Woodend bypass starting to look like roadkill on the RoNS off-ramp
Tuesday, 14 July 2026
Mike Yardley is a Christchurch-based writer and commentator on current affairs, and a regular opinion contributor.
OPINION: As a holiday weekend loomed, the Transport Minister Chris Bishop made his move to the off-ramp, consigning his major roading projects policy dump to the mists of Matariki.
The government’s delivery of its Roads of National Significance programme (RoNS) is officially in tatters with Bishop forced to swallow the dead rat. It’s a sobering retreat for National which for so long has placed a premium on spruiking major roading projects as vote-catching bait.
Thursday’s announcement on the “Major Transport Projects Pipeline” laid bare that only six of 17 RoNS are now scheduled to be funded to completion. Given the fiscal crunch, the rest are relegated to an indeterminate future.
Some of these projects have become notorious on-again, off-again political footballs, like the Mt Victoria tunnel in Wellington, or Auckland’s Mill Rd project. But unlike the shambles over a second Mt Victoria tunnel which carries a monstrous price-tag of up to $3.8 billion, it’s deeply troubling to see the Belfast to Pegasus motorway and Woodend bypass, also demoted.
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That project’s estimated price-tag is a far more palatable $800million-$1b. And like Mill Rd, it has been repeatedly plagued by fickle political whims.
Community safety concerns saw the Woodend bypass first embraced by the NZ Transport Agency in 2013. National committed to delivering the project in the 2017 campaign, only for Labour to scuttle it in 2018. In the 2023 election, both National and Labour pledged to finally deliver the bypass.
The project would extend State Highway 1’s motorway from the Lineside Rd intersection to just north of the Pegasus roundabout, creating a 6km bypass of Woodend.
During the 2023 campaign, National explicitly promised to commence construction (not just early works) within one to three years. It was a key plank of Waimakariri MP Matt Doocey’s re-election campaign.
In May last year, Bishop issued a release alongside South Island Minister James Meager, reaffirming that “main construction is likely to begin later in 2026. The project is expected to take four years to complete.”
But any chance that this motorway extension and bypass will still open by 2030 is all but dashed. Early works have been underway since the start of the year, but the prospect of main construction works commencing this year are now dead in the water.
Thursday’s announcement was unhelpfully nebulous, other than signalling no funding allocation for construction before 2027. Whether you’re a resident, commuter, voter or all of the above, the whiff of betrayal will be widely felt.
It’s also a black eye for Matt Doocey, given he has parlayed this project for so long.
So what soothing words of reassurance is the Waimakariri MP now offering? Not a lot.
Does Doocey consider the failure to have main construction underway this year a broken promise? He won’t say. Nor will he reveal whether he is surprised or disappointed at the shifting timeframe.
Aside from trying to frame Thursday’s announcement as “good news” that the project was moving into “phase two: preparing for construction,” he can’t give any guarantees that construction funding will be forthcoming, nor that the bypass will be completed in the next 4-5 years.
“I'm confident once all the consents have been granted through the Fast Track Approvals Act, the project will move to the next stage. I am looking forward to this significant road coming to fruition,” he tells me.
But when? The delivery timeframe is now anyone’s guess.
Labour list MP Dan Rosewarne is once again contesting Doocey’s hold on the Waimakariri electorate. He’s slamming National for “walking back the certainty they sold at the election”.
Rosewarne tells me he’s “extremely disappointed that the Government still has no funding allocated to begin construction. Cantabrians deserve certainty about when it will finally get underway.”
So will Labour whole-heartedly commit to it? Conditionally.
“If a project is underway and funded under this Government, we will continue it,” says Rosewarne.
Nor is he prepared to reprise the pledge he made three years ago, which was also to double the lanes on the Ashley River bridge.
“That’s something we’ll assess when we see the books fully when we get back into government,” he tells me.
The era of major transport projects being cynically dangled as voter cat-nip is surely over.