Tauranga Eastern Link – another white elephant motorway?
NZTA were pleased to announce on Wednesday that they are making good progress on the “Tauranga Eastern Link” road, a Road of National Significance that we haven’t paid much attention to in the past. Given our general disdain of the justification for projects given this title (Victoria Park Tunnel and Waterview Connection excepted) I thought I’d look in a bit more detail around what the Tauranga Eastern Link road actually is – and whether it falls into the category of pointless and stupid RoNS (like Puhoi-Wellsford, parts of the Waikato Expressway and most of the Wellington Northern Corridor project) or more reasonable RoNS (like the aforementioned Auckland projects and perhaps part of the Christchurch projects though I’m not too familiar with them).…
31 Comments What’s Best for Northland?
Pretty much every single time we hear the government talk about the Puhoi to Wellsford road of national significance they say that its crucial to Northland’s economy, even standing up and saying so in parliament here are a few quotes from different exchanges:
Dated 15 August 2012
Phil Twyford: Does it make economic sense to borrow to fund the Pūhoi to Wellsford “Holiday Highway”, which has a benefit-cost ratio that barely breaks even and costs $1.7 billion, when a $400 million upgrade would fix the congestion and safety problems?…
Kapiti Expressway’s BCR is actually 0.2!
A great scoop by Campbell Live tonight showing that the cost-benefit ratio of the Mackays to Peka Peka part of the Kapiti Expressway – a key section of the Wellington Northern Corridor RoNS project – has been recalculated recently as being 0.2.…
Are driverless cars the future?
I wonder if you can guess who wrote the quote below?
Cars are noisy, they’re dangerous, they emit fumes, they take up so much space that our cities seem to be built for cars first and people second, and they are not much fun to sit in on a jammed Auckland motorway.…
P2W timesavings just don’t stack up
From time to time I like to check on the written questions asked by MPs to ministers, these questions are important as the ministers are required to answer them and the results are stored on record so they can be a great way of finding out information.…
Shifting the problem, not solving it
It’s generally accepted that the Victoria Park Tunnel represents probably the most cost-effective project out of the entire Roads of National Significance package. This was confirmed by the SAHA report, which puts the VPT miles ahead of any other project in terms of its cost-benefit ratio:
For southbound traffic, the project has worked wonders – at least making it easier for traffic to access State Highway 16 westbound (which will be important post Waterview Connection as the primary route from the North Shore to the Airport), the Port and the Cook Street offramp.…
Transport – It’s the Economy, Stupid
I came across a well crafted piece about the Government’s transport policies on Scoop, by Dr Glen Koorey (presumably the same person who comments here occasionally as “Glen K”) a senior lecturer in transportation at the University of Canterbury’s College of Engineering.…
Can these RoNS Make a Right?
*An old post for a little holiday reading, especially as Steven Joyce is on Twitter repeating that tendencious line about the $1billion dollar duplicate Holiday Highway being all about making the Northland economy go wild. Enjoy.*
It is interesting that Transport Minister Gerry Brownlee invoked the Auckland Harbour Bridge in a recent interview about the Roads of National Significance.…
From a fly on the wall, deep inside the NZTA
Its scary just how accurate this sounds, hopefully the fly doesn’t get discovered and we get some more insights from it.
Great work Radio NZ (this is from last Sunday).…
Brittle Thinking
This post is a follow on from Stu’s, here, on the transport minister’s extraordinary answers to questions in parliament concerning the wisdom of his extremely unbalanced transport spending programme.
You will recall that Mr Brownlee thinks that petrol price is irrelevant to decisions about transport investment.…
Processing...