Tunnel vision

A low carbon harbour crossing for under a billion, no worries

Election time is vision time. You must have one. You must read out speeches that bring it, and also your conviction and passion for it yada yada et cetera, to life. 

Todd Muller, or at least whoever was in charge of National Party policy and speeches a month ago, had an absolute belter ready to go. But then he discovered this stuff wasn’t his sort of thing really, so it fell to the next pop-up leader to read it out.

What a vision it was, though.

The vision sees thriving people moving freely and at will between the mighty city of Auckland and the future mighty cities of Whangarei and Hamilton and Tauranga on a four-lane expressway and driving through holes in the bottom of mountains to do it.

This is what you look for in a vision even if it's not coming until 2040 and has no pricetag. 

It says to the voters: 

I am a leader who can see through mountains. 

I can see through the Brynderwyns. 

I can see through the Kaimais. 

I have been to the mountaintop. 

I have been to the mountaintop in my car and I have said 

surely to christ you could cut a good quarter of an hour off this trip. 

We don't seem to have been delivered much of the tunnel vision since that day. It would be nice to have some more, because I too have tunnel dreams. I believe, as people like to say when they can see that clearly we are all going to violently disagree, this is a conversation we should be having. 

As things stand right now, Tunnel Kaimai and Tunnel Brynderwen are just an idea. If you don’t vote National, you won’t get two colossal tunnels this decade. And if you do vote National you won’t get two colossal tunnels this decade.

This is by no means unknown in the annals of tunnel vision. Let us go now to the gateway of East and West, Istanbul. There they have built an underwater tunnel to connect two continents and if you don't think that's cool, I don't know, man, who are you, The Taxpayers Union? The Eurasia Tunnel is five kilometres of double-deck tunnel connecting the Asian and European sides of Istanbul, below the waters of the Bosphorus strait.

Pretty damn cool, right. And that’s not even the tunnel I'm here to rave about. The one I'm here to rave about is the one they announced at the same time, namely the Kabataş-Üsküdar Pedestrian Tunnel Project which was going to let you do the crossing on foot. 

Across the Bosphorus. Through an underwater tunnel. Two kilometers long, 20 metres underwater, a  two-storey tunnel, ready to go by 2019. The top floor for  pedestrians and bicyclists, the lower floor for rubber-tired electric vehicles. There would be a moving walkway.

News reports from exciting days four years ago paint the exciting picture:

Drilling work begins for Istanbul’s pedestrian underwater tunnel 

and

Drilling work for an underwater pedestrian tunnel that will connect Istanbul’s European and Asian sides has begun. 

and

‘Underwater Domes of Istanbul’ has been chosen from a shortlist of six entries by an expert judging panel, who commended the scheme’s approach to a new pedestrian route that would result in an intriguing and inviting location to visit in its own right.

A travelator, under the sea, is what they were talking about. Loyal readers will know that nothing could make my heart beat faster. And then... nothing. Try as I might I can find no more news reports, no exciting updates, no photos of Erdogan cutting any damn ribbon or getting on any damn travelator. I have to regretfully conclude that things are not moving. 

Before we tunnel on through to my own actual vision, let’s now go to Japan, between the cities of Shimonoseki and Kitakyūshū, which are separated by water and connected under the sea. Kanmon Pedestrian Tunnel  is 780 metres long and has been there for half a century now. Everyone uses it:  joggers, students, shoppers, commutres.  It’s a 15 minute walk,with direction boards every hundred metres telling you how far you have left to travel. On the walls are delightful pictures of marine life you might find beyond the concrete walls.

Underwater pedestrian tunnels in other words, are an actual thing. Tunnels are not just for trains and automobiles. They can be for  happy people doing stuff like we did in lockdown, walking, biking, scooting from one point to another. There is solid technology for it, and it’s rapidly evolving, I have been learning. One reads the most  exciting things about  immersed tubes.

An immersed tube is a kind of modular undersea tunnel composed of segments. You construct chunks of it elsewhere, you float the chunk to the tunnel site, sink it into place, link all the chunks together, gasket them up tight as a drum and there you go.There are only a couple of hundred of them across the world, but if for example you've been in Sydney you may well have been in one if you’ve taken a cab through the harbour tunnel. 

Immersed tunnels are set to become far more common - longer, deeper, pushing the envelope and more competitive than ever. The technology, one reads, is moving ahead rapidly. They can be considerably more cost effective than alternative options, one reads. 

The vision Judith Collins offered was not just a four-lane expressway and tunnels. There were also some good options: more rapid transit, more rail...and an additional Auckland Harbour crossing in the form of a tunnel for road, rail and public transport. 

I just wonder if she'd like to think about a harbour crossing that's more about two legs and low-carbon alternatives.

My idea of a forward looking transport policy is one that embraces new ways of moving - like the maxim goes: if you design a city for cars, it fails for everyone, including drivers. If you design a multi-modal city, it works better for everyone, including drivers. 

Why not refine our transport  visions to be a bit more future-looking, a bit more climate- friendly? Why not have an underwater tunnel where we can cross from one side to the other at will on foot, scooter or on bike? 

You could have it at the shortest point between Devonport and the city. That would be about 800 metres, by the look of it, from the Devonport ferry terminal to Bledisloe Wharf (which, I propose to explore in a future blog, is the part of the port you could quite readily remove from the equation if you want a less radical way of organising our ports arrangements. But I digress).

The future is coming and it's full of e-bikes. They might be some kind of expensive toy for the affluent for now, but that's how cell phones were, once. It won't be long before those things are everyday and affordable and really, really good at getting us all over the place. 

One way to get to low carbon transport is to switch to an e-car, but for much of what we do, an e-bike might well meet our needs equally if not better.  That tunnel could be taking a whole lot of traffic and if you have your doubts about that, here, come stand with me outside the railway station in Amsterdam. Holy mackerel look at all those fucking bicycles. 

What would this magnificent vision cost? I asked my friend Vic-the-very-experienced-engineer to get his roughest ballpark estimate down on the back of a napkin and don't worry how rough as guts it is mate I won't use your name and he told me:

“Very much an estimated guess as there are no tunnels of this type in NZ. CRL rail tunnel is around $1B per km which includes stations. Ballpark for immersed tunnel - 500 to 700 million per km.”

Sold. I imagine a day, not too far from here, where things are different and better, where we have moved on from one person, one car and a thousand awful journeys.  I would very much like to see us put 500-700 million up for an immersed pedestrian tunnel beneath the Waitemata. And if the leader of the opposition, who seems to be framing herself as some kind of Roads Scholar, is prepared to back my vision, I'm prepared to go all in and turn this blog into an all singing all dancing 24/7 campaign for her party this election. 

 Or not. But I’m deadly serious about the tunnel.