New cheaper, faster Wellington transport plan piques interest

Monday, 11 December 2023

An audacious transport plan featuring a mega-tunnel, demolition of heritage buildings, and a host of other changes – promoted as a cheaper and faster than the doomed Let’s Get Wellington Moving – has piqued the interest of city leaders.

Greg Pollock, the capital’s public transport boss in 2019 and 2020, will this week present his plans to city councillors and Wellington’s two new Green MPs.

It includes a 3km-long tunnel from north of the Terrace tunnel to Kilbirnie via the hospital. It would emerge on State Highway 1 north of The Terrace Tunnel, which would effectively become an off ramp into the city. Pollock backed building the Petone to Grenada link road with bus services on it, and called for a new cruise ship terminal in the central city.

He estimates the cost of the project could reach $1 billion — a figure he admitted was back-of-the-envelope — and achievable in five years, making it far-more palatable than the $7.4 billion Let’s Get Wellington Moving (LGWM) transport overhaul. However, the mega-tunnel was outside that timeframe and cost.

Pollock self-funded all the work himself and is now ready to hand it over to “whoever wants to pick it up”. But, with Wellington’s long history of never-off-the-ground projects including monorails, hovercrafts, gondolas, and now LGWM, it remains to be seen what will become of this.

In the plan, the Bluebridge and Interislander ferry terminals would become one, out of the central city, and there would be no roll-on-roll-off trains.

While Wellington’s Golden Mile changes remain in limbo with LGWM seemingly dead, Pollock advocates for trialling the pedestrianisation part of it first, for much less money.

His plan includes parking changes that would make some short-term parking free but longer parking harder, with higher penalties for overstaying. More car parking buildings are also in the plan.

There would be weekly fee caps on public transport, which would be free in the central city. He proposes a circular central city public transport route, with more direct bus and rail services from regional hubs, and more services on weekends and between weekday peaks.

“It is all about moving people faster on the buses.”

He also suggests permitting more housing and demolishing some quake-prone buildings, including heritage ones, and a city fund to backstop insurance.

Pollock studied where LGWM failed and where he believed this plan could could succeed.

“LGWM showed the hard parts are implementation and communicating with the public,” he said.

“Building things can’t be done by committee split by agendas. The public has to like the idea in general, and be willing to trust you to carry it out.”

The plan has already been welcomed by the council’s acting infrastructure committee chairperson, Tim Brown, who said it meets two key needs: Connecting the city with the regions and getting people through the central city. It had “far less waste” because it ditched light rail, which was in LGWM, and rethought the Interislander ferries.

“No doubt the tunnel proposal will draw criticism, but that really is the sliver bullet to improve connectivity between the city's east and west and to address the problems caused by State Highway 1 cutting the city's main north-south arteries,” Brown said.

While National, now the major party in government, campaigned to ditch LGWM, it also said it would build a second Mount Victoria tunnel and the Petone to Grenada link road.

Greater Wellington Regional Council transport chairperson Thomas Nash backed Pollock’s ideas, except for new roads and tunnel.

“State Highway traffic is down since 2019 in Wellington while bus use is up. We have a severe housing shortage, our rail network needs serious investment and we need 400 new electric buses. How can we justify multibillion-dollar road tunnels that don’t help solve any of these problems and instead gobble up funding for projects that could?”

Green Rongotai MP Julie Anne Genter also pointed to lower traffic readings on the highway.

'I find it surprising that a 3km road tunnel, with an off ramp, could possibly cost less than surface light rail, so I will be asking Greg about his cost assumptions,“ she said.

“I also don’t think it would be ‘less disruptive’. It would certainly be higher carbon and enable fewer people movements per dollar spent.”

Money would be better spent by focusing on public transport and “active transport”, she said.

Wellington mayor Tory Whanau and Wellington Central Green MP Tamatha Paul were approached for comment.

The ideas that never …

Hovercraft to Hutt Valley

In 2004, there was a plan for a hovercraft to race a car from the Hutt Valley to downtown Wellington. It was a stunt to promote a proposed hovercraft ferry service from the Hutt Valley, down the Hutt River, into Wellington Harbour and Queens Wharf in the city beyond. While two rival operators were looking at the idea, Wellington’s wind soon made the realities of a commuter service unviable.

Tunnel under Cook Strait

Cook Strait is 22km across at its narrowest point, on either side is unforgiving terrain, and is scuttled with fault lines. A tunnel under the Cook Strait was always going to be audacious but a Hawke’s Bay Herald article in 1904 said Premier Richard Seddon was talking up the idea, that never came to pass. There was guarded talk of a bridge or tunnel in 2018 but reality took hold fast and it never got past the grand idea phase.

Basin Reserve flyover

Before there was Let’s Get Wellington Moving, there was the Basin Reserve flyover – a planned two-lane, elevated highway 20m north of the fabled cricket ground. It was not without is detractors and, if never built, can claim one win. With a board of inquiry hearing that lasted 72 days over 16 weeks, it easily set a record for New Zealand’s longest resource consent hearing. By the time it was ditched in 2014, it had cost the Wellington City Council almost $11m in planning, staff, technical experts, lawyers, and reimbursing the Environmental Protection Agency.

A network of Gondolas

In 2012 a gondola was proposed from the end of Holloway Rd in Aro Valley to Polhill Reserve above. It was to feature a log-cabin style restaurant and souvenir shop, and would cost between $12m and $14m. It clearly never got built but the gondola idea recently resurfaced. Doppelmayr, the world’s biggest ski lift manufacturer, in November proposed four potential cable car routes the capital: the airport to CBD, Island Bay to CBD, Karori to CBD, and Wainuiomata to Hutt Valley.

Trains through the heart of town

Picture this: You get on a train in Porirua, then get off at Wellington Hospital. Transport geeks of a certain age recall a plan from the 1970s in which trains would not stop at the Wellington railway station but would keep going, down the harbour quays to Courtenay Place and beyond. A couple of copies of the plan are said to still exist but actual works never got off the ground.

Trenched inner city bypass

The bypass did get off the ground and is called Karo Dr. But it is a far cry and has more traffic lights than the original plan. Wellington’s motorway was built between 1967 and 1972. Entire Thorndon streets were bulldozed and human remains were moved at Bolton St Cemetery. While works stopped then, the master plan was for the motorway to push on through the city and, in 1990, the debate opened again. By 1992, there was a plan to trench the road through the city to avoid north-south traffic and give a clear run to the other side. After a massive outcry, the plan was significantly watered down and Karo Dr opened above ground, with traffic lights, in 2006, albeit with a small trench near the Terrace Tunnel entrance.

A second Terrace Tunnel

Go to the Clifton Car Park off The Terrace and the ghosts of a never-to-be transport plan remain. The foundations for a second road, to go to a second Terrace tunnel, remain there to today. But, in the 1970s, acting Prime Minister Hugh Watt diverted the money for that tunnel, as well as a second Mount Victoria tunnel (an idea that is still alive with National campaigning on building it), for Auckland’s “Spaghetti Junction”.

Long haul flights from Wellington

Wellington is an oddity in that it is a capital city inaccessible to long haul flights due to its short runway. Extending that runway, by pushing it out into the sea to the south remains in the airport’s “Blueprint to 2040” but the airport boss, Matt Clarke, in 2022 said plans were on “pause”, at least until a seawall could be renewed.

Monorail to the airport

In 2021 government procurement specialist Stephen Moore pitched the idea of a suspended monorail from the city to the airport, arguing it would be safer, cheaper, and faster than the light rail and trackless trams that LGWM was then considering. LGWM bosses quickly dismissed the idea due to the “high visual impact and the requisite regulatory processes that need to be fulfilled”. Back in 2006, the idea was floated for a monorail from Johnsonville, through the city, to the airport. That time, the plan failed die to a lack of investors.

A foiling Cook Strait ferry

Among a stack of 400 pages of material released by the Marlborough District Council under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act came one intriguing nugget. “It has come to my attention,” the council’s deputy harbour master emailed in 2021, “that there are, apparently serious, plans for fast, foiling, Cook Strait ferries. They would be about 30m long and do about 45 knots [83kph]. It is likely there will be smaller foiling craft too, in the coming years.” The email chain appears to die off there.