So the latest plan to fix central Wellington traffic has been released for consultation, and it’s a monster. 

There’s a couple of tunnels. A new one at the Terrace end of the motorway and another new tunnel through Mount Victoria. Land and houses will be taken out of the town belt at Mount Victoria and parkland at the Terrace 

There will be a major redesign of the Basin Reserve roundabout and a bridge near the airport. 

And the price tag? 

3 billion dollars. Ironically the same sort of cost for two ports and two ferries to cross Cook Strait, that was thought to be wildly expensive at the time. 

So the immediate reaction is that this plan is wildly expensive. Which it is.

Wildly expensive and totally predictable. The Rongotai Airport was opened in 1959 and from day one it was dependent on the Mount Vic tunnel, which opened in 1931. 

It should have been expanded then. It’s Wellington’s Auckland Harbour Bridge moment - a piece of insufficient infrastructure that only got worse.

You could argue the same thing about the Terrace tunnel that was built ending abruptly in tiny urban streets designed before the rise of the automobile. 

Meanwhile some of Mount Vic’s funky houses are going to be destroyed, and that gets right up the inner-city residents noses - the ones who don’t have to drive far at all.

So consultation is open now and I’m expecting it to be rancorous. But it’s the bed Wellington chose to lie in when building an inner city airport and not making the hard calls earlier. 

And that also means strife for the good people of Khandallah who are complaining about the plane noise over their suburb after the flight paths changed in 2022. They’d rather the flights went over Newlands, who love the flight path change. 

As soon as you put your airport at Rongotai this was bound to happen. So you can’t really complain about the bill you’ve inherited from your forebears who lacked foresight. 

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