I honestly did think this was a belated April Fools prank, yes indeed. I mean, a long tunnel, under Wellington, going from the Terrace tunnel right through to Wellington Road – and saving more than 60 seconds, but quite probably not the 10-15 minutes they are talking about. Let’s face it, the boy is still wet behind the ears and hasn’t really got a single clue in his head, but there are many things about this that are totally incongruous. Shall I name a few?
• Sacking all the LGWM team one week, and then recalling them the week after, to redesign the thing you told them they couldn’t do in the first place.
• Having a tunnel that zooms underneath all the best part of the city, to go to where?
• Carefully mapping all the underwater springs in Te Aro, and then propose to go and fuck them all up with a massive underwater underground motorway.
• Destroying the entire infrastructure of the Wellington Civil Service to save some money…
• Then spending all that money for Tax cuts, and then having the cheek to propose a….
• Long tunnel that would cost more than the rest of the other Roads of Simeon Existence all put together…
• I mean, what are they saying about the cost? Wasn’t a short tunnel going to cost a billion? Now this one is 4 times longer, so a starting guess might be $4 billion?
• But then isn’t the standard QS’s way of doing things, to think of a number and then double it? So, $8 billion, at least? But weren’t we saving money?
• And for what? Remember that at least part of this rationale is that MPs want to get from the Beehive to the Planes quicker. But will the MPs be able to actually get on to the underground motorway, seeing as it doesn’t stop on the way?
• It would help Wingnut et al go on holiday quicker, but they already live at the beach! So exactly HOW many people would use it?
• No more “Think Big”, but seriously, the last time we did that Muldoon almost bankrupted the country – this time Simeon may actually do it !
• And of course – not a single mention of a bus or a railway anywhere? Just solely cars and trucks only? Surely my watch has gone forward 2 weeks instead?
100% on point Nemo.
The guy couldn’t fail harder if he tried. Absolute moonbat.
He should go back to school and learn some basic economic (and city-building/planning) lessons.
https://www.facebook.com/SimeonBrownMP/photos/a.402178586826886/1418535948524473/?type=3
Thanks – but what worries me is that it is precisely so batshit crazy, that they might actually go ahead and do it
What blows my mind is our -green – mayor is “interested” by the idea. But a green city where? More concrete for more towers, more tar for more motorways to drive more cars to more planes. Meanwhile, some cycleways, such as the 5/6 kms long Evans Bay one isn’t finished, 6 years after they started building it. The state of it all.
Yes, speed does not seem to be a top priority. But can I just say – they’re making a beautiful job of it !
I keep thinking of the Simpsons Monorail episode
I know what you mean 60, except of course there is one thing that we can absolutely totally say with confidence, and that is that is absolute zero chance of anything with steel wheels getting approved by this government. Monorail? Well sir, there’s nothing on Earth like a genuine, bona-fide, electrified, six-car monorail! What’d I say? Monorail!
I did read somewhere that this is just yet another cynical ploy by politicians to implement yet another delay into the life of Wellingtonians, and that they have no intention of ever doing anything. But must always give off the appearance of doing something, even if it is total nonsense.
I always thought that LGWM was installed to pretend progress while waiting for a National Government to put the road tunnel back into play. That turned out to be true.
I also feared that National might then actually progress the tunnel together with our road building agency (it is named transport agency but that is a mislabel) and with their habit of bypassing democracy potentially force it through.
But it seems that while LGWM was dreaming about light rail one of the stakeholders (the road building agency) was planning this road tunnel, completely detached from reality. Hopefully this distracts them from their other tunnel plans.
NZTA has long been known as the NZ Trucking Agency by many.
The earthquake risk alone should see people divesting themselves of all things Wellington. A tunnel will certainly have a budget blowout attached too. You mentioned Brown may just succeed in bankrupting the nation? Too late, that was done long ago.
I feel certain this can only be a stalking horse to get the overpass/bridge back on the table, probably fast tracked so they don’t have that annoying local opposition to deal with
I’m not sure what to read into the “idea”
If it had a mid Te aro entry and Exit it would ideal, but the cost is the magic unknown….
Therefore my take is this, Either
1) The expected costs of the extra Mt Vic tunnel the Govt has committed to + the Basin Reserve Grade separation have got well over $2-3 billion, therefore the government is hoping the price on this “mega tunnel” to be huge $5-8 billion,
Then they can say we are being prudent and are ONLY sending $2-3 Billion on our pet project that we signed up to when we killed LGWM..
2) The expected costs of the extra Mt Vic tunnel the Govt has committed to + the Basin Reserve Grade separation have got well over $2-3 billion,, therefore the government is hoping the price on this “mega tunnel” to be only a little bit more than that – maybe $3-4 Billion,
Then they can say this is a much better option than the other two, and hand on heart promise “we are getting a much better deal with only a little bit of extra $$$”
Or 3) NZTA has realised that it gets so much grief for proposing 4 lane motorways everywhere, that they reckon “If we stick them underground” no one will notice and complain :)
Number 3 worked OK for Auckland with the Waterview tunnel… except have you seen the nightmare of flyovers and massive motorway junctions that results at the end of it?
https://www.swansontransport.co.nz/blog-1/waterview-tunnel-connecting-west-and-south
There is some excellent conversation on this topic over on : https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2024/04/16/long-tunnel-or-long-con/
The finest minds in urban design and traffic management have been poring over Wellington’s unfortunate geography for more than half a century. What’s the best that they’ve come up with so far?
So much design, so many proposals, so much inertia, and for what” Surely it can’t be beyond the mind of man to distill a comprehensive, workable design . . . . surely it can’t.
Or is the whole thing little more than a result-free, expiry-date-free, middle-class job creation scheme, destined to produce nothing but the status quo?
Well, it is the seat of Government
So yes.
“Surely it can’t be beyond the mind of man to distill a comprehensive, workable design”
Time to get some women on the job then !!
I’m really not sure that a long tunnel is the answer but it would help solve the east/west v north/south mess that we currently have (which will only get significantly worse). The LGWM grade separation scheme at the Basin never seemed convincing to me. As Greenwelly commented at some point, “It is the elephant in the room”.
Well, the LGWM people know what to do, when it was handed to them on a plate many years ago. The plans are all done, ready to go, they just need to grow the balls to do it.
Move the airport north and out of Wellington city, near the rail line. Sell the existing land to partly fund it.
To where? And don’t say Palmerston North!
Palmerston North International Airport would be the obvious choice.
or not. I think perhaps the one reason that politicians enjoy being in Wellington is that they can jump in a taxi and get the hell out of here quickly. People have often said “they should move the airport to Paraparaumu” – and now even to Palmerston – but Paraparaumu would take an hour, and Palmy would take two hours, so for a politician who wants to fly in quickly on a Tuesday morning and out on a Thursday evening, neither of those are ever going to fly. And nor would the politicians.
What would really help, for everyone, would be a nice fast rail line from Parliament to the Airport….
“. . . a nice fast rail line from Parliament to the Airport…..”
If speed is of the essence, isn’t there that vacant lot in Bowen Street where Broadcasting House used to be that’s perfectly positioned for a Parliamentary helipad?
Don’t put ideas in their heads! Can you imagine the ruckus if Parliament used choppers to get around! Luxon would be off at every opportunity he had – and Winnie would be stationed like a tailgunner on an Iroquis, strafing miscreants from the air with a stream of invective….
Is an hour really that long? For lots of places with better rail than the Capital it would be that long, via a rail, to get from the airport into the central CBD station.
Out of idle curiosity, how long are the trips Arlana-Stockholm, Heathrow-Shepherds Bush, Gardemoen-Oslo, JFK-Manhattan?
All good questions, to which i do not have an immediate answer, but i see what you’re getting at. The only one I can really answer off the top of my head is from when i lived in London and would have to fly home to NZ, occasionally, so I know the route from Piccadilly to Heathrow quite well. I just used to take the Tube and it took almost an hour on the Piccadilly line, and cost about 3 or 4 pounds i think. Stopped at about 20 places along the route, so it took a while. But then some rich buggers put in another whole rail line on the surface, and created the Heathrow Express from Paddington, and that only took 15 minutes, and cost, i dunno – maybe 20 pounds? But they have a lot more people through there than we do – it’s the second busiest airport in the world innit? Or third?
I once took a taxi (by mistake) from Gardemoen to central Oslo and suffered an interminable motorway ride watching the kroner accumulate on the meter. From memory – and based on whatever the exchange rate was at the time – my decision not to take the train cost me over $120. It’s a long way, even at 100kph.
I once took a taxi in Auckland, on a Friday, from the airport to the North Shore – to Devonport Naval Base. Ouch! Over $120 – and I’m never doing that again ! Last time in Auckland I caught a 380 bus to Puhinui, (about $2), then a train into Britomart, about $4, all on my HOP card, perfectly fast and comfortable and seamless travel. Much better.
But it is the fact that at present the trip can be done in 15 minutes, that makes the prospect of an hour long trip seem so utterly nonsensical. The old saying: “a turkey won’t vote for an early Christmas” springs to mind – politicians are simply never going to go for it, even if there was a good reason.
I’ve never been much keen on commuting, and wasting time in traffic jams, and that is exactly what is driving all this. We’re a small city, and big waits in traffic are nonsensical. Politiicians are busy people and they think they are important people, so they would always do what they can to shorten their trip. That’s why Luxo lives in a flat directly opposite Parliament, so he only has a one minute walk to work.
The only difference between myself and Simeon Brown is that i believe in trains and he does not….
Surely you are taller. . .
And don’t look to be about 14 years old
good points, well done you two…
I think that Thomas Nash (GW Councillor) has put it all best when he says:
“Wellington Regional Council transport chairperson Thomas Nash said the investigation of a four lane 4km tunnel under Wellington city showed “an astonishing misunderstanding of transport priorities at a national level”.
He said the idea had been considered and discarded before, because it did not deliver value for money.
“We have new inter-island ferries that we need, we have massive upgrades to regional rail/metropolitan rail that we need, we have basic stuff like bus lanes, more buses that we need. The idea that a multi-billion dollar tunnel underneath Wellington for the 30 percent of traffic going out to the east should be the top of your priority list is, frankly, astonishing.”
https://www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/350246199/we-get-our-city-back-expert-welcomes-wellington-tunnel-idea
Does anyone have the text to this?
https://www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/350245438/kilbirnie-terrace-tunnel-mayor-interested-freed-city-streets
Or to this?
Meanwhile, a wonderful Ode to Tunnels, on the Spinoff – well done !!
https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/20-04-2024/all-28-road-tunnels-in-new-zealand-ranked-from-worst-to-best
Good on you Nemo for thrashing this out. There are some good articles in the Post today, like this one:
https://www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/350253549/mega-tunnel-possible-unpredictable-construction-expert-says
The article is basically saying that New Zealand’s construction industry is not well-situated to be able to build a mega-tunnel of this size. That’s not going to come as news to anyone currently in the NZ construction industry – it says we would have to import the TBM – well, Duh ! Yes, Japan, China, Switzerland, America – take your pick. The amount of such machines made every year must be relatively small – each machine is hand-made for the job. The one for Auckland’s Waterview tunnel was dismantled and sent back when it had completed its job, but would not have been the right size anyway. It was one of the largest ever built, being wide enough for three car lanes – and no trains – but “our” tunnel, as proposed, would have to have two tunnels, each two lanes wide, leading to another issue: what to do with the spoil.
Let’s do some basic maths on this. Let’s say each tunnel is 7m in diameter, and 4km long. That makes for 38m3 soil for each metre of tunnel, so a conservative estimate of 304,000 m3 of soil extracted, which would be enough to cover a single hectare in dirt 30m high, or perhaps 10 hectares of downtown Te Aro in a layer 3m high.
More realistically, the dirt would be either trucked away to somewhere else (which would fill up and destroy any remaining space at our Southern Landfill over night) or more likely, used to reclaim more land – perhaps in the Wellington harbour, maybe near the Port, or perhaps over near Evans Bay. It is a considerable amount – and of course, having been through a TBM, it would be in the form of mucky wet slurry, so not suitable as rock for the Te Ara Tupu walkway. The best use might be to demolish much of Kilbirnie, and then raise it all up out of the way of the next Tsunami, before building more medium density housing all over it.
The second article though is by Dave Armstrong, entitled Why there is no light at the end of this plan, and is very good also. He ends up by saying:
“If you really want to save air travellers 15 minutes, double the number of airport security portals so passengers could whip through at busy times – far less expensive than $9 billion and counting.
But I’m not holding my breath. The private car rules and seems to be the primary focus of the government’s transport policy. Ironically, a slim young man who could probably beat the pants off this chubby old boomer in an uphill cycle race, seems to be the embodiment of narrow, tunnel-visioned, middle-aged, single-passenger-vehicle road rage in politician form.”
Perfect.
Can’t fault your maths, but just a note: google says that the size of Te Aro is 128ha (and notes population size of 15,960) which means that, ummm, each hectare would have 2375m3 to spread over it. How deep is that?
4.2m deep, all over Te Aro ?
or 230mm deep for every m2, all over Te Aro?
https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/15-04-2024/revealed-a-cost-benefit-analysis-for-wellingtons-long-tunnel?
2375 divided by 10 000m per hectare is indeed just shy of 240mm deep
Do fishes have platform shoes?
Surely not waders
Would it be possible that the even distribution of muck would render all scooter riding futile?
Silver linings and all that..