)
3. Howick Busway Extention = $150 million (6km)
4. Airport Busway = $235 million (6km)
5. Airport Rail = $700 million (9km)
6. High Speed High Frequency Ferries = $30 million

From that last time I looked as this we had a unit rate for busways of $35 million per km, we also had a property cost of $20 million per km in urban areas.

So using those rates and taking account that some of the busways are out in the country side we get the following values.

1. Northern Busway Extension = $420 million (12km)
2. Western Busway Extenstion = $245 million (7km)
3. Howick Busway Extention = $330 million (6km)
4. Airport Busway = $330 million (6km)

Looking at the rail option, $50 million per km is about what I would expect however due to the reduced geometric flexibility the property costs are likely to go up. On a pure per km rate we are looking at $720 million however the tricky part here is the crossing over the Mangere Inlet. The current plan is to have a bridge weaving its way across the inlet between the existing two bridges, however I suspect such visual destruction is not likely to be approved, unless it follows the same grade as the existing motorway bridge, and so we are more likely to see a tunnel here if this route is to be approved. Once you take this into account the cost of the route is more likely to at least $1 billion.

Mangere Inlet - 2015

So if we put the various parts together, the total cost for the CFN 5 year plan from 2020 to 2025 comes out at $2.3 billion, comparing this to the CFN budget of $1.5 billion we have managed to come in much closer to budget than we did in the first 5 year plan.

The total cost to date for the CFN is now at $13.3 billion running at 136% of the total CNF budget of $9.8 billion.

Similar to last time, I have updated the 2025 CFN plan to show what we could build if we limited are funds to what the CFN has allocated.

Costed 2025 CFN - 2015

The next post will cover the years 2025 to 2030.