Long Tunnel or Long Con?

Yesterday it was revealed that Transport Minister had asked Waka Kotahi to look at the options for a long tunnel through Wellington.

State Highway 1 (SH1) through Wellington City is heavily congested at peak times and while planning continues on the duplicate Mt Victoria Tunnel and Basin Reserve project, the Government has also asked NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) to consider and provide advice on a Long Tunnel option, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says.

“Boosting economic growth and productivity is a key part of the Government’s plan to rebuild the economy. The Long Tunnel option aligns strongly with priorities in the Government Policy Statement on Land Transport (GPS), including a reduction in travel times, greater resilience for the SH1 corridor, and improved safety for road users, pedestrians, and cyclists,” Mr Brown says.

“The Long Tunnel option has the potential to deliver up to 15-minute travel time savings between the region and Wellington airport, compared to around 2-3 minutes for the current parallel or diagonal tunnel proposals at Mt Victoria and the Basin.

“The option would also see better urban amenity through greater reallocation of surface level road space to active modes and public transport in the CBD and greater opportunities for housing intensification. Enhanced regional connectivity to the airport and hospital would also be achieved with reduced city and state highway congestion.

“The option would also mean less construction disruption for local traffic as the Long Tunnel option could be built with less disruption to the city centre and less impact on public and private properties required for other options.

“To rebuild our economy and ensure people and freight can get to where they need to go quickly and safely, we need to move at pace to deliver the infrastructure our country needs.

“I look forward to receiving advice from NZTA on the technical feasibility, cost, and funding and financing options for this proposal as NZTA works on delivering the Government’s priority of a second Mt Victoria Tunnel in Wellington.”

First up, given the rhetoric from the minister so far in his tenure (and leading up to it), it’s interesting to see him mention reallocation of street space to active modes and public transport in such a positive light. Likewise, his observation that this enables more housing because people typically don’t like living next to traffic sewers. If he’s being honest about that, hopefully this marks a step forward in his transport thinking, and away from the tedious culture war he’s seemingly been trying to wage against anything and anyone not in a car or truck.

The Long Tunnel

As you can see on the map below, SH1 carves through the central city of Wellington. Currently, just south of the Terrace Tunnel, SH1 shifts from being a motorway to running along Vivian and Buckle Streets before joining together again at the Basin Reserve and travelling though the Mt Victoria Tunnel.

The notion of a Long Tunnel isn’t new: it last emerged a few years ago as one of a long list of options for Let’s Get Wellington Moving and the talk about duplicating the Mt Victoria tunnel. The idea is to continue the motorway in a tunnel underground all the way from the Terrace Tunnel though to Cobham Dr. This would also likely include a duplication of the 3-lane terrace tunnel to enable at least 2 lanes in each direction. Such a tunnel would be up to 4km long, easily eclipsing the 2.4km Waterview tunnels as the longest road tunnels in New Zealand.

I can certainly see the appeal of it at a conceptual level – but even with all of the talk of street reallocation and more housing, like so many of National’s projects, this is just incredibly difficult to justify.

Cost

Of course the first thing to think about is the cost. This was estimated a few years ago at $3.1 billion, but given what has happened with project cost inflation in the last few years, it could easily be double that now.

Add to this the fact that Wellington, as a region, has typically received more government funding for transport than most. For example, a quick look at National Land Transport Fund spending shows Wellington typically gets a greater share per person than the national average. Auckland, by comparison, normally gets less than its share, although that is made up a little bit by the CRL which sits outside the NLTF.

It’s not just the construction costs either: tunnels are extremely expensive to operate and maintain, due to needing things such as ventilation, emergency crews etc.

As an example: before Waterview opened, Waka Kotahi told me in an OIA that it would cost around $16 million annually to operate. To put in perspective, in the five years before Waterview opened, Waka Kotahi spent an average of just under $100 million annually to maintain all state highways in the Auckland region. So an additional $16 million per annum for a 2.4km stretch of road is a significant increase.

In fact, the actual amount being spent to keep Waterview operating may be higher, given that in the five years since it opened, costs for the Auckland network increased to an average of $146 million. The Waterview tunnels carry an average of 80,000 vehicles a day, and the road/fuel taxes they’d pay isn’t even enough to cover the cost of maintenance.

So how much worse will an even longer tunnel be?

The real issue with the cost is, of course, the opportunity cost. How many other, more valuable state highway upgrades could that kind of money enable? Or how many projects that would help people avoid adding more cars to the road? How many hospitals or schools could be built or upgraded? Feel free to do the maths with your own preferred examples.

As Greater Wellington Regional Council transport chairperson Thomas Nash said to RNZ, the announcement showed “an astonishing misunderstanding of transport priorities at a national level”.

“We have new inter-island ferries that we need, we have massive upgrades to regional rail/metropolitan rail that we need, we have basic stuff like bus lanes, more buses that we need. The idea that a multi-billion dollar tunnel underneath Wellington for the 30 percent of traffic going out to the east should be the top of your priority list is, frankly, astonishing.”

Benefits

As well as the high cost, the problem is there just don’t seem to be that many benefits (although Joel MacManus at the Spinoff had a satirical go at calculating some of them).

Currently, traffic along both Vivian and Buckle Streets is much lower than Waterview, at between 40k-50k combined. That’s still a lot of cars to funnel through a city, but not the kind of volumes needed to justify a perhaps $6 billion project.

Furthermore, and perhaps even more seriously, my understanding is that much of the traffic that goes south through the Terrace Tunnel doesn’t carry on to the Basin Reserve. This would suggest that a Long Tunnel is only really going to be of benefit to the small number of people driving all the way to or from the airport – unless even more expensive underground interchanges are added, which would come with on- and off-ramps at surface level, thus continually pulling cars through the city and negating the street realm benefits the Minister alluded to.

The big benefit the government are pushing is the travel time savings that this could enable – but that’s only really going to be for the small number of people who will actually be able to use it from end to end. So who really benefits?

The (Industry) Long Con

Putting aside all the technical reasons and economic reasons why this is a dumb idea, perhaps most concerning is it indicates that the minister may quickly be falling into the same trap as his predecessors in the previous government – the trap of being goaded into continually supersizing already massive projects.

Labour of course most famously fell for this with their brainwave of undergrounding light rail at huge expense. But also with the harbour crossing plans, their NZ Upgrade programme, and their transport policy for the last election. They fell for the lines from officials, advisers and consultants about:

• how you only ever get one chance to build something, so you have to make it as big and as bold as possible (the Harbour Bridge being the classic misunderstood example of how it’s better to pace yourself).
• how we must avoid disruption at all costs (forgetting there’s no project without disruption, and plenty of examples of how to stage and handle it).
• and always, how we always need to design our urban infrastructure around maximum predictions of what will happen in 50-100 years, even though no one can accurately predict what will happen that far out (and climate change is rarely part of those calculations).

It seemed that every time Labour felt they were getting real pressure amongst the electorate, they’d announce another bigger, dumber and completely unrealistic transport project that was never deliverable.

I’ve heard from both politicians and people in the industry who say this kind of push for massive infrastructure happens almost immediately a new government is in place, and is consistent across changes of government.

It seems unlikely Minister Brown woke up one day and thought: hey, why don’t we do a long tunnel? More likely, someone in the transport industry, quite possibly someone at Waka Kotahi, was upset that the previous proposal was not progressed, and has been pushing hard behind the scenes for this zombie idea to re-emerge.

Somewhat ironically, adding this proposal back into the mix will ultimately suck up a lot of resources and time to investigate it, lessening the overall likelihood that anything will actually be delivered.

Perhaps the one area where the minister has done better than his predecessors in the role is that he’s given himself an out, if the advice comes back that the proposal is just too expensive.

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In the meantime, the Post reports that some locals are wondering if a discredited Mars-going billionaire could swing in to deliver the project, and The Spinoff suggests a few other “tell him he’s dreaming” ideas for Wellington if there’s this much money going free for a “munnel” (mega-tunnel).

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