Nick Mills: Is a bus lane on Harbour Quays really the best option for Wellington?

EDITORIAL: I want to start this morning with something that I genuinely cannot understand, the more I think about it the more it frustrates me, and the more I look at it the more I don’t understand it. The Harbour Quays bus corridor. Think about that. An eleven million dollar price tag. History will tell us that everything we’ve seen done in this part of the world, when you start with a price of eleven million dollars, you know it’s not going to end anything under that – and could be double that. We’re talking about bus lanes down Customhouse Quay, Jervois Quay, Cable Street and Wakefield Street — taking road space away from general traffic to create a public transport corridor through the outskirts of the CBD in Wellington. And I think it is nuts. We do not need it. This thing was conceived when Wellington was planning for substantial population growth, more commuters pouring into the CBD and enormous growth in public transport. But circumstances have changed. The Golden Mile project that it was supposed to complement has stopped. The wider transport plan isn't settled. The SH1 changes aren't settled. And serious questions are now being asked - whether the population and passenger growth originally anticipated is actually going happen. Yet we're still marching ahead with the solution. Why? Because we've already spent money planning it? That’s not a good enough excuse. That is possibly the worst reason imaginable to spend another dollar. And anyone who actually drives along Jervois Quay, Wakefield St, Customhouse Quay and Cable Street at busy times knows exactly what happens when you start removing general traffic capacity. Remember when we put those drainage systems down Wakefield St and what happened then. Where do the cars go? They don't magically disappear. You create a thing called congestion. And here's another thing. We have tried for decades to convince Wellingtonians that the waterfront side of the city is somehow an extension of the Golden Mile. Now a lot of us will remember the old Harbour City Centre. Remember when that was conceived and built, at great fanfare? It was going to be the massive city shopping centre. It was supposed to be fantastic. It even had a McDonalds in it! Well it closed very quickly. Getting people across several lanes of traffic, particularly on a cold, wet, windy Wellington day, was never particularly attractive. Now we're apparently going to do it with bus passengers and tell them somehow: Don't worry — you can walk across to the Golden Mile. Seriously? With horizontal Wellington rain? The wind? The cold weather? And we're spending $11 million to do it, when we don’t need it! Greater Wellington has endorsed it. Wellington City Council gets its turn on Thursday. I desperately hope councillors have the courage to say: No don’t do it, we don’t need it right now. Forget what was predicted two years ago. Look at Wellington today. Do we need it? Does it stack up? And is removing road capacity from one of the busiest routes through our CBD really going to make Wellington better, quicker? I think you know my answer to that. Because from where I'm sitting, this has all the ingredients of another Wellington transport cock-up. A massive cock-up Eleven million dollars. Remember I said it first here - they say eleven million dollars. We don’t want to pay eleven million dollars to create another problem that’s not really there and could possibly make it a hell of a lot worse. LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.