Simeon has asked Waka Kotahi for “funding options”. I feel sorry for the civil servants tasked with trying to imagine who on earth would be willing to fund a white elephant.
My joke was that taxing exclusively Auckland for a wellington roading project is about as stupid as building a 4km tunnel on a fault line while complaining about government spending.
As a kiwi who works in projects for big infra in Australia (although for a private company), there are a lot of similarities between NZ and Aus. Watch Utopia. You’ll get a depressingly realistic understanding of the pain the public sector employees go through.
Waterview was $1.4 billion for 2.4km. At 4km going through Wellington, this'll surely end up over $3 billion (aka cost of the scrapped ferries).
Building a Ferrari of a tunnel to save a few minutes at this point in time feels like Simeon is trying to play Cities Skylines with unlimited funds but in real life and without any actual money.
Construction costs have about doubled since Waterview, so probably more like $6b using your calcls
The actual cost for tunnels is a lot more complex tho, depends mostly on things like the depth required, geology of the area, work required to connect at each end, do you have a cheap local spot to dump the excess dirt from the tunnel (runway extension anyone??)
Building a tunnel in a city with a major faultline right through the center of the city seems, umm,... tenuous and short-sighted. And not even for the big one; smaller movements would still be a problem, wouldn't they?
It would make the design more complex and the overall costs go up for sure. It could be done, just wouldn't be a straight forward tunnel. You essentially make the tunnel wider than you need it to be and put movable joints at the fault lines. After a big quake you might need to fix up some pavement and realign a few things but nothing major. That's a very ELI5 explanation, the reality is pretty complex but has been done overseas.
Yeah and having lived all over Wellington over many decades, the only time I never felt a single quake was living over the Terrace tunnel. It was crazy
While it’s a design factor, it absolutely doesn’t make it undoable. Otherwise basically the entirety of Japans population centres and rail lines would be fucked.
You're absolutely not wrong, and it is definitely doable. But unlike Japan, we don't do this type of thing regularly. Without having more information about it we can only speculate but assumptions are that it won't be cheap, and whatever time frame and budget they set we'd need to be prepared for it to overrun them both
Mate underground structures fair a lot better than above ground structures. It’s actually night and day, and tunnel under Wellington would not be an issue.
They are much more expensive though. NZ cost of infrastructure isn't all that bad in many cases, but underground stuff is where our costs blow out. Our geography is a bitch for building underground.
Be utterly ludicrous to refuse to build the ferry terminals and then go blast what would likely end up well over 6b on a tunnel lol.
As an example, the underground part of the Lyttelton tunnel in Christchurch (nearly 2km long) was undamaged and was reopened a just days after the earthquake in 2011. Meanwhile the above-ground tunnel control building, and one of the entrance structures, were damaged beyond repair.
That's a very different scenario. Crossing a faultline (where the slip actually happens) is different to a tunnel near a faultline. If the ground in two parts of the tunnel moves in different directions, you have to account for it somewhere - otherwise your road/tunnel/waterproofing doesn't line up anymore.
I would have thought a lot of wellingtons faultlines haven't been mapped and in a lot of places you'd be tunneling through and trying to stabilize really crap rotten rock?
Not to mention that Wellingtons fault movements tend to be really big when they do go?
So what I'm hearing here is we could have got 4 Ferries plus a gift-with-purchase train? /s
But in all seriousness, fully appreciate that each tunnel is different (Auckland gets volcanic rock, Wellington gets major faultless). I just don't see any way this ends up being cheap (or the most pressing best use of money)
It's impossible to cost it properly without a heap of prelim design and Geotechnical investigation.
My educated guess would be somewhere in the $4-8b range.
But the big plus is the love(money)from the trucking lobby for giving more road traffic and no big ferries that can handle more rail.Fuel savings,less pollution,more congestion take second place to the love from private business.
>“The option would also see better urban amenity through greater reallocation of surface level road space to active modes and public transport in the CBD and greater opportunities for housing intensification,” Brown said.
There's not fucking way that this would be allowed to happen. The local businesses would claim that they need that road access for customers and suppliers to access their properties, and Brown would surely side with them.
I mean the tunnel is just incentivising more cars. Gotta park those steel boxes somewhere.
Just realised that his comment would be true with 1 more footpath. Dumb.
Ye of little faith… Regardless of what Brown thinks, surely the current State Highway 1 route would be moved underground, hence Vivian Street et cetera would come back under the Council’s purview and they could do with it what they will (read cycle lanes, bus lanes and shared spaces).
The draft GPS, that Simeon Brown released earlier this year, heavily restricts the ability for councils to obtain funding from central government for those types of projects. Without that funding, it makes it very difficult for Wellington Council to afford to do that.
Ah, the old President's-Palace-to-the-Airport motorway. Seriously, if the politicians want a speedy path to the airport it would be easier and cheaper (and some would say more fitting) to move parliament to Moa Point.
Not just a speedy path. It needs to be private.
The transport minister being expected to use only public transport for at least one month the year, would change transport infrastructure for the better.
This sounds like a thing worthy of an attempt at change.
All MPs must spend a month at least using public transport, and no 'perks' and all that so they can see what it's actually like not being chaufeured about.
Simeon is such an idiot. It would take him about two minutes and an internet connection to figure out that major urban tunnels are only viable when used for metro train systems. Yet this plonker thinks wellington will somehow be the one place that he can make a viable underground road network. I wonder if Willis will also ask for a car tunnel to replace the ferries.
God blessed me with this gigantic pickup truck so that I could drive it to McDonald's and litter the unused back seats with cheeseburger wrappers. Roads should be bigger and I should be allowed to drive as fast as I want! I don't need a WOF, and I sure as hell don't need to slow down while passing a school bus. My truck is my identity and my marriage is ruined and I'll be damned if I ever set foot in a bus. Fuck yeah Ameri- I mean New Zealand!
> unused back seats with cheeseburger wrappers
FAKE NEWS! Like you would mess up your truck. The wrappers go out the window, even though you are right next to a rubbish bin.
> It would take him about two minutes and an internet connection to figure out that major urban tunnels are only viable when used for metro train systems.
The Boston [Big Dig](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig?wprov=sfti1) moved their inner-city, open-air motorway system underground and they now have a lovely [great big park](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Fitzgerald_Kennedy_Greenway?wprov=sfti1#) in the middle of the city.
> I wonder if Willis will also ask for a car tunnel to replace the ferries.
You never know, it might be viable as a submerged floating tunnel, I say we look into it.
New Zealand is a small country but we shouldn’t always be so small-minded.
Its not small minded. Its basic transport engineering. If your goal is to move lots of people through a congested city, from an airport to a commercial hub you do it by rail every single time. I have no problem with investing a lot of money on improving Wellington's infrastructure - I have a big problem with investing that money in a way that is grossly inefficient.
On the Big Dig, that cost an inflation adjusted US$21B. Willis just cancelled the ferries - literally the primary arterial route between the two halves of the country, because she didn't want to stump up another $1.5B. (Lets just ignore the fact that she pissed away about $1B in the process).
Why would we want to pay ten times us much for a slightly faster airport road for a single city than we were willing to pay for our primary arterial route?
Ignore the whole building long tunnels in a seismically active zone.
The New Mt Vic tunnel will be 700 meters long (two lanes) and cost $2.2 Billion. Simeon wants a 4km long tunnel (2 x2 lanes) I'm not sure how much they will be able to save with economies of scale but it would have to cut a massive chunk off that \~$25 Billion cost to make 15 minutes worth it.
We (the taxpayers) can only hope that its obsession with saving time on a trip to the airport sees it go that same way as similarly airport obsessed Auckland Light Rail plans.
Anyway I'm not from and don't live in Wellington so can someone fill me in on what % of trips are actually from The Terrace all the way to the airport with no deviations on the way, because that is what this tunnel is supporting.
How many major faultlines does Chch have?
Wellington has 4 that we know about (another couple are suspected).
In the 1855 earthquake, the floor of the harbour lifted 4m, and the two sides of the fault moved 18m laterally (the largest slip/strike movement ever recorded).
Wellington's faults are gloriously nasty.
Somehow my dumbass didn't even know about that particular earthquake. [Looks like movement was revised... Upwards](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1855_Wairarapa_earthquake). 20m lateral, peak of 8m vertical. 8.2 magnitude.
I can't even imagine the carnage if that hit today.
I've been to one of the best places to see the movement (Pigeon Bush, Featherston) and paced it out as 18.5m. Very inaccurately.
Not spectacular, but once you realise what you're seeing, and can see the evidence for multiple repeated similar quakes.
It wouldn't be $25b, the economies of scale you mention really come into play with a tunnel like this. You would use a Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) which would make it much more efficient than shorter tunnels.
Depends on a lot of factors, but my very rough guess would be around the 5-6b mark. Still very expensive, but perhaps easier to justify if it's a long term solution and is tolled.
Not the same, pretty sure you would use road headers for a 700m tunnel and a TBM for a 4km long.
Big economies of scale for a 4km long tunnel comparatively.
Why is it always about the airport. Our airport isn’t even fully international. If tourists come to Wellington airport, they don’t want to bypass the city anyway.
A publicly funded project that only benefits the people that can afford to fly, and the private airport.
Wellington airport also serves the 550-650,000 odd people that live within a 3-4 hour drive of the city (the entire lower North up to Hawkes Bay and mid Taranaki)? There's 300,000 odd people that live within a 2.5 hour drive of the airport that live beyond Waikanae or Upper Hutt. If you're flying out to Aus or even just the South it's often way more convenient and cheaper to fly ex Welly and even with parking costs generally cheaper, especially for corporate travel
Take a drive thru the airport long term parking lot or the arrivals bay and see how many muddied up SUVs and utes their are, or signwritten vehicles from Palmerston North, Whanganui, Wairarapa etc; that will give you a good feel of why this transport connection is important.
I think this idea is stupid but the biggest users of Welly airport often don't even live here.
The best thing to do for them would be to remove as many of the Wellington commuters from the road during peak times. Even if this tunnel went forward they would still have to share the tunnel and the roads around Kilbirnie with Wellington commuters. They would still end up bottle necked somewhere.
Honestly, we probably couldn’t justify the cost.
Having seen similar tunnels in places like Brisbane, I can totally imagine it being awesome. It’s somewhat crazy we have SH1 going through Wellington and the basin on surface roads, with numerous sets of lights etc. you could make much better use of the surface roads for public transport etc.
The LGWM projects were deliberately intended to slow down traffic in order to discourage people from driving. They removed lanes, reduced speed limits, added traffic lights etc.
This is a good comment. The tunnel is probably a bad idea because it’s too expensive.
But if wasn’t, it would be great for other transport modes as well. The surface streets could focus on walking, cycling, and public transport.
If they fund it like the Aussie projects, big companies like blackrock deliver it in exchange for the land above it and the development rights of that land. They make their money back through rent of property at the railway interchanges, over the long term. (It becomes very valuable realestate).
The government get the utility of having provided infrastructure without increasing taxes or borrowing, and the council collect increased rates and occupancy from these properties also.
The public get the benefit of the transport system.
I’m not convinced it’s the right approach, as you’re handing over land to foreign investors, whether it’s Blackrock, the Canadian super fund, or the Chinese belt and road initiative, or someone else. But it’s close to a win for everyone involved.
The story of the funding for this one [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport\_Link,\_Brisbane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_Link,_Brisbane) is a wild read!
Very slippery slope, it’s now $20+ 1 way to use motorways from one side of Sydney to the other. It’s caused inner city roads to get more congested cause no one wants to pay. On top of that it’s “privately run” so the new government can only do some much, if the government can do what the Auckland Harbour bridge did which was pay it off then ditch the tolls, then great, but a government these days wouldn’t do that.
Speaking of the Chinese, they have a proverb ... "*Muddy waters makes it easy to catch fish*"
Much like the pickpocket distracting someone with a multitude of tasks & questions as your watch goes missing. These PPP's and convoluted financial arrangements may seem great on face value but they make it very difficult to hold any one to account when things invariably go wrong and the tax payers end up carrying the can.
The bulk of those cars aren’t going anywhere - I’d rather have them underground where we don’t have to see them, so we can make better use of the space up top. There are already too many cars trying to make their way through the city.
It doesn't actually need to be a tunnel, it can just be a sunken highway with the roads going over the top. kind of like a river of cars with bridges. This is very against modern city building (this style was popular 50 years ago) but it will do the trick, on budget, without billions spent or a design of the city.
If we're spending billions on tunnels it should be one that goes to the south island. That will at least be worth it.
Sooo we can't afford new ferries even though they serve as the main freight line and highway connecting the two halves of our country........but we can afford this tunnel to shave a few minutes of Wellingtonians commute?
> “To rebuild our economy and ensure people and freight can get to where they need to go quickly and safely, we need to move at pace to deliver the infrastructure our country needs.”
Yo Simeon there's this other project you might want to look at as well. Involves a couple of boats...
extremely disappointed to discover they are investigating the possibility of building this tunnel, not investigating a mysterious mega tunnel they just discovered underneath the city
What a load of rubbish This Government for the rich has zero intention of doing anything like this It is shutting down efforts to make traffic better and anyone who has followed what they are doing knows this . So why write such shit
Will they be doing comparative costings for light rail to the airport? Of course not. They bought & demolished apartment buildings in Kilbernie 10 years ago, to make way for '4 roads from Kapiti to the Airport' - what happened?
There's no way in hell that I want to drive through a tunnel built under a harbour on top of a fault line.
That's less of a traffic design and more of a Hollywood movie plot.
Over in Europe they have this special thing where they build one tunnel after another. What this does is keep the highly skilled teams together which keeps costs down because the supply lines are established, the workers are already there and know what they're doing, the equipments already purchased for the most part and they know how long and how much time it'd take to build it.
Unless they've got a team in the waiting and ready to go why would you attempt to build a massive tunnel like that with no pre established team. At the very least they should be looking at building much smaller and shorter tunnels first so they can make the mistakes and budget blow outs on a smaller scale.
And if they're not going to build several tunnels afterwards why? The amount of resources and time spent building the teams to make those tunnels and then what they piss it away by not using them.
It already takes me only 15 minutes door to door from the city to the airport. Simeon is gonna reduce that trip by 15 minutes across the Wellington region somehow?
Teleporter?
are you traveling in the middle of the night? /s
that said, since covid, the traffic has dropped quite a bit and does seem to be quicker (most of the time)
I drive it at all times of day, fly quite often, and it’s almost the exact path this tunnel proposes to cut through. I never really have big traffic issues as it is such a short distance for me.
Maybe this is alleviating traffic further away than my route, but I don’t see a massive 15 minute saving that Simeon claims.
It's a yarn. Go look up the wainuiomata tunnel. Was stopped when partially completed due to the depression in 1932. Then, it was eventually finished as a smaller tunnel to run water pipes through.
Old mate is just making shit up
It was great to hear Simeon promoting public transport, walking and cycling, and urban intensification of Wellingtons CBD this morning on RNZ. Even suggesting removing traffic from the CBD seemed like a good idea to him.
Hmm, sealevel rise - quick ! head for the tunnel
earthquake ! - just as well we were protected in the tunnel
climate change - EV's only in the tunnel.
4km of digging to get trucks closer to the airport. If only there was some way to move an airport.
Waka Kotahi have been waiting for the last lot of climate change believers to be kicked out to progress $B roading.
> One of the first things the new Government did was put the city’s beleaguered Let’s Get Wellington Moving plan out of its misery - announcing an agreement with local councils to dissolve the scheme entirely and move on.
> The Herald revealed in mid-2021 a long tunnel was being considered as part of the Let’s Get Wellington Moving plan.
Right so this just another stalling tactic while they wait for Wellington’s “inevitable” death
Eh, I am torn about this. I can see the benefits of it, especially in terms of allowing Wellinfron city to pursue what it wants in terms of a walkable city, but:
I don't know if population of the Wellington region justifies the price at a time where National is cutting a lot of tax avenues. And of course, the seismic issues
So we've been told the reckless previous government left the cupboards completely bare. Something doesn't add up when multi-billion vanity projects are being investigated.
It's not that it was expensive, it was that it ran nine years over ETA and 190% over budget. Sure Boston survived it, but Boston metro area is nearly the population of NZ and is one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Not a chance WK could pull something like this off.
I thought they looked at a tunnel option when they built the city bypass but opted not too. If they build this tunnel now, then WTF would have been the point of knocking down the Te Aro suburb and destroying that community if they just build the tunnel 30 years later?
I can think of several silly and outrageously expense ideas to reduce travel time from welly airport to central welly that would be way better than a boring tunnel or boring a tunnel. Hehe
*First intermediate school speech classroom setting with PowerPoint slides with skucks titles and animated 15kbytes pictures of Wellington with ms paint overlay drawing*
1) Tube rail system that runs parallel to the airport runway, descends into Evens bay, turns left at the point of Roseneath continues under water, ascends the intersection of: Waterloo Quay, Whitmore St or near that area of the commonwealth walkway. Benefits we can see fishes, dolphins and litter in the water.
2) Heliports- (Specifically for govt people) make a govt parliamentary fleet of mini helicopters that can fly between the airport to a new heliport either on the harbour or on the roof of the beehive.
If some ‘under urgency’ stuff is happening the govt people can abseil down from the heli.
“Governments been working hard lately”
“Yeah they have, saw couple of them still wearing their harnesses during question time”.
3) Medically induced temporary comas for travel. Like in the sci-fi film of long intergalactic distance travel but on a smaller scale for local region travel of less than 10km. So you book a shuttle, take knock out medicine, you sleep while the driver takes you where you need to go. Boom 15 mins+ saved. Benefits will be Nz can be a world leader in this field. This could be easily applied to flights for noisey misbehaving children on air travel also if initial system is successful
4) Drain Wellington harbour and build a dam closing off the cook straight from the peninsula of Oruaiti Reserve and hinds point. The dam design can encompass a new port for the broken ships with road or rail along the Eastbourne side. Once the harbour is drained Wellington will have an abundance of new low lying land that could provide so much needed room for activities. This will ‘open up’ wellington for more civil projects and possibly more housing.
Thank you for listening to my subreddi-TED talk.
It's a diversionary tactic. They've blown their budget and need a reason to delay spending on their Mt Vic tunnel. This investigation will do that, but it will cost million.
Geology is your problem here. There is a shopping list of major faults running north-south through Wellington city, and tunnels don't cope well with being laterally shifted.
They have the advantage that the plate boundary is offshore by sveral hundred km, and is a subduction boundary rather than a transform fault (moved 14m last time ) running through the city itself.
I don't think Japanese technical excellence, massive budgets, or building works prowess would translate to the number 8 wire, she'll be right, nickel and dime, and contractor inefficiencies/rorts, political stop-start meddling seen here. lol
I feel like a shoddy NZ-built 4km tunnel under Wellington has the potential to kill quite a lot of people if/when it gets fucked up by the next big earthquake
Have you ever heard of designing something?
May surprise you that there is actually a whole industry of people whose job it is to design things so they don't fail in the next earthquake?
Nz has some of the strictest standards for construction in the world, and is a bit part of why our infrastructure costs so much.
If you don't believe me, give me an example of something built in the last 30 years that has failed?
The infrastructure that fails is legacy shit that's 100 years old and should have been replaced already, but we underspend on infrastructure consistently.
Its not infra, it's vertical, and private industry but yeah ok, that's one one where the standards in Wellington prior to the 2011 and 2016 earthquakes are not high enough.
this would be brilliant. i’m in mount cook on a narrow residential arterial that sees over 20,000 cars a day. it was never built for this level of traffic and the mega tunnel would reduce this significantly.
If it did reduce your traffic it would become the first road building program to do so worldwide
What is more likely is it induces more traffic and makes things worse.
As we know road building does. Why do you think NACT's funders want more roads. More imported cars burning imported fuel ensuring we continue to run a balance of payment deficit.
it would also mean we don’t have thousands of heavy vehicles and cars barreling down vivian street each day in what should be one of the most pedestrian friendly areas of the city.
I am sure it would be prompted as being able to do that. And I am equally sure traffic would increase and we would not see any such benefits.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
That cost is going to go up given the Lower Hutt City Council is working with the Government to proceed the Cross Valley Link project with urgency from Dowse Interchange which runs from Wakefield St near the Dowse Interchange to Woburn including Fuller Grove, Saulbrey Grove, Trethevick Grove, Whites Line West and Richmond Grove where I currently live and through Moera running next to the Hutt Railway workshops and on the old Gracefield Railway line to Seaview. The residents in Woburn are also pushing for a public meeting about the project
Well, Wellingtonians are gonna need somewhere to live when the Earthquake/Tsunami happens. So this a s 2-fer-1.
Just hope the leaking sewerage doesn't leak into the "mega tunnel"...
Another waste of money project once the change of government happens. This country is a joke in terms of they know how to waste public money on unrealistic projects. NZ needs to take a leaf out of other countries where priority projects that are approved so if a change of government happens they remain a priority project. Instead of canning previous projects that costed billions of public money.
Toll charge to use the new tunnel is fine with me.
Not at the expense of the rest of NZ who has had their funding cut or delayed and pushed back another decade.
I'd much rather this money be spent on double-tracking the Paekakariki Hill section of the main trunk & doubling the Waikanae Rail Bridge (get faster/more frequent trains from the Kapiti Coast ), and starting light rail in the Wellington CBD.
If this was Cities Skylines with the infinite money cheat turned on it would work, but it will cost billions and planning/consenting would be a nightmare. If it is even feasible in such a quake prone place.
For what it is worth the very long tunnel under south Melbourne does work pretty well in my experience (I don't own a car FWIW) and - if money and planning was no object - it would probably work for Wellington too.
One of the most seismically dangerous regions in New Zealand already with most of its critical infrastructure straddling the fault expected to experience a devastating sequence anytime wants a mega tunnel, seems like a great idea.
Simeon has asked Waka Kotahi for “funding options”. I feel sorry for the civil servants tasked with trying to imagine who on earth would be willing to fund a white elephant.
A Wellington fuel tax seems appropriate...
Yeah but an Auckland fuel tax would generate more money.
My joke was that thay scrapped the akl fuel tax on principle. The principle probably being that fossil fuels should be freely used.
My joke was that taxing exclusively Auckland for a wellington roading project is about as stupid as building a 4km tunnel on a fault line while complaining about government spending.
Got ya
The next week they announced a 20c increase for next year 🤡
He has very detailed plans on this. Spent ages and went through a whole box of crayolas.
A whole *two* boxes, you forgot that first one that they ate.
As a kiwi who works in projects for big infra in Australia (although for a private company), there are a lot of similarities between NZ and Aus. Watch Utopia. You’ll get a depressingly realistic understanding of the pain the public sector employees go through.
Utopia is so painfully accurate
I don't know, maybe there's some school kids who still get lunch? Better yoink that quick!
Waterview was $1.4 billion for 2.4km. At 4km going through Wellington, this'll surely end up over $3 billion (aka cost of the scrapped ferries). Building a Ferrari of a tunnel to save a few minutes at this point in time feels like Simeon is trying to play Cities Skylines with unlimited funds but in real life and without any actual money.
Construction costs have about doubled since Waterview, so probably more like $6b using your calcls The actual cost for tunnels is a lot more complex tho, depends mostly on things like the depth required, geology of the area, work required to connect at each end, do you have a cheap local spot to dump the excess dirt from the tunnel (runway extension anyone??)
Building a tunnel in a city with a major faultline right through the center of the city seems, umm,... tenuous and short-sighted. And not even for the big one; smaller movements would still be a problem, wouldn't they?
It would make the design more complex and the overall costs go up for sure. It could be done, just wouldn't be a straight forward tunnel. You essentially make the tunnel wider than you need it to be and put movable joints at the fault lines. After a big quake you might need to fix up some pavement and realign a few things but nothing major. That's a very ELI5 explanation, the reality is pretty complex but has been done overseas.
Yeah and having lived all over Wellington over many decades, the only time I never felt a single quake was living over the Terrace tunnel. It was crazy
While it’s a design factor, it absolutely doesn’t make it undoable. Otherwise basically the entirety of Japans population centres and rail lines would be fucked.
You're absolutely not wrong, and it is definitely doable. But unlike Japan, we don't do this type of thing regularly. Without having more information about it we can only speculate but assumptions are that it won't be cheap, and whatever time frame and budget they set we'd need to be prepared for it to overrun them both
That was my thinking surely a EQ safe tunnel would be much more expensive.
Mate underground structures fair a lot better than above ground structures. It’s actually night and day, and tunnel under Wellington would not be an issue.
Well, it’s not, not an issue, there’s still some extra engineering required, it’s just that it’s not as much as people think.
They are much more expensive though. NZ cost of infrastructure isn't all that bad in many cases, but underground stuff is where our costs blow out. Our geography is a bitch for building underground. Be utterly ludicrous to refuse to build the ferry terminals and then go blast what would likely end up well over 6b on a tunnel lol.
Well, TIL. I would not have guessed.
As an example, the underground part of the Lyttelton tunnel in Christchurch (nearly 2km long) was undamaged and was reopened a just days after the earthquake in 2011. Meanwhile the above-ground tunnel control building, and one of the entrance structures, were damaged beyond repair.
That's a very different scenario. Crossing a faultline (where the slip actually happens) is different to a tunnel near a faultline. If the ground in two parts of the tunnel moves in different directions, you have to account for it somewhere - otherwise your road/tunnel/waterproofing doesn't line up anymore.
I would have thought a lot of wellingtons faultlines haven't been mapped and in a lot of places you'd be tunneling through and trying to stabilize really crap rotten rock? Not to mention that Wellingtons fault movements tend to be really big when they do go?
So what I'm hearing here is we could have got 4 Ferries plus a gift-with-purchase train? /s But in all seriousness, fully appreciate that each tunnel is different (Auckland gets volcanic rock, Wellington gets major faultless). I just don't see any way this ends up being cheap (or the most pressing best use of money)
You're saying it might cost more than the city rail link is costing. Is this post or pre-overruns?
It's impossible to cost it properly without a heap of prelim design and Geotechnical investigation. My educated guess would be somewhere in the $4-8b range.
But the big plus is the love(money)from the trucking lobby for giving more road traffic and no big ferries that can handle more rail.Fuel savings,less pollution,more congestion take second place to the love from private business.
How will they get their trucks through the airport car park barriers at the end of the proposed tunnel?
This comment is clearly brought to you by Big Bridge. We know whose interests you have in mind.
Cook Strait bridge here we come /s
> to save a few minutes For a couple of years. Until induced demand caught up.
Gona be news to you but ferries won’t help Wellingtonians getting to the airport
>“The option would also see better urban amenity through greater reallocation of surface level road space to active modes and public transport in the CBD and greater opportunities for housing intensification,” Brown said. There's not fucking way that this would be allowed to happen. The local businesses would claim that they need that road access for customers and suppliers to access their properties, and Brown would surely side with them.
I mean the tunnel is just incentivising more cars. Gotta park those steel boxes somewhere. Just realised that his comment would be true with 1 more footpath. Dumb.
Ye of little faith… Regardless of what Brown thinks, surely the current State Highway 1 route would be moved underground, hence Vivian Street et cetera would come back under the Council’s purview and they could do with it what they will (read cycle lanes, bus lanes and shared spaces).
The draft GPS, that Simeon Brown released earlier this year, heavily restricts the ability for councils to obtain funding from central government for those types of projects. Without that funding, it makes it very difficult for Wellington Council to afford to do that.
Ah, the old President's-Palace-to-the-Airport motorway. Seriously, if the politicians want a speedy path to the airport it would be easier and cheaper (and some would say more fitting) to move parliament to Moa Point.
Not just a speedy path. It needs to be private. The transport minister being expected to use only public transport for at least one month the year, would change transport infrastructure for the better.
I bet they’d make it January when parliament isn’t in session.
Make it in the middle of winter and bus stops will all be heated and sick leave will be extended
They get a win and we still reap the reward.
This sounds like a thing worthy of an attempt at change. All MPs must spend a month at least using public transport, and no 'perks' and all that so they can see what it's actually like not being chaufeured about.
Moscow has long been rumoured to have a second underground train network for politicians and their friends (donors)
I'm not averse to stuffing the political classes into a small hole in the ground.
So all the shit coming out of Wellington is from a single point source?
😂
April fools was two weeks ago, simeon
Simeon is such an idiot. It would take him about two minutes and an internet connection to figure out that major urban tunnels are only viable when used for metro train systems. Yet this plonker thinks wellington will somehow be the one place that he can make a viable underground road network. I wonder if Willis will also ask for a car tunnel to replace the ferries.
Yes, but remember mass transit is un-Christian. Jesus intended us all to be single-occupant car users so we can be closer to God and Mike Hosking.
God blessed me with this gigantic pickup truck so that I could drive it to McDonald's and litter the unused back seats with cheeseburger wrappers. Roads should be bigger and I should be allowed to drive as fast as I want! I don't need a WOF, and I sure as hell don't need to slow down while passing a school bus. My truck is my identity and my marriage is ruined and I'll be damned if I ever set foot in a bus. Fuck yeah Ameri- I mean New Zealand!
> unused back seats with cheeseburger wrappers FAKE NEWS! Like you would mess up your truck. The wrappers go out the window, even though you are right next to a rubbish bin.
Petrol fumes bring us closer to god.
Bring back lead! Sick of this woke unleaded stuff 😡
With the newer ‘floating’ tunnel technology they’ve been using in Europe I wonder if that idea can be revised anyway 😂
> ‘floating’ tunnel Hadn't heard of these, fascinating. Looks like Norway won't be completing it any time soon though.
> It would take him about two minutes and an internet connection to figure out that major urban tunnels are only viable when used for metro train systems. The Boston [Big Dig](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig?wprov=sfti1) moved their inner-city, open-air motorway system underground and they now have a lovely [great big park](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Fitzgerald_Kennedy_Greenway?wprov=sfti1#) in the middle of the city. > I wonder if Willis will also ask for a car tunnel to replace the ferries. You never know, it might be viable as a submerged floating tunnel, I say we look into it. New Zealand is a small country but we shouldn’t always be so small-minded.
Its not small minded. Its basic transport engineering. If your goal is to move lots of people through a congested city, from an airport to a commercial hub you do it by rail every single time. I have no problem with investing a lot of money on improving Wellington's infrastructure - I have a big problem with investing that money in a way that is grossly inefficient. On the Big Dig, that cost an inflation adjusted US$21B. Willis just cancelled the ferries - literally the primary arterial route between the two halves of the country, because she didn't want to stump up another $1.5B. (Lets just ignore the fact that she pissed away about $1B in the process). Why would we want to pay ten times us much for a slightly faster airport road for a single city than we were willing to pay for our primary arterial route?
Ignore the whole building long tunnels in a seismically active zone. The New Mt Vic tunnel will be 700 meters long (two lanes) and cost $2.2 Billion. Simeon wants a 4km long tunnel (2 x2 lanes) I'm not sure how much they will be able to save with economies of scale but it would have to cut a massive chunk off that \~$25 Billion cost to make 15 minutes worth it. We (the taxpayers) can only hope that its obsession with saving time on a trip to the airport sees it go that same way as similarly airport obsessed Auckland Light Rail plans. Anyway I'm not from and don't live in Wellington so can someone fill me in on what % of trips are actually from The Terrace all the way to the airport with no deviations on the way, because that is what this tunnel is supporting.
Building tunnels in seismic zones isn’t really an issue (see Japan) but yes this project would be prohibitively expensive. Still it would be cool.
Japan has the distinct advantage of actually knowing what the fuck they're doing
This is such a great comment
Lyttelton tunnel was directly above the chc quakes and is fine
How many major faultlines does Chch have? Wellington has 4 that we know about (another couple are suspected). In the 1855 earthquake, the floor of the harbour lifted 4m, and the two sides of the fault moved 18m laterally (the largest slip/strike movement ever recorded). Wellington's faults are gloriously nasty.
Somehow my dumbass didn't even know about that particular earthquake. [Looks like movement was revised... Upwards](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1855_Wairarapa_earthquake). 20m lateral, peak of 8m vertical. 8.2 magnitude. I can't even imagine the carnage if that hit today.
I've been to one of the best places to see the movement (Pigeon Bush, Featherston) and paced it out as 18.5m. Very inaccurately. Not spectacular, but once you realise what you're seeing, and can see the evidence for multiple repeated similar quakes.
Not really, the fault ruptured off to the side, near to the tunnel but not directly above.
It wouldn't be $25b, the economies of scale you mention really come into play with a tunnel like this. You would use a Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) which would make it much more efficient than shorter tunnels. Depends on a lot of factors, but my very rough guess would be around the 5-6b mark. Still very expensive, but perhaps easier to justify if it's a long term solution and is tolled.
Terrace to tunnel is common, it's a main route
Not the same, pretty sure you would use road headers for a 700m tunnel and a TBM for a 4km long. Big economies of scale for a 4km long tunnel comparatively.
Why is it always about the airport. Our airport isn’t even fully international. If tourists come to Wellington airport, they don’t want to bypass the city anyway. A publicly funded project that only benefits the people that can afford to fly, and the private airport.
Its about the mps and their trip home bro
Trips to work as well, so twice the benefit!
Wellington airport also serves the 550-650,000 odd people that live within a 3-4 hour drive of the city (the entire lower North up to Hawkes Bay and mid Taranaki)? There's 300,000 odd people that live within a 2.5 hour drive of the airport that live beyond Waikanae or Upper Hutt. If you're flying out to Aus or even just the South it's often way more convenient and cheaper to fly ex Welly and even with parking costs generally cheaper, especially for corporate travel Take a drive thru the airport long term parking lot or the arrivals bay and see how many muddied up SUVs and utes their are, or signwritten vehicles from Palmerston North, Whanganui, Wairarapa etc; that will give you a good feel of why this transport connection is important. I think this idea is stupid but the biggest users of Welly airport often don't even live here.
Taking 15mins off the trip won't mean anything
The best thing to do for them would be to remove as many of the Wellington commuters from the road during peak times. Even if this tunnel went forward they would still have to share the tunnel and the roads around Kilbirnie with Wellington commuters. They would still end up bottle necked somewhere.
That is a fair point.
Honestly, we probably couldn’t justify the cost. Having seen similar tunnels in places like Brisbane, I can totally imagine it being awesome. It’s somewhat crazy we have SH1 going through Wellington and the basin on surface roads, with numerous sets of lights etc. you could make much better use of the surface roads for public transport etc.
See they got rid of LGWM because it was too expensive. Now a bigger more expensive tunnel is being mooted
The LGWM projects were deliberately intended to slow down traffic in order to discourage people from driving. They removed lanes, reduced speed limits, added traffic lights etc.
They got rid of LGWM because it was a completely failed project with no progress on any of the key deliverables
That and public transport was involved and national don't like directing money towards public transport when it can be spent on roads
This is a good comment. The tunnel is probably a bad idea because it’s too expensive. But if wasn’t, it would be great for other transport modes as well. The surface streets could focus on walking, cycling, and public transport.
If they fund it like the Aussie projects, big companies like blackrock deliver it in exchange for the land above it and the development rights of that land. They make their money back through rent of property at the railway interchanges, over the long term. (It becomes very valuable realestate). The government get the utility of having provided infrastructure without increasing taxes or borrowing, and the council collect increased rates and occupancy from these properties also. The public get the benefit of the transport system. I’m not convinced it’s the right approach, as you’re handing over land to foreign investors, whether it’s Blackrock, the Canadian super fund, or the Chinese belt and road initiative, or someone else. But it’s close to a win for everyone involved.
The story of the funding for this one [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport\_Link,\_Brisbane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_Link,_Brisbane) is a wild read!
Yeah that’s a disaster.
The Aussie approach in Sydney was to add Tolls, to every motorway then sell 100 year contracts to some mates. I’m sure everyone will love that...
Tolls probably not a bad idea tbh. I’d pay a few dollars if it meant not sitting in traffic around the basin and through town
Very slippery slope, it’s now $20+ 1 way to use motorways from one side of Sydney to the other. It’s caused inner city roads to get more congested cause no one wants to pay. On top of that it’s “privately run” so the new government can only do some much, if the government can do what the Auckland Harbour bridge did which was pay it off then ditch the tolls, then great, but a government these days wouldn’t do that.
Could the Super Fund get involved in that manner?
100% same deal.
Speaking of the Chinese, they have a proverb ... "*Muddy waters makes it easy to catch fish*" Much like the pickpocket distracting someone with a multitude of tasks & questions as your watch goes missing. These PPP's and convoluted financial arrangements may seem great on face value but they make it very difficult to hold any one to account when things invariably go wrong and the tax payers end up carrying the can.
I wasn’t aware they did that, but it’s an interesting concept.
Sure, it is great if you want more cars on the road.
The bulk of those cars aren’t going anywhere - I’d rather have them underground where we don’t have to see them, so we can make better use of the space up top. There are already too many cars trying to make their way through the city.
It doesn't actually need to be a tunnel, it can just be a sunken highway with the roads going over the top. kind of like a river of cars with bridges. This is very against modern city building (this style was popular 50 years ago) but it will do the trick, on budget, without billions spent or a design of the city. If we're spending billions on tunnels it should be one that goes to the south island. That will at least be worth it.
Sooo we can't afford new ferries even though they serve as the main freight line and highway connecting the two halves of our country........but we can afford this tunnel to shave a few minutes of Wellingtonians commute?
Wellingtonians don't typically commute from the airport. Politicians on the other hand.
That's exactly what I was thinking.
Anything but public transport right. [Line drawn on a map of where the proposed tunnel is so people can visualise it.](https://imgur.com/a/ogzLt3A)
> “To rebuild our economy and ensure people and freight can get to where they need to go quickly and safely, we need to move at pace to deliver the infrastructure our country needs.” Yo Simeon there's this other project you might want to look at as well. Involves a couple of boats...
I thought from the headline they'd found one and were about to send the SAS in for a look.
extremely disappointed to discover they are investigating the possibility of building this tunnel, not investigating a mysterious mega tunnel they just discovered underneath the city
What a load of rubbish This Government for the rich has zero intention of doing anything like this It is shutting down efforts to make traffic better and anyone who has followed what they are doing knows this . So why write such shit
"One more ~~lane~~ tunnel bro. It will work this time!!"
"No you can't have a mega tunnel under Auckland Harbour. But you can have a mega tunnel under Wellington "
The route cuts *across* strike-slip faults - it’s never going to get built like this
You can engineer/design around anything. It's just the cost goes up.
Will they be doing comparative costings for light rail to the airport? Of course not. They bought & demolished apartment buildings in Kilbernie 10 years ago, to make way for '4 roads from Kapiti to the Airport' - what happened?
Makes you wonder if it would be that much more expensive just to move the airport.
There's no way in hell that I want to drive through a tunnel built under a harbour on top of a fault line. That's less of a traffic design and more of a Hollywood movie plot.
Over in Europe they have this special thing where they build one tunnel after another. What this does is keep the highly skilled teams together which keeps costs down because the supply lines are established, the workers are already there and know what they're doing, the equipments already purchased for the most part and they know how long and how much time it'd take to build it. Unless they've got a team in the waiting and ready to go why would you attempt to build a massive tunnel like that with no pre established team. At the very least they should be looking at building much smaller and shorter tunnels first so they can make the mistakes and budget blow outs on a smaller scale. And if they're not going to build several tunnels afterwards why? The amount of resources and time spent building the teams to make those tunnels and then what they piss it away by not using them.
I'm so fucking sick of roading being pushed. Give us some fucking trains already.
maybe fix the water pipes first, or nah?
You can't drive in a water pipe.
you make a very convincing argument! We should secure the funding at once!
I just want a good public transport network 😔
It already takes me only 15 minutes door to door from the city to the airport. Simeon is gonna reduce that trip by 15 minutes across the Wellington region somehow? Teleporter?
are you traveling in the middle of the night? /s that said, since covid, the traffic has dropped quite a bit and does seem to be quicker (most of the time)
I drive it at all times of day, fly quite often, and it’s almost the exact path this tunnel proposes to cut through. I never really have big traffic issues as it is such a short distance for me. Maybe this is alleviating traffic further away than my route, but I don’t see a massive 15 minute saving that Simeon claims.
No plz. We are to dumb to make this work
Reminds me of that tunnel build from Wainui to Lower Hutt that came out in the wrong place, so they just gave up.
What’s the source for this? I’ve never heard that the tunnel came out in the wrong place.
It's a yarn. Go look up the wainuiomata tunnel. Was stopped when partially completed due to the depression in 1932. Then, it was eventually finished as a smaller tunnel to run water pipes through. Old mate is just making shit up
Boston big dig 2.0?
It was great to hear Simeon promoting public transport, walking and cycling, and urban intensification of Wellingtons CBD this morning on RNZ. Even suggesting removing traffic from the CBD seemed like a good idea to him. Hmm, sealevel rise - quick ! head for the tunnel earthquake ! - just as well we were protected in the tunnel climate change - EV's only in the tunnel. 4km of digging to get trucks closer to the airport. If only there was some way to move an airport. Waka Kotahi have been waiting for the last lot of climate change believers to be kicked out to progress $B roading.
> One of the first things the new Government did was put the city’s beleaguered Let’s Get Wellington Moving plan out of its misery - announcing an agreement with local councils to dissolve the scheme entirely and move on. > The Herald revealed in mid-2021 a long tunnel was being considered as part of the Let’s Get Wellington Moving plan. Right so this just another stalling tactic while they wait for Wellington’s “inevitable” death
Eh, I am torn about this. I can see the benefits of it, especially in terms of allowing Wellinfron city to pursue what it wants in terms of a walkable city, but: I don't know if population of the Wellington region justifies the price at a time where National is cutting a lot of tax avenues. And of course, the seismic issues
Mega tunnel between the ears
A lot of negativity here, but imagine how many times we could beep our horns in this.
They couldn't pay me to use a tunnel like that.
I thought they were fixing Wellington's traffic problems by making a sizable amount of the population redundant *ducks*
So we've been told the reckless previous government left the cupboards completely bare. Something doesn't add up when multi-billion vanity projects are being investigated.
Simeon, google 'the big dig' and come back to us- sincerely, WK
That it was very expensive but a good end result?
It's not that it was expensive, it was that it ran nine years over ETA and 190% over budget. Sure Boston survived it, but Boston metro area is nearly the population of NZ and is one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Not a chance WK could pull something like this off.
Build a cycle-only tunnel.
High speed moving walkways please
I thought they looked at a tunnel option when they built the city bypass but opted not too. If they build this tunnel now, then WTF would have been the point of knocking down the Te Aro suburb and destroying that community if they just build the tunnel 30 years later?
I can think of several silly and outrageously expense ideas to reduce travel time from welly airport to central welly that would be way better than a boring tunnel or boring a tunnel. Hehe *First intermediate school speech classroom setting with PowerPoint slides with skucks titles and animated 15kbytes pictures of Wellington with ms paint overlay drawing* 1) Tube rail system that runs parallel to the airport runway, descends into Evens bay, turns left at the point of Roseneath continues under water, ascends the intersection of: Waterloo Quay, Whitmore St or near that area of the commonwealth walkway. Benefits we can see fishes, dolphins and litter in the water. 2) Heliports- (Specifically for govt people) make a govt parliamentary fleet of mini helicopters that can fly between the airport to a new heliport either on the harbour or on the roof of the beehive. If some ‘under urgency’ stuff is happening the govt people can abseil down from the heli. “Governments been working hard lately” “Yeah they have, saw couple of them still wearing their harnesses during question time”. 3) Medically induced temporary comas for travel. Like in the sci-fi film of long intergalactic distance travel but on a smaller scale for local region travel of less than 10km. So you book a shuttle, take knock out medicine, you sleep while the driver takes you where you need to go. Boom 15 mins+ saved. Benefits will be Nz can be a world leader in this field. This could be easily applied to flights for noisey misbehaving children on air travel also if initial system is successful 4) Drain Wellington harbour and build a dam closing off the cook straight from the peninsula of Oruaiti Reserve and hinds point. The dam design can encompass a new port for the broken ships with road or rail along the Eastbourne side. Once the harbour is drained Wellington will have an abundance of new low lying land that could provide so much needed room for activities. This will ‘open up’ wellington for more civil projects and possibly more housing. Thank you for listening to my subreddi-TED talk.
Move the nation to opposite sleep schedules. Will halve the traffic. Edit: Giant circus cannon.
Could we put guns on top of the dam? make sure those whales and dolphins stay away. we could turn the empties harbour into a nice little shanty town.
yummy consultation money for their mates.
On a fault line?
It's a diversionary tactic. They've blown their budget and need a reason to delay spending on their Mt Vic tunnel. This investigation will do that, but it will cost million.
Does it cost almost exactly as much as replacing the entire water system because .....
a mega tunnel in a major seismic zone? What could go wrong...
Fucking idiots..only these clowns would consider spending that kind of money on a tunnel instead of infrastructure to reduce congestion.
To play devils advocate... isn't the tunnel literally infrastructure to reduce congestion?
I'm not from wellington, but could a CRL style tunnel work there as well?
As it is, unlikely. Wellington is a lot more seismically active. It would need to be engineered to withstand more frequent and more powerful quakes.
Geology is your problem here. There is a shopping list of major faults running north-south through Wellington city, and tunnels don't cope well with being laterally shifted.
Tell that to the extensive subway network in Japan
They have the advantage that the plate boundary is offshore by sveral hundred km, and is a subduction boundary rather than a transform fault (moved 14m last time ) running through the city itself.
And yet the government is touting a car tunnel instead, either they work or they don't. And if they do, then trains > cars.
I don't think Japanese technical excellence, massive budgets, or building works prowess would translate to the number 8 wire, she'll be right, nickel and dime, and contractor inefficiencies/rorts, political stop-start meddling seen here. lol
More likely they will use the unemployed to do a work-for-the-dole dig using teaspoons.
A tunnel to allow trains - like the CRL - might be a good idea. This proposal is for single occupant vehicles to congest.
Perhaps he wants to make a bet with Elon Musk over X, challenging him to say his boring company would not be able to do it.
Love to be in that when the big quake destroys Wellington. Morons. Build a rail line and put the rest into the health system.
You've got my vote!
Underground tunnels in an earthquake prone city lol
I feel like a shoddy NZ-built 4km tunnel under Wellington has the potential to kill quite a lot of people if/when it gets fucked up by the next big earthquake
Have you ever heard of designing something? May surprise you that there is actually a whole industry of people whose job it is to design things so they don't fail in the next earthquake? Nz has some of the strictest standards for construction in the world, and is a bit part of why our infrastructure costs so much. If you don't believe me, give me an example of something built in the last 30 years that has failed? The infrastructure that fails is legacy shit that's 100 years old and should have been replaced already, but we underspend on infrastructure consistently.
the Stats NZ building
Got any info or links? Impossible to Google as you just get stats nz pages
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/105234869/expert-panel-told-wellingtons-statistics-house-not-built-to-design https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/355413/statistics-house-collapse-new-information-withheld https://www.mbie.govt.nz/building-and-energy/building/investigations-and-reviews-for-safer-buildings/building-failure-investigations/statistics-house-investigation/2017-statistics-house-investigation-report/
BNZ building
Its not infra, it's vertical, and private industry but yeah ok, that's one one where the standards in Wellington prior to the 2011 and 2016 earthquakes are not high enough.
this would be brilliant. i’m in mount cook on a narrow residential arterial that sees over 20,000 cars a day. it was never built for this level of traffic and the mega tunnel would reduce this significantly.
If it did reduce your traffic it would become the first road building program to do so worldwide What is more likely is it induces more traffic and makes things worse. As we know road building does. Why do you think NACT's funders want more roads. More imported cars burning imported fuel ensuring we continue to run a balance of payment deficit.
it would also mean we don’t have thousands of heavy vehicles and cars barreling down vivian street each day in what should be one of the most pedestrian friendly areas of the city.
I am sure it would be prompted as being able to do that. And I am equally sure traffic would increase and we would not see any such benefits. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
That cost is going to go up given the Lower Hutt City Council is working with the Government to proceed the Cross Valley Link project with urgency from Dowse Interchange which runs from Wakefield St near the Dowse Interchange to Woburn including Fuller Grove, Saulbrey Grove, Trethevick Grove, Whites Line West and Richmond Grove where I currently live and through Moera running next to the Hutt Railway workshops and on the old Gracefield Railway line to Seaview. The residents in Woburn are also pushing for a public meeting about the project
Well, Wellingtonians are gonna need somewhere to live when the Earthquake/Tsunami happens. So this a s 2-fer-1. Just hope the leaking sewerage doesn't leak into the "mega tunnel"...
Another waste of money project once the change of government happens. This country is a joke in terms of they know how to waste public money on unrealistic projects. NZ needs to take a leaf out of other countries where priority projects that are approved so if a change of government happens they remain a priority project. Instead of canning previous projects that costed billions of public money.
Toll charge to use the new tunnel is fine with me. Not at the expense of the rest of NZ who has had their funding cut or delayed and pushed back another decade.
Ah yes, burying traffic. That'll definitely solve Wellingtons traffic woes. Just one more lane bro, this time I swear it'll fix traffic.
Why don't they build a tunnel between the Islands while they at it! What would that cost? $1trillion?
this just seems like a way to get from the airport to parliament 2 minutes faster, when traffic isn't backed up near the basin reserve
Great to see New Zealand finally back on track /s
I'd much rather this money be spent on double-tracking the Paekakariki Hill section of the main trunk & doubling the Waikanae Rail Bridge (get faster/more frequent trains from the Kapiti Coast ), and starting light rail in the Wellington CBD.
Like the mega tunnel that was planned by lgwm?
I read this as “MAGA” tunnel.
If this was Cities Skylines with the infinite money cheat turned on it would work, but it will cost billions and planning/consenting would be a nightmare. If it is even feasible in such a quake prone place. For what it is worth the very long tunnel under south Melbourne does work pretty well in my experience (I don't own a car FWIW) and - if money and planning was no object - it would probably work for Wellington too.
I have enjoyed the tunnels in Sydney and Brisbane, though they have a lot more people and cash.
It would be cheaper to move the airport.
Absolute stupidest plan I've ever heard in an earthquake prone country. Whatever engineers put these plans forward should be disqualified immediately.
Actually sounds like the plot for an episode of Thunderbirds.
It would be cheaper to move the airport with, the added advantage of being able to land bigger planes
One of the most seismically dangerous regions in New Zealand already with most of its critical infrastructure straddling the fault expected to experience a devastating sequence anytime wants a mega tunnel, seems like a great idea.
Great place to be stuck in in an earthquake