this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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Being an advocate for genuine transport options in this country would drive anyone mad imo, I don't know how they do it for years on end.
The most basic infrastructure to enable public and active transport is continually challenged, subject to predatory delay and actual sabotage (tacks thrown on cycle paths, including this one).
Wellington seems particularly terrible for this, a city of nimbys and vested interests that want nothing to change, ever, because they already got theirs. But it doesn't really work because every year things decay a little more, the traffic gets worse and so on.
And this is definitely because we don't have enough cycle lanes, not because we haven't invested in roading in the capital since the nineties.
Public transport is great, but we still need roading infrastructure.
Yeah it is. And bus lanes. You can at least get everywhere in a car on the existing road network, can't say the same about other modes. There are huge gaps in coverage.
Doubling down on road infrastructure for cars without alternatives is monstrously expensive and only ends up making traffic even worse in the long run.
Just think how many problems it would solve if people heading towards Kilbirnie and Miramar could do so without interacting with the Wellington CBD. Imagine how much more pleasant the place would be.
The estimated cost of that is nearly 10 times what transmission Gully cost, and it'd be certainly more than that in practice. Ridiculous amounts of money, just shift some of the peak capacity.
I suspect that was done to wind people up, or at least wasn't a serious proposal.
I do think it would be better for everyone to make it easier for traffic to get through the CBD though, especially since we can't build a ring road.