John Armstrong: Cycleway will do little to create jobs

Is that it? John Key says there is a lot more yet to come. But yesterday's announcement of the first sections of what is intended to add up one day to a national cycleway from North Cape to Bluff is slightly underwhelming - especially given a prime function of the project was to be a relatively cheap, easy and quick method of soaking up unemployment.

On that score, yesterday's unveiling of just seven "potential" routes where construction "could" start this summer failed to live up to the high expectations that Key himself raised when he first mooted the project at his Job Summit back in February.

That was always likely to be the case once the flood of suggestions for potential routes ran up against engineering, land access and resource management problems.

However, if a national cycleway is ever to be realised, then the scheme probably needed to kick off in more solid and spectacular fashion.

That is not to decry the routes selected, none of which can be faulted.

In particular, the four-to-six-day, 245km route from Ohakune, through part of the Tongariro National Park, down to Wanganui will be an exciting addition to the tourist infrastructure and create long-term jobs servicing the route.

Similar claims can be made for the planned St James Great Trail, which will run close to the St James Walkway near Hanmer Springs.

However, in these two cases the cycleway money is being used to extend and upgrade existing Department of Conservation tracks. The routes were likely to have been constructed regardless of whether the cycleway went ahead or not.

Indeed, three of the four projects which are deemed likely to start construction this summer are largely on DoC-run land where the Government can call the shots.

The worry for the Prime Minister is that vital Ministry of Tourism liaison with local councils, whose boundaries encompass private or publicly owned land through which most of the national cycleway will pass, has not yet proved more fruitful in selecting potential routes.

Whole expanses of the country are bereft of any route.

Key's more immediate problem concerns jobs. First, those hired to work on the cycle routes will number barely 300 - less than a tenth of the number he previously predicted would work on the project during its lifespan. That total may be even lower if some of the proposed tracks still subject to feasibility studies do not get under way.

Second, the earliest that construction will start on any track will be November - a full nine months after the Job Summit.

Third, the DoC tracks are in the back country and way beyond commuting distance for the newly unemployed in urban centres.

On top of that, the $9 million set aside for the seven projects out of the $50 million budgeted overall for the cycleway looks to be pitifully inadequate given the engineering challenges.

Whether the national cycleway will be a plus or minus for Key politically depends on how much actually gets built in the two years before the next election.

But, tellingly, Key's "vision" of a national cycleway is now being pitched in terms of the environmental, health and longer-term job-generation benefits of the project.

The shift is admission that Key's high hopes of the national cycleway being a stunningly successful stop-gap job-creation scheme have foundered.