Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!
Anyone can make the thread, first in first served. If you are here on a day and there’s no daily thread, feel free to create it!
Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.
So, how’s it going?
I love the Kapiti expressway, such a stress free driving experience. Just set the cruise control, and sit at 100-ish up to Otaki.
I drove from Palmy to Wellington early yesterday morning. Put on cruise control at the start of two lanes north of Ōtaki and didn’t touch the pedals until heading down Ngaranga Gorge (minor adjustments to CC via control buttons).
Wait until you drive a vehicle with radar cruise, it will maintain speed down the gorge even.
The whole thing. Transmission Gully, Kāpiti bypass, Ōtaki bypass. “Soon” they will add on a Levin bypass (if National don’t cancel it to pay for their new roads being funded from money already ringfenced for building and maintaining roads).
There’s a stretch of road between Sanson and Bulls that could do with being 4 lanes, or otherwise avoid having two major roads come together for a few km just to split off again, but other than that travelling from Wellington to New Plymouth is pretty smooth sailing now even at the busiest times of the year.
I have a hard time believing National would cancel a road, especially a project like that, it would go down like a lead balloon amongst their supporters.
We have a few sites in Foxton we service, this new road would mean I can get there in around two hours from Wellington.
Petrol tax and RUC goes into a fund called the National Land Transport Fund (NLTF). This fund is ringfenced and can only be used for building and maintaining roads. Basically, money going into this fund is allocated out for maintenance and for new roading projects.
National have come in with a promise to build a bunch of new roads not currently planned. Their proposal is to pay for these roads from the NLTF.
The only way they can do this, it to cancel other roading projects, or take money that would have been allocated to other roading projects in the future.
Isn’t Foxton much less than 2 hours away now? I’d think you’d be in Palmy by 2 hours.
It probably is, come to think of it, Otaki is reliably under an hour.
There will be a chunk of funding coming from places like RUCs on electric vehicles, I’m not sure what else they plan to use.
Electric vehicles are from memory about 1.7% of light vehicles, so I doubt they will get 6 billion of funding (plus the other 2-4 billion needed because they used old estimates). Pretty sure they just intend to reallocate funding from other projects (probably to avoid criticism, might try to add these projects to the end of the queue so any already approved projects proceed as planned).
But to be fair, they probably just won’t go ahead. If a party completes 50% of their election promises, then it’s a pretty good run.
Imagine if Labour had built 50% of the light rail they promised us.