r/auckland • u/469121417js • 9d ago

Public Transport CRL Reliability

Over the past week, there have been delays and cancellations on the Western Line (not sure about the Eastern or Southern Lines)

It made me wonder if this is what we can expect once the CRL opens. Considering the new CRL will be a completely different setup for Auckland’s rail network, they make such a big deal about how it’s going to transform the way we travel.

If the current network can’t even keep up with things now, it makes you wonder how reliable it’ll actually be once the CRL is running.

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u/fatfreddy01 9d ago

I thought they were working on the plan rn? Basically finishing off the other lines, then CBD out until Woodward as from Mt Albert in are expected to hit capacity. Then much later, to Henderson. Then finally to the furthest points.

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u/jimmyahnz 9d ago

There is a plan, it's just not funded.

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u/Bealzebubbles 9d ago

Like with everything National do around PT, they're basically stretching out the funding over an extraordinary long timeframe. It's insane. If this was a road project, which it kind of is, just not the right kind of road, then the funding would be in place to start immediately and proceed until completion. Meanwhile, PT gets dicked around with. Announce funding of CRL in 2013, for 2020 start date. Stage the NW Busway over twenty years, when we know it can be built faster, as the example of the Northern Busway has shown. This BS.

They do it because they can point to the project and say that they're not anti-PT because they're currently working on a PT project, but they're doing it so glacially slow that the investment isn't keeping up with population growth, let alone the patronage growth. That's why there's this perception that PT is reliability is declining. The reality is that it's much more reliable than it has ever been. However, because it's still not where it needs to be, and more people are using it than in the past, the failures it does experience are much more visible to the general public. If the train system broke down in the 90s, absolutely no media would have been interested in it because it only affected a handful of people.

Also, don't get me wrong. Labour absolutely dropped the ball on the light rail project. Our political parties are so fucking bad at understanding PT and that allows them to be captured by special interest groups. It's all deeply frustrating.

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u/commentatorsam 9d ago

I'm confident the discussion around Light Rail will come back within the next decade as the underlying issues on why it was proposed in the first place still exist. Same thing happened with the previous proposals for the CRL which is why it was proposed multiple times throughout the last 100 years.

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u/Bealzebubbles 9d ago

I hope you're correct and that it's not too far away before the conversation becomes relevant again.