(everyone knows roading budgets usually blow out - the total final cost of Transmission Gully appears to be $2.5bn – double the projected cost of $1.25bn).
I saw this recently
"Even so, the numbers are staggering. The section between Whangarei and Te Hana is expected to cost $15.3-18.3 billion, and this doesn’t include the cost of the Warkworth to Te Hana section which is expected to start construction next year and was most recently estimated to cost $2.9-3.8 billion.
Combined, that’s $18.2-22.1 billion – which is incredible for a road that for most of its length carries only 10-15,000 vehicles a day.
To put the cost a different way: if usage of the road more than doubled to 30k vehicles per day (which is more than most parts of the Waikato Expressway) over a 30 year span, that would still work out at nearly $70 per trip include the cost of operating and maintaining the road."
https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2025/10/21/rons-reality-needs-to-bite/
How many years of free public transport would $22B buy?
I recall the 50% price cut during COVID (for the whole country) cost the government a few hundred million for a year. This was during COVID so it didn’t get higher uptake, but let’s assume there was a higher uptake and make it $500M for 50% off per year, or 1B for free public transport per year.
We could have free public transport for everyone for 22 years for the price of this one road.
In the article they came up with a few other things 22B would buy:
- four City Rail Links ($5.5b)
- seven fully equipped Dunedin hospitals ($3b)
- seven Cook Strait ferry terminals ($3b)
- 99 contract-cancellations for no Cook Strait Ferries ($222m)
- fully funded 7kwh solar panel and battery systems for all 700,000 dwellings in Auckland and Northland ($21b)
- 169 times the annual walking and cycling budget in the 2024 GPS ($130m)
- Enough funding to run the Te Huia train between Auckland and Hamilton for 3780 years…
- … or, how about free passenger rail across the whole country for effectively forever?
- four and a half Northwest Busways ($5b)
- seven Airport to Botany Busways ($3b)
- 22 twice-built International Convention Centres ($1b)
It buys a hell of a lot of post-parliamentary corporate directorships.
We really need a better way of managing this risk. I don’t have any suggestions but the blatant bribery is a pretty big problem to democracy.
How much is that per centimeter?
$2320 per cm; or $232 per mm
Thanks
That’s absolutely insane. Imagine if that was the number in the proposed plan. Would have been squashed instantly
Is anybody held accountable or are there any incentive structures to prevent it from happening in the future?
8 months till the election. They haven’t started work on this yet so it’ll probably come to nothing if they lose.
