It’s not a good idea, but it’s not going to make congestion worse while bankrupting the country, and that’s the best we can hope for at this point.
The Waitematā Harbour drops down 29m at its deepest point, which is almost enough space to contain all the dumb ideas on how to cross it. Over the last few weeks, Auckland mayor Wayne Brown has been sending another brainwave into the depths, making the case for a bridge between Toby Manhire’s Pt Chev bungalow and Anna Rawhiti-Connell’s Beach Haven shack.
Both are fine writers and only slightly worse human beings, but connecting their houses isn’t intuitively a top infrastructure priority for Auckland. Brown has nevertheless doggedly defended the proposal, telling the Herald that it’s an “obvious, much cheaper and better solution” than a road tunnel nearer to the Harbour Bridge. He expanded on that in an 18-minute interview on this weekend’s Q&A, saying the Manhire-Connell expressway will cost 8 to 10% of a tunnel, and could pay for itself if we open up Defence Force land on its North Shore side for housing.
His arguments aren’t completely watertight. The bridge would cross a lava reef before disembarking at a swampy shoreline in the middle of an ammo dump, after which travellers would somehow ascend 100m and disgorge en masse onto an already busy arterial road.
North Shore councillor Richard Hills says that’s not actually “possible” or “good”. He prefers a public transport, pedestrian, and cycle bridge linking up with the existing Northern Busway instead. “I support the mayor on a more affordable bridge option. I just prefer a route that could actually happen,” he says. “I do not support going through the zoo, an ecological lava reef, and several of our important native kauri reserves, before removing hundreds of local homes to jam the traffic through small local streets up a steep 100-metre incline to a connecting road.”
A compelling argument.
On the other hand, fuck it, why not?
Right now, almost all the country’s top transport priorities are impossible, ruinously expensive, or both. The government is currently dusting off the steamrollers for a motorway which recorded a benefit-cost ratio of 22 to 37 cents on the dollar before it suffered a $1.5 billion cost blowout. It’s a small appetiser for the smorgasbord of tarmac planned over the next few decades. Simeon Brown’s latest national transport plan includes a single road which could chew up 10% of all government infrastructure spending for 30 years. Somehow that’s not even the one once dubbed the “most expensive road in the world” which we’re also set to build after years of delay.
All those investments look parsimonious compared to our major parties’ plans for the Waitematā. Labour’s election plan for the harbour was to build a three-lane roading tunnel, along with a circuitous light rail line that snaked its way through every North Shore suburb before mercifully meeting its end in the arid hellscapes of Albany. The proposal was a perfect complement to its light rail tunnel to the airport, in that it would also never get built. Perhaps that’s for the best. The only thing worse than its relegation to the great transport waste bin of history would have been it by some miracle getting constructed and bankrupting the country.
National’s answer to its opponents’ stupidity hasn’t yet been fully fleshed out, but appears to be creating a traffic jam to link two existing traffic jams.
In that context, a bridge across some shallow water connecting roughly 63 houses starts to look pretty good. No, it probably won’t fix congestion in any meaningful way. It won’t create a rapid transit corridor for light rail, as the designers of the Northern Busway initially intended. It won’t be that good. But it won’t cost more than the entire GDP of Slovenia. It won’t make congestion that much worse. It might not even spend the next 40 years going through 62 separate business case processes before consultants arrive at the conclusion more business cases are required.
That’s the best we can hope for when our transport pipeline is modelled on the human centipede, with each successive plan more diluted in value than the last. It’s time to build a funny little bridge that won’t singlehandedly nuke every cent of health spending until 2035. I hope you like construction noise, Toby and Anna. Rev up the diggers. We’re going to Pt Chev.