I’d agree with what No Right Turn says..
“The entire project looks to be an expensive failure. Rather than transferring risk to the private sector, it turns out to be the usual scam of privatising profits and socialising losses.”
A tunnel is like a wormhole to another dimension. It changes people’s behaviour ever so slightly, ever so briefly, without them realising.
The announcement that National were granting infrastructure funds to develop housing projects in the far north and south of Auckland caused me some amusement. Wisely Auckland council resisted this boondongle that only benefits land bankers, speculators and their political party (National) for some time. To the point where National used taxpayer funds instead.
A fully laden logging truck tears up the road like thousands of cars. And when they keep rolling over around the corner, locals get very nervous and upset for themselves and their kids.
National has been sucking billions of dollars out of the provincial road maintenance budgets to throw into “Roads of Significance only to National” since 2009. In the latest round, maintenance costs for roads mostly used by trucks will drop to an average of 52%, with the small populations of ratepayers expected to subsidize trucking firms. Is it any wonder that they’re looking at National’s token gesture over the weekend with disdain and anger. Meanwhile the urban centres aren’t getting the public transport they need.
Ok, I know this image has a lot of issues. It is a 256 color animated gif. Dithered to hell. Bad colour balance, tilt and even a moving focus point. But it certainly makes its point about what kind of road space we’re paying for to inefficiently fill with cars? Have the idiots at NZTA and in this incompetent National government not read their own statistics? Roads aren’t filling up. Public transport does.
