Wellington needs to get real about Transmission Gully.
The priority list of for infrastructure projects is to be reviewed as a consequence of the Christchurch earthquake. This process will include reviewing the programme of work on Roads of National Significance. Transmission Gully Motorway, which has a pitifully low cost/benefit ratio, must be a prime candidate for indefinite deferral. It was always a distant prospect which would not be completed for at least 20 years and there is now no hope of seeing TGM for fifty years.
Transmission Gully cannot be given priority over the rebuilding of Christchurch and our newspapers and local politicians should not waste their energy campaigning for the unattainable. If they keep crying out for TGM nothing will be done to improve the north-west corridor. The focus should be on the road between Pukerua Bay and Mackays Crossing and in particular the Pukerua Bay section which is still much as it was when built in the 1930’s. If nothing is done we will have to endure the capacity and safety limitations of this relic of the Model T Ford era indefinitely.
The Mayor of Porirua has no basis for his claim that a Transmission Gully Motorway can be restored in a fraction of the time needed for Centennial Highway and should stop perpetuating the nonsense that it would provide a more earthquake proof escape route out of Wellington. He ignores the fact that the most vulnerable section of SH1 is between the city and Ngauranga and then up the Ngauranga Gorge. There is no point in building an enormously expensive alternative road between Linden and MacKays, most of which is on a faultline, if the earthquake we all fear will close the roads from Wellington city to Johnsonville.
The Coastal Highway Group urges Nick Leggett and other local body leaders to get real and start agitating for action on a Pukerua Bay by-pass.
Dick Jessup
For the Coastal Highway Group