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.
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.
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.
You’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.
Exactly this. We cannot maintain the routes we have, never mind building more. They didn’t even cost it properly.
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.
I 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.
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.
There are lots of bridges and you’ll have to make all of them four lanes.
That’s going to take fifty years.
It’s a pork barrel policy.
“We’ll pour an extra billion dollars a year into Fulton Hogan’s (etc) coffers” doesn’t sound as good.
The amazing thing about this country is how the population doesn’t perceive the corruption right in front of their faces.
