Contrary to popular belief, NZ always did have the money to pay for state-of-the-art rail-enabled ferries linking the North & South Islands, even at a cost of several billion dollars. It is not a matter of finding the funds, its a matter of using the scarce resources the country already has to maximum effect & not wasting them on stupid projects. Are there tools to help make these decisions? Yes, they go by the name of cost-benefit analysis.
On that note, Wellington is currently building for itself a bunch of new cycle ways, costing $33 million per kilometer, a world record cost. Three of them - Melling to Petone, Seaview to Eastbourne, and Petone to Ngauranga - are costing around 1/2 billion dollars. Upon adding the cost of continuing them from Ngauranga to Wellington there will be little change out of a billion. Wellington put the nation's State Highway 1 system joining North & South on the chopping block at Cook Strait by bungling replacement ferries, whose benefit-cost ratio is dozens of times larger than the cycleways (even at the ships' and ports' blow-out-costs) in favor of spending the funds on itself, the only shrinking city in NZ.
Who will use the cycleways? Who has the most to gain from them? Three MPs in particular - the one for Hutt South, called Chris Bishop, the one for Rimutaka, called Chris Hipkins (who grew up in The Hutt), and Finance Minister Nic Willis, who's trying to win Ōhāriu electorate. All the cycleways lie within, or border, their three electorates. These MPs personally benefit by being able to bike from their homes to Parliament along the sea, and from helping their own careers by garnering electoral support through pork-barrel politics to pay for those cycleways. Meanwhile, the three of them threw NZ under a bus, threatened the integrity of State Highway 1, turned the Cook Strait crossing into chaos, endangered passengers on run-down ships, all when the funds for new ferries were there. Now they blame KiwiRail.
Sources:
https://www.pressreader.com/new-zealand/the-post-1022/20230919/281569475334257
Who will use the cycleways? Who has the most to gain from them? Three MPs in particular - the one for Hutt South, called Chris Bishop, the one for Rimutaka, called Chris Hipkins (who grew up in The Hutt), and Finance Minister Nic Willis, who's trying to win Ōhāriu electorate. All the cycleways lie within, or border, their three electorates. These MPs personally benefit by being able to bike from their homes to Parliament along the sea, and from helping their own careers by garnering electoral support through pork-barrel politics to pay for those cycleways. Meanwhile, the three of them threw NZ under a bus, threatened the integrity of State Highway 1, turned the Cook Strait crossing into chaos, endangered passengers on run-down ships, all when the funds for new ferries were there. Now they blame KiwiRail.
Sources:
https://www.pressreader.com/new-zealand/the-post-1022/20230919/281569475334257
Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.
4 comments:
Interesting take .... agree the cycleways are very much in the nice to have category, if the country was rich enough.
1 point though: Petone to Ngauranga is really more about protection the rail lines with the shared path an opportunist added in my view. The line gets closed occassionaly in winter due to storm spray in a decent Southerly.
Re the Ferries: Sorry the current KiwiRail operated ferries will be replaced the govt has committed to that rightly or wrongly. And there is a private alternative on the strait for passengers and vehicles already
The overblown costs for shoreside build killed the iReX project. Ordering the larger ferries BEFORE locking in shoreside costs was a project management governance fail of a very significant order or....
An attempt to strong arm Government funding for the whole iReX project by creating a large cost for cancellation or project rescoping to something more affordable. Its an unfortunately common project tactic
The Question is: Why is the Government involved in providing the ferry service anyway?
Private business can handle vehicles and passengers - so why not let it expand to cover the current InterIslander carrying capacity?
If KiwRail wants a floating rail line - they should just provide that and leave the rest to free enterprise. or alternatively organise an efficent 'on/off load of containers from train' service across the strait
In closing on the cycleways you mention: grossly expensive and not particularly needed. Hutt to CBD Wellington is easy to cycle (done it a few hundred times), while walking has a grotty path which is difficult to access(Petone over bridge to path start is about 150 metres on the shoulder which is not fun with 100 kph whizzing past (yes I have walked but only 2 or 3 times). That could have been made accessible in a much cheaper and less environment impacting way
There is already a path from Lower Hutt which I have cycled multiple times. As previous commented said, only a couple of hundred metres actually needed to be plugged. The whole thing also needs a good reseal. If the goal was a cycle path that was the only thing needed. The current project will clearly be a nicer experience but the inevitable gold plating has occurred, with all sorts of debatable work going on under the sea alongside. If we really cared about the environment and getting people on bikes we would have just fixed the existing path. This project follows the earlier work on the path from near Melling, which from my view of driving past most days, was one of the slowest and least efficiently managed projects I have ever seen. I’ve also ridden on this but like the path from Petone, only for joy riding in the weekend and I think most others will be the same.
Bikes are all very well but there are a lot of people for whom they are impractical the more so if topography is challenging and many situations where they are not useful. Cyclists generally seem to me to be a small but visible and loud pressure group often with their cause being presented as self righteous.
Personally I would find a donkey and cart more useful as an alternate to my car.
Anon@9.10 "with all sorts of debatable work going on under the sea alongside."
Yes, reef building and, of course, thereby consulting with local Iwi who traditionally had a lot of experience at building same with concrete pyramids. Yeah, right! But I'm sure very nice well-paid consultation work if you can get it?
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