Climate implications

Mayor Gurunathan is over the moon about the opening of Transmission Gully. But the reasons he likes it amount to tragedy for our efforts to fight climate change. Greatly increased housing built on the coast, because people will be more easily able to commute to town by car. It seems likely that the passenger train service will wither and die as everyone will take to driving instead. Gurunathan talks of social housing built associated with the road. I guess he means low-income people living in Ka¯ piti and having to maintain cheap and high-polluting cars to drive in to work in Wellington – what a good idea, to reproduce the Auckland nightmare.

And he finishes by criticising the “Wellington bottleneck”, which annoys people who don’t live there and only want to drive through as fast as possible. The path of survival means getting rid of fossil-fuelled vehicles within the next 10 years. Transmission Gully ends up a rather over-engineered route for electric buses, e-bikes and the odd EV.

Sue Boyde Paraparaumu