Hallelujah! Roads are back
Expressway network would do the same for Wellington, Hutt Valley, Levin, and Palmerston North, on towards Whanganui and over the hill to Hawke’s Bay.
The Southern network would radiate out from Christchurch, north to around Amberley, south to Ashburton and on towards Timaru, and inland towards the Alps.
A decent chunk of each is now already built. Completed over, say, a 20-year period, the three networks would provide stressfree travelling of a standard that is taken now as a given in the rest of the developed world.
They would help spread around growth and development as has occurred in the Waikato with the new expressway, and much earlier on Auckland’s North Shore with the Northern Motorway. They would lower the road toll by eliminating the temptation for dangerous passing manoeuvres on our busiest two-lane roads, as we have seen with the Tauranga Eastern Link and Waikato Expressway.
This sort of plan would be an upgrade worthy of the name, and would require simply upping the pace of the past 10 years. Many were cynical that Auckland’s Western Ring Route, Puhoi to Warkworth, the Victoria Park tunnel, the Waikato Expressway, the Tauranga Eastern Link, Levin to Wellington, and the Christchurch motorways could all be completed in a decade. Yet here we are, nearly done.
Have a plan, and fund it. It’s amazing what can be achieved. Of course all bets are off should the Greens get hold of the transport portfolio again.