c/politics · by rimu@piefed.social · 152d

$22 billion on just one 95km road ($232 million per km)

https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2026/03/03/22000000000-on-just-one-road/

(everyone knows roading budgets usually blow out - the total final cost of Transmission Gully appears to be $2.5bn – double the projected cost of $1.25bn).

19 points · 10 comments · view on lemmy.world

10 Comments

Dave@lemmy.nz · 7 pts · 152d (3 replies)

How many years of free public transport would $22B buy?

I recall the 50% price cut during COVID (for the whole country) cost the government a few hundred million for a year. This was during COVID so it didn't get higher uptake, but let's assume there was a higher uptake and make it $500M for 50% off per year, or 1B for free public transport per year.

We could have free public transport for everyone for 22 years for the price of this one road.

rimu@piefed.social · 9 pts · 152d

In the article they came up with a few other things 22B would buy:

four City Rail Links ($5.5b)
seven fully equipped Dunedin hospitals ($3b)
seven Cook Strait ferry terminals ($3b)
99 contract-cancellations for no Cook Strait Ferries ($222m)
fully funded 7kwh solar panel and battery systems for all 700,000 dwellings in Auckland and Northland ($21b)
169 times the annual walking and cycling budget in the 2024 GPS ($130m)
Enough funding to run the Te Huia train between Auckland and Hamilton for 3780 years…
… or, how about free passenger rail across the whole country for effectively forever?
four and a half Northwest Busways ($5b)
seven Airport to Botany Busways ($3b)
22 twice-built International Convention Centres ($1b)

deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz · 2 pts · 149d (1 reply)

It buys a hell of a lot of post-parliamentary corporate directorships.

Dave@lemmy.nz · 2 pts · 148d

We really need a better way of managing this risk. I don't have any suggestions but the blatant bribery is a pretty big problem to democracy.

philanthropicoctopus@thelemmy.club · 5 pts · 152d (2 replies)

How much is that per centimeter?

freshcow@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 152d (1 reply)

$2320 per cm; or $232 per mm

philanthropicoctopus@thelemmy.club · 2 pts · 149d

Thanks

That's absolutely insane. Imagine if that was the number in the proposed plan. Would have been squashed instantly

BaconWrappedEnigma@lemmy.nz · 3 pts · 152d (1 reply)

Is anybody held accountable or are there any incentive structures to prevent it from happening in the future?

rimu@piefed.social · 2 pts · 152d

8 months till the election. They haven't started work on this yet so it'll probably come to nothing if they lose.

GGNZ@lemmy.nz · 2 pts · 144d

I saw this recently

"Even so, the numbers are staggering. The section between Whangarei and Te Hana is expected to cost $15.3-18.3 billion, and this doesn’t include the cost of the Warkworth to Te Hana section which is expected to start construction next year and was most recently estimated to cost $2.9-3.8 billion.

Combined, that’s $18.2-22.1 billion – which is incredible for a road that for most of its length carries only 10-15,000 vehicles a day.

To put the cost a different way: if usage of the road more than doubled to 30k vehicles per day (which is more than most parts of the Waikato Expressway) over a 30 year span, that would still work out at nearly $70 per trip include the cost of operating and maintaining the road."

https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2025/10/21/rons-reality-needs-to-bite/