As Peter found when covering the Ministry of Transport’s review of capital spending on roads (parts 1, 2, 3, and 4) our multibillion dollar national transport budget is being spent in some bizarre ways. Money’s being allocated to major roading projects that don’t offer many economic benefits in return.
While the high-level picture is clear, it’s not always obvious what’s going on in project selection. Why does the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) choose one project over another? What are their processes for assessing “strategic fit” and other considerations?
Some smart people have been taking a critical look at a major Wellington road project that’s been flying under the radar: the Petone-to-Grenada motorway. Like the Transmission Gully motorway, it’s being touted less for its benefit-cost ratio than for its impacts on the “resilience” of the Wellington region.
Tamara Duran, who writes on the Takapu Valley website, provides a useful summary of the project… and the issues with the project. In addition to her extensive analysis of the the impacts of the project on resilience (parts 1, 2, and 3), she’s put together a primer on the project, complete with maps for the out-of-towners:
Since the Christchurch and Tōhoku earthquakes, “resilience” has been the mantra of… pretty much anyone building anything, be it a building, a corporate structure, or a communications network. We all want to be resilient, to survive whatever has just happened and get back up and about our normal business as quickly as possible.
The New Zealand Transport Agency has picked up on how keen everyone is on resilience, and so is now including it in all of their sales material. Perhaps unsurprisingly, NZTA has defined “resilience” from a transport perspective as “more roads”. Not “more transport options”, and not even really “better roads”, just more. Got congestion problems? Build another road to get around it. Got a road falling apart? Build another road to take traffic off it.
Case in point: The Petone to Grenada link road, in Wellington. This road has been in the investigation and planning stages for a good 20 years now, the reason being Wellington’s notoriously challenging geography. To get from the CBD to the rest of the Region (and ultimately the rest of the North Island), there are essentially two routes out – SH1 up Ngauranga Gorge, and SH2 along the harbour. Both of those are through narrow corridors with few or no alternatives.
Source: Google Maps
The logical thing to do, then, as proposed in various studies since about 1991, is something like this:
Source: Google Maps
Traffic wanting to get between the SH1 corridor in the west and the SH2 corridor in the east can “cut the corner” of Ngauranga, taking pressure off those two chokepoints.
If there’s a truck flipped in Ngauranga Gorge, traffic can go up SH2 and across P2G. Likewise if there’s a crash along SH2 traffic can go up SH1 and across P2G back to Petone. All good, and everyone’s back about their business with minimal fuss.
But 7km of road is Not Enough Road. More Road = More Resilient, remember. So what NZTA is proposing is this:
Source: NZTA Presentation to Chief Executives Group, November 2014, released under OIA
We’ll turn the whole thing north-south (because clearly a north-south road is how you solve an east-west problem); then we have room to double the length. Here are some other “resilient” features:
Motorway to motorway interchanges through chains of roundabouts!
Source: NZTA/Opus
Motorway to motorway interchanges via two-lane local streets! (and roundabouts!)
Source: NZTA Petone to Grenada Project website
“Bypasses” with one-way ramps that force you 12km out of your way!
Source: Petone to Grenada Scoping Report, February 2014
Motorways next to other motorways! (More Roads = More Resilient!)
Source: NZTA Petone to Grenada Project website
Roads on unstudied active fault lines!
Source: GNS Active Faults database
80 meter deep canyons through the Wellington Fault Scarp!
Source: HC8/9, Grenada-Petone Link and SH58 Upgrade Economics, Sinclair Knight Merz, April 2010, released under OIA
In Petone!
Source: Petone to Grenada Link Road Preliminary Geotechnical Appraisal, September 2013, released under OIA
NZTA has taken a reasonable solution to Wellington network resilience woes and “made it better”, in the process negating the very function the road was originally supposed to serve. In the meantime, genuine improvements to the earthquake and natural hazard resilience of the roading network are left to languish.
Source: (ex. labels) Wellington Region Road Network Earthquake Resilience Study, Opus, August 2012
I’d really recommend reading herentireseries on the motorway. It seems like NZTA is pursuing a more expensive option that delivers much worse outcomes. In particular, Tamara argues that better results could be achieved through upgrades to a few problematic bits of the existing State Highway 58.
Meanwhile, University of Auckland statistician Thomas Lumley (who writes the excellent StatsChat blog) has been digging into NZTA’s options assessments on the project. He’s found that the agency has made some basic statistical errors in its weighting of evaluation criteria. The effect seems to have been that NZTA’s chosen the wrong project, for the wrong reasons:
If you have to make a decision with several options, each with different types of positive and negative effects, it’s going to be hard. Techniques for breaking down complex decisions into sets of simpler questions are very valuable, but it’s important that the way you break down the problem and recombine the answers fits with how you answer the simpler questions.
I’ve been pointed to what looks like an unfortunate example from the NZTA, in assessing options for the Petone–Grenada link road to be constructed near Wellington. The road comes in two sections: from Petone to the eastern section of Lincolnshire Farm, and from there to Grenada. According to the scoping report (PDF), these can be decided independently of each other, so there’s an ideal opportunity to simplify the decision making. NZTA describes four options P1 to P4 for the first section, and four options A to D for the second section.
I would have expected them to just make independent recommendations for the two sections, but what they actually did was more complicated. First, they looked at the P options and decided based on four criteria that P4 was best. They then looked at A+P4, B+P4, C+P4, and D+P4 for the same four criteria, and said in a footnote (p172) “Upon combining one of Option P1, P2, P3 or P4 with one Option A, B, C or D the effect more towards the negative takes precedence.”
This can only make sense if the harms or benefits weren’t independent. Sometimes that’s possible. In particular, one of the criteria was “resilience”, and you might argue that it doesn’t matter how robust the second part of the road is when the first part is under several meters of rock and mud, or filled with bumper-to-bumper traffic jams. It could make sense to take the worst value of the two sections when assessing resilience: but people who know more about Wellington-area transport than I do still seem dubious.
The same argument certainly doesn’t apply for the other criteria: archaeological, ecological, landscape/visual impact, and transport benefit/cost. If one section of the road is an environmental nightmare, that doesn’t make the environmental impact of the other section unimportant. If one section of the road is unavoidably ugly, that doesn’t excuse making the other section ugly. If one section destroys an important heritage site, it doesn’t mean the other section doesn’t have to care about preservation of the past. If one section is ridiculously expensive it doesn’t mean the costs are unimportant for the other section.
The impact of decomposing and recombining the evaluation as they did, is that any criterion where P4 was bad becomes much less important in choosing among options A to D. P4 was very bad on the landscape/visual criterion, and moderately bad on ecology.
By now you should be expecting the punch line: evaluated independently, options A and B look good because they score well on ecology and landscape/visual criteria. Evaluated in combination with P4, they look terrible, because the ecology and landscape benefits are masked by the “more negative” combining rule. That’s a problem with the combining rule, not with the road. Here’s a colour-coded version of the information in Table 23-19, p182 (from T. Duran)
Not only is the combining rule obviously missing some information, it’s not even internally consistent. If the evaluation had been done in the opposite order they might well have chosen A first, and then looked at A+P1 to A+P4. Even D was what they’d chosen first, P3+D would then look slightly better than P4+D.
It’s very tempting to look for ways of combining preferences that don’t rely on numbers, just on orderings, but in most cases they aren’t available, and attempts to do it leave you worse off than before.
This evaluation wasn’t set up to focus only on resilience — even assuming that the resilience assessment is valid, which I hear is also being questioned — it was set up to value the four criteria equally. It really looks as though a minor detail of the approach to simplifying the evaluation has had a large, accidental effect on the result.
Thomas’s words are gentle but suggest serious methodological errors in NZTA’s project selection. Taken together with Tamara’s critique of the agency’s evaluation of the resilience impacts of the Petone-to-Grenada road, it really makes you wonder what’s wrong with NZTA’s decision-making.
Interesting post. As a Wellingtonian I know about and take an active interest in the project. I do agree that this project is needed not only for the resilience, but also to improve Hutt Valley-Porirua connections (If you look at a map of Wellington there are two big arms extending northward, the Hutt Valley and Porirua/Kapiti, with limited connection between the two). Its 2.1 BCR is relatively high compared to many road of national significance projects. Also minor point. The road is not a motorway (it will have a 80kph speed limit), and if we were to avoid roudabouts e.t.c. for “motorway to motorway” interchanges through roundabouts e.t.c. the cost would rise dramatically (perhaps turning it into a true motorway). As for the complaints about “motorways next to other motorways” bear in mind that the P2G road will be significantly higher and the stretch of land photographed than the current SH1, and if an interchange was built further south (which the NZTA looked at) there would be significant issues with the near proximity of the tawa interchange.
Currently NZTA is looking at two options for the road. Option C which involves widening SH1 from Transmission Gully to the Tawa interchange, and a new road from Tawa to Petone. Option D involves the new road going from Transmission Gully to Petone through the Takapu Valley, with a short link road connecting this new road to the Tawa interchange. It seems most of the objections Tamara Duran raises focus on option D (option C is controversial as the widening of the motorway through a residential are will require a number of homes to be demolished), I suspect she is a NIMBY living in Takapu Valley. And to me has a overly negative view of the whole project.
Not convinced by your claims there Nicholas. NZTA pushing for the twice as long version that includes parallel motorways, terrible multi-roundabouts, and the destruction of a rural valley. To spend way more to destroy more? In an region that is barely growing. Even the shorter versions can’t be justified by traffic volume. And this is on top of TG, another project that stretches all economic evaluation. It’s hard not to conclude that NZTA Wellington are as seriously out of touch with reality on this as they are with the Basin Flyover. And it seems they failed the process test too, according to the stats professor.
I personally support the option C version (widening SH1 through Tawa and avoiding Takapu Valley) which keeps Takapu valley intact (infact think the NZTA should give serious consideration to just building the road without either widening SH1 or building the takapu Valley link). However I will admit that it looks like option D is more likely at this point, especially after the city council expressed a preference for option D over C. Even if option D is built, I think one would be hard pressed to say the valley will be “destroyed” or “bulldozed”
I’m not sure what the projected traffic volumes of the new road are, or what would be needed to justify the link. But the BCR of 2.1 seems reasonable to me, and much higher than many Road of National significance projects including transmission gully. I am also hoping that the road might allow a new Porirua – Tawa – Grenada – Petone bus route to be created (shame no Ladbrooke Drive connection proposed, allowing a Johnsonville – Newlands – Petone route).
An 80km/h speed limit does not preclude a road from being a motorway. Auckland’s Central Motorway Junction has an 80km/h limit, extending right the way over the Auckland Harbour Bridge, but it’s still legally a motorway. A motorway is a corridor designation with minimum road construction standards, but does not require a 100km/h ordinary limit to qualify.
Nicholas, this post focused on Option D largely as a companion piece to Prof. Lumley’s StatsChat write-up of NZTA’s mis-handled option analysis. They way they chose to combine the evaluation results masked the better ecological and landscape values of A and B, with the result that NZTA is championing Option D based on its apparently superior resilience assessment. Unfortunately, the specialist who did the assessment that rated Option D so highly missed both the one-way ramps and the fault line (and its associated problems).
Option A — which as you can see had an identical BCR to C and D — joined SH1 at the existing Churton Park interchange, so there are no problems with the proximity to Tawa. According to the Scoping Report [Section 13.6.1]:
“When network wide performance is compared to the do minimum Option A is considered the best… Option B, while still performing better than the do minimum, shows the least improvement of the four options. Options C and D produce similar results to Option B. Options A and C provide the best travel time savings as a whole and again Option B provides some of the worst travel time savings on key routes (refer Appendix C.5).”
It goes on to note in glowing terms:
“Option A provided the best network wide performance results… the highest increase in average network speeds; 11% in the AM peak and 7% in the PM peak. … With the increase in speed, there are the associated large drops in network travel time, delay and queuing time.”
The P2G and Cross-Valley Link are long-standing dream-projects which have been very hard to justify and have thus been staved off up to now. Exactly like Transmission Gully in fact. However, since the Government has decided to fund Transmission Gully anyway, regardless of its poor economic justification, the extra induced traffic it will generate is now seen as justification for pushing ahead with these other roads also. In other words, build one poorly-justified road and you then have to build more poorly justifed roads! And in reality, this may be just the start of the need to adapt the Wellington Region to cope with the adverse effects of Transmission Gully. But hey, let’s push on regardless.
Meanwhile the sensible, logical and sorely-needed alternative of creating a Levin – Airport RAILWAY of NATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE has been completely swept off the radar. This would basically involve extending Wellington’s existing regional rail network along the same City-Airport corridor that yet another motorway is planned for, thereby enabling high-quality public-transport connectivity from all rail-served parts of the region to the southern CBD, southern suburbs and Airport. This would be the kind of step-change for Wellington that the CRL will provide for Auckland, and could very likely be achieved for a much lower price than the massive roading splurge that appears set to happen, though no-one has been interested enough to properly study and price the options.
Interestingly, one of the most ardent supporters of Transmission Gully, United Future leader the Hon. Peter Dunne, is strongly opposing the Takapu Link. (One hopes he now realises that his support for the one has helped usher in the ‘need’ for the other!) And viewed in conjunction with the Basin Flyover controversy, it is evident that all is still not plain sailing for Wellington Motorway proponents.
Perhaps there is yet time to avert the screwing-over that the Wellington Region will suffer by the construction of these undesirable highways, and the criminal loss of opportunity to fix the problem of its stunted rail spine, once-and-for-all.
The new fashion for resilience as the justification for doing whatever needs much closer examination. There are lots of points of potential vulnerability in NZ’s transportation sector and they aren’t all locational. And they certainly aren’t solved by expensively and destructively building new motorways up and across every fault line in Wellington.
One systemic vulnerability is our reliance on imported liquid fuels from the middle east. This is our single biggest forex cost and every low value motorway we build is a further doubledown on this weakness. Investing in urban electric rail and completing and extending our electric rail freight network should also be pursued vigorously on these grounds. Renewable electrons we got, and we are likely to have more than we hope to use fairly soon: http://www.odt.co.nz/news/business/338754/smelters-future-seems-more-uncertain
Furthermore there are enough already consented additional renewable projects to have the place awash with electrons. But how to pay for this? Well if we weren’t sending quite so much money everyday to the Middle East for their black gold…. How do we justify the necessary capex investment? In part by the resilience it builds, and of course the long term savings. Self-sufficiency, and of course to build our case as both clean and lower carbon producer. Electric rail is proven current technology, passenger uptake is going at 20% in Auckland. This growth can continue for as long as capacity is there. Yet gov builds nothing but motorways: Anti-resilience.
Your oil importation argument is somewhat redundant given we will be driving electric cars (not necessarily self-driving) once the technological side gets sorted out. The only question is how far away that time is – I’d estimate mainstream in around 15-20 years but there are a number of variables that could alter that.
The other side to it is that we could produce our own oil but that’s a whole new argument!
1. exactly 15-20 years away at best 2. we’re trying very hard to do that and our oil production is falling. 3. cars, no matter how they are propelled, do not make for efficient and dynamic cities. And Cities, especially Auckland, is where we increasingly are.
Our cities need electric transit plus EVs and bikes, and e-bikes. The nation needs the gap in the MTL electrification plugged and new electric locos.
If the Climate change experts are correct, we do not have 15-20 years to continue mucking around with fossil-fuel based transport while we wait for the promised changeover to electric.
There is actually an urgency to move away from fossil-fuels NOW! In fact we have already wasted 25 years of opportunity to change with very little to show for it.
Business-as-usual is no longer an option, unless you believe the National Govt.
“One systemic vulnerability is our reliance on imported liquid fuels from the middle east” – not factually correct. NZ does not rely on importing fossil fuels from the Middle East, it currently buys ME crudes because they are the cheapest source for the type of crude oil favoured at Marsden Point refinery. NZ could just as easy – and increasingly likely – import feedstocks from the US and when Obama passes the law changes, import crude from the US. NZ could also revive the XTL industry and turn bio mass to transport fuels. Currently we export tallow to the Finnish Government owned XTL plant in SE Asia.What won’t change – regardless of climate change – is the NZ public’s preference of private MVs over PT and although EV’s will have their place, petrol and diesel powered vehicles will be the norm for years to come.Suggesting that roads can be or should be replaced with rail is pie in the sky thinking. Even ignoring the fact trains travel A2B while cars and trucks can travel door2door, building a useable national rail network would cost billions more than improving the road networks. Then you have the problem of how to power this new rail. Currently NZ produce about a third of Electricity through burning coal (dirtier than liquid fuels) and any increase in electric power gen would mean an increase in fossil fuel burn or a massive multi billion dollar investment in AE. So to sum up. Patrick is suggesting spend billions on new rail lines, billions on new rail rolling stock, billions on new alternative energy so that people can travel A2B v the Govt want to spend a few billion on RONs that take people and freight door2door.
Dear Phil: even you must grasp that the US is and will remain a net oil importer? Sure it may become possible to import oil from the US but this would simply mean we are importing Middle Eastern oil via the US. If the Straight of Hormuz is blocked or some other major event there the US has less than no spare oil for anyone, let alone little old NZ.
Biofuel; bollocks. If we could do that at scale we would be already.
And Patrick is suggesting no such thing. Patrick is suggesting we stop spending billions on uneconomic duplicate highways under the guise of building resilience and actually build resilience and self-reliance by electrifying those parts of the transport sector that work. Passenger transit in Auckland [growing at 20% pa] and long haul rail freight.
‘“At almost 80%, the share of renewable electricity generation in 2014 was the highest since 1996,” said Bryan Field, MBIE’s Manager of Modelling and Sector Trends.
“Geothermal electricity generation contributed more electricity than natural gas during 2014, this is the first time that this has happened in 40 years,” he continued.”
How are motorways door to door exactly? As far as I can see they too, like railways, go from A to B. The difference is that we’ve built so many of them (and their lesser cousins) that it feels like they truly are door to door.
RONS projects only improve or replicate existing road connections. What we are buying with new motorways is not a great improvement. Rather it is convenience and small efficiency gains.
@ Phil Moore: “Suggesting that roads can be or should be replaced with rail is pie in the sky thinking.”
Er – who is suggesting this? The only mention of it comes from you, Phil. No-one is seriously advocating that people be forced out of cars and into trains.
I assume your comment is a response to my suggestion that Wellington’s ‘incomplete’ rail-spine should be completed by extending the network by about 8 Kms, in preference to spending a much greater amount on duplicating highways which are already largely adequate.
What is it about this that worries you, Phil? Nothing I have suggested will restrict your ability to drive, or bring about a wholesale reduction in the road network. So why throw up this ‘straw-man’, arguing against things that nobody has remotely proposed?
All I am advocating is that we have better public transport instead of even more roads. And although you may like to cling to the myth that the NZ public won’t use public transport no matter how good it is, both Wellington and Auckland refute this view.
Historically, Wellington has had high public transport ridership because a better-than-average service has been provided (and logically it should be expanded to spread its benefits further). Auckland by contrast is now experiencing major growth in its P.T. ridership, because the service is improving. And the net effect in both cities is for public transport to take pressure off the roads and make it easier for those still driving to get around.
Why is this concept so threatening to certain types of people?
None of these roads are going to be any use for “resilience” when the next big (or moderate) Wellington quake strikes (or it seems, is more likely sooner: – the Alpine fault ruptures and shakes the shit out of Wellington in the process). And who knows what either will do to the Hikurangi trench off the coast of Kaikoura – generate a huge tsunami as well. Be like Japan 2011 all over again – without the nuclear meltdowns.
Those proposed roads all rely on the main highway that runs right beside the Wellington harbour for a good chunk of its length to be useful as a connector to Wellington proper. So sea level rise and/or tsunamis will take the SH1/SH2 roads out first. So no roads in or out of Wellington.
GNS says based on latest analysis of Alpine fault ruptures over the last 8,000 years that the Alpine fault is now >=30% likelihood of rupture in next 50 years, with 95% confidence and thats a way, way, higher likelihood than any Wellington fault – see this Youtube video from GNS reporting on the latest research info from GNS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfj8MIAxec4 to understand that.
The quakes or related tsunamis will devastate that part of the network between Wellington and at least Ngauranga will be isolated whether these other roads are built or not. Railways will be similarly impacted too given it runs beside the roads (on the seaward side too so will likely be damaged first/fixed last).
Therefore at best these roads will allow all those Hutt valley people a way out of the Hutt valley – assuming that the quakes haven’t trashed all the hilly roads as well that is.
If NZTA is serious about their job they’d find another “fully inland” route to connect Wellington to the rest of the country that doesn’t run beside a harbour or a coast which is seismically prone while also being prone to tidal flooding, general sea level rise and tsunami events.
Yes the more new routes of any mode that we build is more kit to repair and rebuild after geological events. And some kind of quake or quakes are a certainty for the region.
Yes, exactly. Instead of building new roads, how about we get the existing ones up to scratch?
Have look at “Research Report 355 Engineering lifelines and transport – should New Zealand be doing it better?” published in August 2008 [http://www.nzta.govt.nz/resources/research/reports/355/index.html] — one of the key findings is that there is a lack – or a perceived lack – of interest and funding from NZTA in forward mitigation (ie., fixing things before they break). It’s much easier to get money to fix a road after an earthquake (or storm) than to strengthen it beforehand.
SH58 was falling down a gully for how long before they fixed it? Rod James stood up at the Tawa Community Board meeting less than a month after a man died on that road and told everyone that we needed to build P2G to take traffic off SH58 because look how dangerous it is! Stood there and used a man’s death to sell a new road instead of as a wake-up call to fix an existing one.
Same argument with Puhoi to Warkworth [Omaha]. The current road is dangerous, so lets duplicate it. It will now only kill locals and those unwilling/unable to pay the toll on the new road. The old dangerous road will never get its safety upgrade as all the money has gone to the vast new project, and with fewer vehicles on it average speeds will be higher and therefore it will be even more dangerous.
All roads cost to maintain we should duplicate them thoughtlessly.
The tail end of the GNS video has some really good points made about how and what sort of damage will happen, where it will happen, and how to prepare for the inevitable quakes in the south island and to minimise the resulting damage. Not just to roads, but to Electricity pylons/lines and other infrastructure too.
And a large part of the message – prepare **now**, make what you’ve got resilient to damage, and do not just plan to “fix it” after the fact ‘cos it will be 10 times harder to do that.
And also have resources pre-staged so that you can fix the stuff that does break, and do so quickly. And have back up plans, and back up plans to the back up plans.
‘cos when the earth starts shaking and the shit starts hitting the fan you’ll need all that and more in short order…
Transmission Gully will move alot of the SH1 route away from the coast (particularly the Paekakariki – Pukerua Bay section) and improve resilience from other events (the existing SH1 use to have a very high crash rate, although fortunately thanks to the median barrier and safety improvements the crash rate has decreased significantly). The Ngauranga – city route is at risks of tsunamis, but not landslips. Tranmission Gully is the reverse, and existing SH1 route at risk of both tsunamis and landslips. I agree with Patrick the main focus should be on buying more equipment etc to repair existing roads quickly, but favour resilience being a small factor in deciding whether to build more roads
Resilience could be achieved with a modest, 2-lane, 80K emergency road for a fraction of the cost. It does not need a full-blown 4-6 lane motorway. Reslience is largely being used as an excuse to justify the motoring-lobby’s otherwise-unjustifiable wish-list.
There seems to be some implication that “resilience” is this qualitative thing that we can’t quite put our finger on its value; hence even if a project has a crappy BCR it may still be strategically important because of its resilience. My take is that such assessment of resilience could be included in the economic evaluation; essentially you do a probabilistic comparison of the network costs (including during closures or other incidents) with or without the proposed facility/improvement. Indeed, I did research for Transfund NZ on this, back in 2000 (Research Report 159, http://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/handle/10092/1559) suggesting how it could be incorporated into their standard economic evaluation – not sure that anyone has ever picked it up and run with it though…
They haven’t because they know the answer!! There was a time when any significant expenditure on roads required a B/C of over 4.0. It kept things rational for a while ruling out pet projects that didn’t really stack up like Transmission Gully and Petone-Granada. But unfortunately the policy analysts have got into the act and we now have subjective criteria. Much easier to screw the analysis to make your pet scheme seem good. If you can’t trump up some rationale like ‘resilience’, Petone-Granada is a total non-starter. How much extra time does it take to drive to Ngauranga and up? And how many people make that trip anyway? Haywards is still a crap road because the demand is not there. PG looks good on a map, and it might be convenient for Hutt valley residents heading off for the weekend, but that’s not going to justify what is going to be another very expensive road.
Hi Glen – interesting comment… thanks very much for the reference!
I’ve been thinking a bit about the value of an “insurance policy” against unlikely events as a result of some work I’ve been doing in an unrelated field. It looks like your work recommends applying a bit of actuarial science to the subject – i.e. quantify the cost and likelihood of an outage and use it to calculate the “expected value” of more resilient infrastructure.
My intuition is that risk-averse individuals will sometimes be willing to pay “over the odds” for insurance against extremely unlikely events. If this is the case, the value of resilience may be higher than is indicated by the actuarial approach. (Although certainly not orders of magnitude higher!)
In principle, one way of getting information on people’s risk-averseness is to survey them on their “willingness to pay” for more resilient infrastructure. If I were NZTA, I would be putting some money into a few decent surveys on the topic.
If they wanted resillience it would be better spent protecting sh2 between petone & wellington with more reclamation. Side effect would be wider road, room for a cycleway and rail curves eased.
imo nzta should just six lane sh2 between Petone and Ngauranga Interchange. reclaim some more land, straighten out the railway and put a cycleway/walkway. This would remove the current sh2 northbound bottleneck without causing too many issues downstream (except The Esplanade) as sh2 past petone is free flowing. While they are at it, they could also four lane The Esplanade or build the Cross valley link. In the article, “they (WCC) agreed that Option A (the long-planned Petone to Grenada/Churton Park highway) did have their support.” If this is built, it would significantly increase sh1 traffic between Grenada/Churton Park and the Transmission Gully interchange meaning that there WILL be a need for the duplicate/widened highway
Indeed, it is great news that the Wellington City Council has told NZTA to stick their proposals for a Takapu Valley route up their well-padded, four-wheel-drive arse and walk away, but I have a feeling that this story does not end here, just yet. NZTA appears to have a hard-on for extra, unnecessary roads in Wellington, and actually, what WCC thinks or votes for/against, doesn’t seem to matter much to our national road-builders. They may yet just decide to build it anyway, despite opposition. The more crucial vote yet to come is the Regional Council one, and Porirua Council is still pro-NZTA road schemes as well. Fingers crossed, but not much hope for sanity to rule just yet…
Yup. It may be that you are not well served in Wellington by having government right there. It is pretty clear that NZTA, HNO in particular, don’t wish to be bothered with local government and its concerns with things like the impacts on place and people of their plans [and cost!]. And in WGTN they can just go straight upstairs to get this view reinforced.
Dare I say it you need more scale to your local authority. Amalgamation seems to have a bought more balance to the partnership between local and that central gov agency in Auckland. Not that they don’t still all need watching like a hawk….
No, it won’t end there. WCC was basically voting on what their representative should take to the Regional Transport Committee [http://www.gw.govt.nz/regional-transport-committee-2/], which is made up of the region’s mayors, a Greater Wellington rep and an NZTA rep (Raewyn Bleakley). The RTC makes a recommendation to NZTA. Then NZTA ignores them (or not) and does what they want to do. In theory, it will be harder for NZTA to push through a road if the regional bodies are all against it.
I see a lot of potential for East – West (Hutt Valley – Johnsonville, Porirua and Kapiti) PT with the P2G project. Check out the link for some of my thoughts, welcome any feedback.
Basic Option A with a PT focus that connects Johnsonville with Waterloo via Petone and a new train station at Glenside could be a real (unintended) winner from this project.
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Interesting post. As a Wellingtonian I know about and take an active interest in the project. I do agree that this project is needed not only for the resilience, but also to improve Hutt Valley-Porirua connections (If you look at a map of Wellington there are two big arms extending northward, the Hutt Valley and Porirua/Kapiti, with limited connection between the two). Its 2.1 BCR is relatively high compared to many road of national significance projects. Also minor point. The road is not a motorway (it will have a 80kph speed limit), and if we were to avoid roudabouts e.t.c. for “motorway to motorway” interchanges through roundabouts e.t.c. the cost would rise dramatically (perhaps turning it into a true motorway). As for the complaints about “motorways next to other motorways” bear in mind that the P2G road will be significantly higher and the stretch of land photographed than the current SH1, and if an interchange was built further south (which the NZTA looked at) there would be significant issues with the near proximity of the tawa interchange.
Currently NZTA is looking at two options for the road. Option C which involves widening SH1 from Transmission Gully to the Tawa interchange, and a new road from Tawa to Petone. Option D involves the new road going from Transmission Gully to Petone through the Takapu Valley, with a short link road connecting this new road to the Tawa interchange. It seems most of the objections Tamara Duran raises focus on option D (option C is controversial as the widening of the motorway through a residential are will require a number of homes to be demolished), I suspect she is a NIMBY living in Takapu Valley. And to me has a overly negative view of the whole project.
Not convinced by your claims there Nicholas. NZTA pushing for the twice as long version that includes parallel motorways, terrible multi-roundabouts, and the destruction of a rural valley. To spend way more to destroy more? In an region that is barely growing. Even the shorter versions can’t be justified by traffic volume. And this is on top of TG, another project that stretches all economic evaluation. It’s hard not to conclude that NZTA Wellington are as seriously out of touch with reality on this as they are with the Basin Flyover. And it seems they failed the process test too, according to the stats professor.
I personally support the option C version (widening SH1 through Tawa and avoiding Takapu Valley) which keeps Takapu valley intact (infact think the NZTA should give serious consideration to just building the road without either widening SH1 or building the takapu Valley link). However I will admit that it looks like option D is more likely at this point, especially after the city council expressed a preference for option D over C. Even if option D is built, I think one would be hard pressed to say the valley will be “destroyed” or “bulldozed”
I’m not sure what the projected traffic volumes of the new road are, or what would be needed to justify the link. But the BCR of 2.1 seems reasonable to me, and much higher than many Road of National significance projects including transmission gully. I am also hoping that the road might allow a new Porirua – Tawa – Grenada – Petone bus route to be created (shame no Ladbrooke Drive connection proposed, allowing a Johnsonville – Newlands – Petone route).
An 80km/h speed limit does not preclude a road from being a motorway. Auckland’s Central Motorway Junction has an 80km/h limit, extending right the way over the Auckland Harbour Bridge, but it’s still legally a motorway. A motorway is a corridor designation with minimum road construction standards, but does not require a 100km/h ordinary limit to qualify.
Nicholas, this post focused on Option D largely as a companion piece to Prof. Lumley’s StatsChat write-up of NZTA’s mis-handled option analysis. They way they chose to combine the evaluation results masked the better ecological and landscape values of A and B, with the result that NZTA is championing Option D based on its apparently superior resilience assessment. Unfortunately, the specialist who did the assessment that rated Option D so highly missed both the one-way ramps and the fault line (and its associated problems).
Option A — which as you can see had an identical BCR to C and D — joined SH1 at the existing Churton Park interchange, so there are no problems with the proximity to Tawa. According to the Scoping Report [Section 13.6.1]:
“When network wide performance is compared to the do minimum Option A is considered the best… Option B, while still performing better than the do minimum, shows the least improvement of the four options. Options C and D produce similar results to Option B. Options A and C provide the best travel time savings as a whole and again Option B provides some of the worst travel time savings on key
routes (refer Appendix C.5).”
It goes on to note in glowing terms:
“Option A provided the best network wide performance results… the highest increase in average network speeds; 11% in the AM peak and 7% in the PM peak. … With the increase in speed, there are the associated large drops in network travel time, delay and queuing time.”
The P2G and Cross-Valley Link are long-standing dream-projects which have been very hard to justify and have thus been staved off up to now. Exactly like Transmission Gully in fact.
However, since the Government has decided to fund Transmission Gully anyway, regardless of its poor economic justification, the extra induced traffic it will generate is now seen as justification for pushing ahead with these other roads also.
In other words, build one poorly-justified road and you then have to build more poorly justifed roads! And in reality, this may be just the start of the need to adapt the Wellington Region to cope with the adverse effects of Transmission Gully. But hey, let’s push on regardless.
Meanwhile the sensible, logical and sorely-needed alternative of creating a Levin – Airport RAILWAY of NATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE has been completely swept off the radar. This would basically involve extending Wellington’s existing regional rail network along the same City-Airport corridor that yet another motorway is planned for, thereby enabling high-quality public-transport connectivity from all rail-served parts of the region to the southern CBD, southern suburbs and Airport. This would be the kind of step-change for Wellington that the CRL will provide for Auckland, and could very likely be achieved for a much lower price than the massive roading splurge that appears set to happen, though no-one has been interested enough to properly study and price the options.
Interestingly, one of the most ardent supporters of Transmission Gully, United Future leader the Hon. Peter Dunne, is strongly opposing the Takapu Link. (One hopes he now realises that his support for the one has helped usher in the ‘need’ for the other!)
And viewed in conjunction with the Basin Flyover controversy, it is evident that all is still not plain sailing for Wellington Motorway proponents.
Perhaps there is yet time to avert the screwing-over that the Wellington Region will suffer by the construction of these undesirable highways, and the criminal loss of opportunity to fix the problem of its stunted rail spine, once-and-for-all.
The new fashion for resilience as the justification for doing whatever needs much closer examination. There are lots of points of potential vulnerability in NZ’s transportation sector and they aren’t all locational. And they certainly aren’t solved by expensively and destructively building new motorways up and across every fault line in Wellington.
One systemic vulnerability is our reliance on imported liquid fuels from the middle east. This is our single biggest forex cost and every low value motorway we build is a further doubledown on this weakness. Investing in urban electric rail and completing and extending our electric rail freight network should also be pursued vigorously on these grounds. Renewable electrons we got, and we are likely to have more than we hope to use fairly soon: http://www.odt.co.nz/news/business/338754/smelters-future-seems-more-uncertain
Furthermore there are enough already consented additional renewable projects to have the place awash with electrons. But how to pay for this? Well if we weren’t sending quite so much money everyday to the Middle East for their black gold…. How do we justify the necessary capex investment? In part by the resilience it builds, and of course the long term savings. Self-sufficiency, and of course to build our case as both clean and lower carbon producer. Electric rail is proven current technology, passenger uptake is going at 20% in Auckland. This growth can continue for as long as capacity is there. Yet gov builds nothing but motorways: Anti-resilience.
Your oil importation argument is somewhat redundant given we will be driving electric cars (not necessarily self-driving) once the technological side gets sorted out. The only question is how far away that time is – I’d estimate mainstream in around 15-20 years but there are a number of variables that could alter that.
The other side to it is that we could produce our own oil but that’s a whole new argument!
Agree EVs are part of the solution, but:
1. exactly 15-20 years away at best
2. we’re trying very hard to do that and our oil production is falling.
3. cars, no matter how they are propelled, do not make for efficient and dynamic cities. And Cities, especially Auckland, is where we increasingly are.
Our cities need electric transit plus EVs and bikes, and e-bikes. The nation needs the gap in the MTL electrification plugged and new electric locos.
If the Climate change experts are correct, we do not have 15-20 years to continue mucking around with fossil-fuel based transport while we wait for the promised changeover to electric.
There is actually an urgency to move away from fossil-fuels NOW! In fact we have already wasted 25 years of opportunity to change with very little to show for it.
Business-as-usual is no longer an option, unless you believe the National Govt.
“One systemic vulnerability is our reliance on imported liquid fuels from the middle east” – not factually correct. NZ does not rely on importing fossil fuels from the Middle East, it currently buys ME crudes because they are the cheapest source for the type of crude oil favoured at Marsden Point refinery. NZ could just as easy – and increasingly likely – import feedstocks from the US and when Obama passes the law changes, import crude from the US.
NZ could also revive the XTL industry and turn bio mass to transport fuels. Currently we export tallow to the Finnish Government owned XTL plant in SE Asia.What won’t change – regardless of climate change – is the NZ public’s preference of private MVs over PT and although EV’s will have their place, petrol and diesel powered vehicles will be the norm for years to come.Suggesting that roads can be or should be replaced with rail is pie in the sky thinking. Even ignoring the fact trains travel A2B while cars and trucks can travel door2door, building a useable national rail network would cost billions more than improving the road networks. Then you have the problem of how to power this new rail. Currently NZ produce about a third of Electricity through burning coal (dirtier than liquid fuels) and any increase in electric power gen would mean an increase in fossil fuel burn or a massive multi billion dollar investment in AE.
So to sum up. Patrick is suggesting spend billions on new rail lines, billions on new rail rolling stock, billions on new alternative energy so that people can travel A2B v the Govt want to spend a few billion on RONs that take people and freight door2door.
Sorry that’s quite wrong, NZ produces only about 5% of electricity by burning coal, and 20% more from other fossil fuels.
Dear Phil: even you must grasp that the US is and will remain a net oil importer? Sure it may become possible to import oil from the US but this would simply mean we are importing Middle Eastern oil via the US. If the Straight of Hormuz is blocked or some other major event there the US has less than no spare oil for anyone, let alone little old NZ.
Biofuel; bollocks. If we could do that at scale we would be already.
And Patrick is suggesting no such thing. Patrick is suggesting we stop spending billions on uneconomic duplicate highways under the guise of building resilience and actually build resilience and self-reliance by electrifying those parts of the transport sector that work. Passenger transit in Auckland [growing at 20% pa] and long haul rail freight.
We’ve shown you before how inaccurate you are about NZ electricity generation. 2014 calendar year was just under 80% renewable, coal is insignificant and falling. Gas is being phased out too. http://www.med.govt.nz/sectors-industries/energy/news/record-renewables-in-2014
‘“At almost 80%, the share of renewable electricity generation in 2014 was the highest since 1996,” said Bryan Field, MBIE’s Manager of Modelling and Sector Trends.
“Geothermal electricity generation contributed more electricity than natural gas during 2014, this is the first time that this has happened in 40 years,” he continued.”
How are motorways door to door exactly? As far as I can see they too, like railways, go from A to B. The difference is that we’ve built so many of them (and their lesser cousins) that it feels like they truly are door to door.
RONS projects only improve or replicate existing road connections. What we are buying with new motorways is not a great improvement. Rather it is convenience and small efficiency gains.
@ Phil Moore: “Suggesting that roads can be or should be replaced with rail is pie in the sky thinking.”
Er – who is suggesting this? The only mention of it comes from you, Phil. No-one is seriously advocating that people be forced out of cars and into trains.
I assume your comment is a response to my suggestion that Wellington’s ‘incomplete’ rail-spine should be completed by extending the network by about 8 Kms, in preference to spending a much greater amount on duplicating highways which are already largely adequate.
What is it about this that worries you, Phil? Nothing I have suggested will restrict your ability to drive, or bring about a wholesale reduction in the road network. So why throw up this ‘straw-man’, arguing against things that nobody has remotely proposed?
All I am advocating is that we have better public transport instead of even more roads. And although you may like to cling to the myth that the NZ public won’t use public transport no matter how good it is, both Wellington and Auckland refute this view.
Historically, Wellington has had high public transport ridership because a better-than-average service has been provided (and logically it should be expanded to spread its benefits further). Auckland by contrast is now experiencing major growth in its P.T. ridership, because the service is improving. And the net effect in both cities is for public transport to take pressure off the roads and make it easier for those still driving to get around.
Why is this concept so threatening to certain types of people?
Phil – when Obama …. say what? Seriously? Where have you been for the last couple of years?
Resilient – my arse.
None of these roads are going to be any use for “resilience” when the next big (or moderate) Wellington quake strikes (or it seems, is more likely sooner: – the Alpine fault ruptures and shakes the shit out of Wellington in the process). And who knows what either will do to the Hikurangi trench off the coast of Kaikoura – generate a huge tsunami as well. Be like Japan 2011 all over again – without the nuclear meltdowns.
Those proposed roads all rely on the main highway that runs right beside the Wellington harbour for a good chunk of its length to be useful as a connector to Wellington proper.
So sea level rise and/or tsunamis will take the SH1/SH2 roads out first. So no roads in or out of Wellington.
GNS says based on latest analysis of Alpine fault ruptures over the last 8,000 years that the Alpine fault is now >=30% likelihood of rupture in next 50 years, with 95% confidence and thats a way, way, higher likelihood than any Wellington fault – see this Youtube video from GNS reporting on the latest research info from GNS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfj8MIAxec4 to understand that.
The quakes or related tsunamis will devastate that part of the network between Wellington and at least Ngauranga will be isolated whether these other roads are built or not. Railways will be similarly impacted too given it runs beside the roads (on the seaward side too so will likely be damaged first/fixed last).
Therefore at best these roads will allow all those Hutt valley people a way out of the Hutt valley – assuming that the quakes haven’t trashed all the hilly roads as well that is.
If NZTA is serious about their job they’d find another “fully inland” route to connect Wellington to the rest of the country that doesn’t run beside a harbour or a coast which is seismically prone while also being prone to tidal flooding, general sea level rise and tsunami events.
Yes the more new routes of any mode that we build is more kit to repair and rebuild after geological events. And some kind of quake or quakes are a certainty for the region.
Yes, exactly. Instead of building new roads, how about we get the existing ones up to scratch?
Have look at “Research Report 355 Engineering lifelines and transport – should New Zealand be doing it better?” published in August 2008 [http://www.nzta.govt.nz/resources/research/reports/355/index.html] — one of the key findings is that there is a lack – or a perceived lack – of interest and funding from NZTA in forward mitigation (ie., fixing things before they break). It’s much easier to get money to fix a road after an earthquake (or storm) than to strengthen it beforehand.
SH58 was falling down a gully for how long before they fixed it? Rod James stood up at the Tawa Community Board meeting less than a month after a man died on that road and told everyone that we needed to build P2G to take traffic off SH58 because look how dangerous it is! Stood there and used a man’s death to sell a new road instead of as a wake-up call to fix an existing one.
Same argument with Puhoi to Warkworth [Omaha]. The current road is dangerous, so lets duplicate it. It will now only kill locals and those unwilling/unable to pay the toll on the new road. The old dangerous road will never get its safety upgrade as all the money has gone to the vast new project, and with fewer vehicles on it average speeds will be higher and therefore it will be even more dangerous.
All roads cost to maintain we should duplicate them thoughtlessly.
The tail end of the GNS video has some really good points made about how and what sort of damage will happen, where it will happen, and how to prepare for the inevitable quakes in the south island and to minimise the resulting damage.
Not just to roads, but to Electricity pylons/lines and other infrastructure too.
And a large part of the message – prepare **now**, make what you’ve got resilient to damage, and do not just plan to “fix it” after the fact ‘cos it will be 10 times harder to do that.
And also have resources pre-staged so that you can fix the stuff that does break, and do so quickly. And have back up plans, and back up plans to the back up plans.
‘cos when the earth starts shaking and the shit starts hitting the fan you’ll need all that and more in short order…
Transmission Gully will move alot of the SH1 route away from the coast (particularly the Paekakariki – Pukerua Bay section) and improve resilience from other events (the existing SH1 use to have a very high crash rate, although fortunately thanks to the median barrier and safety improvements the crash rate has decreased significantly). The Ngauranga – city route is at risks of tsunamis, but not landslips. Tranmission Gully is the reverse, and existing SH1 route at risk of both tsunamis and landslips. I agree with Patrick the main focus should be on buying more equipment etc to repair existing roads quickly, but favour resilience being a small factor in deciding whether to build more roads
Resilience could be achieved with a modest, 2-lane, 80K emergency road for a fraction of the cost. It does not need a full-blown 4-6 lane motorway.
Reslience is largely being used as an excuse to justify the motoring-lobby’s otherwise-unjustifiable wish-list.
There seems to be some implication that “resilience” is this qualitative thing that we can’t quite put our finger on its value; hence even if a project has a crappy BCR it may still be strategically important because of its resilience. My take is that such assessment of resilience could be included in the economic evaluation; essentially you do a probabilistic comparison of the network costs (including during closures or other incidents) with or without the proposed facility/improvement. Indeed, I did research for Transfund NZ on this, back in 2000 (Research Report 159, http://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/handle/10092/1559) suggesting how it could be incorporated into their standard economic evaluation – not sure that anyone has ever picked it up and run with it though…
They haven’t because they know the answer!! There was a time when any significant expenditure on roads required a B/C of over 4.0. It kept things rational for a while ruling out pet projects that didn’t really stack up like Transmission Gully and Petone-Granada. But unfortunately the policy analysts have got into the act and we now have subjective criteria. Much easier to screw the analysis to make your pet scheme seem good. If you can’t trump up some rationale like ‘resilience’, Petone-Granada is a total non-starter. How much extra time does it take to drive to Ngauranga and up? And how many people make that trip anyway? Haywards is still a crap road because the demand is not there. PG looks good on a map, and it might be convenient for Hutt valley residents heading off for the weekend, but that’s not going to justify what is going to be another very expensive road.
Glen K, agreed. I haven’t read your paper, but it would seem a fairly straightforward excersize at least in principle.
Hi Glen – interesting comment… thanks very much for the reference!
I’ve been thinking a bit about the value of an “insurance policy” against unlikely events as a result of some work I’ve been doing in an unrelated field. It looks like your work recommends applying a bit of actuarial science to the subject – i.e. quantify the cost and likelihood of an outage and use it to calculate the “expected value” of more resilient infrastructure.
My intuition is that risk-averse individuals will sometimes be willing to pay “over the odds” for insurance against extremely unlikely events. If this is the case, the value of resilience may be higher than is indicated by the actuarial approach. (Although certainly not orders of magnitude higher!)
In principle, one way of getting information on people’s risk-averseness is to survey them on their “willingness to pay” for more resilient infrastructure. If I were NZTA, I would be putting some money into a few decent surveys on the topic.
If they wanted resillience it would be better spent protecting sh2 between petone & wellington with more reclamation. Side effect would be wider road, room for a cycleway and rail curves eased.
And the Council does the thinkable: http://wellington.scoop.co.nz/?p=77318
imo nzta should just six lane sh2 between Petone and Ngauranga Interchange. reclaim some more land, straighten out the railway and put a cycleway/walkway. This would remove the current sh2 northbound bottleneck without causing too many issues downstream (except The Esplanade) as sh2 past petone is free flowing. While they are at it, they could also four lane The Esplanade or build the Cross valley link. In the article, “they (WCC) agreed that Option A (the long-planned Petone to Grenada/Churton Park highway) did have their support.” If this is built, it would significantly increase sh1 traffic between Grenada/Churton Park and the Transmission Gully interchange meaning that there WILL be a need for the duplicate/widened highway
Indeed, it is great news that the Wellington City Council has told NZTA to stick their proposals for a Takapu Valley route up their well-padded, four-wheel-drive arse and walk away, but I have a feeling that this story does not end here, just yet. NZTA appears to have a hard-on for extra, unnecessary roads in Wellington, and actually, what WCC thinks or votes for/against, doesn’t seem to matter much to our national road-builders. They may yet just decide to build it anyway, despite opposition. The more crucial vote yet to come is the Regional Council one, and Porirua Council is still pro-NZTA road schemes as well. Fingers crossed, but not much hope for sanity to rule just yet…
Yup. It may be that you are not well served in Wellington by having government right there. It is pretty clear that NZTA, HNO in particular, don’t wish to be bothered with local government and its concerns with things like the impacts on place and people of their plans [and cost!]. And in WGTN they can just go straight upstairs to get this view reinforced.
Dare I say it you need more scale to your local authority. Amalgamation seems to have a bought more balance to the partnership between local and that central gov agency in Auckland. Not that they don’t still all need watching like a hawk….
No, it won’t end there. WCC was basically voting on what their representative should take to the Regional Transport Committee [http://www.gw.govt.nz/regional-transport-committee-2/], which is made up of the region’s mayors, a Greater Wellington rep and an NZTA rep (Raewyn Bleakley). The RTC makes a recommendation to NZTA. Then NZTA ignores them (or not) and does what they want to do. In theory, it will be harder for NZTA to push through a road if the regional bodies are all against it.
https://www.google.com.tw/maps/@-41.1887904,174.8376729,13z/data=!4m2!6m1!1szOMls5OLDdgc.kHwUYEeA-ETQ?hl=en
I see a lot of potential for East – West (Hutt Valley – Johnsonville, Porirua and Kapiti) PT with the P2G project.
Check out the link for some of my thoughts, welcome any feedback.
Basic Option A with a PT focus that connects Johnsonville with Waterloo via Petone and a new train station at Glenside could be a real (unintended) winner from this project.