spinofflive
hayden-traffic.png

PoliticsOctober 7, 2024

Traffic is made of cars

hayden-traffic.png

Please listen. 

Today is my last day as a fill-in Spinoff staff writer. These five weeks have been filled with incisive storytelling, literary achievement, and most of all, men with eels in their bums. Sadly now it’s over. But if I had to leave you with one message, it would be that traffic is made of cars.

Traffic is made of cars. The other day there was a story about people not being able to get to the airport because they were stuck behind other people waiting to get into the new mall. Do you know the problem? Too many cars. Why were there too many cars? Because there’s almost no other way to get to the airport or the mall. When you don’t give people other ways of getting around, everyone takes a car, and when lots of cars are together, that’s called traffic jam. 

“Wah wah wah,” you might say. “I saw a bike lane with no bikes in it.” First of all, irrelevant. If that bike lane was one quarter of a car lane, cars would drive there, and traffic is made of cars. Second of all, untrue. As many people travel into the city centre every day on bikes as on ferries. You just don’t see them because they’re small, sneaky, and sometimes behind a wall.

“Just add an extra car lane,” you might say. “Then there will be no traffic jam.” Many problems. 1. Not enough space. Cars are big and weigh many kilograms. 2. Too expensive. Roads are 10 billion dollars. 3. Pointless. Every time we widen a motorway it fills up with cars, and traffic is made of cars. In Texas they made a 26-lane freeway and it made traffic worse than before

But here is good news. If we remove car lanes, poof! Traffic often goes away. On Quay St they took away two car lanes and added two bike lanes and bus lanes. There is less congestion now. Why? Fewer cars. There were 19,841 cars per day there in 2018 and only 9867 per day now. 

Please help. I don’t know how to explain this. I have written so many articles. “The city is committed to a motorway system and all projections indicate that an increasing number of people will want to drive to the Central Area,” said the 1955 Master Transport Plan. We’ve been building motorways ever since. Seventy years. More congestion than ever before. Not working. 

Soon we’re going to build more new motorways to deal with the problems created by the old new motorways, and in the future a politician will stand up and say they need to build more new motorways to deal with the problems caused by these new motorways, and it will go on forever until I die and moulder away in the ground and eventually am paved over by a new motorway.

It is enough to drive a man a little bit batty. But thankfully I am fine. Okay I have to drive home now. Google says it’s one hour in heavy congestion. Why? Probably due to all the bike lanes.

Keep going!
Screenshot-2024-04-15-143854.jpg

PoliticsOctober 7, 2024

Windbag: Is there a case for the long tunnel?

Screenshot-2024-04-15-143854.jpg

Simeon Brown has tied himself to an unpopular and probably impossible project. But are there any positives?

Transport minister Simeon Brown is expected to make a decision in the coming weeks on the design for the second Mount Victoria tunnel, which is one of 149 projects being included in the Fast-track Approvals Bill. There are three options being considered, but the one that has garnered the most interest is the long tunnel, running all the way underneath the Wellington city centre.

The investigation has cost $1.6 million so far, which is not an unreasonable amount of money to spend during the early stages of a multibillion-dollar city-building project. But this is a transport minister who has been happy to attack other projects as “a gravy train for consultants”, which does make it seem a bit more hypocritical. 

The city council and regional council both hate the long tunnel. There is no natural constituency clamouring for it other than Simeon Brown himself and some late-career Marks and Johns at Waka Kotahi NZTA. It’s an easy project to mock, especially with its juvenile moniker – “the long tunnel” sounds like the title of a picture an eight-year-old would draw in crayon and send to the mayor.  But the long tunnel isn’t stupid. It’s expensive and high-risk, but if it were viable, it would be a fundamentally good idea.

three lanes of cars queued up on Jervois Quay in Wellington
Wellington traffic (Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

The long tunnel would solve real problems. It would speed up trips through Wellington and, more importantly, free up space in the city centre. Right now, State Highway 1 empties out onto Vivian Street, which would be a much more popular retail area if it wasn’t a car sewer. It cuts straight across Cuba Street, causing a noticeable drop in foot traffic south of the intersection.

Motorways have many of the same urban design disadvantages as railway tracks. Namely, they cut off one part of the city from another. This hurts cohesiveness and pedestrian movement and can lead to inequalities, hence the term “the wrong side of the tracks”. Moving the road underground would remove that barrier and help create a livelier city centre. The southern end of Te Aro is underdeveloped because the through traffic makes it unappealing; this presents a big opportunity for apartments.

Then, there’s the Basin Reserve, which has been an awkward issue for transport. It sits right in the middle of a complex intersection, with traffic going east/west between SH1 and the airport and traffic going north/south toward the city. It’s the worst possible location for a cricket ground, but it’s too sacred to our nation’s sporting fans to ever touch. If the long tunnel ran underneath the Basin, it would ease traffic flow and make it much easier to run high-speed buses to Newtown and Island Bay.

It’s not a question of whether the long tunnel would be good for Wellington – it would. The question is whether it is the best use of money. Is $4 billion (or whatever the final cost ends up being) worth it for a slightly quicker drive from the Hutt to the airport, a few apartments in Te Aro, and a slightly better service on the Number 1 bus? If the government built a smaller tunnel through Mount Victoria and used the rest of the money on light rail or bus rapid transit, it would be far more transformative for the city and its economic growth.

‘Hutt Valley, Kāpiti, down to the south coast. Our Wellington coverage is powered by members.’
Joel MacManus
— Wellington editor

There is a conflict of ideology that gets in the way of transport decision-making. Transport choice has become a culture war, driven in large part by Simeon Brown himself. The Green Party manifesto generally opposes all new roads. Labour and National are both more pragmatic; Labour tends to tip the balance of spending towards public and active transport, while National tips it towards roads.

It’s a popular talking point to say we should depoliticise infrastructure spending, but that’s oversimplifying the issue. Massive government works programmes are inherently political decisions, and the projects are based on different theories of what will take the country forward. At the same time, though, we shouldn’t overpoliticise it. While political leaders and beltway types get really steamed up when new projects are proposed, none of it actually matters much to the median voter. Most people don’t have strong views on the BCR of tunnelled vs surface light rail. Complaining about traffic and promising to build a massive new road is a good way to drum up a bit of local energy, but when voters walk into the polling station, transport is not at the top of their minds. Most people don’t attribute construction to any one person or party. 

Big infrastructure projects take a long time. Everyone complains during construction, and by the time it opens, there is usually a different government or at least a different minister. The VIPs at the Transmission Gully sod-turning included John Key, Peter Dunne and Hekia Parata. The opening ceremony was headlined by Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson and Michael Wood. None of them are in office any more. Motorists cruising towards Waikanae might be happy to have the road, but no one is sitting in their car screaming, “Thank you, Peter Dunne.” 

Politics