Wellington RoNS show-down

Later today there will be a very interesting Wellington City Council meeting, that may have some significant effects on not only Wellington’s future transport options, but also potentially the prioritisation of transport projects in Auckland. Over the last couple of weeks there has been a developing split within Wellington City Council over their position on the Wellington Northern Corridor Road of National Significance (which I shorten as simply the “Wellington RoNS”).

Essentially, there are a couple of parts of the Wellington RoNS project that will have pretty massive adverse effects on important parts of the city. The most controversial seems to be what’s proposed around the Basin Reserve cricket ground – which involves large flyovers, the probable demolition of a number of important buildings and, all up, a pretty massive impact on the urban quality of what’s a really nice part of the city. It’s sort of like Wellington shifting towards the very thing that I celebrated Seoul moving away from in yesterday’s post. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the plans (which for some strange reason haven’t been released in any level of detail) are not popular with all members of the Wellington city council: after all they do have a mayor who’s a member of the Green Party and historically Wellington’s councils do seem to have been quite concerned about creating a quality urban environment (at least to a far greater extent than Auckland City Council ever seemed to be).

NZTA have been spooked a bit by growing rumours that the council no longer supports the project – with Chief Executive Geoff Dangerfield writing to the council with the goal of finding out what the council’s position actually is. Here’s his letter, with some extracts:

I always find it interesting how NZTA emphasise the relatively minimal PT benefits of their giant state highway projects, and always happen to ignore the potentially massive adverse urban blight impacts of what they’re proposing. The letter later mentions: I must say it does seem strange for NZTA to be asking for council’s in principle support of the project when NZTA hasn’t actually yet shared the details of the project’s design, including important elements of where they propose the road to actually go. Wellington City Council is supposed to be an advocate for the community in this process, it is the councillors’ job to find out all the positives and negatives from the project and weigh up whether – based on that information – they can support it. If the councillors don’t even yet know details of preferred alignment it seems a bit rich for NZTA to start demanding their support.

Mr Dangerfield’s letter ends in a somewhat ‘stroppy’ way in my opinion, with some suggested recommendations for the council to (hopefully, from where he’s coming from) support: What has been interesting about the response to this letter, is how incredibly angry with the council some have become. A Dominion Post editorial worried about funding for the whole Wellington RoNS project being put at risk of ‘being reallocated elsewhere in the country’. This left me in a bit of a quandry – wondering about what would happen if the council decided to not support Mr Dangerfield’s position.

Would NZTA simply abandon one of its RoNS? If so, does that mean if we can get the Auckland Council Transport Committee to say it opposes the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” that NZTA would simply abandon that project too?

The prospects are rather exciting, but I doubt whether NZTA or the Minister of Transport gives enough of a damn to really listen to what the local councils think about the pet RoNS projects. Nevertheless, I’m hoping Wellington City Council does come out in opposition to the project at their meeting – just so we can see what happens.

Share this