Transport Pipeline Delivers 'Certainty', Mostly About Which Roads Won't Be Built

NZTA released its latest Major Transport Projects Pipeline this week under the headline “Transport Pipeline Provides Certainty”. The certainty, as it turned out, mostly concerned which projects would not be getting built. Two Auckland roading projects were pushed into what officials are calling the slow lane, and the Petone to Grenada Link Road in Lower Hutt was left with no construction date at all, to the visible relief of the locals who live where it would have gone.

Transport Minister Chris Bishop acknowledged that some of the Government’s earlier commitments had been “ambitious”, which is a generous word for promises that did not survive contact with a budget. The trucking industry, which had been planning around those commitments, expressed disappointment. NZTA maintains that a phased pipeline delivers certainty regardless of which phase never arrives, on the logic that knowing a road will not be built is technically a kind of clarity.

Certainty, it turns out, was never a promise about concrete. It was a promise about paperwork, and on that measure the pipeline has delivered handsomely. Lower Hutt residents can now plan their weekends without a motorway in them, indefinitely. Everyone else can look forward to a future press release confirming that the current pipeline remains the pipeline, precisely as certain as it was the last time somebody announced it.