The $15 billion white elephant no one wants
Stuff reports:
Normally, the mayor of a city is grateful if a government comes along and offers to drop $15 billion in their town.
Of the four most prominent candidates to be Auckland mayor – Viv Beck, Efeso Collins, Wayne Brown and Craig Lord – Collins, the candidate endorsed by the Labour Party, is the most in favour of such a money drop when it comes to the light rail project.
He says he will encourage the Government to go with a cheaper surface light rail option, but won’t stand in the way if it decides to press ahead with tunnelled light rail anyway. “I disagree at the moment with the current proposal to go underground, or to tunnel parts of it.”
No one wants it because they know it will never happen, and you could do much much more with the money.
Matt Lowrie, editor of Greater Auckland, a public transport advocacy blog, says the tunnelled light rail option is effectively the worst of both worlds.
He also argues it doesn’t represent great value, because for $2b more you could experience the full advantages of a light metro system and for $7b less you could have a surface light rail system which would be accessible to more people. Or, you could spend that $15b on something else entirely.
“We could be building two or three other light rail lines around Auckland for that; or around the country, we could be using that money to build hospitals or more housing or a bunch of other things,” Lowrie says.
On this I agree with Lowrie.
Within the infrastructure industry, he says there is little confidence that this project will actually be delivered. “A lot of people are hesitant to support the project with too much capacity within their organisations because they’re not confident that this will ever actually go ahead.”
Of course it will never happen. Its a fantasy, just like Kiwibuild.
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