Saving minutes, spending billions: Checking the big claims behind Wellington highway push
Saturday, 31 January 2026
What will you do with your 86 extra hours? Or is that 43? With NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi promising up to 10 minutes peak time travel savings from its changes to State Highway 1 within Wellington city, that is how much time you could save in a year.
Grand promises but, as with nearly everything about the Government’s $2.9 billion to $3.8b Wellington roading plans – second Mt Victoria and Terrace tunnels, three-laning of Vivian St, a complete overhaul of roads around the Basin Reserve and dual carriage ways to the airport with a Hataitai interchange – everything is contested.
Bonus time
Perhaps the biggest claim by the roading agency is that “current modelling forecasts travel time savings of up to 10 minutes on key state highway journeys at peak times”. At five to 10 minutes a morning rush hour, another five to 10 after work, that works out to up to 5200 minutes in a 260-day working year. Or 86.6 hours a year (or 43.3 at the lower end).
That is for trips from Ngāūranga Gorge to the airport. Ngāūranga to the hospital is four to six minutes while the airport into the city is four to seven minutes.
NZTA has not given time savings from Ngāūranga to the city but its consultation document does promise: “The proposed design will enable state highway traffic to enter and exit the city smoothly, improving access to and from the wider region as well as the eastern suburbs and Wellington International Airport.”
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Not so, says Green regional councillor Yadana Saw, at least not without NZTA releasing the modelling the figures are based on. The Post has asked NZTA for the workings but this was not supplied though it did say it used a “range of industry standard models”.
After missing two deadlines, it did manage to give the non-peak travel savings: Ngāūranga to airport, four to six minutes; Ngāūranga to hospital, three minutes, airport to the southern central city, three to four minutes, with the southern city one minute more.
“Nobody disputes the merit of getting across the city fast and efficiently,” Saw said.
“The argument is are there better ways of spending that money to get the outcomes we want?”
For her, that meant investing in better trains which, with a successful Airport Flyer, would get people to the airport faster. If the problem was school pick ups and drop offs, or weekend traffic, perhaps behaviour change was needed.
Around the Wellington City Council table, councillor Diane Calvert is one of the biggest cheerleaders for the project, though her support is not without qualification.
She drives into the city from her northern suburbs home most days and there is usually a Terrace Tunnel queue.
“We have to stop thinking of Wellington City being [only] in the east and south,” she said.
“When we go to amalgamation, it is just a suburb.”
Entrepreneur and company director Luke Pierson, a lifelong Wellingtonian, the plan is a chance to fix a longstanding transport challenge for Wellington.
“A real solution, based on real traffic data and travel times, solving a real problem. A chance to actually get Wellington moving.”
Pierson said this proposal had room for improvement and there were 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.”
He pointed to the 45,000 vehicles a day using the Mt Victoria tunnel, and a recent Curia poll showing 67% of Wellingtonians want another a second tunnel. Just 16% don’t.
“Wellingtonians want this problem solved.”
With Wellington, Hutt Valley and Porirua moving towards possible amalgamation, growth in the north would only increase. And those people would need to get into the city, be it for work or to the hospital or airport.
Along with promised faster travel comes the NZTA claim of a 40% improvement in travel time “reliability” – that when you leave home you will have some certainty when you will arrive at your destination.
Infrastructure NZ chief executive Nick Leggett said projects such as Transmission Gully or the Kāpiti expressway proved that new roads delivered on reliability and, as a result, “people have more productive lives” freed from sitting in traffic.
“It frees up the city to get on with the job it needs to,” he said.
Measures such as benefit-cost ratios (BCRs) were useful but missed things such as new housing intensification that couldn’t be fully predicted.
“We can’t even understand [all] the benefits,” he said.
Green Transport spokesperson and Rongotai MP Julie Anne Genter has been trying, via written questions to Transport Minister Chris Bishop, to get the estimated average travel time savings. She has been able to get only peak time savings back.
Economist and urbanist Roland Sapsford, who campaigned against the inner city Wellington bypass when it was being planned, said the scant and unexplained figures NZTA had released were “more sales pitch than economic analysis”.
The time savings were based on adding all the projected time savings ‒ seconds here and seconds there ‒ together and this tended to inflate the overall number.
He argued that this project built to address capacity issues at peak times, meaning that the vast majority of the time we would have roads well-exceeding demand.
A better, and internationally proven, way was to have time-sensitive congestion charging in the central city. This would show where the real congestion was ‒ and that could be addressed.
A number of years ago, only about a quarter of traffic leaving the Terrace Tunnel was taking the route to the Mount Victoria tunnel the revamped road would follow.
“Wellington is the destination,” he said. “[The new road] is not bypassing anything.”
The bypass he lobbied against was built and is now called Karo Drive.
“Things are basically back to where they were in terms of congestion,” he said.
Why an airport wants roads
Wellington Airport chief executive Matt Clarke is pro the plans. He points out there are times the drive from central Wellington to the airport takes longer than a flight to Auckland.
“Trying to choke the road to boost public transport as a strategy is nothing short of economic vandalism,” he said in November as the airport released a survey (conducted days before detailed designs and costings were released) showing clear public support for the NZTA plans.
Speaking recently, he said airports were a place for convenient travel but the time that could be wasted getting to or from the airport negated some of that efficiency.
And with that, went the city’s capacity for growth. Take, for example, a Wellington-based consultant who needed to work around the country. Their ability to do that, and stay in Wellington, depended on being able to travel easily.
When he started at the airport 15 years ago, the road was already seem a “major inhibitor” and congestion was getting worse.
“More people missing flights and that is on a good day,” he said.
He sung the praises of the Airport Flyer bus and pointed out that bigger roads would benefit existing and future road-based public transport ‒ possibly with dedicated bus lanes.
Clarke flat-out denied his pro-road position was motivated by increasing car parking revenue ‒ a claim made by some.
Genter, the local MP, said the airport was a commercial entity and “they would probably have fewer opportunities to make money off rapid transit than cars”.
The airport survey, conducted before NZTA released projected costs and designs, appeared to have no questions about support for light rail, which had always been highly valued in past surveys. Nor did people answering the survey know how much it was going to cost, she said.
Less traffic on local roads
NZTA, in its consultation document, promised the changes would mean reduced traffic on local roads.
They don’t show the predicted 3500 extra daily cars on Moxham Ave in Hataitai, that southern Evans Bay Pde will increase by 3400 cars daily and Elizabeth St in Mt Victoria will increase by 1600. Each goes past a school.
The NZTA thinking goes like this: With more traffic using State Highway 1, less traffic will go around Oriental Bay into Evans Bay while the intersection at the north of Cambridge and Kent terraces will be freed up. By the same token, a 20% drop in morning peak traffic on the harbour quays is predicted.
Genter said one had to look to Auckland to see that wasn’t true. When the Waterview Tunnel opened in 2017, there was a drop in traffic on local roads but it was now back to where it was.
Around the world, it was shown that more roads meant more cars and an eventual return to congestion. Meanwhile, investing in public transport or introducing congestion charging got people out of cars long-term.
A further assumption of NZTA is that those newly quiet local roads would enable “opportunities for greater use by public transport and other modes”.
Greater Wellington Regional Council transport committee chairperson Ros Connelly said her council ‒ which runs public transport ‒ had given no input to the plans politically and, while some staff were involved in operational aspects such as bus stops, they were not involved in modelling.
She was “dubious” about claims it would improve public transport and said, with some roads getting busier and others quieter, there would be wins and losses.
The overall plans were “not done with public transport at the fore”, she said.
Increased walking and cycling
A wider shared cycle and footpath through the new Mount Victoria tunnel is undoubtedly an improvement on the status quo, where cyclists and walkers share a far-narrower path through the existing tunnel. It is far from the previous government’s solution of devoting the existing tunnel to separated cycling and walking.
Save the Basin co-convenor James Fraser said the planned shared cycleway was dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists: 'It is not wide enough and there would be a high risk of collisions between faster moving cyclists and those on foot if it goes ahead.'
Motukairangi/Eastern ward Green councillor Jonny Osborne welcomed the improvements on the current “inadequate” path through the tunnel.
“[But] no safe cycling link between Kilbirnie Park and the Mount Victoria Tunnel is disappointing, especially as there will be 47% more traffic on Moxham Ave, the main cycling route to the tunnel,” he said.
Do the benefits outweigh the costs? It’s complicated
The project has a benefit-cost ratio (BCR) of 0.7 to 1.2, with one the level the costs equal the benefits.
Principal Economics director Chris Parker said this project used a 2% “discount rate” (excluding inflation) ‒ meaning each year the benefits of the project dropped by 2%. The older method, used until 2008, was a 10% annual drop. This meant that, within a decade, the benefits worked out close to zero.
The new system, approved by Treasury for large, long-term public projects, effectively gave projects a far-longer time frame to realise the benefits, but also made the BCR more favourable than it would have been under the previous system.
The longer time frame meant a lot more thought had to be given to alternatives, he said.
For example, light rail under the lower discount rate would also get a better BCR. It was also vital for such a large, long-term growth project that the right methodology was used, he said.
This should including looking at roads, public transport, water, land zoning and a city economic development strategy rather than just roads.
This project would seemingly open the eastern suburbs up to more development but the reality was there was not a lot of room in the east that was currently undeveloped.
Ideally, the government and city should look at the situation in reverse ‒ if, say 80,000 more residents were going to be here, then work backwards to what transport would be needed.
It was a process that he believed would come up with a mixture of roads, public transport and “active modes” such as walking and cycling.