Warning to avoid past mistakes

Leaders and transport commentators are warning the city not to make the mistakes of the past with a long unwieldy transport wishlist that will never get finished.

It comes after a study by a Wellington City Council adviser into the costlier-than-expected InnerCity Bypass project that found many of its touted benefits never came about.

John Rankin of Fair and Intelligent Transport Wellington said the ICB was meant to be part of a network, one that never got built and Wellington risked the same with its Let’s Get Wellington Moving project.

‘‘If we try to have it all then actually we will waste a lot of money. We’ll be much better to make some tough choices and say we are going to do this and we’re going to do it properly.’’

Let’s Get Wellington was a list without priorities right now, Rankin said.

Similar plans without any priorities or vision had left the city with the ‘‘litany of suboptimal projects’’ including the bypass. As finances and circumstances changed bits dropped off many proposals leaving the city with ‘‘piecemeal’’ networks, Rankin said.

‘‘If we built our telephone networks the way we build our transport networks we’d have all the cellphones in one suburb.’’

Chamber of Commerce Chief Executive John Milford agreed there were lessons for Wellington in the bypass study. His preferred option for the bypass was one that was dismissed as too expensive at the time – undergrounding it and widening the bypass to four lanes.

‘‘I would like to think we have learnt by now that fiddling with bit solutions does not work.’’

The report into the cost-benefit analysis of the Inner-City Bypass project, presented to a transport conference last week, recommended the New Zealand Transport Agency reassess them against real-world results.

‘‘If we try to have it all then actually we will waste a lot of money.’’ John Rankin