Another Auckland harbour crossing study, right on schedule

Seventeen years ago, Google started teaching cars to drive themselves. At the time, fully autonomous vehicles were still somewhere between serious engineering and science fiction. Auckland’s modern search for another Auckland harbour crossing was already 21 years old.

A lot has happened since. Driverless taxis now carry paying passengers around several American cities. Google’s project became Waymo and has completed millions of fully autonomous trips.

Auckland has made progress too. We have produced several more harbour-crossing studies.

This week, the Cabinet announced the next steps for the Waitematā Harbour crossing. Those next steps include a new Crown-led Detailed Business Case, more work on funding and financing, possible further investigation of the Meola Reef option, and consideration of a private-sector proposal to modify the existing bridge.

The business case is due in 2027. After that, the Government says it will decide on its preferred crossing.

It’s a bit awkward because in March 2025 the Government said it was “finally ready to put a stake in the ground”, with a preferred bridge or tunnel option to be announced by mid-2026. NZTA got to work. On May 15 this year, its board endorsed a tunnel as the preferred option.

Three months later, the stake was pulled back out of the ground when the Government said both bridge and tunnel options were still on the table.

None of this is to suggest major infrastructure should be planned on the back of an envelope. A crossing likely to cost tens of billions of dollars needs serious engineering, financing and scrutiny. A Detailed Business Case is a legitimate part of that process.

But Auckland is hardly suffering from a shortage of analysis.

NZTA says at least 10 major studies into another harbour crossing have been undertaken over the past 30 years. The 1997 study considered around 40 options. In 2008, officials managed to identify 159 feasible options. The latest process began with more than 20.

Four decades of studies suggest Auckland has never lacked options. What it has lacked is the political will to do much beyond commission another report.

There’s something almost admirable about the predictability and longevity of the process. Governments change. Ministers change. Transport priorities swing from roads to rail and back again. Cost estimates climb. Project names get refreshed. But, the one constant is another report explaining what should happen next.

We could probably save time by preparing a Waitematā Harbour Crossing checklist for every incoming government:

• Declare another harbour crossing a national priority.
• Explain that previous governments spent too long talking about it
• Commission officials to examine bridges and tunnels.
• Promise that this time a preferred option really will be selected.
• Receive a preferred option from NZTA.
• Do not select preferred option from NZTA.
• Commission another business case to help select a preferred option
• Reconsider an alignment the Government says has already been studied “many times” and discounted.
• Promise that even though two and a half years have passed, this is still a priority
• Announce that the new work will be completed after the next election.
  Hand checklist to next government.

The Meola Reef diversion also deserves special recognition. Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop says the option has been looked at “many times in the past” and discounted as unachievable. Cabinet has nevertheless agreed, “in the spirit of good faith”, to commission another study if Auckland Council wants one, and pays half.

There are few sentences that capture New Zealand infrastructure planning quite so efficiently.

The timing is also hard to ignore. The general election is around the corner on November 7. The Detailed Business Case won’t be finished until 2027. A decision that was supposed to be made by mid-2026 has therefore been transformed into a process that can’t produce an answer until after voters have chosen the next government.

Politically, this is exquisitely convenient and boringly predictable. The Government can reaffirm its commitment to an enormous Auckland project before the election without choosing the design, finding the money or owning the final price tag. The actual answer might come some time next year.

It’s the same decision churn that’s kept this project alive, expensive and permanently just beyond reach for nearly 40 years.

Bishop has said megaprojects often fail because of governance, approvals and too many decision-makers. In that, he’s right. Designing a bridge or tunnel is not the problem. Neither is modelling demand or working out how to pay for it. The problem is making a decision and sticking with it long enough to build something.

Auckland’s second harbour crossing has become extraordinarily good at surviving without being built. It can absorb new governments, new priorities, new studies and new preferred options, then emerge on the other side requiring further investigation.

Perhaps the Detailed Business Case due next year will finally break the cycle. Perhaps it will settle the engineering, funding and political agreement needed to carry a project across several parliaments.

But I’d keep the checklist handy.