Finally, some fresh details about Wellington’s long-awaited street upgrade.
Windbag is The Spinoff’s Wellington issues column, written by Wellington editor Joel MacManus. It’s made possible thanks to the support of The Spinoff Members.
Wellington’s Golden Mile upgrade is supposedly a thing that is happening. For the last few months that has been increasingly difficult to believe due to the lack of anything happening. After a long silence, last week we saw the first updated details of what it will look like and when we might finally see some construction.
Wellington has spent almost a decade arguing back and forth about the project. Some people (including this columnist) think making the main streets nicer would be a significant boost for the city’s vibrancy and economic outlook. Others have argued it would be a disaster on the scale of Erebus or the Titanic.
The redevelopment on Lambton Quay, Courtenay Place, Willis Street and Manners Street was previously part of the Let’s Get Wellington Moving programme, with a $139.4m budget funded 51% by Waka Kotahi NZTA and 49% by Wellington City Council.
During the 2023 election campaign, Simeon Brown promised to cancel LGWM and the Golden Mile project if he became transport minister. Wellington mayor Tory Whanau said she was going to sign the construction contract before he was sworn in, so he wouldn’t be able to cancel it. Neither of those things ended up happening. The council still hasn’t signed a contract, and Brown wasn’t legally able to cancel the Golden Mile project, because NZTA had already committed the funding. When LGWM was dissolved, Wellington City Council got to keep the Golden Mile project. As part of the agreement, the council promised the government it would do more engagement with businesses.
The council went back out and talked to people and worked on some redesigns in-house. In a workshop on Tuesday, a team of council officers treated councillors and the public to some delicious little morsels of detail.
A construction contract will be awarded in December to redevelop the Courtenay Place/Cambridge Terrace intersection, with works beginning in January 2025. The main Courtenay Place contract will be awarded in the first quarter of 2025, with works beginning in Q2. The works around Manners Street to Lambton Quay won’t start until 2026.
Officers revealed the design of new pavement stones which they promised would be grippier and easier to clean than the horrible orange slippery banana skins that currently line the Golden Mile. There are some minor design changes around Courtenay Place; the new design will remove the left slip lane onto Cambridge Terrace, which will allow for enough space to keep the public toilet block in its current location.
A larger bus shelter will be built on Courtenay Place, with room for 100 people. Councillor Sarah Free wanted assurance that it would offer protection from the wind. “I use buses a lot and like to be sheltered,” she said. Councillor Iona Pannett had similar views. “I appreciate the walls because they keep you dry.”
After the councillors finished declaring their support for walls and shelter, they moved onto a slightly more controversial matter. The planned road layout has fewer, but larger, bus stops. Metlink hopes it will be more efficient and speed up bus trips. Among the stops that will be removed is the one outside the St James Theatre. Attendees would instead have to walk about 200 metres from the main Courtenay Place stop. “Two hundred metres on a rainy cold night is still a long way to go,” Pannett said, standing up for the important constituency of ballet fans who take public transport and don’t own coats.
Officers promised the stops would be no more than a five-minute walk apart. Pannett thought she had found a glaring hole in their evidence. “I walked from Courtenay Place along to Manners Street and it took seven minutes, yet one of your staff said it was five minutes,” she said. The officer explained they meant a pedestrian would never be more than five minutes from a bus stop, not that it would take five minutes to walk between them.
Councillor Nicola Young was highly concerned about the cycleway running down Courtenay Place, which could lead to “the nightmare of cyclists on pavements”. She demanded answers. “What penalties will there be for cyclists on the pavement?” she asked. When an officer burbled out a boring and serious response, she cut them off, “Could we do something like jail, or knock off their heads?”
But even if councillors did want to remove the cycleway or add extra bus stops, they can’t. According to officers, “that would be a change in scope and would have to go back to NZTA”.
Anything significant enough to change the objectives, outcomes or costs of the project would need to go back to NZTA for reconsideration, which means Simeon Brown could use his ministerial discretion to cancel funding for the entire thing.
Wellington City Council can’t afford to do the project without the 51% funding share from NZTA, so it isn’t going to risk making any changes. The council can’t even make changes that the transport minister would support, like removing the cycle lane, because they could be left with nothing. The latest round of engagement was essentially a farce, because the council can’t change anything other than making extremely minor tweaks around the edges.