Hutt cycleways cost $33 million per km and rising

Tuesday, 19 September 2023

The long-awaited Melling to Petone cycleway will be open in October.

The costs of three cycleway projects in Hutt City have risen by more than $300 million, with only one of them nearing completion.

The three are all part of Te Ara Tupua, a project to improve transport resilience between Wellington and Lower Hutt by building a cycleway and improving public transport.

The long-awaited Melling to Petone cycleway – alongside the Melling rail line – opens in October at a cost of $65m. When work began in 2019 it was supposed to cost $30m. Two years earlier the figure was $17m.

Earlier this year the cost of the Hutt City Council-led Seaview to Eastbourne shared path and seawall rose from $30m to $80m. Although construction is well underway, there is still a significant shortfall in funding.

The reclamation needed for the Ngauranga to Petone shared pathway is good news for rail commuters. It will stop the rail corridor from being undermined in storms and for cyclists there will be a cycleway.

The budget blow out for the Petone to Ngauranga shared path and cycleway (Ngā Ūranga ki Pito-One) is, using published figures from before construction began, as much as $238m.

In June 2020 it was reported that MP Chris Bishop had revealed the cost was between $76m and $94m. In September 2020 Waka Kotahi’s board approved a new estimate of $170m, with an upper cost estimate of $205m.

That was roughly a quarter of what the nearby Transmission Gully was originally meant to cost before it too blew its budget. In March, when work began, the cost had increased to $312m.

An artist's impression of the Normandale section of the Melling to Petone cycleway.

In 2021, Stuff noted the Petone shared path to Ngāūranga (then costed at $190m) would soak up the equivalent of the entire country’s maximum annual cycling and walking budget, working out at $4.2m for each 100 metres of cycleway.

Although it depends on which initial cost you use, the overall cost of the three projects had increased more than $300m by September this year.

Regional manager infrastructure delivery Jetesh Bhula said there were a range of reasons for the delay, and massive increase in cost, in finishing the Melling to Petone cycleway, including the weather.

“There is extensive existing infrastructure in the project zone – underground pipes, gas mains, power supply and fibre broadband cables.”

Working around that infrastructure had proven to be more complex than anticipated, he said.

“The land along the Petone to Melling project was also contaminated with substances linked to the long history of rail line operations. This contamination was more extensive than expected and required additional remedial work.”

In addition, the project had been affected by the significant cost escalations affecting the construction sector.

At 3.5km, the cycleway is one of the most expensive in the country at roughly $18m a km. That is a figure that even cycling advocate Patrick Morgan says is unacceptable.

Issues around underground services and contamination should have been considered before work began, he said.

He believed costs linked to upgrading railway infrastructure had been unfairly loaded onto the cycleway.

If the three projects are completed, on current budgets the 13.5km of connecting cycleway would cost $457m or $33.8m a km.

Although all three projects began life as cycleways, both the Ngāūranga and Eastbourne projects have a major resilience component. The cost of a storm in 2013 that undermined the railway line cost up to $43m in repairs and disruption to commuters.

Since work began on the Petone to Ngāūranga project, there had been no cost increase announced.