There's rather an odd front-page lead in this week's Wellingtonin http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/local/the-wellingtonian/4059978/Green-light-for-second-Mt-Vic-tunnel, with the mayor claiming that it's "fantastic news for the eastern suburbs" that a new tunnel will be built.
It's odd, because nothing has changed since the Government announced their RONS scheme before Christmas; that NZTA haven't even started designing a new tunnel; that the best estimate is that it won't open for another 15 years; and that part of the justification for the tunnel is apparently traffic created by the new Indoor Community Sports Centre (famously once labelled a "mayoral vanity project") and by the airport exapansion.
If the mayor thinks that it's good news for the taxpayer (that's us) to be spending $175m on a project that will destroy part of the Town Belt, induce more traffic and generate more congestion in the city centre, all in order to offset her council's expensive blunder in the location of the sports centre, perhaps we need a new mayor?
If the council wasn't planning for 95% of sports centre users to arrive by private car, and if it gave some thought as to how to get airport passengers out of the huge number of taxis and into public transport, it would realise that traffic problems don't need expensive and long-drawn-out solutions, particularly when SH1 traffic volumes have barely increased over the last five years. Invest much less money in public transport, walking and cycling now, and we can avoid spending our hard-earned cash on a project that the government's own figures show barely makes any sense economically, let alone in any other way.
No comments:
Post a Comment