RONS are back in town

My fledgling tender buds that started to like Chris Bishop and think that he may have a brain in his body have been trampled on. I’ve gone back to thinking that he is a complete and utter plonker, because, well, dickish behaviour. In short: He has put the RONS back on the table.

Most of it goes to Auckland, where roads reign supreme, and logic fails to register. Having just watched a video on the Katy highway, from Houston to a smaller city called Katy, where they widened the highway to 13 – yes, THIRTEEN lanes – in EACH direction – and it still clogs up each day – Jesus H Christ, how stupid can you be to think that anyone can ever build their way out of traffic congestion.

But in Wellington, once again we have some projects back on the planning table. Will they ever happen? National and the Trucking Lobby say Yes. The Eye of the Fish says No, probably never. Two projects, each more stupid than the other.

Petone to Grenada – utterly pointless waste of $2.1 to $2.6 BILLION. But thankfully, they now have a route which uses 70% less digging than before. Before it was one of the most expensive and useless roads in the world. Now, it costs more, but inflation means that it looks like it is more affordable. No, it isn’t.

Here (above and below) is the plan from a dozen years ago from the RONS team then, showing a snake blue line that traversed across Horokiwi over the plains on the top (up in the cloud level) and with a god-awful tall cutting, up the valley right next to the Belmont Regional Park. From memory, it would have been more effective to pave a highway to the moon rather than to do this plan, and NZTA scrapped it pronto. First time they had ever said – “it is beyond us, we cannot do it, it would just be too expensive.”

Now they have a new route and a new plan, and the cost has gone up, and the road has gone down into the gullies, because after Transmission Gully, they now know how cheap and simple it is to build a road through a scenic gully full of trees and ferns and streams and shifting shingles, gully floors. Two tunnels, one 410m long, the other 230m long, and several bridges. As a comparison, the existing Mt Vic tunnel is 623m long.

Each to their own, I guess, but it makes no sense to me – just continue down a few more kilometres to the Ngauranga Gorge and then turn left, and back up SH2 to Petone. But yes, that takes time. And to Bishop, time is money. But to me, I’m very happy to save a couple of billion dollars. I’d rather have a train tunnel from Petone to link to the Kapiti Line. And of course, I’d really rather have Light Rail in Central Wellington.

A bit hard to read on their washed out maps, so I’ve done you a nice new crystal clear map of what I think they proposed last time and this time. Red for the latest scheme, blue for the one from 2018 or whenever it was. Before they were trying to go behind it, now they are just simply going in front of it (beware of litigious residents nearby). I keep thinking “why don’t they buy the land off Horokiwi quarry and put the road up through there, as they have already dug it out!” The stone round there is especially hard and gnarly for the roading people to build things with, so it should be a good stable base. Remember, that quarry has been going for 40 years or more, digging the whole time, and they’ve hardly made a dent in it.

Now onto the main event for Wellington. A proposal to do all sorts of things to the centre of Wellington. Haven’t we been here before? Here is the picture to scare off the people who currently live in Paterson St – not for much longer !! So – parallel and to the north of the existing tunnel – I thought that they would be going diagonal and to the south of the existing one. But no. Looks like they are aligning once more with the pilot tunnel, which should really just be left alone. It is actually easier to build a new tunnel than to have to eat up the existing one.

And here is the plans to scare off the rest of us. So simple, so unspoiled and pure and simple, much like Minister Brown.

Not sure that I believe any of this, but here is what Bishop proposes.

I would reply to this proposal to “solve” our traffic problems very simply like this revised sketch proposal below. Not everyone will agree – the Save the Basin crew and the Mt Victoria Residents Association will no doubt be girdling their loins as we speak (although, I confess, I still have no idea what a girdled loin actually is).

Three-laning of Vivian Street is my real hatred – the traffic already hoons through there at an almost motorway speed at times – on my infrequent trips up that end of town I despair over how badly the Cuba Street area is chopped in half by this hideous SH1 route. Can’t we underground it? Please?