I have a hard time believing National would cancel a road, especially a project like that, it would go down like a lead balloon amongst their supporters.

We have a few sites in Foxton we service, this new road would mean I can get there in around two hours from Wellington.

[–] Dave 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Petrol tax and RUC goes into a fund called the National Land Transport Fund (NLTF). This fund is ringfenced and can only be used for building and maintaining roads. Basically, money going into this fund is allocated out for maintenance and for new roading projects.

National have come in with a promise to build a bunch of new roads not currently planned. Their proposal is to pay for these roads from the NLTF.

The only way they can do this, it to cancel other roading projects, or take money that would have been allocated to other roading projects in the future.

We have a few sites in Foxton we service, this new road would mean I can get there in around two hours from Wellington.

Isn't Foxton much less than 2 hours away now? I'd think you'd be in Palmy by 2 hours.

[–] Ilovethebomb 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It probably is, come to think of it, Otaki is reliably under an hour.

There will be a chunk of funding coming from places like RUCs on electric vehicles, I'm not sure what else they plan to use.

[–] Dave 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Electric vehicles are from memory about 1.7% of light vehicles, so I doubt they will get 6 billion of funding (plus the other 2-4 billion needed because they used old estimates). Pretty sure they just intend to reallocate funding from other projects (probably to avoid criticism, might try to add these projects to the end of the queue so any already approved projects proceed as planned).

But to be fair, they probably just won't go ahead. If a party completes 50% of their election promises, then it's a pretty good run.

[–] Ilovethebomb 2 points 1 year ago

Imagine if Labour had built 50% of the light rail they promised us.