On a busy day, Auckland Harbour Bridge hosts over 200,000 trips. No money has been found for decades to build a second harbour crossing. Auckland's population, currently running at between 1.7 to 1.8 million, will shortly hit 2 million, given that NZ's population is increasing by around 100,000 a year at present and around half of those will probably settle in the city. Auckland is getting bigger. Wellington is not.
The bureaucracy there will not tell us how many are "working" from home. Most Wellington bureaucrats don't want to go into "work" anymore and their bosses are letting them get away with it. Lucky they don't work for Elon Musk or JP Morgan in which case the lot of them would be fired. Now we hear that a cycle track costing $236 million (given cost over-runs it will likely end up being a whole lot more) is being built that runs exactly - that is, exactly - along the Wellington Fault Line for 5km. Given the thousands of civil servants being laid off in Wellington, the "working" from home culture there, and given that every serious urban economist says its best to encourage density & not incentivize longer commutes, what on earth is the point of the cycleway connecting Lower Hutt with Wellington? Is it so Minister Chris Bishop can be one of the 360 people walking on it as he comes & goes from his Hutt South electorate, or Chris Hipkins can be one of the 290 people riding his e-scooter down it as he goes to buy Fish & Chips in the Hutt where he grew up (which are the numbers projected to use the track by 2030)?
Even given the number of cyclists they're saying will use it - around 2,000 "trips" per day by 2030, which would seem to suggest 1,000 people going into work & back - that's still a tiny number. Especially given that for half the year it is wet & windy in Wellington & so wont be much used on those days, which is most days). There are only just over 100,000 people in Lower Hutt - for Auckland's projects you're talking numbers 20 times bigger. The net benefit of spending 1/4 of a billion dollars on one of Auckland's pressing projects is orders of magnitude bigger. In a cost-benefit analysis of projects around the country, which the new coalition is committed to doing, this cycle way would rank way down the list. The project is not even environmentally friendly - they're dumping 144,000 tons of rock into Wellington Harbour & spending $10 million to protect fish. Wellington is not building the agglomeration benefits that come with getting large numbers of cool, smart young people together in tight urban spaces who feed off each other to come up with new ideas and businesses that will change the world. Why encourage even the ones who are in Wellington to go live in the Hutt? To paraphrase Rolling Stone Magazine, Wellington has become a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of NZ, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into money that the rest of the country makes so it can build things to keep itself from disappearing. Move the capital to Manukau City, next to Auckland International Airport, and be done with it. Should Auckland not work, New Zealand will go down with it. When will Wellington get that point? Obviously never, because it wants to divert resources to itself.
Sources:
https://www.1news.co.nz/2024/04/03/behind-the-scenes-look-at-312m-pathway-connecting-hutt-valley-wgtn/
Even given the number of cyclists they're saying will use it - around 2,000 "trips" per day by 2030, which would seem to suggest 1,000 people going into work & back - that's still a tiny number. Especially given that for half the year it is wet & windy in Wellington & so wont be much used on those days, which is most days). There are only just over 100,000 people in Lower Hutt - for Auckland's projects you're talking numbers 20 times bigger. The net benefit of spending 1/4 of a billion dollars on one of Auckland's pressing projects is orders of magnitude bigger. In a cost-benefit analysis of projects around the country, which the new coalition is committed to doing, this cycle way would rank way down the list. The project is not even environmentally friendly - they're dumping 144,000 tons of rock into Wellington Harbour & spending $10 million to protect fish. Wellington is not building the agglomeration benefits that come with getting large numbers of cool, smart young people together in tight urban spaces who feed off each other to come up with new ideas and businesses that will change the world. Why encourage even the ones who are in Wellington to go live in the Hutt? To paraphrase Rolling Stone Magazine, Wellington has become a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of NZ, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into money that the rest of the country makes so it can build things to keep itself from disappearing. Move the capital to Manukau City, next to Auckland International Airport, and be done with it. Should Auckland not work, New Zealand will go down with it. When will Wellington get that point? Obviously never, because it wants to divert resources to itself.
Sources:
https://www.1news.co.nz/2024/04/03/behind-the-scenes-look-at-312m-pathway-connecting-hutt-valley-wgtn/
3 comments:
If Wellington must dump rocks into the sea , why not increase the RESA (runway end safety area) at the south end of the Wellington airport and use the rock and fill from Mt Victoria tunnel secong tunnel, or better still put it to private contract and the result will almost be cost benefirt plus for NZ travellers
And send ministries to the provinces. Hamilton,Napier,Dunedin etc.
Wellington is wasting huge amounts on cycle lanes, no argument on that.
However, the main reason for the rock dumping is to protect the suburban rail line which carries many more people daily than the cycle lane will in a year.
We have way too many Watermelons in our city and on the various councils. Probably due to the high number of government leeches. You could say we providing a service for the rest of the country by keeping them corralled.
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