“Is this one motorway really worth one-tenth of our entire country’s spending on schools, hospitals, houses and public transport infrastructure?”
Wow. This is a return to Think Big of the 1970s in all its white elephant glory.
I know Winston’s bach is in Northland but it would be much cheaper to just pay for him to get helicopter rides.
They want to 4 lane the Hawke’s Bay Expressway too which for me is stupid on any number of levels.
- Its only really congested at particular times of the day, and only around merges either side of roundabouts or on-ramps.
- Because they’ve not fully funded 4 lanes along the whole thing (in fact thus far only a tiny portion is funded) they’ll just be introducing even more merges.
- They’ve talked about tolling it, which will likely put more pressure on regional council maintained routes.
- They would need to build two bridges over large rivers (Ngaruroro & Tutaekuri) that would need to withstand large floods and an overpass where there is very little space and it would come at the expense of a walking/cycling path.
- It comes at the expense of doing anything to better utilise the existing rail-line for passenger commutes from Waipukurau to the Airport.
Yes, but consider the benefits:
- Fulton Hogan makes a lot of money
10% for the next 25 years is an insane amount of money, and no way will it be cost effective.
We have a habit in NZ of completely over-speccing projects, then either cancelling them or never proceeding in the first place. It’s what we did with the ferries, it’s what we did with that idiotic cycle bridge idea, the Petone-Grenada road… And now this. Which will get binned the moment a Labour coalition takes over.
The spec for the Petone-Grenada road initially called for it to be 100 km/h end to end, which is completely over the top considering the terrain the road would traverse.
At least the Melling Link project seems to be moving.
