RODNEY HIDE - City Rail Link: 19th-Century Trains Under a 21st-Century City
- Administrator
- 5 hours ago
- 2 min read
The City Rail Link is a $5.5 billion monument to backward thinking.
Auckland is digging a 3.5 km twin tunnel under its CBD to run 19th-century steel-on-steel trains. The project, originally budgeted far lower, has ballooned to $5.5 billion. Auckland ratepayers and taxpayers are on the hook for billions upfront with rate payers coughing up $220–$265 million every year in operating, interest and depreciation costs. That is real money sucked out of productive parts of the economy.
This is government at its most predictable: always looking backwards. When new technology screams opportunity, politicians and bureaucrats reach for Victorian-era solutions wrapped in 21st-century rhetoric.
Imagine instead a genuine 21st-century system. The Boring Company’s Vegas Loop is already operational. It uses electric Tesla vehicles in tunnels, driverless or minimally crewed, delivering passengers in safety, comfort and speed. Built in roughly a year for a fraction of CRL’s cost — the original LVCC section came in at around $47 million. It moves thousands per hour and tens of thousands per day at fares around US$12. No taxpayer mega-subsidy. No endless operating deficits. Just rapid, on-demand transport that scales.
Auckland could have offered The Boring Company a showcase project: dig the tunnels privately, run a fleet of electric Teslas, and charge users directly. Zero cost to ratepayers and taxpayers. Door-to-door convenience. No waiting on platforms. No fixed timetables. Real 21st-century mobility.
Instead we get CRL. Let’s do the maths that exposes the madness.
$5.5 billion capital cost. Even using optimistic projections of around 20,000–30,000 daily passengers in the early years (well below the long-term peak-hour claims), the capital cost alone works out at well over $150,000–$200,000 per daily passenger, i.e. the "Capital Cost per Daily Boarding" -- a useful metric in cost-effectiveness analysis. Add the annual $220+ million running costs and the insanity deepens. This is not transport infrastructure. It is a slow-motion fiscal train wreck.
Governments love rail because it looks impressive, locks in jobs and lets them play central planner. They hate flexible, innovative, private solutions because those expose how outdated their thinking is. And they no longer control where and how we live.
The population is ageing and fertility is collapsing. We cannot afford white elephants that deliver yesterday’s technology at tomorrow’s prices. Auckland deserved forward-looking transport. Instead it got a very expensive hole in the ground for very old trains.
Scrap the nostalgia projects. Open the city to genuine innovation. The future does not run on 19th-century rails. It drives on electric autonomy — faster, cheaper and without the endless bill to ratepayers. CRL is not progress. It is expensive proof that government transport policy remains stuck in the past.
Indeed, with driverless cars we won’t need the tunnels, we won’t need public transport and unbelievable space in cities will be freed because we won’t need the car parks.
The world is digital and yet our government is subsidising the pony express.
Rodney Hide is a former minister and ACT party leader
Maybe wr are just importing too many new people without understanding the true consequences? Yes, more people increase competition of jobs so wages can be lower. They also collectively spend more money so the government ngets more tax revenue. That compoetition for enmployment, consumer products and real assets like houses is definitelt beneficial for some people like owners of large corporations and those called the government who get more of the wealth created by the productive working people. It does not seem to be as beneficial for the majority of citizens (native or new) or New Zealand in general. Most people and the country have become poorer and burdened by more personal and collective debt. The "solution" seems to be doing more of what causes the…
Rodney … What did you do about your supposed transport problem when you were an MP. Never heard from you.
This “ new” Auckland short rail link started up about 15 years ago when Auckland car congestion problems were really beginning to loom.
In came MMP and the influence of theloopy Greens with an agenda to rid us of cars and so it has been to woo their votes we go for this very expensive over run budget rail link.!!!
Now Rodney wants more cars on the Auckland roads but to go for the fanciful electric cars carrying just one or two people of course only those who can afford one.
Or does Rodney want the taxpayer (us) to purchase…
What exactly is the 'door-to-door convenience' you suggest? Are you saying we no longer individually own cars, we rely on govt.-provided electric automated fleets? A 15-minute city in other words? Do people share-ride these cars? How many thousands of cars would be needed to move thousands of people at a time? Do we have the capacity to generate this much electricity? Where and how huge are the charging stations for all these cars or do they charge as they run? How do we travel outside the city? Not everyone goes to the CBD they criss-cross NSEW. Or have I got your vision totally wrong?
Brilliant thinking Rodney! Overseas innovative investment and once there's a significant mass electric driverless eco system it becomes a jumping off platform for some amazing driverless extensions over time.
Essentially what this boils down to is replacing rails and steel with high speed rubber wheels and digital intelligence. The "tracks" become a toughened road surface through tunnels (and/or overhead) with perhaps some assisting control sensors. Guess were stuck with the sunk cost fallacy!
The real problem is far too many accountants, lawyers, bankers in the board room and Government instead of business savvy engineers and innovative entrepreneurs, who have typically been the kind of driving characters behind most significant technological advances, including railroads.
Rodney, you are SO right. Why is it that lonely voices talking obvious truth and sense can still be ignored by the politicians, who remain driven by unreason pushed by activists, bureaucrats and the MSM? Commuter rail, in more and more of the world, has become the modern era's epitome of the "Concorde Project" but without the national pride at leading the world in a new technology.
This CRL project should have had a stake put through its heart when Tony Randle did his completely FREE audit of it's "business case" way back in 2011. The project cost has around tripled since then, and I bet the ridership forecasts won't pan out. But even if they did, as Rodney points…