The cost of moving the port to Northport

Stuff reports:

Even if ships are happily heading into Whangarei instead of Auckland, there’s still the question of how the goods get to their final destination, from there.

About 70 per cent of what goes into Auckland’s ports stays within the region.

“That stuff will have to come back to Auckland, anyway,” Young said.

“So all you’ve done is add to the cost of it by sending it to Northport.”

At the moment, it is impossible for containers to be transported by rail from Northport to Auckland. What rail line there is is constrained by the fact that its tunnels are not big enough to accommodate containers.

KiwiRail has estimated the cost of getting Northland’s rail network operating to the same standard as other regions as up to $1 billion, and improving the rail link for freight through Auckland at another $2b to $3b.

I’m in favour of moving the Port if it can be done affordably. But $4 billion just to allow freight to move by rail from Whangarei is mad.

That means, at least for the meantime, there would be a big increase in truck traffic on roads that are not among the country’s finest.

Chris Carr, of transport firm Carr and Haslam, estimated that if cars were shipped to Whangarei instead of Auckland, there would have to be a car carrier running between Auckland and Whangarei every two-and-a-half minutes, all day, every day.

So that is 576 extra massive trucks a day on that road.