The double tracking and electrification of our existing railway network, plus link to Northport, would provide Northlanders with an efficient connection to the rest of the country for centuries to come.
The double tracking and electrification of our existing railway network, plus link to Northport, would provide Northlanders with an efficient connection to the rest of the country for centuries to come.
A few weeks back Dean Scanlen wrote a letter to this paper questioning the $2 billion figure floated as the cost of building a four-lane highway between Warkworth and Whangarei.
He argued the cost would be closer to $5 billion, based on the $50 million per kilometre cost of building the proposed highway between Wellsford and Warkworth.
That's a big difference from the $2 billion figure used by supporters of the highway, and repeated uncritically by myself and elsewhere in this paper.
While I've no expertise in the costing of roads, I suspect Dean Scanlen is probably closer to the truth, which makes the prospect of the highway being built even more unrealistic, regardless of who's in government.
The problem for me is that putting energy into lobbying for a four-lane highway puts us in a weak position when it comes to a rail upgrade as well.
Short-term thinking and blind faith in the invisibility of the car has won out. It's time for political leaders to think further ahead, writes Northern Advocate columnist Vaughan Gunson. PHOTO/FILE
Getting our focus wrong now, as I believe current political leaders in Northland are doing, could mean we risk getting neither the highway nor a modern functioning railway network.
That's why the highway versus railway debate is so vital to our future, and why I welcome people like Dean Scanlen contributing to it through the letters page of this paper.
We have a choice, and like all big decisions involving large sums of taxpayer money, there are costs and benefits to different people and different sections of the economy. There's no getting away from this.
It's worth remembering that successive New Zealand governments have undermined rail. It's probably a little-known fact that there used to be restrictions on the distance trucks were allowed to transport goods.
In 1977 it was 150km. This limit was removed in 1986 by the then Labour government. At the stroke of a pen, the railways went into decline, costing thousands of jobs and resulting in much of the network slipping into dysfunction and underuse.
All of us have to pay for the damage heavy trucks do to our roads, particularly here in rain-heavy Northland, including the time lost to never ending roadworks.
The brave, but sensible thing to do now, is to go back to the future. The double-tracking and electrification of Northland's existing railway network, plus the link to Northport, would provide Northlanders with an efficient connection to the rest of the country for possibly centuries to come.
It's like the situation in Auckland, where a light rail network should have been built 40 years ago. The benefits of that investment to Auckland today would be massive. But short-term thinking and blind faith in the invincibility of the car won out.
We are closer now to the end of the fossil fuel era, so the stakes are much higher. Humans being humans, we like to prioritise the present, but it's the responsibility of our political leaders and public institutions to think further ahead.
Let's hope some of them are brave enough to walk away from the roading lobby and get on with ensuring Northland's future is lined instead with hard shining tracks of steel.
