Comment

WCC, RTC and now GWRC adopt positions to protect Takapu Valley from motorway

29 April 2015 – Greater Wellington Regional Council voted strongly against NZTA plans to put a road through Takapu Valley (http://www.gw.govt.nz/committee-meetings-calendar/detail/7239).

28 April 2015 – Regional Transport Committee voted against putting a motorway through Takapu Valley (http://www.gw.govt.nz/committee-meetings-calendar/detail/7237).

14 April 2015 – Wellington City Council voted strongly against a motorway through Takapu Valley (http://wellington.govt.nz/your-council/meetings/committees/council/2015/04/14)

That’s really signficant in our drive to stop this pointless road destroying Takapu Valley forever.  Councillors have almost unanimously agreed that the claimed benefits from NZTA are nowhere near the potential social and environmental costs to the city.

However, as Raewyn Bleakley pointed out to councillors at the March 2015 RTC meeting, it doesn’t matter because NZTA will be taking the matter to the NZTA Board to decide this year.  This might be so, but we really hope Wellington NZTA will relook at the matter with an open mind and see that they now have a clear mandate to refocus on making a very good east-west link road from Petone to Grenada without the distracting unnecessary matters of options C (SH1 widening) or D (Takapu) add-ons diluting it’s purpose. 

We also hope that NZTA are listening to the grave concerns we have regarding joining Petone to Grenada Road to SH1 at a Tawa interchange.  We know this is going to induce it’s own traffic congestion and problems.  The smart solution we think is to go back and develop the original designs further for a fast merge near Churton Park (original options A & B).  There are early promising signs that NZTA are starting to do this (like the 8 NZTA staff seen in a huddle with lots of pointing, near Churton Park interchange today), and we’d like to commend and encourage them to do so.

Getting here has taken considerable work from volunteers so far.  Many councillors have invested considerable time investigating the matter properly too. And there has been considerable support from Hon. Peter Dunne and also Wellington Scoop, for which we are grateful for their ongoing support

Common sense decision by Wellington City Council on Petone to Grenada Rd

On 14th April 2015, the Wellington City Council voted a strong (11/4) position on the Petone to Grenada Road proposal, and the last minute additions of either widening SH1 past Tawa (option C), or a new road through Takapu Valley (option D).

Their decision was to SUPPORT the Petone to Grenada Link Road proposal (which will be the largest road building exercise in Wellington City for decades), but NOT SUPPORT the last minute additions.

Clearly the case for Option C and Option D doesn’t exist.  Especially with the Takapu Valley Road option, where more scrutiny simply uncovers more environmental and social damage, that doesn’t equate with the small benefits claimed by NZTA.  Also, NZTA’s & OPUS’s own traffic modelling says volumes past Tawa will be fine until at least 2030. There are also serious concerns about NZTA’s analysis errors that mistakenly promoted the worst option (D) into first place.

It’s also becoming clear the massive interchange being designed at Tawa will be a huge weak link, and likely create its own congestion, which is becoming a concern with observers.  Councillors were concerned about this, and are strongly recommending that the P2G junction with SH1 should occur further south towards Churton Park.

Most people should be happy with this, as it’s a positive step to get on and build the Road aimed at removing congestion from Ngauranga Gorge.

Of course there will be misguided detractors – the Wellington Employers Chamber made a hash of a press release yesterday, but it mostly shows they don’t get the decision at all, as most of the commenters point out.  Some go further to suggest that John Milford was merely doing a favour for his predecessor Raewyn Bleakley – who is now the NZTA staffer responsible for the project.  Which if true wouldn’t surprise onlookers, as the behaviour of NZTA in Wellington has been very questionable of late – and heavily criticised by the Hon. Peter Dunne

Throughout the marathon council deliberations it became clear that Councillors had been fed a very one sided officials paper that talked only about traffic volumes and infrastructure details, without mention of the huge impacts amassing, especially with option D Takapu. Several Councillors chastised the poor quality.  It left councillors to have to research out the facts for themselves.  We’re very grateful that they did.

Takapu Valley: Last clean headwaters of Porirua Harbour. Protect it from NZTA

NZTA are proposing a big road through the last undeveloped headwaters of Porirua Stream, which is a major tributary of the Porirua Harbour system.

Last week Wellington City Councillors voted to endorse the new Te Awaura-O-Porirua Harbour and Catchment Strategy Action Plan to clean up the Porirua catchment. Surprisingly, Councillors weren’t even told by officials that Takapu Valley is an such an important asset to Porirua Stream and Harbour health in their report to bulldoze Takapu Valley in the following agenda item.  This report (item 3.3) made no mention of the terrible impacts possible if councillors vote for Option D of the Petone to Grenada Road proposal.

There are no trout in the Takapu Headwaters.  The stream teams with native fish (Banded kokopu, upland bullies, long finned eel etc) that replenish the catchment, and the 50+ springs in the headwaters feed pure water into a neglected stream.  NZTA’s plan would see huge amounts of sediement, hydrocarbon and rubber pollution washing into the catchment continually.  This can’t be allowed to happen.Click here for a link to the biggest map image to view.Takapu-Valley-Porirua-Stream-Headwaters_m

Fish-surveys-Takapueel-&-frances

P2G and WGTN Resilience, Part 2: EQ and Natural Hazard Resilience

This is the second of three posts examining the effects of the proposed Petone to Grenada link road on the network and natural hazard resilience of the Wellington road network. This post covers Earthquake and Natural Hazard Resilience.

Part 1 looks at network resilience.

Part 3 takes a closer look at the challenges of the Hutt Valley in particular.

You can download the full report as a PDF [2MB] here: Resilience WGTN P2G_v1.4

 

 

Natural Hazard Resilience – Petone to Grenada

Jump to Takapu Valley Extension

If there’s a big earthquake, both SH1 in the Gorge and SH2 along the harbour shore are expected to be closed. The map below shows “Availability State” – how bad will a given road be immediately after an event? For example, parts of SH1 through Tawa may be reduced to a single lane each way. Transmission Gully has a couple of short bits that may need a 4WD to get across.

Availability after 7.5 EQ

Availability map, from the Wellington Region Road Network Earthquake Resilience Study, Opus, 2012

 

The map below shows “Outage State” – how long will a given stretch of road be in the state shown in the map above? They’ll be able to get most of SH1 usable, even through the Gorge – though maybe only via a few lanes – within a few days (though it appears they’ll need to divert to surface streets through Johnsonville). The northbound SH1 through Tawa will still be down to a single lane for two weeks to three months, though the southbound lanes should be back to normal much sooner. Transmission Gully likewise should be cleared in that 3 days to 2 weeks timeframe.

The Hutt, though, is expected to be cut off for weeks to months, depending on whether they can safely clear the slips along the shore there.

 

Outage after 7.5 EQ

Outage map, from the Wellington Region Road Network Earthquake Resilience Study, Opus, 2012

 

How will P2G perform in the event of a Magnitude 7.5 earthquake? What does it do for regional natural hazard resistance?

The slide NZTA presented to the local chief executives at their closed-door briefing back in November was this:

CE's P2G "Resilience" slide

P2G “Resilience” slide from “Petone to Grenada and SH58: Presentation to EAG August 2014”, released under OIA

We don’t get Availability or Outage information for P2G – instead, it’s represented as a black road, apparently constructed of a magical “unbreakium” that won’t fail in an earthquake.   Note that according to the sales pitch, Transmission Gully, which hasn’t even been built yet, is already a write-off and needs to be bypassed, as does the stretch of SH1 through Tawa, which as you can see from all that yellow and blue is likely to be the least damaged piece of highway in Wellington.

So how is P2G actually likely to fare in a major event?

On the Petone/Korokoro side it has 60-85 meter deep double sided cuts:

proposed Korokoro canyon

from “Petone to Grenada and SH58: Presentation to EAG August 2014”, released under OIA

 

Cuts of that size – think canyon walls the height of the Intercontinental Hotel in Wellington, or the Quay Tower in Auckland – are capable of generating large landslips. The P2G Scoping Report 2014 notes in regard to the southern end of P2G that “failures in cut slopes can close the road for a few weeks”, and “high cut slopes reduce time for recovery.” Such slips can be very difficult to clear (think the Manawatu gorge), especially when working at the bottom of a canyon where aftershocks threaten to send more material down onto the diggers below. This means that the slips could not be quickly cleared, and the road might well be closed for at least weeks, and possibly even months.

Then there is the fact that the road terminates in Petone, one of the most geologically/geotechnically problematic spots in the Wellington region, subject to subsidence, liquefaction and lateral spreading:

Petone Liquifaction map

Liquefaction and ground damage map from P2G Preliminary Geotech Appraisal, 2013

In addition, the area is subject to Seiches – a type of harbour tsunami that sloshes back in forth in a periodic oscillation, hammering Petone and the P2G terminus again and again.

Petone Tsunami zone

Petone Tsunami risk map from WREMO – the P2G terminus would be in the orange high-risk area at the far left

 

But it is potentially even worse than that. In the 1855 Wairarapa Earthquake Petone was uplifted about 2 meters.

1855 EQ ground movement

Ground movement, 1855 Wairarapa Quake

The Wellington and Wairarapa faults tend to induce movements in opposite directions, so if the next major regional EQ is along the Wellington fault, then all of Petone could be thrust back down ~2 meters over the course of 60 seconds. The end result would be that P2G, even if it was made of unbreakium (and note the P2G/SH2 interchange at Petone is mere meters from the Wellington Fault), could end up linking to little more than a rubble-strewn lake.

… And speaking of lakes, here’s the 1976 Korokoro Flood, caused by a large storm – that flooding is from Korokoro Stream, by the way, not the Hutt River. The photo below is of Ullrich Aluminium and the current Petone overbridge, right where P2G will connect to SH2 in Petone.

1976 Korokoro flood

from GWRC presentation “Floods and People, a historic perspective of the Hutt River”

Petone is not the best place to put one end of a road intended to be a natural hazard resilience route, even if that road itself were not so vulnerable.

 

Natural Hazard Resilience – Takapu Valley

 

We’ve already addressed how the Takapu link does not offer very much in terms of network resilience, how about natural hazard resilience? The resilience specialist consulted for the P2G Scoping Report rated the Takapu Alignment highly.

Unfortunately, the specialist made another mistake and also missed the fact that the proposed alignment runs directly along and atop an active uncharacterized fault:

Takapu/Moonshine Fault

from GNS Active Faults Database, accessed 29 March 2015

 

GNS has listed the Takapu Fault as a spur of the Moonshine Fault. The Moonshine Fault has a nice long failure interval – NZTA sources quote a figure of 11,000 years. Unfortunately, geotechnical sources we’ve consulted tell us that it’s not correct to assume that the Takapu spur operates at the same displacement or interval that the Moonshine Fault does. That’s why GNS has all those “not established”s in the database.

The fault itself is not necessarily the problem – you can’t throw a stone in Wellington without throwing it across a fault line, after all. The problem is that Takapu Valley is narrow and in places quite steep, and the best land has long been occupied by power pylons. Lots of them.

Even with the best alignment they could pick, the Takapu link road features “moderate height cuts that may fail, closing the route for up to two weeks”. (The section of SH1 it is supposed to “bypass”, by contrast, is expected to remain usable immediately after a quake.) The proposed narrow, two-lane Takapu extension runs through terrain with a moderate to high risk of slope failures, particularly at the southern end, which has an overall greater extent of at-risk slope than the Duck Creek and Linden sections of Transmission Gully.  (The worst bit is the southern end of the valley, unfortunately cut off in the image available.)

Takapu slope failure map

Images from Appendix A, Statement of evidence of Pathmanathan Brabhaharan (Brabha) (Geology and geotechnical engineering) for the NZ Transport Agency and Porirua City Council. 18 November 2011

 

This is the other shoe dropped by the fault line: even if you give the fault itself minimal clearance (and first they’d need to pay GNS to figure out where it actually is, because that bit you can see – where you can see it at all – is only where it happened to break the surface the last time it ruptured), the rock all through there has been fractured and crushed by the movement of the fault over millions of years.

When describing the resilience aspects of the southern end of P2G, the specialist repeats multiple times: “Away from poor rock conditions and faults [the cuttings] can be engineered to reduce failures in earthquakes”, “Likely to have better rock conditions being further away from the Wellington Fault Zone”, “Rock conditions are likely to be better being away from the Wellington Fault zone, and a short crossing of the inactive Korokoro Fault scarp.” If the fault isn’t the problem, the rotten rock near the fault is. It’s difficult to build on – as the Transmission Gully team has discovered attempting to site the foundations for the Cannons Creek viaduct, which nips off the top of the valley – and it’s far more likely to fail than even the usual Wellington “wheatbix” greywacke.

In a series of answers to questions raised by Hutt City Councillors, the P2G project team identified as key risks for Option D specifically:

  • Geotechnical, relating to the stability of the large cuts and differential settlement within road embankment fills required to form a link road in complex terrain
  • Geometric constraints, particularly with respect to horizontal curvature and gradient, as a result of difficult terrain

An alignment which gives a safe clearance to the fault line may not be possible, with the pylons to the west and the steep hill faces to the east – there’s also the Wellington water main and the gas main to avoid, particularly at the north end of the valley. They could be forced into an alignment requiring still higher, more vulnerable cuts into multiply-fractured, slip-prone hillslopes – though if they go too high, they’re into more power lines.

Speaking of which:

Pylons at Takapu Substation

Photo taken at the north end of Takapu Valley, looking south along proposed road alignment.

 

The Wellington Region Road Network Earthquake Resilience Study released by Opus in August 2012 pays special attention to sections of the network – particularly in Upper Hutt – that are at risk from fallen power lines.

The alignment of the proposed Takapu extension weaves under and through the 33, 66, 110 kV lines and under the 220 kV lines and the HVDC link – right up through the spot where more than a dozen sets converge on the Takapu Substation. Even when well-sited, the pylons themselves may fail in an earthquake or severe weather event. One of the sets of pylons running alongside the proposed road alignment was built in 1924.

 

Conclusion

 

P2G does not provide very good regional natural hazard resilience, due to the vulnerabilities of the deep cuts on the Petone end, and the simple fact that it connects to Petone, one of the most geotechnically problematic areas in the region.

The Takapu Valley has mediocre to poor natural hazard resilience, due to its constrained alignment along an active fault line in steep, fault-fractured terrain. What it does do is add extra lane-kilometres of road that will need to be cleared (or abandoned) after a disaster – likely to be low priority compared to the adjacent Wellington RoNS corridor.

Part 3 looks at road access to the Hutt Valley after a major event.

Part 1 looked at network resilience, in the case of a crash or congestion.

You can download the full report as a PDF [2MB] here: Resilience WGTN P2G_v1.4

 

 

 

 

P2G and WGTN Resilience, Part 3: The Hutt Valley

This is the third of three posts examining the effects of the proposed Petone to Grenada link road on the network and natural hazard resilience of the Wellington road network. This post looks at road access to the Hutt after a major event.

Part 1 looks at network resilience.

Part 2 examines earthquake and natural hazard resilience.

You can download the full report as a PDF [2MB] here: Resilience WGTN P2G_v1.4

 

So how do we rescue the Hutt if the Big One hits?

 

As described in the previous post, all of the routes in or out of the Hutt Valley are vulnerable to long outages following a major event. The Wellington Region Road Network Earthquake Resilience Study (Opus, 2014) modelled the effects of a 7.5 Magnitude earthquake, and determined that the Hutt Valley should expect to be isolated for “many weeks to months”. They’re cut off from Wellington by slips where SH2 runs along the harbour, cut off from the Wairarapa by slips closing SH2 over the Rimutakas, and cut off from Kapiti by most of the Akatarawa road having fallen down a gully (again).

Unlike other parts of Wellington, Porirua and Kapiti, the Hutt Valley is not well-served by water access. The current plans require relief by air to Trentham, or supply boats making beach landings at Petone or Seaview. Petone, as discussed previously, is vulnerable to a variety of quake-related problems: liquefaction, lateral spreading, tsunami, and – in the case of a failure on the Wellington Fault – significant downthrust which may drop that end of the valley by up to two metres.

Seaview has the same tsunami and seiche risk as Petone, and will require bailey bridges to reach, as the current bridges are not expected to be usable after a major event. Supplies and personnel landed at Petone or Seaview then have the entire length of the valley to traverse.

Petone-Seaview planning map

from Restoring Wellington’s Transport Links after a Major Earthquake, Wellington Lifelines Group and WREMO, March 2013

 

The best candidate for a resilience road for the Hutt is SH58, which in conjunction with Transmission Gully actually looks pretty fantastic:

 

Haywards outage map

Wellington Region EQ Resilience Study, Opus, 2012

 

…except for that pesky red bit right at the end, where the road sidles along a hillside and then swings down to join SH2. This is a far shorter section of road than either SH2 over the Rimutakas or SH2 along the harbour shore, and unlike the proposed Petone to Grenada link, the road is not at the bottom of a 20 storey canyon.

Towards the Porirua end, SH58 connects directly to Transmission Gully, which, supposedly built to the highest seismic standards, is being touted as the EQ saviour of the (rest of the) region. At the eastern end, SH58 connects at the boundary between Upper and Lower Hutt, providing good access to both ends of the valley. It’s a short, straight shot on good roads to Trentham, where the Army Camp and racecourse form a natural logistics centre.   SH58 would be the lifeline for the 150,000 people of the Hutt.

At the 9th March meeting of the Regional Transport Committee, a vote was taken to (finally) upgrade the interchange between SH58 and SH2. With that work already approved, and funding freed up by the Transmission Gully PPP burning a hole in NZTA’s pocket, now is the ideal time to bring that dodgy last couple of km up to scratch and give Hutt Valley a real resilience solution.

Additional reading: Wellington Lifelines Group

 

Conclusion

Where Petone to Grenada proposes an improvement in an area of poor network resilience, SH58 must become a priority for regional disaster resilience.

Part 1 looked at network resilience.

Part 2 examined earthquake and natural hazard resilience.

You can download the full report as a PDF [2MB] here: Resilience WGTN P2G_v1.4

 

P2G and WGTN Resilience, Part 1: Network Resilience

This is the first of three posts examining the effects of the proposed Petone to Grenada link road on the network and natural hazard resilience of the Wellington road network. This post covers Network Resilience.

Part 2 looks at earthquake and natural hazard resilience.

Part 3 takes a closer look at the challenges of the Hutt Valley in particular.

You can download the full report as a PDF [2MB] here: Resilience WGTN P2G_v1.4

 

Background

If the stars and the BCR align – and NZTA has been working very hard on the latter, to be sure — Wellington will be getting a new road, the Petone to Grenada Link road. To recap a bit, here’s the situation. The extra blue lines are a rough indication of NZTA proposals for Petone to Grenada. The brownish one shows a rough outline of Transmission Gully.

Wellington road map

Wellington road map, with TG and P2G added, problem area circled.

As you can see in that red circle, there are currently two routes out of Wellington:

  1. SH1 goes up Ngauraga Gorge, through Johnsonville, Churton Park, Tawa and Porirua to (eventually) Kapiti.
  2. SH2 runs along the edge of the harbour and goes through Petone, Lower and Upper Hutt, and then over the Rimutaka Hill Road to the Wairarapa.

By “cutting the corner” to connect these two routes, P2G is intended to increase resilience for the Wellington Region.

However, there are two different meanings of “resilience”, and each has to be looked at separately.

  • Network Resilience – The ability to route around congestion, crashes, and other events that temporarily block a part of the road.
  • Natural Hazard Resilience – The ability of any given road to withstand damage from storms, earthquakes, etc., and how quickly a damaged road can be brought back into service.

 

Network Resilience – Petone to Grenada

Jump to Takapu Valley Extension

Improving network resilience is especially important for areas where there are no alternatives – and this is the big problem with the Ngauranga Triangle region, in the red circle above.

Neither SH1 through the Gorge nor SH2 along the harbour shore have much in the way of alternatives, if there’s a blockage. For instance, if a crash blocks SH2, the only way to get into Lower Hutt is to go up SH1 all the way to SH58 up at the top of the map there, and then come back south.

With P2G, if you need to get to the Hutt and SH2 is blocked, you’ll be able to take SH1 up the Gorge and cut across P2G to get to Petone, instead of going all the way up to TG and SH58. But see what they’ve done:

Option C Map

Option C, Tawa end, from NZTA Petone to Grenada Project website

The main connection to P2G is all the way up at Tawa. There’s access from Churton Park via Mark Avenue, a 5km shorter trip, but only via surface streets and roundabouts (the unmodified Churton Park interchange is just out of the image at the left). If Hutt-bound traffic tries to use P2G to route around a blockage on SH2, the undersized linkage will quickly clog northbound SH1 at the Churton Park interchange.

The same applies if there is a problem in the AM peak – Hutt drivers will try to take the shortest route, and be balked by the Mark Avenue roundabout.

There is less of a problem if the blockage is on SH1 in the Gorge, depending on how far north people are going/coming from, and whether they get the word early enough to get onto P2G at Tawa or get stuck queuing at Churton Park – but SH1 drivers can and do avoid the Gorge via designated roads through Broadmeadows and Khandallah. Hutt drivers have nowhere else to go.

To sum up: the best option for network resilience would be to make the primary P2G connection via a robust, preferably high-speed interchange at Churton Park. This is basically what the 2009 Feasibility Study recommended. The 2014 Scoping Report also identified a connection at or near Churton Park as “provid[ing] the best network-wide performance results” – unfortunately, an analysis error resulted in this option being dropped from consideration before it could be developed further.

 

Network Resilience – Takapu Valley

 

Not content to stop at Churton Park, or even at Tawa, NZTA has proposed extending Petone to Grenada up Takapu Valley along the rejected Transmission Gully route, to connect with the main TG alignment just east of Linden.

 

Link Road Options Map

Link Road Options Map, from NZTA Petone to Grenada Project website

 

This Takapu extension, they say, “provides a complete bypass” for a short (~3km) section of SH1 though Tawa, and an equally short (~2-3km) section of Transmission Gully at Linden. Unfortunately, the resilience specialist who gave the Takapu option such a high rating in the Scoping Report missed the fact that the connection to TG at the top of the valley is via one-way ramps:

 

One-Way Ramps at Takapu/TG

Takapu-Transmission Gully interchange at Cannons Creek viaduct, from the Scoping Report

 

If you tried to use the Takapu link as a bypass for a crash in Tawa, you’d be stuck on TG all the way to the northeast corner of Whitby, many km out of your way, and have to make your way back via surface streets.

Even if they changed the one-way ramps to a full interchange, there are already alternate routes between Tawa and Linden – Main Road on the west side of SH1 and Woodman Drive on the east side – do we really need to spend $60-140M on another one?

Conclusion

 

The Petone to Grenada road has the potential to provide significant improvements to regional network resiliency, especially if the interchange at Churton Park is improved so it can efficiently handle high speed, high load traffic flow between SH1 and P2G.

Due to the one-way ramps and the limited geographic separation from SH1, TG, and nearby junctions, and the existence already of multiple alternate routes, the proposed Takapu extension to Transmission Gully does not contribute significantly to network resiliency.

Part 2 examines earthquake and natural hazard resilience.

Part 3 looks at road access to the Hutt Valley after a major event.

You can download the full report as a PDF [2MB] here: Resilience WGTN P2G_v1.4

 

 

Is the behaviour of NZTA Wellington appropriate for a Government Agency?

After a year working alongside NZTA over their plans to bulldoze the valley.  We’ve learnt a lot about NZTA, and not all of it is nice and respectful.

Things are getting bad. Government Agencies should work within decent standards, but things came to a head yesterday when our MP Peter Dunne front footed the unethical behaviour used by NZTA in Wellington.  This is serious stuff when blackmail is being accused.

Hon. Peter Dunne said:

“…The worst and most arrogant dinosaurs are those quasi-government bodies who somehow think the Government’s policies do not apply to them, and that they can just carry on doing what they have always done. The worst, by a country mile and then some, is the New Zealand Transport Agency which, leaving aside its precious and downright silly pronouncements on road safety, regards itself as a complete law unto itself when building new state highways is concerned, as my constituents in Tawa and Takapu are presently finding out.

 

NZTA’s sublime arrogance in proceeding with a link road proposal the neither local people, nor local authorities want or think is even necessary is breathtaking in the extreme. But what is more repugnant is NZTA’s clumsy attempts at blackmail –threatening to withdraw funding from the widely supported Petone to Grenada road unless it gets its own way on the link road.

 

If NZTA cannot understand and respond to the depth of local feeling on this issue, then maybe it is time to unceremoniously dump its current entire board and senior management and replace them who fully understand – and support – the concept of Better Public Services.”

Full text at: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA1504/S00106/dunne-speaks-better-public-services.htm

This is not the first time Hon. Peter Dunne has called out NZTA’s behaviour, here is another of several: http://www.unitedfuture.org.nz/news/time-drop-link-road-proposal

Is this the tip of the iceberg?  You decide:

  • We’ve sat in Regional Transport Committee meetings and heard the unelected NZTA representative directly threaten elected representatives to either do as they’re told otherwise funding will be reviewed, and also denegrate public consultation by saying that it didn’t matter what the Regional Council thought anyway as she’d be taking matters to the NZTA board directly and the Regional view had little relevance anyway.
  • We seem to have caught out NZTA staff using underhanded tactics to influence public opinion – this coincidence with a Murray Carpenter seems too unlikely.  A complaint has been laid with the State Services Commisson.
  • The treatment regarding OIAs is bad.  One request to merely establish the RoNS status of the project took 2 letters, 4 ombudsman interventions and over 200 days, to elicit a 2 line reply.  So bad in fact that in the Ombudsman’s government wide review of OIA behaviour, NZTA have been given special attention, and the Ombudsman has requested they use this example as a case study.  There has also been bullying of OIA requesters by phone after hours trying to make them go away.
  • And of course, there is this well known bullying tactic by NZTA in Wellington where funding to other projects would be pulled from WCC if NZTA didn’t get their way
  • Very hard to get NZTA to front publically.  When pushed by our local MP and Councillors to attend a public meeting, the senior NZTA official finally agreed but required conditions before he would (like only written questions he could vet, and no interjecting), presumably because when you’re a bully you fear bullying?
  • NZTA’s standard operating procedure is to play communities off against each other by presenting 2 competing proposals that impact 2 communities that will invariably fight each other.  We were contacted by other communities to warn us, and that’s exactly what happened.  It’s harsh and brutal, and it’s hard work to avoid this manipulation.

What we see now is NZTA is a Government Agency not prone to listening.  It comes in over the top of regional planning layers, flops down it’s plans, creates total regional disruption and then uses coercion or blackmail to get it’s way past widespread local and regional concerns and plans.  This is exactly what it has done with Petone to Grenada and the last minute Takapu Valley tack ons.

They say ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely‘. Perhaps when you walk around with the power of the Public Works Act in your back pocket, that power does corrupt the culture of the organisation that welds it?

Is it time for this to change? Perhaps Peter Dunne is right to stick his neck out like this – it’s a very serious issue for NZ.  Hopefully the Chief Executive and the Board of NZTA will take note?.

Senior NZTA staff hiding conflict of interest? Not cricket if it is

Are Senior Staff of NZTA writing Letters to Editors and not declaring conflicts, or providing transparency, or worse – passing themselves off as the public to deceive?  Surely there are rules about this?  A very knowledgeable Murray Carpenter wrote this letter to the Indepentent Herald this week:

NZTA-4

Is he the same Murray Carpenter, senior Engineer at NZTA, designing the exact same road his letter to the editor promotes? Here’s a link to Murrary Carpenter of NZTA, the author of a section of the scoping report for the exact road he’s promoting (flick to page 189). Here’s part of it below:

NZTA-letter-to-Editor2

 

If they’re the same person, where does he declare his credentials and conflict of interest for transparency?

Would it therefore be appropriate that he should be passing judgement on Hon. Peter Dunne and people opposing plans of NZTA, given his job for NZTA (assuming it’s the same Murray Carpenter)?

Worse still, if this is the same Murray Carpenter, there appears to be an attempt to deliberately mislead readers and deliberately conceal his conflict of interest further by trying to pass himself off as a member of the public, saying:  “After attending the Open Day held last year at Tawa and studying the plans and information, I support the proposed new link …….The advantages are…”.  That public open day was created by his employer, and the report he ‘studied’ is the same one he helped write (if it’s the same person).

NOT THE FIRST TIME

Here’s another letter to the Editor by Murray Carpenter attacking one of the fundamental problems of NZTA building new highways in Wellington – traffic volumes being static for a decade. Of course a roading engineer would argue this wouldn’t they?

Perhaps the Minister of Transport could look into this serious matter.  It’s really not cricket as thay say, but then anyone who has opposed NZTA’s plans will know that playing with a straight bat isn’t their strongest point.

 UPDATE 16 April 2015: A complaint was laid with the State Services Commission, and their response was:

Thank you for your 26 March letter in relation to a possible undeclared conflict of interest by a Mr Murray Carpenter and his work with NZTA.  We are satisfied that, while a Mr Carpenter worked for a company contracted to provide advice to NZTA several years ago, if this is the same Mr Carpenter,  we understand that he has been retired for the last two years, and would be acting in the capacity of a private individual.

This might be legally correct, but we’re concerned that this Murray Carpenter did not declare his professional connection with the proposal when he used a public forum to criticise people opposed to it – that’s not cricket.  The fact that he may have been retired at the time does not escape the fact that he was a part author of the report he tries to appear as an independent commenter of.  We think he should have declared his interest, and our concerns still stand.

 

 

CE Stitch-up for Regional Transport Committee

So, this report from the Wellington Region Chief Executives probably shouldn’t come as a surprise.  After all, despite promising an open working group to discuss roading requirements in the region, NZTA proved false (quelle surprise) and instead opted for secret closed-door meetings where they could spoon-feed the CEs their preferred option without having to worry about anyone calling them on their BS.

And BS it most certainly is.  If it weren’t, they wouldn’t need to work so hard to prevent alternate voices being heard, would they?  Here’s just one example:  back in December, we OIA’d the information NZTA gave to the CEs — the information that the CEs have had long enough to produce the report being tabled Monday — and have been told they still won’t be able to get it to US for weeks yet, 10 weeks after we submitted the question.  Yeah.

So what might NZTA not have told the CEs in their closed-door meetings?

That the resilience argument they’re leaning on to force through the Takapu Road option is pure fantasy.  The geotechnical report they’re basing all this on STOPS AT GRENADA VILLAGE.  That’s right.  Their analysis of the Takapu Valley route is based on, I kid you not, Google maps and a vague notion that most of the rock around Wellington is more or less the same.  Tell that to the poor sods trying to get the footings sorted for the Transmission Gully bridge over Cannons Creek, at the top of the valley.

NZTA’s “resilience expert” didn’t know — and didn’t do enough homework to find out — that there’s an active fault right where they want to put the road.  Anybody who’s claiming to be qualified to site a road in Wellington should know by now that tidy little valleys like Takapu are *created* by fault lines.  So, do you think they’ve included paying GNS to study that fault line into their budget?  Um, nope.

Did anyone point out to them that having two parallel highways could actually be a liability in a major event?  That it could well just leave them with multiple routes to clear instead of one, dividing their resources?  Ask Christchurch about triage.  Do you think they showed the CEs the map showing the bit of SH1 that are listed as earthquake vulnerable?  Including that controversial stretch above the school?  And that NZTA has already said that if they get to build their shiny new Takapu highway, they’re not going to bother strengthening SH1?  Because, you know, building a new greenfields road is ever so much more fun than maintaining an existing one.  People complain about the road cones.  Best to just let it fall down first, and then make people beg you to fix it — like they did with SH58.

How about consulting with Transpower and Wellington Energy, who are currently busy burying power lines right under where NZTA wants its interchange with TG to be?  Also, nope. And that consultation isn’t free, either.

Did they show the CEs that there are already three different ways to get from the Tawa junction to Linden?  Does adding a fourth through Takapu Valley really count as significant improvement to the network connectivity of theWellington Region?  If they’re going to be ploughing more routes where there are already routes, aren’t there suburbs that might want to upgrade to TWO, before we gift Tawa with FOUR?

Did NZTA remind the CEs that the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has already shot down a highway through Takapu Valley once already, when it was proposed as part of the Transmission Gully project?  Evidently not, since the CEs are saying they think it’s a “logical” idea to extend TG down the valley.  Oh wait, but according to NZTA, it’s not the same road the PCE rejected, because, hey, they’ve moved it 500 meters to the left, don’t you know?  Totally different.  Won’t wreck the community or the environment at all, now.

Were the CEs made aware that if the idea is to move heavy trucks from Petone to Transmission Gully — because they make a big noise about how they can make a nice even grade for heavy trucks —  then SH58, being lower and shallower, is a much better choice…. oh wait!  NZTA is planning to DOWNGRADE SH58, lowering the speed limit and slapping in some roundabouts.  Making it safer by turning it into a slow, inconvenient road. See, that road’s no good anymore, so you’ll have to approve this new one.  No, you don’t get a proper interchange on SH58, either.  [UPDATE: Apparently, they found the money somewhere.  Maybe because most of the submissions on P2G were asking why they heck they weren’t fixing SH58?] They’re too expensive if we build them on SH2.  Fortunately, we can magically do them for half the cost on the other side of the ridge.

Yes, they’ve budgeted HALF the cost for the big interchanges they want to put in for P2G [$20M max] as they say SH58 would cost [$42M], or that Dowse actually did cost, despite the size and complexity being comparable, if not worse.

Speaking of budgeting, they’re also budgeting their earthworks — remember that 20-storey-deep canyon they want to blast through Korokoro? — at half what they were told was the likely cost back in 2011.  And that’s assuming they only have to take the stuff 6km, which won’t get most of it out of the project area. Planning on using that dirt for a runway extension?  Hope you have another hundred million lying around.

So if the biggest chunks of their budget are already off by a factor of two, what does that say about their Benefit-Cost calculations?  Which, by the way, include some generous “future benefits”, but don’t have to include the future expense of maintaining the kilometers of highway they want to build parallel to the existing one, plus all the superfluous interchanges.

What else shall we look at?  Time savings?  They’ve said you can save 15 minutes on your drive between Tawa and Petone.  Which is a good trick considering that drive usually only TAKES 15 minutes at peak hour.  So NZTA’s roads are so good, they’ll send you back in time?  And the time savings they want to bulldoze Takapu Valley for?  Ooh.  10 seconds. As much as 30 seconds on a good day, southbound.  Maybe a minute or two northbound.  If you live in Kapiti, since that’s the only place that Takapu highway will take you, northbound (one-way ramps!).  That’s if the multiple roundabouts and traffic lights they want to put at Tawa haven’t stuck you in a half-hour queue.

Here’s the kicker, though:  NZTA is pushing the wrong road.  Of the four options they analysed for the route north of the saddle, the one that was closest to the originally proposed route — what was “Option A” that came out at Grenada Village — was actually the best option, according to their own project goals AND their own internal experts.  It had good natural resilience, did the least damage to the environment, didn’t have bizarre snarly interchanges that tried to mash together two motorways with eight local streets, a train station and a footpath, and most importantly, IT MADE THE TRAFFIC FLOW BEST.  Seriously, they rejected the option that actually made the traffic flow best.

Five Roundabouts

…is how many roundabouts Takapu Valley and Grenada North residents will need to traverse to get into Tawa, according to the latest design from NZTA.  It appears pedestrian and cycle commuters between the Takapu Road train station and Grenada North will be expected to navigate at least four of those.  Because it’s all about reducing congestion and improving safety.  (Yes, that was sarcasm.)

NZTA's proposed Tawa interchange

NZTA’s proposed Tawa interchange