I’m a firm believer in blogs like this connecting to other blogs rather than the MSM (breaking news aside) because blogs often provide a level of expert analysis and detail of subjects that the MSM does not.

In this case I’ll link to two blogs, Not PC and Liberty Scott on the matter of transport and do so in two separate posts. But they should be read together.

First up is Not PC, run by Peter Cresswell, an architect who has spent decades writing and thinking about urban planning. This particular article is a guest post by The Uncivil Servant, and focuses on transport in just one place, Wellington, and one group there planning it:

A RUNNING JOKE AROUND Wellington is the organisation for activist bureaucrats Let’s Get Wellington Moving (LGWM). A running joke, because it is a symbol for how bureaucracy barely lets anything move at all.

The last National Government foolishly set it up to try to get agreement with local government on fixing transport problems in Wellington. Labour however has since changed its objectives, and painted a wide band of Green all over it. So now it isn’t really much about transport at all.

You could say the same about MBIE, set up at the behest of ACT. When are our “Right-wing” parties going to realise that setting up new bureaucracies to get things done simply results in these scenarios? All that happens is that the lovers of the State, the Left, have a new home to burrow into. In this case the writer details how the organisation’s primary objectives have been changed:

The upshot of this capitulation to blancmange is that LGWM is now less about transport and more about enabling intensification for housing development, and reducing carbon emissions. In fact, almost all about carbon emissions. Note: not noxious emissions like particulates…

The autistic focus gets worse than that:

It is also single-mindedly focused on reducing emissions solely by mode shift. Not by travelling less, not by moving to electric or hybrid vehicles, or by reducing traffic congestion to waste less fuel. LGWM is instead now almost solely focussed on enabling more housing (on one corridor), and on making peasants like you drive less by using public transport more.

They already have the statistics in front of them that show that their approach is not going to work, even on their own terms of reducing CO2 emissions. One third of traffic enters Wellington only to get to other places, and the primary reason for the congestion is that there is no bypass:

The problem is easy to identify: Wellington’s urban motorway ends abruptly at Te Aro at one end, and at the other end, SH1 from the airport stalls at the bottleneck of Mt Victoria Tunnel, with one lane in each direction. This causes congestion all day long and on weekends as well. Plus between 15-40% of traffic along Wellington’s waterfront is travelling to avoid that congestion, according to LGWM, that’s traffic that helps separate Wellington city from its harbour.

But LGWM is just not interested in solving that problem. Although the author does not say so I reckon that they’re actually happy with the congestion, thinking it will force drivers on to their trains, trams and buses, much as the Greens are happy about the Covid-19 lockdown destruction of our tourist industry, since it means fewer CO2 emitting planes ferrying people to and from our shores.

One of LGWM’s primary proposals is some sort of tram system that will cost $2.2 billion. That’s their estimate: public transport systems around the world regularly blow out such forecasts, often by multiples of two, three or more. Auckland’s ring train being merely the latest local example. The LGWM idea won’t do a damned thing for CO2 emissions either. In fact it has a different objective:

This policy of LGWM is straight out of the North American urbanist planner playbook, which calls for more “PT” (public transport) to induce more high-density housing. A policy that  has had the same success in addressing housing shortages and traffic issues there (i.e., virtually  none) as it would in Wellington. 

The other idea is fiddling around with the Mt Victoria road tunnels; building one for walkers and cyclists only and the other for buses only. Seriously, do these people even live in the city? I’ve walked and cycled around the place and on the rare nice day of sun and little wind it’s great, but there is no way I’d do it most of the time, especially during Winter and Autumn (Spring is not great either). There is already a dedicated bus tunnel of one lane only: why not just enlarge it? Probably for the following reason:

So all of the proposals essentially keep the current road capacity and do nothing at all about the bottleneck. This is straight out of the Green Party “building new road capacity is bad” school of thinking, on the basis people might have the audacity to drive (even with an electric car). One has to suspect the proposals are designed to just be dumped for being uneconomic, because they won’t encourage housing, won’t reduce emissions, nor encourage people to shift modes.

There’s nothing for the rest of Wellington either, even for other places with bottlenecks and congestion, like Karori. What a future National/ACT government should do about this is pretty simple:

If we want to ever get Wellington moving, a first step must be to remove Let’s Get Wellington Moving. It must be stopped.

Thereafter, [NZ Transport Agency] should be directed to finish SH1 in Wellington with a second Terrace Tunnel and Mt Victoria Tunnel; to trench the highway under Te Aro; and to grade separate at the Basin Reserve. Wellington City Council should put in place bus-priority measures at strategic points across the network.

On the other hand perhaps we just let Wellington drown in its own juices? Despite countless fuckups I see the locals regularly voting in very Lefty and Green councillors so Mencken’s rule of democracy should perhaps apply.

The only problem with that approach is that the rest of us, via central government, would end up paying to dig them out of their crap sooner or later. Better to stop them now before they hurt themselves.