Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Could the CRL be a game changer for Auckland?

Author: Heather du Plessis-Allan,
Publish Date: Sun, 9 Aug 2026, 4:18pm

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Finally, and after a long bloody wait, we've got a date for the opening of Auckland's CRL, the underground train line: September 13.

Actually, the date doesn't really matter. September 6, September 20, September 13, who cares? What matters is that it's opening, it works and it's ready to go.

This thing has been a long time coming. It's taken a decade to build. It's taken so long, and disrupted Auckland commuters and businesses for so long, that it's actually hard to remember a time when they weren't digging up the middle of the city.

I don't know if you realise this but it's actually been talked about for 100 years. Back in the 1920s, it was called the Morningside Deviation. It was supposed to run from Beach Road near Parnell, then go under the CBD, up the hill, with a station at the Auckland Town Hall, before joining the western line at Morningside.

It never happened because, like we always do, we quibbled about costs, worried about spending too much and delayed building a piece of infrastructure that we will never regret.

Ten, 20, 100 years from now, no one's going to remember this debate about spending too much or overbuilding the cathedral ceilings of the CRL. People will simply use it every day. It will be normal.

I don't think it's going too far to say that the CRL is a game changer for our biggest city. Auckland is besieged by traffic snarls. They're so frequent and so bad that I often choose to buy my stuff online rather than drive 10 minutes to a mall because I just can't be bothered with the traffic.

This train line will give people the option to move quickly around the city without having to sit in traffic or risk their lives on a bike. It will definitely, definitely, definitely lead to densification around the city centre as developments spring up near the train stations. It will definitely save people time on their commutes as they travel faster and live closer to where they work.

It actually feels to me a little bit like a coming of age for Auckland. Auckland likes to consider itself a world-class city. If you want to be a world-class city, you need some world-class infrastructure.

So, September 13.

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