Mass Rapid Transit: Harry Potter fantasy or basic common sense?

People seem to get very idealistic very quickly when it comes to transport.

Pension fund manager Sam Stubbs wrote an unintentionally ironic post on linked in the other day accusing a rail advocate of being too ideological, before immediately setting off on an intensely ideological rant about how much he hates trains.

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It got a lot of comments: some calling him out for his hypocrisy, but many lapping it up and agreeing with him. One of the replies mentioned Christchurch in it:

I think a lot of people in the city probably share similar views though: something along the lines of it being self-evident that mass rapid transit just doesn’t make sense in a city like Christchurch, for vague reasons relating to (a) our small population justifying the large cost and (b) people preferring cars.

Luckily we don’t actually need to rely on these sorts of uninformed ideological takes. We’ve just spent over a million dollars over the last 4 years commissioning experts to crunch the numbers and tell us objectively whether or not mass rapid transit in Christchurch stacks up or not.

They’ve calculated the costs, likely usage, population required, and overall economic benefits as a ratio to the costs of the scheme. There’s over a thousand pages of reporting, with the 261 page summary publicly available here. Have a read if you’re interested, but I’ll save you a job – in a nutshell it says that yes, mass rapid transit in Christchurch does stack up financially.

“Investing initially between $3.0b and $4.0b in this MRT solution, and funding its operation by $64m p.a., will return benefits worth up to 2.8 times the costs to Greater Christchurch.”

I know a lot of people out there aren’t influenced by facts and will simply refuse to believe it but, for everyone else, I think it’s worth doing a very quick myth-busting session.

1. We’re not Singapore!

Indeed we are not Singapore, but that’s not particularly relevant to the question of whether or not mass rapid transit makes sense here. You don’t have to be Singapore to have mass rapid transit. London isn’t Singapore, New York isn’t Singapore.

Canberra, smaller than Christchurch, isn’t Singapore. Newcastle, smaller than Christchurch, isn’t Singapore. Gold Coast, Camden, Trenton, Kitchener-Waterloo, Lausanne, Bern, Lund, Norrkoping, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Parla, Granada, Bratislava, Ulm, Heidelberg, Tours, Le Mans, Brest, Avignon, Innsbruck, Takaoka, Tallinn, Kochi, Qiubei, Setif: all are not Singapore, yet all have mass rapid transit systems. All are smaller than Christchurch too. A lot of these you probably haven’t heard of because they’re not very big cities!

The thing I find really infuriating is that Christchurch itself used to have mass rapid transit! The city was built around it’s tram and passenger rail networks. We still have the underlying urban form of a transit oriented city. Nek minnit we’ll have people trying to claim that Christchurch isn’t Christchurch!

2. We don’t have the population to support it!

In some people’s heads, you need an astronomical number of people using a mass rapid transit system to make it stack up. I’m speaking loosely here as I distil 1,000 pages into a few sentences but broadly, the tipping point at which the Christchurch mass rapid transit system starts to make better financial sense than the status quo is when demand reaches about 25,000 trips per day.

Twenty five thousand is not that much.

You don’t need a population of millions upon millions of people all stacked on top of each other in Singapore-esque skyscrapers to reach twenty five thousand. A group of people about the size of Mosgiel (population 14,000) making a return trip each day would exceed this tipping point.

The corridor through which the MRT line is being proposed (Hornby-City-Belfast) already has about 50,000 people living in it. If a quarter of them were to use it for a return trip each day, then the scheme stacks up economically.

That’s not a wildly implausible scenario.

3. But the costs will be astronomical!

Mass rapid transit will cost somewhere around $3-4 billion to build. This sounds like a lot of money to you and me, but in the context of national transport budgets it is not that big.

The National-led government are trying to build 15 “Roads of National Significance” around the country, estimated to cost $24-40 billion. Roughly ten times the Christchurch MRT scheme.

All the government would need to do to fund mass rapid transit in Christchurch is cancel one or two of these roading projects. If you accept that New Zealand can afford these Roads of National Significance, then you have to concede that we could easily afford a mass rapid transit system in Christchurch.

Recap

Mass rapid transit is not unusual for a city Christchurch’s size; on the contrary it’s unusual for a city our size to NOT have some form of mass rapid transit. Secondly, mass rapid transit doesn’t cost that much different to a motorway and we could easily afford it if we just cancelled one or two of the fifteen planned motorway projects. Thirdly, mass rapid transit would almost certainly attract more than enough people to make it an economically worthwhile investment.

It’s completely natural to be sceptical of new ideas. But I’ve been looking at mass rapid transit in Christchurch for about a decade now and found that, the more I interrogate the numbers, the less it looks like a “Harry Potter Fantasy” and the more it looks like the sort of basic, common sense project that we should have got on and done years ago, as almost every other city in the world of comparable size has done.