From the NZ Listener
March 13-19 2004 Vol 192 No 3331

Down the road

by Sarah Daniell

Should the capital be moved, if Wellington can't quickly navigate roading solutions first proposed, astoundingly, in 1939?

As New Zealanders assess the toll of storms that swept away livestock and livelihoods in a brutal avalanche of mud and water, it is timely to look at a fundamental weakness exposed by last month's floods – the vulnerable network of roads that service our capital city.

Wellington – alias Middle Earth and host to the much-lauded International Festival of the Arts – has many celebrated assets. It also has the dubious honour of being the only capital city in the world to have just two points of road access: State Highway 1 and State Highway 2.

Last month, those crucial access points were intermittently blocked. When roads finally did open, the traffic had seized up like a blocked artery. Closed, too, were the secondary links that might have provided last-resort access – the Paekakariki Hill Rd, Akatarawa Rd, the Manawatu Gorge, the Pahiatua Track, the Haywards Hill and Grays Rd (via Pauatahanui Inlet leading to SH1, just after Plimmerton).

The passenger rail network to Kapiti stalled, just as it did after the floods in Paekakariki in October last year.

Since last month's floods, there have been renewed calls to revisit the Transmission Gully proposal – the 27km route from McKays Crossing on SH1, to Linden, just north of Wellington. The journey along the route, say proponents, will take 18 minutes, driving at the legal limit, instead of the frustrating one hour-plus that it can take (off-peak and on a good day). The eastern corridor, over Rimutaka Hill Rd, is also vulnerable to the high winds for which the region is renowned.

According to United Future leader Peter Dunne, the earliest government record of Transmission Gully is dated, staggeringly, 1939. Sixty-five years and reams of costly reports later, Transmission Gully is still nothing more than a political monster that no one wants to wake, floundering in a rugged valley 20km north of Wellington.

What's wrong, or indeed right, with Transmission Gully? What is the cost of having it, or not having it? The answers to these are as convoluted, plagued with blind spots and difficult to negotiate as the roads themselves. Everyone has an opinion, but everyone agrees on one thing: action on the capital's roads must be taken, and soon.

According to its critics, the Transmission Gully project is too expensive. The latest estimate puts the project at $260 million, though this is currently being revised. The route evidently has the approval of the majority – a willingness-to-pay survey revealed that 70 percent of people in the Wellington region want it built now, with 63 percent supporting a road toll.

Dunne says that $260 million for a 27km stretch of highway isn't a big deal, when you compare it to, say, the cost of four-laning the highway north of Auckland, at approximately $190 million.

Auckland has received $2.6 billion over 10 years for its roads. And there's nothing like a taxpayer-funding scrap to fuel Auckland-Wellington rivalry. Even Dominion Breweries got on the bandwagon in January, with a Tui billboard in Wellington that said: "I don't mind paying for Auckland's roads … Yeah right."

It was 150 years ago this year that Auckland lost its status as capital. As the country can afford just one major road project – in the City of Sails – should we not move the capital back there?

Who better to put this question to than Prime Minister Helen Clark, who is, after all, an Aucklander. After the October floods in Paekakariki, Clark said that the "appalling weather and flooding that occurred is a very, very rare event there. So, you wouldn't make a decision about a huge roading project on the back of one event."

Damn that rare event, because the same stretch of highway was closed again in the latest floods. In fact, flooding and slips have closed SH1 between Paekakariki and Pukerua Bay three times in the past five years, cutting off Wellington. That's not taking into account the bog-standard hold-ups after accidents, or the regular log-jams that turn an hour-long jaunt up the coast into a mission of Frodo-like dimensions.

I put this to Clark, but she declined to comment, referring me instead to erstwhile Transport Minister Paul Swain. He also declined to comment. However, a spokesman for the Prime Minister's office said there were "no plans to move the capital to Auckland. PS. Go the Hurricanes."

National's spokesman for transport Maurice Williamson says that debt-financing and road tolls are the answer. "When I talk to people in countries like the United States, Canada, Britain, France and Germany, people look at me with glazed eyes when they hear we pay for our roads out of tax funds.

"I say build it [Transmission Gully]. Make sure you recover a realistic rate of return for the money you invested and watch it go."

There is a perception that politicians don't have to deal with grassroots reality. They fly in and out of cities and towns and, once on the tarmac, are chauffeur-driven. So, if a Crown car gets stuck in a jam, the minister can read the newspaper or make phone calls, and it's pretty much business as usual.

One politician who has taken the issue to heart, however, is Peter Dunne. To say that he is pro-Transmission Gully is, by his own admission, a gigantic understatement.

"The point which I think the floods have demonstrated is, where you have a capital city that has essentially, to the north, a single access – an egress – then the risk of its isolation is very great.

"Transmission Gully, in the event of the floods, for instance, would not have been flooded because it is on much higher ground. So it does provide an alternative.

"I think there's certainly an argument that the relative political clout of Auckland has carried a greater weight than Wellington for a long time … I think what Transmission Gully now needs is a collective regional will, demonstrated by the local authorities here, to get on with it. For years it's been easy to blame

central government, because there was never much prospect of it being advanced. But now that there is a possibility of toll-roading and locally based projects, the onus goes onto the local and regional authorities here to give it the priority they always claimed it had."

Wellington Mayor Kerry Prendergast says that the collective will is there and a comprehensive analysis is in progress. "We're doing that work now. The chief executives [of council] have prepared a brief and funded a project manager and staff who will do a regional economic study, which will include issues of population growth and transport infrastructure, as well as social and environmental issues. So that work has started.

"It's taken Auckland 10 years to put a package to government that got them that sort of money. We hope to have that complete in two years."

Naturally, Prendergast scoffed at the idea of moving the capital north. "That's a very silly suggestion. We are the administrative centre of the country and whether or not there's one lane in and out … it takes 10 minutes for politicians and business people to get from the airport to Parliament – you don't sit in traffic for an hour and a half, like you do in Auckland."

Prendergast needn't worry about getting a capital-grab challenge any time soon from Auckland Mayor John Banks.

"We wouldn't want the capital moved to Auckland because, frankly, we wouldn't want the attendant stampede of politicians," he says.

"And it certainly wouldn't be good for our health. Wellington is somewhat moribund by the seat of government and the supporting bureaucracies under that. And we think that Wellington deserves that."

As for Transmission Gully? "We think that, in the short term, Wellington definitely needs two arterials in and out of the city. In the long term, the last one out that turns out the light will only need a bike."

Gully campaigner and Kapiti regional councillor Chris Turver prefers to take what he calls a "helicopter view". It's an appropriate analogy, since taking a helicopter sometimes seems about the only guaranteed way of getting in and out of the city.

It's not just the region that will benefit, says Turver. "If people stop thinking of Transmission Gully as a nice, handy route from Kapiti to Wellington and start thinking it's the main arterial route from the North Island to the South Island … and providing an interconnecting capability to the rest of our region … then a bit more fact comes into the thing, rather than emotion."

The problem, says Turver, lies with a lack of leadership and the favouritism of Auckland.

"If you're hard-headed enough, you don't begrudge Auckland getting a push along, because the situation there is dreadful. But the irony is that some of the roads in the Wellington region – particularly the Petone Esplanade – are as busy as the worst Auckland road at peak time. But the government chooses to ignore the plight of Wellington because it doesn't suit their political agenda. By that I mean many of the members of Cabinet are Aucklanders, including the Prime Minister, and they have a very strong lobby in the Auckland area and it seems the loudest voices get the best results."

Although Prendergast, a former commuter from Paraparaumu, has sympathy for the challenges facing road users, she takes the Clark line – that these apocalyptic weather phenomena are rare events.

Not so, say John and Betty Perkins, who have farmed on the Kapiti Coast for 30 years. Those "rare events" are coming around rather more frequently than is comfortable. "We get one every 125 days," says John.

"October 2003 was the worst, but it's definitely not unique."

The Perkins' farm, just north of Paekakariki, has been in John's family for 150 years. The couple, both in their sixties, have sold part of the farm to Transit New Zealand and want a decision to be made on how much more Transit wants, so they can get on with their lives.

"I was totally against Transmission Gully," says Betty. "But as time's gone by and with the uncertainty that's affected our lives – which has been pretty distressing and upsetting and confusing – I just feel, if it's going to happen, then let it happen.

"I think one of the problems is they [Transit] change personnel too often. And every person who comes along reinvents the wheel and does another report.

"We've had it with Transit men and their consultants. Guys in patent leather shoes have actually been dropped off in helicopters out the back of our farm."

Mark Mitchell moved from Auckland to Waikanae seven years ago, and was alarmed by the congestion.

"In Auckland you just accept that you've got enormous amounts of traffic and you know that at certain times of the day you're going to have problems going from A to B, and you expect it. But the frustrating thing about Wellington is it's just unnecessary. It could be planned a lot better and there's been a lack of commitment by any authority to exercise common sense and correct it.

"I've missed flights [from Wellington Airport] because there's a huge backlog at Mana and you can't get through in time. If I'm going north, I'll go to Palmerston North and fly from there."

For Mitchell, 44, the road dilemma took on far more gravity when his child became ill. "I've got a five-year-old daughter. She had suspected meningitis and it's very hard to diagnose. First, we went to Kenepuru [Hospital, in Porirua] and they said we had to go to Wellington, and that was smack on rush hour – so I had to get this little girl in there as fast as I could." Fortunately, she was fine.

But Mitchell's experience highlights the human dimension to the issue, which often seems forgotten in all the talk and paper shuffling.

AA regional manager Brian Roberts says the association has long supported Transmission Gully.