One transport planner is looking into the feasibility of a fixed link between New Zealand's two islands.
KiwiRail are officially cancelling an overseas contract for building more mega-ferries, after the Government declined to foot the bill.
Nicolas Reid, the Principal Public Transport Planner for MRCagney, says there are other options available to cross the Cook Strait.
"There's options around the existing ferries and expanding those ferries, and also moving to a fixed link such as a bridge or a tunnel."
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Can we rail enters talks to terminate plans for the new inter islander fairies. One transport planner has been looking into the feasibility of a fixed link between the two islands. Would a bridge or a tunnel be a viable option? Nicholas Read is the principal public transport planner for m R Cagney and he joins me now, good morning, Nicholas, good to have you with us.
Good morning for Chessca.
If we are looking for a better option than what we have, what are our options well.
To cross the strait, There's a whole lot of options we could consider, various scales of cost and impact on the environment in the economy. Certainly there's options around the existing ferries and expanding those ferries and also moving to a fixed link such as a bridge or a tunnel.
What are the main obstacle calls facing a fixed link between the North and the South Islands.
The main obstacle is in the nature of the strait itself. Cook straight is very wide and it is very deep. It's up to two hundred meters deep over to hundred meters deep in places, and over twenty two kilometers at the closest point. So it is a very large gulf of water to bridge or tunnel under.
Could you put a bridge in?
The short answer is no, it would be a bridge of the lakes the world has never seen. It is just simply too far and too deep. There are some places that have very long bridges, but they are more like viaducts. Effectively, they're sitting in tens of meters of water and they're supported below from piles. We're talking over two hundred meters deep, where you just can't physically build a bridge of that length in that depth.
And I suppose, as you mentioned, if you did, you'd want to build it from the shortest point, you know, from the shortest points, but then there probably is no infrastructure at those points. There's nowhere for there's no roads already or rail or anything like that in place.
That's correat and the shortest point is actually off to one of the islands of the Sounds and not actually the mainland itself, So then you'd be into the position of having it off that island onto the South Island proper and indeed on both sides, the western side of Wellington the eastern side of Picton. That is that's remote country, very hard rain. There's barely a gravel road in those areas, let alone the kind of connections, the need of national network.
Okay, so tricky to build a bridge. What about a tunnel?
Yeah, surprisingly, a tunnel appears to be feasible. A cook straight tunnel wouldn't be the longest tunnel in the world, and it wouldn't be the deepest, but it would be close on both accounts. So it would be still a very very large project to deliver that sort of tunnel.
And what would the tunnel cater to Would it be able to take cars and trains or would you have to refine it down.
Yeah, all of the really large tunnels of this kind of scope are rail tunnels, not road tunnels, because the rail tunnels a lot easier to build, and they're lots safer and easy to operate on those extreme sorts of lengths and debts. So if we're talking about a practical, technically feasible option, it would be a rail tunnel.
Were keywise, we like practical nicholas, don't we. And so when you say safer. In other words, if you've got railway lines going through there, you've got less possibility for I suppose crashes or an ax or I suppose I've also got to think a little bit about fumes and things like.
That exactly that. Yeah, you know, individual vehicles, individual drivers a lot more chance of crashers. You've got a lot more people in there with the higher fire risks from private vehicles, and then the issues of how do you manage a situation like that with evacuations with all potentially hundreds of individual vehicles in place. With a railway, it's more of a controlled system. They have a lot more ability to manage situations like that.
What about our tendants, our fault lines and earthquake risks and things like that, Does that come into play or have engineers been able to safely around the world build tunnels and environments like ours.
Yeah, So the leaders in this kind of space are the Japanese, who have currently the longest underwater tunnel in the world between their main island and the Norman Island. And that is a very active part of the world when it comes to fault lines, volcanoes, and earthquakes. As we probably all know, and they manage it so it is possible.
Yeah, I'm so. I imagine the benefit then of having a tunnel as it's going to be faster and we could always put you can put your car on a train, can't you that that's a service that can be operated, so if you were going from one arm to the next. I imagine the main benefit of it is that we're going to be able to have a lot more traffic traveling back and forward, and it's faster. It would add productivity.
Yeah, that's right, it would. The operation would be like the Channel Tunnel between Great Britain and France. It's a rail tunnel. Passenger and freight trains can run straight through and those will save a lot of time themselves. And they also get operate a shuttle train system for cars and trucks which would load onto the oversized train cars at one end, run through and unload in the other. So we're talking about getting down from about three and a half hours ish plus loading time on the ferries down to about forty minutes.
Okay, so that's that's the benefit. But something tells me, Neicholas, it's not going to be cheap building a tunnel in a very deep straight.
No, unfortunately, because you know, it looks technically feasible for sure, but we if you look at the projects like that Psych tunnel in Japan and the Channel Tunnel in Great Britain, taking the cost of those projects, working them forward into today's dollars, we're looking at minimum fifty billion dollar project, possibly double that, and that alone just you know, good idea, it would work well, but it's just completely infeasible from an economic perspective.
That is a hard sell. So all and all in really, the ferry crossing is probably still the most viable option in trying to improve that.
Yes, the fairies are it. The feares are what we're going to be needing to use going forward, So it is about making that work.
Yeh oh, look, thank you so much for your time this morning, Nicholas, I really appreciate.
Ith No way, thank you.
Right, So there we go. That solves that. No, bridge tunnels too expensive. Back to the fairies. Oh no, we're not getting your ferries just yet.
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