Roads to ruin

One day, someone poring over the archives of transport news will alight on Wellington's long tunnel and shake their head. What, that person may wonder, were they thinking in 2024?

- Russell Brown

The proposed tunnel - actually two 4km tunnels running under Wellington from The Terrace to Kilbirnie - had, the potential, then-transport minister Simeon Brown declared, “to deliver up to 15-minute travel time savings between the region and Wellington airport”. By “the region” Brown seemed to mean “Parliament”. The tunnel didn't look like being much use if you wanted to go to the airport from, say, Te Papa.

But it hardly mattered. This was the ascendant period of the Roads of National Significance (Rons), when anything could be promised (so long as it was a road) and no spec was out of bounds. The long tunnel plan (Brown claimed it would have cost $8 billion) didn't last the year, with no realistic potential for recovering the cost, but the Rons juggernaut rolled on.