Contrary to popular belief, NZ always did have the money to pay for state-of-the-art rail-enabled ferries linking the North & South Islands, even at a cost of several billion dollars. It is not a matter of finding the funds, its a matter of using the scarce resources the country already has to maximum effect & not wasting them on stupid projects. Are there tools to help make these decisions? Yes, they go by the name of cost-benefit analysis. On that note, Wellington is currently building for itself a bunch of new cycle ways, costing $33 million per kilometer, a world record cost. Three of them - Melling to Petone, Seaview to Eastbourne, and Petone to Ngauranga - are costing around 1/2 billion dollars. Upon adding the cost of continuing them from Ngauranga to Wellington there will be little change out of a billion. Wellington put the nation's State Highway 1 system joining North & South on the chopping block at Cook Strait by bungling replacement ferries, whose benefit-cost ratio is dozens of times larger than the cycleways (even at the ships' and ports' blow-out-costs) in favor of spending the funds on itself, the only shrinking city in NZ.
Who will use the cycleways? Who has the most to gain from them? Three MPs in particular - the one for Hutt South, called Chris Bishop, the one for Rimutaka, called Chris Hipkins (who grew up in The Hutt), and Finance Minister Nic Willis, who's trying to win Ōhāriu electorate. All the cycleways lie within, or border, their three electorates. These MPs personally benefit by being able to bike from their homes to Parliament along the sea, and from helping their own careers by garnering electoral support through pork-barrel politics to pay for those cycleways. Meanwhile, the three of them threw NZ under a bus, threatened the integrity of State Highway 1, turned the Cook Strait crossing into chaos, endangered passengers on run-down ships, all when the funds for new ferries were there. Now they blame KiwiRail.
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