Wellington needs real solutions, not selective outrage over tunnels

Friday, 26 December 2025

Luke Pierson is an entrepreneur, company director, and lifelong Wellingtonian

OPINION: Like many who’ve built their lives in this city, I was here during the Lord of the Rings years — when half the population had a cousin who’d been an orc, a dwarf, or knew a bloke who pushed a trolley past Viggo Mortensen. Hobbit holes, caves, journeys through mountains … it was all part of a mythology we absorbed by osmosis.

Which makes it slightly surreal to watch an unlikely fellowship of small groups insist that burrowing into a hill here constitutes some kind of moral crisis — not with dragons or magic rings, but with selective outrage and some truly circular logic.

They’ve set out on a quest to destroy the duplication of the Terrace and Mt Victoria tunnels – work designed to fix two major choke points we’ve all been complaining about for years. Aside from making journeys there and back again significantly faster, the project could lower the number of cars using the Harbour Quays by 20%, making way for buses, cycling and walking – and even provides a dedicated, separated cycling and pedestrian link to the eastern suburbs.

A lot to like, I would’ve thought – but the plan, they say, is evil.

Opposition forces are being rallied by our Green MPs and city councillors. They’re firmly against any tunnel-building activity, labelling the $3 billion project “eye-wateringly expensive” and “potentially disastrous for our city”. They’re upset that private property will need to be acquired to make room for the project, and concerned about the likelihood of a cost blowout. One of our Green councillors even reckons the years of disruption will make it “incredibly difficult for the city centre to stay alive”.

Now, if you squint, you can sort of see where they’re coming from with this – but you’d have to have a very short memory to take them seriously. Because barely two years ago, the Greens were championing a massive tunnel vision of their own, in the form of Let’s Get Wellington Moving.

The tunnel they were happy to build was not only much bigger than the one proposed at Mt Victoria, but was part of a project costing about twice as much – well over $6 billion. It, too, involved significant acquisition of private property and years of disruption – including not only tunnels and roads, but installing light rail and digging up the Golden Mile.

So it’s hard to make the case that our Green representatives are, in fact, opposed to tunnels. It doesn’t look like they really care about cost. They don’t seem to mind buying up private property, and don’t look all that concerned about disruption.

And as for the Golden Mile – our Green councillors used their first vote in the newly formed council to forge ahead with that project, in support of a huge cost blowout. Our new mayor and every other councillor prudently pressed pause.

It looks to me like the problem is not the double lanes, but the double standards.

This inconsistency matters, because the two projects weren’t even built on the same kind of thinking. The new proposal is grounded in things we can actually measure - how many vehicles use the route, how long they take, and where the queues form. The old plan bet its benefits on behaviour change – tens of thousands of Wellingtonians making different transport choices, every day, for decades. In other words, one is grounded in real-world engineering, while the other drifts into magical thinking.

Let’s be clear – this proposal certainly has room for improvement. There are changes, trade-offs and compromises to be made. But all infrastructure projects cost money, they usually cause disruption during construction, and building anything has an environmental impact.

What we don’t have here is perfection. But what we do have, is a chance to fix a longstanding transport challenge for Wellington. An offer to invest $3b in infrastructure for the future of our city. A real solution, based on real traffic data and travel times, solving a real problem. A chance to actually get Wellington moving.

With 45,000 vehicles a day using the Mt Victoria tunnel, and a recent Curia poll showing 67% of Wellingtonians want another one (just 16% don’t), Wellingtonians want this problem solved. But we need to move the debate away from selective outrage, and towards constrictive criticism.

Because in the end, this isn’t a battle between good and evil. It’s a choice between solving real problems with real infrastructure, or leaving the city’s future with its opponents – firmly in the realm of fantasy.