I apoligise for echoing Poneke almost entirely, but today is the last day to submit feedback on the Ngauranga to Airport study.
Enough has probably been said about the study, the response, and the alternatives. If you have been following the issue, but haven’t put through a submission yet, then now is the time to have your say!
The online submission form makes things exceedingly easy, you can address whichever topics you like, to whatever depth you like (none of the feedback fields are required). Submissions close at 5pm
A second terrace tunnel is certainly needed. The waterfront carries as much traffic as the motorway already does. It’s a completely stupid situation. The waterfront is not a friendly or nice place for pedestrians or cyclists and pedestrians obviously can’t use the motorway. The waterfront should be more of a tree lined pedestrian friendly boulevard with light rail. By having the second tunnel it would allow the motorway to carry the traffic where it belongs.
Tubehat, the problem is that even in an ideal model world where you build a new tunnel, and shift the waterfront traffic to it now, due to the ever increasing traffic growth you’ll be back to square one at some point anyway. Probably within the next 10-15 years with current growth rates. Then what, build yet another tunnel? The report says this’ll effectively be impossible to do. So why is it acceptable then to force the change in priorities, but not now? Because it won’t be the current crop of politicians’ and engineers’ problems by then, they’ll have moved on. That way they don’t have to make the hard decision, that yes, despite its possible unpopularity there needs to be a major shift towards PT usage, and yes the roads need to be charged to reduce congestion for commercial vehicles.
This has the benefit that we’ll remain flexible during the Peak Oil transition, and leave our options open for what we do with roads after that. (Maybe we find in 25 years the vehcile fleet has swapped out to electric vehicles and traffic is increasing, then due to our much larger population we can afford a wider tunnel at the terrace, and a covered trench all the way to the Basin Reserve.)