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9:50 am, December 20th, 2025 - 13 comments
Categories: climate change, disaster, Environment, infrastructure, public transport, transport, uncategorized -
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During the 1990s I was Roading Design Manager at the Wellington City Council. One of my functions was liaison officer with Transit New Zealand on the motorway extension from the Terrace Tunnel to the Basin Reserve, now known as Karo Drive. The proposed solution was a cut and cover operation, effectively creating an underground motorway. This proposal was dropped due to cost and funding issues, in hindsight a lost opportunity.
The government has announced proposed “improvements” to SH1 from the Terrace tunnel to the airport and plans to construct twin tunnels beside the existing tunnels at the Terrace and Mt Victoria. This plan includes keeping Vivian Street and Kent Terrace as part of the designated route, with the stated objective of reducing travel time and traffic congestion to and from the airport.
Estimated to take 3 years to design and a further 6-8 years to complete at a cost of $2.8 to $3.8 billion, the plan will cause major disruption for years to come. lt will adversely impact upon the development potential of the Te Aro precinct and add to traffic movements on adjacent city and suburban streets.
The plan also ignores standard traffic and transport planning practice that has evolved in cities around the world during the past 75 years. Worst of all, it takes no account of climate change and predicted sea level rise in the years to come. The plan will be obsolete before the last stone is turned.
A widely-accepted truism is that traffic expands to fill the available road space. Therefore, if this project proceeds, congestion will remain a recurring problem. The converse is also true – diminish or eliminate available road space for motor vehicles, traffic volumes shrink and may even disappear. There is much evidence to support this contention in cities around world, where motorways have been constructed and later removed.
During the 1950s, in an effort to modernise New York and speed up traffic, power broker and developer Robert Moses set out to demolish great swathes of housing, build new high-rise accommodation and construct superhighways the length and breadth of Manhattan. His plans included a limited access expressway through Washington Square, a community park in Greenwich Village where writer Jane Jacobs lived with her family.
Angered by what she saw as a high handed, commercially driven development, Jacobs led a successful grass roots campaign to prevent construction. In the David versus Goliath battle that ensued, her tenacity and courage eventually won through, and plans for citywide motorway development were eventually dropped.
This government’s plan will not achieve more efficient movement of people and goods. The travel time savings during peak hours and on busy weekends will be short-term at best. At present, there is no congestion problem during non-peak hours and school holidays. Do we want a transport system to serve the automobile for short times of the day, or do we want one that will best serve more people throughout the day?
This question goes to the heart of the issue, and the answer is clear. The plan will not achieve its desired outcome, and it should be stopped in its tracks. NZTA’s outrageously expensive solution for a temporary problem will be better solved by public transport improvements and congestion charging.
Urban motorways were a feature of post WW 2 development and their construction shaped the cities that accommodated them. During the 1960s in many cities around the world there was growing public opposition due to the negative impact such roads have on the urban environment. The New York experience is just one such example.
So, what are the alternatives for Wellington? A good start would be to remove all through traffic from Vivian Street and Kent Terrace and return them to city designated streets. Convert Karo Drive into four lanes, (two lanes in each direction) and revert to options for light rail transit (LRT) development from the rail station to Newtown and on to the airport, as proposed in earlier iterations of Wellington’s transport planning.
Why light rail? It offers far greater speed and capacity than motor vehicles at peak hours. An on-street LRT lane can carry between 3000 and 10,000 people an hour. Bus Rapid Transit (a busway) can carry between 2000 and 6000 people an hour. A general traffic lane can carry up to about 1500 people an hour. Operating along a fixed route, LRT will give developers certainty, boosting land values by millions of dollars and providing the opportunity for additional targeted rates revenue that can be used to offset development and operating
costs.
Wellington needs a new all-encompassing vision away from the outdated belief that the car is king. Let’s invest in infrastructure to attract commuters out of their cars and onto more efficient transport modes: and create a vibrant city designed around the needs of people, not cars.
Michael Barnett
Fair Intelligent Transport Wellington
December 2025
Gerry Brownlee, in his wisdom, said that a business case can't be made for a Rangiora to Rolleston passenger railway connection. Well, you probably can't make a business case for saving the planet either, but it might be worth doing.
Now, the northern motorway almost grinds to a halt between about 7.30 and 8.30. Expand the roads and cars will increase to fill the available space.
As Russel Norman said 'Motorways just get you to the next traffic jam sooner!'
Cancellation of this dinosaur project (Victoria Tunnel) MUST be on Labour's first 100 days list.
Always seems to be of real value to read you TonyV. Can we change from repeating past mistakes, in some new (innovative) way? Have to keep thinking and reading The Standard etc. and staying sharp and practical; like that one from Russel Norman.
I suggest that some politically concerned groups rehearse and present the play *Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare. (I don't understand how the son of a glovemaker? had the global reach of men's intelligences – I think that he had compatriots.) It is shocking how far the machiavellian mind can go without let or hindrance.
We have to realise the strength of some of our hidden capacities and work and act together to learn to channel our positive and effective drives.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_Andronicus …written between 1588 and 1593. It is thought to be Shakespeare's first tragedy and is often seen as his attempt to emulate the violent and bloody revenge plays of his contemporaries, which were extremely popular with audiences throughout the 16th century.
I suggest starting all discussions about change to state what the desired outcomes would be and work backwards to find the most effective, suitable and affordable method.
If we don't find a way to control and cap our own obsessions, then we are going down probably beyond 16th century. So whether it is our 'blunt' spent on tunnels that are foolish, or anything thought up by a panel of rogues, a proposed tunnel will end as a sewer of our own making. Blunt is a Regency term for money; a study of those 1800s ways would show some interesting parallels with now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regency_era
Michael Barnett
Fair Intelligent Transport Wellington.
Thankyou for this Post. It encapsulates my thinking, (and IMO any Rational persons : ) Under the current NAct1 govt the car is indeed king. I hope with the coming change of govt in 2026, this is seen as dinosaur thinking….like the ancient dinosaurs in power temporarily.
LRT or trams work well if they are designed properly.
level street entry for wheel chairs really make life easier for everyone. A lot of people find the current bus service unusable, and revert to ubers.
synchronised traffic lights with trams never having to stop, make the journey much faster by tram, even at relatively low speed.
Car-free tram streets are a much nicer environment and safer for pedestrians as trams are predictable in a way that cars and even buses aren't.
trams are cheaper to run than buses.
Some european citys do them well and trams are a treasure. We will get them wrong and trams will probably fail.
see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNTg9EX7MLw
An extra lane, ie, extra traffic going through the Mt Vic tunnel is insane. As Julie-Ann G says, it just shifts the bottleneck. The trouble is, the tunnel is right beside the Basin Reserve, which essentially has a giant roundabout going round it, so the whole area is a mess. Traffic needs to be diverted from this area, not increased. There is actually a second tunnel which already exists- the Hataitai bus tunnel- perhaps time to make better use of that.
There is a lot of traffic going to the eastern suburbs- not only is the airport there, it has THE ONLY PAK N SAVE in the whole city. And the fact is, people take a car to the supermarket- they just do. I do.
There is already a "pilot" tunnel next to the existing tunnel – about the width of a car but not tall enough for busses. One option is to use that pilot tunnel to make another one-way bus tunnel, so reducing bus traffic through the Mt Vic tunnel, and making the other two one-way tunnels capable of increasing bus traffic. Then do the widening of SH1 from the intersection with Kilbirnie Crescent to the top of the hill (NZTA own the houses on a least one side, possibly both), and widen the road from that point to the tunnel – with possibly a roundabout at the intersection of Goa St.
Yes there will still be a bottleneck at peak times – taxis know when to go through Newtown or around the bays – it will ease traffic considerably, encourage use of public transport, and still save a lot of the cost of the current proposals. the problem is that even broad proposals get announced without adequate detail, and without exploring alternatives, and with overall costs only.
As far as I know there is no bus traffic through the Mt Vic tunnel. All bus traffic to the Eastern suburbs travels by either the bus tunnel or Constable St.
Thanks, yes I got that bit wrong. More busses would however be an alternative to just accepting growth in private vehicles . . .
It is so dumb to discount the option of just extending the existing cut-and-cover lanes that were completed in 2018.
That project rebuilt multiple walking and fine urban networks.
But light rail is very hard to ever resurrect now, anywhere. These morons and their RONS have sucked the funding system dry for 4 Parliamentary terms.
Thanks for the knowledgeable and committed post.
And with trackless trams you no longer need to roll out light rail tracks.
NAct1 present car kings……(soon to be carked : )
And…If not for our Planet, or your Health…..howzabout your wallet?
GreaterAuckland has done a good job on the enforced OIA silence that surrounds all RONS, and how devastating they are for all other forms of transport for decades to come due to sucking out so much in capital, depreciation, and maintenance.
It's a true travesty for NZ.
Labour can note all the money in RONS (and future maintenance costs) and ask questions about priorities – rather than compete in amount spent.