Brian Rudman: Mantra not enough to fund road

COMMENT

Dear old John Banks really, really needs that Eastern Highway doesn't he?

There he was on Friday with his buddy from the wrong side of the tracks, Sir Barry Curtis, drooling together again about their plans for a super highway linking each other's fiefdoms.

It can be built within 10 years and will last a 100 years, he told the assembled journalists. It will be environmentally sensitive, will end congestion as we know it, will bring prosperity to us all, end world poverty and, oh, yes, will cost, ummm urrrr, mutter mutter ... just under $3 billion. And worth every penny of that price.

"The benefits," he brazened it out, "clearly outweigh the cost."

I couldn't resist a chuckle or three, which, from his look, was less than appreciated. It didn't seem the time to declare it was a snort of recognition of just how like each other we are.

I'd gone through exactly the same sort of reasoning process a few weeks back when I suddenly realised I really, really needed a new turntable. Remember them? Those machines that play ye olde vinyl recordings.

This particular one was magnificent, all polished chrome and exposed rubber bands and stabilised uni-pivots and destined for Hong Kong if I didn't save it. It was also worth ummm urrrr, mutter mutter about $3 billion.

But did I flinch. Of course not. Like Mr Banks, I did my sums and hey presto, it was as plain as day, the benefits clearly outweighed the costs.

The benefits outweigh the cost, the benefits outweigh the cost - I think it's what the experts call triple line accounting.

I've found that if I repeat the mantra often enough, as I drool over my new toy, that the figures stack up every time. Which is obviously what happens for Mr Banks and his buddy from the Manukau badlands, each time they pore over their plans.

The big difference is that I don't have to answer to the all-suffering ratepayers/motorists/taxpayers of Auckland and Manukau.

The highway - now called the Eastern Transport Corridor - was heralded by Mr Banks as the make-or-break project of his first term. That was two years ago and the cost was said to be $460 million. Eleven months ago, he declared the real cost would be around $1 billion.

At that time, the council's consultants, Eastdor, said that plans to finance it through tolling would not work, raising less than $100 million of the projected cost. Indeed, they suggested that tolls would at best finance a two-lane highway. Refusing to accept such negativity, the mayors commissioned a bigger report, a $13.2 million one from Optus International.

Optus were given such tight deadlines that top bureaucrats - Auckland City's director of planning service, Jill McPherson, and Manukau City's environmental management director, Leigh Auton - were moved to warn politicians of the dangers of haste.

Without adequate time for consultation, they warned, "The end product will suffer." The politicians ignored this advice and proceeded with the fast track report.

On Friday the mayors revealed that, "The initial Opus International work-in-progress indicates the total cost of an eastern corridor could be between $1.9 billion and $2.9 billion".

They didn't share any of the details with us, but said it had factored in such environmentally sensitive touches as tunnelling under Hobson Bay.

How is it to be funded?

Well Sir Barry has returned from a trip to Oslo full of the joys of that city's "toll ring".

Opened in February 1990, it consists of a series of tool booths at which all inward traffic has to pay the equivalent of $3.50 a "penetration".

I'm not sure if the Norwegian get a discount for multiple penetrations on the same day, but Sir Barry says it a possibility in the Auckland model.

His preference is for the toll booths to roughly follow the line of the Auckland City boundary, with the outlanders from north, south and west undergoing a shakedown every time they enter Auckland proper.

As someone who sensibly works and lives centrally, I'm all in favour of this, but I wonder whether those living beyond the bounds of civilisation will be so sanguine about this added impost.

One also has to wonder how the Oslo solution will go down with the present Government, which has rather emphatically declared in the past that it will permit road-tolling only where a free alternative public route exists.

But most of all you have to wonder, when the answer starts to cost $3 billion on the way up, whether we're asking the right question to begin with.