Steven Joyce: Better roads have to get out of the slow lane

After years of delay, the Transmission Gully motorway north of Wellington finally opened this week. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Opinion

OPINION:

When I was 14, my family moved from Taranaki to the Kāpiti Coast. Dad had been a grocer all his life, and finally won a Foodstuffs ballot to buy his own supermarket in Coastlands shopping mall.

That blessed narrow strip of land between Paekākāriki and Waikanae below the Tararua Ranges was our teenage playground. My sister and I kept horses at Whiteman's farm at Otaihanga. We rode up to Reikorangi, down the beach to Queen Elizabeth Park, and forded the Waikanae River. Sometimes we rode home from Raumati up the scrubby piece of continuous land known as the Sandhills motorway designation, which skirted the airport.

One of the backdrops to our lives was State Highway One. You couldn't drive anywhere on that coast without ending up on it. Going to Paekākāriki, Waikanae, or up to Levin, all involved dicing with death on a road which was never built for the traffic it carried, even in the late 1970s. The locals mixed it every day with the through traffic heading to and from the capital city. The local fire brigade was a volunteer one, and the sirens going off for a bad accident on that road are an all too prominent memory.

I learnt to drive along it, and lost a school friend to it in a car crash. The carnage happened regularly. When you drove into town you'd take your life in your hands between Paekākāriki and Pukerua Bay, and again outside Whenua Tapu Cemetery, when impatient drivers floored it on the passing lane.

I started driving up to Massey in my Morris Marina, and every week I'd brave the stock trucks and petrol tankers on the killing fields between Ōtaki and Levin. The straights were just long enough for drivers stuck in long lines of traffic to think they could pass, before the bridge on the bend.

So when I was given the privilege of being Transport Minister in late 2008, I knew a bit about that road. Courtesy of Maurice Williamson we had promoted a plan to build Roads of National Significance but, aside from the Waikato Expressway, we hadn't settled on any. My job was to make a list, fund them, and get them built.

We made a shortlist of the busiest "goat track" roads in the country. Those with at least 17,000 vehicles a day, largely travelling on narrow, winding deathtraps. State Highway One from Paremata to Levin was one of the seven. Another was Waterview in Auckland, and Puhoi to Wellsford.

I remember announcing the Airport to Levin Road of National Significance. It was audacious in the context of our roading history, and made a big splash in the daily paper. There was a lot of cynicism too. People had heard big roading promises before.

Under pressure from Peter Dunne, the previous Government had announced an investigation of Transmission Gully, but that piece of road alone was due to cost more than a billion dollars, and ministers Cullen and King had set aside only $400 million for all transport projects across the Wellington region. The Gully was still a pipe dream.

To build a new highway you need confirmed funding, a reasonable consenting process, and people and machinery that can build it. The Roads of National Significance happened only because Nick Smith came up with the one-stop Board of Inquiry process under the RMA, and I managed to convince my colleagues to ring-fence $11 billion of the Land Transport Fund over a decade, so a reliable pipeline of work was more or less fully funded.

I was initially unconvinced about the Gully route. I thought upgrading the old coastal road might be more cost-effective, but a trip up both alignments with a bunch of roading engineers convinced me the coastal route was even more problematic.

The Kāpiti Coast section of the new road was the hardest sell. Hardly anyone lived on the Gully section but Kāpiti was a different story. Then-Mayor Jenny Rowan and her council had just convinced the previous Government to give up the Sandhills motorway designation for a local road through the district, which would leave nowhere for the highway to go.

I was adamant we couldn't spend a billion dollars on the Gully highway if the traffic came to a full stop again at Paekākāriki. No-one had an answer. Finally NZTA bit the bullet and said the expressway would go up the old designation, and I supported them.

The opposition to that decision was "robust", up there with that of the anti-Waterview crowd. There were vigorous meetings with council and opponents where I was read my pedigree. My face was touted as a brand for selling horse manure. Local MP Nathan Guy stayed resolutely onside though, and was rewarded with an increased majority.

The Kāpiti section of the expressway was finished on time and on budget. Transmission Gully not so much, and the Ōtaki bypass section of the highway is still not open. To some degree that is what happens when you shut down construction sites in the middle of a pandemic. In my view big infrastructure projects should have been kept going.

Regardless, Transmission Gully is finally open, and Ōtaki will be soon.

The remaining piece of the puzzle is the Ōtaki to Levin section, where the killing fields still lie.

That has been delayed several times since the change of government, with building apparently now due to start in 2025. Not a single new four-laning project has commenced construction since 2017.

You won't find many opponents to the new Wellington to Levin Highway these days.

Despite voicing their full-throated opposition back in the day, Labour were out in force this week, cutting ribbons and marvelling at the engineering.

Fair enough. Success has many parents, and hopefully experiencing the unalloyed joy of Wellington travellers might help some ministers get over their aversion to new highways.

They will get more chances shortly with the Hamilton bypass, Puhoi to Warkworth and Ōtaki opening. Maybe they can learn to understand the everyday Kiwi's desire for safe roads and reliable low-stress journeys to get to and from work, sport, and visiting their family.

Building a safe modern highway between our capital city and the regions north of it should never have taken this long. Nor should it across Wellington City, between Warkworth and Whangārei, south of Cambridge, north of Tauranga, between the cities of Hawke's Bay, south of Christchurch or across the Hauraki Plains.

Much work has been done — much more needs to be done. Let's get on with it.

- Steven Joyce is a former National MP and Minister of Finance.