June 22nd, 2012 at 9:34 pm
What happened to wanting road projects to have positive BCRs David?
Transmission Gully doesn’t even reach 1, or is only when the other lot are in power that it’s time to damn wasted money? You can’t argue against the ridiculous rail schemes of the Greens when you support these bloated road schemes.
It remains roughly 30% more expensive to do this compared to upgrading the existing route, which only needs a bypass at Pukerua Bay and some widening from there to Mackays to be more than adequate. The only argument in favour of it was that it wouldn’t mean buying off a few NIMBYs at Paekakariki, confronting defenders of the rocky foreshore along the coast. Yet it will cost easily $250-300 million more – or rather, the cost of doing the Basin Reserve-Mt Victoria Tunnel-Ruahine St-Wellington Rd upgrade, but who cares? It’s POLITICS and POLITICIANS always know best how to allocate resources and win votes by conceding to lobbyists whose main interest is increasing the value of their properties in Kapiti and along Mana Esplanade.
I remember when Maurice Williamson and the last real National government actually proudly stated that it didn’t interfere in the decisions of Transfund when it chose how best to allocate revenue from motoring taxes based on economic efficiency.
The congestion arguments at Mana largely evaporated when it was widened for $15 million, the Pukerua Bay bottleneck would take around $90 million to fix and Paekakariki’s nasty little intersection would take a bit over $100 million to trench and grade separate. Then it’s about $300 million to widen the coastal stretch (which hasn’t been killing people since a few million was spent on a median barrier). In the long run a big bypass of Plimmerton and Mana can be considered, but it’s far from necessary now.
It’s notable that Labour took BCR calculations out of the National Land Transport Programme and the Nats have decided that’s really convenient. So there is no longer a principled basis to resist the Greens’ whacky ideas about rail based on wasting money – when you waste money on grandiose excessive road projects that could never be funded from tolls or the fuel tax/RUC paid on a per km basis by the expected users.
Oh and while Wellington City continues to engage in its absurd smartgrowth anti-sprawl planning framework, this will open up Kapiti and beyond for an even faster growing commuter belt.
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