this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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To be fair, Labour made an absolute pig's ear of almost every infrastructure project they had a go at during their term, it seems a bit churlish of them to complain about National turning around and building roads.
If they and our councils had actually been competent at delivering infrastructure, we'd have trams in Auckland and Wellington, new ferries arriving next year with new terminals waiting for them, as well as better rail infrastructure.
But no, that's not the world we live in unfortunately.
Infrastructure is expensive, and often goes over budget. It is hard to deliver large projects on time and on budget. Any builder will tell you how often a simple house build goes over time and budget.
Crying about incompetency is silly when the alternative seems to be to throw away money that has been spent for no gain. We have lost all the money spent on the ferries, plus a penalty, for no fucking gain at all. All the money spent working on ALR has been flushed down the toilet. It's fucking insanity.
The answer is not throwing away projects because they cost more than anticipated, it is finishing projects and figuring out how to do it better next time. New Zealand has seriously terrible infrastructure problems and they can only be solved with money, and a lot of it.
I disagree with you there, the sunk cost fallacy is a real problem, and we are very much prone to it. If light rail had been under construction already, there would have been a solid case to make for keeping it, but Wellington had been planning and consulting for nearly ten years without laying a single piece of track.
The ferries were perhaps less of a good idea to cancel, but the whole project was massively over speced, in my view. One vessel would have been almost the same size as their entire current fleet.
Oh absolutely, sunk cost fallacy is a problem. No disagreement there.
However, my point is cancelling a project doesn't remove the need. We need better public transport, we need ferries, we need infrastructure upgrades. All of these things need to happen, and the longer they are put off usually the more they will cost. So it's not so simple as a sunk cost, as cancelling a project then doing it again later may very well end up costing more in the long run than the over run cost of the initial project. Case in point, the ferries.
I will admit, though, I know less about the wellington light rail project. I was under the impression that a lot of the cost being spent was paying for land that was needed for the project, but you can probably inform me more about this. I'll just say, rail is still needed (or some form of mass transit system).
Wellington light rail was to be run along existing streets, so the amount of land purchased was going to be very low, I think most of the land purchased wastes to be for the new tunnels.
I honestly can't explain what happened with Wellington light rail, they did public outreach and surveys almost ten years ago, had overwhelming support for both light rail and a secondary Terrace and Mt Vic tunnel. The council was taken to court over the flyover project, and then... Nothing happened for about a decade.
I'm honestly at a loss to explain it.
I must be confusing it with Auckland's recently cancelled project, I remember a bunch of money being spent to purchase land.
I mean, I wish they'd build shit. Total agreement here. It needs to be done, just do it!
You may be thinking of the cycle bridge across the harbour, they spent fifty mil or so on that, mostly on consultants.