When the City Rail Link opens (circa 2026), all signs point to it immediately being a huge success. It will be transformational for Auckland, with ripple effects across the city.
Thousands of people an hour will pour in and out of the new and upgraded stations. So, as well as sorting things like level crossings, the focus is on making the areas around the stations easy to get to, and attractive to people.
A high-profile example of the latter – and one that's especially ripe for success – is the Karanga-a-hāpe station, which will have entrances at Beresford Square and Mercury Lane. In 2023, Auckland Transport released a pretty great plan for the area, which attracted strong public support.
On the question of access around the station, two thirds (67%) of respondents felt positive - and if you add in those who were supportive but had some concerns ("mixed"), support rose to 77%. That's a win in anyone's book.
AT had landed an easy win for what was recently named one of the "coolest streets in the world." Done and dusted. Right?
You'd think. Unfortunately, since then, Auckland Transport has quietly watered down the plans that drew such strong support. In particular, AT has:
backed away from the promised pedestrianisation of upper Mercury Lane
and scuppered important work on traffic circulation plans for the area
all in an attempt to appease a very small but very vocal and litigious group of people...
... in the process, exposing some bad habits that really need fixing, so we can get the best out of our city and restore confidence in the way transport and placemaking happen.
A note to readers: This is a long read that focuses on a few key moments in what's been quite a tortuous process. If you're curious for even more detail, dive into the documents and official information requests (LGOIMAs) linked throughout.
I touched on the Mercury Lane walkback in my post last year about AT's failure to implement the Access for Everyone strategy. I want to go deeper here, because it illustrates how projects and strategies are repeatedly undermined and watered down by backroom lobbying, despite being hugely popular with the public, and despite the best efforts of the front-line project teams.
This is a story of how behind-the-scenes manoeuvres led AT to fumble a high-profile win, by hastily kowtowing to a minority of never-satisfied grumblers, to everyone's detriment. We deserve so much better.
The original plan for Mercury Lane
In 2023, Auckland Transport shared plans to improve the area around the K' Road station, dubbed 'Project K'. (It's now called the Karanga-ā-Hape Station precinct integration project, but Project K is shorter, cooler and catchier).
Notwithstanding a few minor issues, this looked to be an amazing improvement to the area, as Matt wrote at the time. It was also way better than what the Link Alliance originally showed in 2018.
Project K had four key components:
A pedestrian mall on Mercury Lane
Walking and cycling improvements
Changes to parking and loading zones as well as to traffic circulation
Improved infrastructure for buses
It wasn't perfect, but it was a damn good plan – and, impressively, it fitted into the well-supported strategies for the city.
Project K is one piece of the bigger puzzle
It's important to understand that this work around the new station is part of a broader strategy: Access for Everyone (A4E), which is the transport part of the 2020 refresh of the City Centre Masterplan (CCMP).
It's also highly popular: when Council consulted on the CCMP in 2019, A4E drew 82% support.
As I've previously discussed here, traffic circulation plans are central to A4E – they deliver the promised outcomes by creating neighbourhood access areas.
Access for Everyone (A4E) is a coordinated response that manages Auckland’s city centre transport needs, by:
limiting motorised through-traffic
prioritising access to city centre destinations
creating new spaces
improving access for servicing, freight and delivery
favouring public transport, walking and cycling.
Unfortunately, even though A4E is the guiding document, official council policy, and highly supported by the public, Auckland Transport has utterly failed to develop and implement it. Since 2019, there's been essentially no progress.
The 2022 A4E programme business case (PBC) only shows concepts of the circulation plans, despite having had a 2019 case study to work from.
Additionally, the PBC included all the bells and whistles for A4E to arrive at a projected cost at $386.2 million over 10 years (with a BCR between 1.7 to 3.3). This completely ignores the point that the core part of A4E – the circulation plans – can be rapidly delivered at a fraction of the price, with more expensive elements staged over time.
As an example, the highly successful scheme in Ghent was implemented over one weekend in 2017, at the cost of just €4m ($7m NZD), using cheap tools like bollards and barriers.
Setting aside the failings of the 2022 business case, it nonetheless highlighted the areas for prioritising – and the Karangahape Rd and Pitt St area was identified as one of the most feasible on the shortlist:
This option was assessed as being one of the most feasible and affordable of the shortlisted interventions. This is due to the smaller scale [of] construction work required. It is expected to have a minor positive impact towards climate change mitigation (through mode shift and reduction in traffic and vehicle kilometres travelled).
You can read what else the 2022 A4E business case said here (page 128). The point is that the Karanga-ā-hape station area was identified as ripe for action, with CRL providing the ideal opportunity to fund some A4E work, bells and whistles included. This is noted in the single stage business case for Project K, the same year:
A4E is the coordinated response to transforming how Auckland’s city centre operates as set out in the CCMP. It coordinates how transport in the city centre could be managed to create a more liveable city centre which is safer to walk and cycle in, has greater public space and is more accessible for everyone.
Key concepts of A4E which are intrinsic to this business case include:
Limiting motorised through-traffic
Prioritising access to city centre destinations
Creating new spaces
Improving access for servicing, freight and delivery
Favouring public transport, walking and cycling.
A4E proposes to organise the central city into low traffic zones (shown in Figure 11) with limited through traffic as shown in Appendix B. The Karangahape area is one of these zones. Under A4E, access to the zone is provided for all transport modes, but access from the Karangahape zone into other city centre zones would be limited to walking, cycling, public transport, and commercial vehicles (at certain times of the day).
Considering the state A4E was in at the time, this showed a really good understanding of what it aims to achieve. Not only was Project K set to be a great project in itself, for once AT was also following the official (and well-supported) wider strategy.
So what did the public think?
In April 2023, Project K went out to consultation, with a good plan that matched the well-siupported wider vision and strategy for the city, and would deliver ideal outcomes for a very busy new station.
The reaction?
As a whole, Project K had significant support (70%), and the access part was supported by 67% of all who gave feedback.
Even among those who lived in the immediate neighbourhood, positive feelings were still higher than negative – with a clear majority (59%) feeling either positive or mixed (which includes positive but with concerns).
However, one part of the proposal would soon become an 'issue': the plan to make Upper Mercury Lane a pedestrian mall.
Under the Local Government Act, in order to change a road into a pedestrian mall, special consultation has to occur (a minimum of one month's consultation) before the decision is made. After a decision to go forward with a pedestrian mall, people then have 30 days to appeal to the environment court. The 2023 consultation would serve as the first part of that.
The pedestrian mall proposal drew high support, with 68% positive feedback, including from many key stakeholders. If you add "mixed", which covers those who support the concept in general but have specific concerns, support was 74%.
For AT – and for cities in general – this early support is really good news. Often, broad ideas are highly popular to begin with; some anxiety and opposition appears when you get into the specifics and head towards implementation – and this is followed by a return to confidence and support as the project is delivered, and the benefits become tangible.
A great example of this trend is the "Goodwin curve" of support for congestion (or time-of-use) charging:
We're currently seeing a live example of this mood shift in real time, with New York's congestion-pricing scheme. The point is, you can always expect support to dip somewhat once details emerge and when the ground is broken. This doesn't detract from the fact that people support the overall goals and outcomes – they're just nervous about the process of getting there.
Consultation, community engagement, and compromise
Where there are real issues to tease out, consultation and community engagement is the best way to address them. Project K's plans for Mercury Lane were no exception: the AT project team wisely held a number of community workshops to help work out any kinks in the plan. (You can read a summary here.)
This process did result in changes to the project, but for the most part the core concept was retained: removing through-traffic via a traffic circulation plan. Subsequent analysis also showed a pedestrian mall was the best option for safety.
However, it was also clear that some local residents and businesses had concerns about the pedestrianisation of Upper Mercury Lane. Over 2023 and 2024, some arguably legitimate issues were raised about deliveries, loading and parking, by people who weren't satisfied by AT's proposal for fixed bollards and two-way access to the bottom of Upper Mercury Lane, just above the Cross Street intersection.
A few key stakeholders, notably the Karangahape Road Business Association, and the Auckland Drug Information Outreach Trust (which runs a nearby Needle Exchange on East Street), had concerns about closing Mercury Lane to traffic, and thought a right turn into Upper Queen Street from Karangahape Road would make access more workable.
Others, like Mercury Theatre, supported lowering the volume of traffic but wanted to retain access for deliveries and services.
AT responded by:
adjusting the circulation plan to enable the right turn into Upper Queen Street
and proposing retractable bollards at the top of Mercury Lane, which could be lowered to allow an exit left-turn onto Karangahape Road as needed for deliveries and services.
AT's fix, while a bit janky, was a potentially reasonable compromise, which allowed some flexibility and preserved the desired outcomes, without gutting the core concept of Project K and A4E.
And if things had concluded there, we'd have a happy ending to this story. Reasonable concerns from stakeholders, mitigated by community engagement from Auckland Transport – and an opportunity to test out retractable bollards, which could then be used elsewhere in the city (such as High Street).
But alas! This was not where it ended.
A small group (including a former AT employee), representing the George Court building's body corporate, had entirely opposed the pedestrian mall – and they remained disgruntled despite the proposed mitigations. So, as Project K moved forward with the process of pedestrianisation, this group began to lobby Auckland Transport and Auckland Council – both publicly and privately.
George Court, lobbying, and the vocal minority
The opposition began in early 2023 during consultation, and was ongoing, as you can see from a LGOIMA from last year (the files of which you can access in this Google drive). The group presented to the AT board in September 2023 (the recording of which is unfortunately corrupted), repeating a presentation they'd given to AT's Traffic Control Committee months before.
Throughout, they threatened to resort to legal action, saying that if AT decided to implement a pedestrian mall, they'd appeal to the Environment Court.
Some information on this lobbying is not publicly accessible, but the AT board public submissions register notes:
Our Legal team have reviewed the legal concerns and noted they are wrong – see attached pdf.
With regards to Todd Langwell’s traffic assessment, changes have been made for access to the Pedestrian Mall by all large, authorised vehicles that do not involve the movements that are of considered unsafe. These issues are addressed in the attached Word document, the contents of which form part of the TCC report for the resolution of the Pedestrian Mall. The project team is still working through the exact operations of the use of bollards in the Mall with SMEs. The final report to TCC will be submitted once this is complete.
In November 2023, the George Court group went on to present to Auckland Council's transport committee, where they decried a "lack of engagement" by AT, re-stating their intention to legally challenge any closure to through-traffic. They expressed support for the (extremely poor) original CRL designs, which as the image below shows, would have been dominated by traffic.
Unlike other stakeholders, this group did not seem interested in compromise or adjustments that would achieve the agreed outcomes while ensuring their real concerns were met. It appears they simply wanted no change whatsoever to vehicle access – despite the enormous benefits (to them and to everyone) of having a brand new CRL station right outside their building (and also notwithstanding the fact they likely would have received compensation for their underground property rights because of CRL.)
Their ongoing pressure and lobbying led to Auckland Transport losing its courage on the pedestrian mall. In December 2023, AT said a bollard system would be 'very challenging to implement', and began looking at an option of retractable bollards that would for the most part stay retracted, prioritising uninterrupted traffic flow.
AT also had a series of meetings over the first half of 2024, in which they attempted to address the concerns of the George Court group. An app system allowing on-demand access via the retractable bollards was on the cards, and other parts of the proposed and consulted design – such as street furniture – were quietly deleted "staged out".
A new issue then arose: Auckland Council wanted to add public toilets, on request from other stakeholders such as the business association, as all other conveniences on Karangahape Road had been closed.
The George Court group (and others from as far away as Grey Lynn) opposed this too, arguing that it would attract anti-social behaviour, and would "mask the beauty of the historical buildings and the street."
In all of this time, none of the compromises and changes suggested by Auckland Transport to appease the George Court complaints went out for consultation. Instead, well-supported designs that the public understood as agreed-upon, were quietly chipped away by a vocal, litigious, oppositional minority, in a series of small rooms.
AT's attempts at working with George Court led them to explore the option of starting out by treating Upper Mercury Lane as a "shared space", i.e. traffic "sharing" with pedestrians. In this vision, a rising bollard system would be pre-emptively installed (so as to not delay construction and prevent future options) but the bollards would only be activated if traffic became too high (the criteria and timeline for "too high" were unspecified) or, potentially, once the CRL station was open.
It goes without saying that this approach effectively gutted the entire purpose of the pedestrian mall (and the circulation plans, and A4E at large) by effectively allowing through-traffic at all times from the get-go.
Even so, upon hearing this, in July 2024 a member of the George Court group took the issue to the Mayor, stating in an email:
AT's website states that the permanent closure of upper Mercury Lane to traffic to create a pedestrian mall has been approved - despite the fact that AT has not progressed the statutory process necessary to allow it to close the Lane. I.e. they do not have the legal right to close the road but intend to spend ratepayers' money building it first, then seeking permission later.
AT is very aware of our body corporate's opposition to the closure (shared by neighbouring building owners), and (as far as I'm aware) has not yet identified any solutions to the various safety and access issues we (and an expert engineer) have raised about the mall option. We have made it clear that we will lodge an objection with the Environment Court as soon as the TCC resolves to go ahead with the mall option.
This culminated in AT's senior leadership driving a stake through the heart of the project to appease this vocal minority.
A reply email from AT's project team titled 'Mercury Lane Shared Zone decision - from Murray Burt' was sent in August 2024:
The reason for reviewing and landing on a Shared Zone was because it was deemed better to defer the Ped Mall change until it is proven that it is needed in this location once traffic behaviour is settled and the number of people using the Mercury Lane station entrance is warranted.
Also, because there is continued objection from a few stakeholders. It was noted that we may also receive objections / complaints because we are not progressing with the proposed Pedestrian Mall as this was well supported.
George Court had seemingly won this battle: their persistent lobbying and legal threats led to AT gutting this integral part of Project K by way of 'compromise'. Once the news went public (around which time, AT seemingly stealth-edited their webpage to obscure the fact that the rationale was to appease a minority view) many people, including myself, were not happy.
In September 2024, one person emailed the Project K team, stating their disappointment and questioning why this occurred. They asked to present to the Transport Control Committee ahead of any final decision, but were not given the opportunity – even though the George Court group had been allowed to present on this very issue.
The final result for the traffic circulation plan would be this bowl of spaghetti: significantly different from what was originally proposed and consulted, with zero public consultation on the changes.
What this unconsulted change will mean in practice: cars everywhere
AT senior leadership's pretext of "waiting to see what happens" with Mercury Lane is a complete waste of time and resources, Every single other "shared space" in the City Centre shows exactly what will happen. People will drive vehicles through, because they can.
Freyberg Place is a perfect example. In 2015, despite 83% support for full closure to traffic, AT folded – after being lobbied by a small number of vocal businesses (who subsequently moved away from the area!) – and implemented a "shared space". Eventually, three year later AT would implement a proper pedestrian mall, with 95% support, but only after everyone saw how inappropriate the volume of traffic was, pouring through this public space.
Or take the evolution of Jean Batten Place: originally a traffic street, then a handsomely designed people-friendly "shared space"... and now, just an expensively paved traffic street with no street furniture, where vehicles dominate. The same is guaranteed to happen on Upper Mercury Lane.
There is one thing about this whole process that I find ironic, even amusing. Despite the George Court group opposing it with as much vigour as the pedestrian mall, the public toilet has been installed on Upper Mercury Lane - to the cheers of nearby businesses.
How do we stop this happening (yet again)?
To conclude this post, I want to come back to the bigger picture.
Firstly, we should be crystal clear that what's happened to Project K and the pedestrianisation of Mercury Lane is not the fault of Auckland Transport project team.
I attended many of the community meetings, and can attest they are capable people who've put a ton of work into Project K. They really care about the outcomes and engaging with the community and, in my view, have put genuine effort into resolving these issues.
Where the blame lies, I believe, is in the abject failure of senior AT leadership to back their project team – underpinned by a failure to understand, champion, and follow consulted-on plans and widely supported strategies.
This is a story we see time and again: the senior level constantly crumples at the slightest hint of pushback from a loud minority who represent nobody but themselves, and who do not care about compromise or improving the city at large.
I'd go so far as to say that the higher levels – those who should, by rights (and given how well they're paid) be courageously leading our city into the future – are why AT constantly exhibits an unparalleled organisational capacity to water its plans down, dabble in dangerous "predatory delay", and even halt projects in their tracks.
Who do these people work for, again?
That [safety] work in particular has also helped to highlight that AT has some really wonderful and talented employees – but equally that there is a strong layer of clay inside the organisation preventing change. The safety improvements have not been anywhere near enough; some responses seemed more performative than substantial.
This "layer of clay" is one of the key reasons AT struggles with doing, well, anything.
In the case of Project K, there is no reason not to implement the pedestrian mall on Mercury Lane. It was supported by current strategies and plans. The legally required consultation showed support. Practical compromises were at hand to address legitimate concerns.
The only reason it was stopped was cowardly caving to a vocal minority.
Instead, they should have said: "See you in court!"
Frankly, it's a disgrace to count up time, energy and money wasted by these relentless delays and cancellations. Not to mention the hours involved in OIAs, as people try to shine a light on how promised improvements have been nibbled away by termites in the night, with zero public transparency. Multiply that effort – including this post – and that frustration by all the projects that are watered down and delayed, and you have a scandalous waste of time, resources, public trust and good faith.
Whether it be the decade-long fight to deliver the Inner West projects, or the complete failure to progress A4E and pedestrianise Queen Street, or the travesty of "Connected Communities", or the broken pipeline of urban cycleways, or the delays in following Transport Emissions Reduction Pathway, and so much more – we keep seeing Auckland Transport failing to deliver what it's funded and directed to do, even when it's loudly supported.
But, this isn't – and shouldn't be – a boring and oh-so-familiar whinge about how AT never listens. Because a) in this case, the project team totally did listen, and b) as advocates, we want to progress the good stuff, so c) this story should serve as a lesson on how AT can actually achieve what it says it wants to do, which is also what Aucklanders want - safety, mode choice, climate action - and which matches the strategies provided by Council.
So, here’s what AT’s leadership should learn from reading this article (and we know you’re reading this article!):
Senior leadership needs to back their staff - and commit to progressing their mandate
Run the process with a firm hand - mitigations are fine, but destroying the core part of a project is not
Stand up to bullies from the vocal minority - even to court if you have to
Have the courage to speak up and communicate with the public - tell the story of why this project is happening
Stick to the plan, stick to the strategies, and stick to the timeline - DELIVER instead of DELAY
Disruption and turmoil is inevitable, and it's also an opportunity to excel and go further - so do it once and do it well
Where to from here?
It looks like AT's planning and strategy is set to move back under Council oversight. While there are concerns about what that means, I hope this shift will empower the passionate and capable people in Auckland Transport, such as the Project K team, to do the good work they have the potential to do.
However, if the reforms are to avoid being merely a bureaucratic rearranging of deck chairs, and in order to restore trust (in AT's leadership, in Auckland Council, or in politicians), then things have to evolve. What stories like Mercury Lane tells us, is that AT's "clay layer" has been persistent, and impermeable, even to quicksilver.
Except, here's the thing.
Clay is mouldable.
In fact, it can also be fired into something useful, even beautiful.
The next few years bring the opportunity to reorient ourselves and look to the future. Now's the time to implement the hugely popular and committed strategies and policies. No more watering down and delay. I want to see action and delivery through working with communities, bringing to life the kind of city the majority of us want to see and live in.
Advocates are more than happy to be the 'wind in the sails' of positive change. We are more than happy to celebrate success and push for a greater Auckland.
So we're calling on AT to deliver the pedestrian mall on Upper Mercury Lane, because nothing is stopping them from doing the right thing.
Thanks Connor - I commend you on your tireless pursuit of this, I've followed your ongoing advocacy for doing what's right. It's remarkable that so much time (especially the time of senior leaders within AT) has been spent going back and forth when the right thing to do all along was to respect the process and then back themselves to do it. It's so disappointing to see a tiny minority scupper the good things that will come about with the opening of the CRL.