National unveils transport policy: Four-lane motorways from Whangārei to Tauranga
National unveils transport policy: Four-lane motorways from Whangārei to Tauranga
National's transport policy has been labelled as 'laughable' and 'breathtakingly misleading' by the government.
Breathtakingly stupid policy in my opinion.
Rather than inducing more traffic onto roads I would rather see freight moved onto rail and coastal shipping instead.
27I live in the far north and they'd be better off increasing the heavy rail capacity to get all the fucking logging trucks off the road. Will fix some of the pothole problems too - they created that mess by increasing the weight limits on large vehicles under the last National government, now they get to winge about Labour not fixing it. Standard right wing strategy.
20If you're talking about the 50max trucks, they added an axle when they created that class, I don't think the axle loading changed much.
1
I love this. Saw it on the news last night. The proposal is likely to cost twice as much as they say because they took the cost from the original proposal and didn't update them.
However, the brilliant part of promising to spend money on roads, funding it from the National Land Transport Fund, is that you don't have to raise taxes. If you take the money from the NLTF, you take money away from other roading projects instead.
So the proposal is basically to not build or repair other roads, and instead spend the money on these projects. It looks like a great election promise (to certain voter bases) but it's all smoke and mirrors.
19You’re forgetting that modern conservative political parties have no platform that actually addresses the needs of our time. As a larger percentage of voters become downtrodden, value signalling and virtue signalling is no longer enough to secure victory for the business owners and 1%ers. They need to add “boots on the ground” initiatives to get the votes. The old favourites are highways and tough-on-crime. They’re essentially returning to the empty pantry over and over looking for something to eat. A four laner from Wh. To Tau. would take 8 years just to sort out land rights. This is just National throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. The NLTF as it is can barely support road required maintenance and renewal. I suspect the National supporters who like this plan are the same people that complain about potholes.
18Exactly this. We cannot maintain the routes we have, never mind building more. They didn't even cost it properly.
11
Absolutely. Add to that some of the interviews saying there isn't that much traffic on these roads anyway, and that induced demand is a real thing, you have a transport policy which will add nothing to the economy of NZ except for the contractors.
9Well even the contracters won't be new, they will just be taken off the other projects that lose funding from this.
6
Whenever someone suggests building more roading capacity to solve congestion I just link them to “The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion” https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.101.6.2616
This is just basic economics. Increasing supply reduces the cost and therefore demand rises to meet the new level of supply. Why the right wing preaches economic purism on everything but transport boggles my mind.
17What I wouldn’t give for some good inner-city and inter-city public transport in this country instead. Maybe in my children’s lifetimes.
161 more lane! 1 more lane!
10Waiting for the Climate Change Commission to shoot this proposal down.
9I am not sure this kind of thing will be the voter winner it was in 2014.
9🤞🤞🤞
I'll let you know when I next hear from my parents and in-laws
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4 lanes per direction? That does seem like overkill. Howabout expanding the road between christchurch and dunedin to 2 lanes (per direction), especially between ashburton and christchurch which is 1 lane (per direction) for the vast majority of it, and people commute it for work.
1 lane means no safe overtaking, and some parts don't have overtaking lanes for tens of kilometres. Milk trucks are the worst for driving slowly, though campervans are also pretty annoying.
Having high speed rail between the towns would be ideal, but christchurch's public transport is terrible, and proper rail would require a complete rework of all (or virtually all) the rail in the country. Busses might help reduce the rush hour load, but since they're limited to 90km (I think), it wouldn't work without also expanding the moterway.
4Since the mangamukas have been closed I've really noticed the big trucks thundering down SH10.
3Since I read more of their proposal and now see that they're proposing doubling the size of the Hawke's Bay Expressway to four lanes I have more thoughts.
Firstly, given the expressway goes over two major rivers with high stopbanks, that means two bridges somehow either expanded or additional bridges built, or the bridges replaced - none of which is cheap.
The expressway between the Ngaruroro and Tutaekuri is already susceptible to being blocked by flooding as there are two streams that go under it at low points. Even after Gabrielle those points have had water encroach upon the road so doubling the length of those culverts probably also means doubling their capacity as well - or, a more resilient solution might be to raise the height of the road entirely on an elevated causeway given we know the flood plain between those two rivers is where the water goes in historical floods that breach stopbanks.
Outside of local freight traffic the bulk of the volume is rush-hour transfers of vehicles from either of the two cities as people go to work. A lot of that traffic is stuff like sparkies, plumbers etc who can't mode shift - but there is still a volume of traffic that could be moved by public transport. A fast and regular railcar service between Waipukurau and the Airport could make a lot of sense.
The other thing we really need to do is to shift long distance freight off the roads altogether - the two north of the expressway are far too prone to closure - and even SH2 south got closed during Gabrielle. As much as i'd love it to be trains its probably better for that traffic to be both coastal shipping and train - and a lot already is (ie logs shipping internationally direct from Napier port).
In any case, my opinion is that 4 lanes on the expressway is 150% more capacity than it needs 95% of the time, and would most likely just shift the congestion point from around the Tutaekuri bridge south of the Taradale on ramps to somewhere else. The problem isn't even really the road's capacity.
As the hand-drawn sign at Taradale says (I paraphrase) "Merge like a Zip, not f$%king Velcro".
2There are lots of bridges and you'll have to make all of them four lanes.
That's going to take fifty years.
2