Seven roads need priority development: Govt

The Victoria Park flyover will be transformed into four southbound lanes. Photo / Brett Phibbs

The Government wants to speed-up work on seven roads it thinks are of national significance.

However, projects like Transmission Gully, north of Wellington, are looking more shaky than ever with no funding guaranteed.

Transport Minister Steven Joyce today named routes which he had told the New Zealand Transport Agency the Government would like to be treated as a priority when allocating funding under the recently revised national policy statement.

"All seven are the most urgent projects within, or adjacent to, our five largest population centres," he said.

"The Government is signalling to the transport agency that these projects are very important."

It would be up to the agency to make decisions and the Government was not issuing a directive, Mr Joyce said.

Plans would be developed to "substantially advance" them over the next 10 years, alongside other state highway projects in the National Land Transport Programme. He believed they could be three quarters or more completed by 2019.

The routes were:

* Puhoi to Wellsford SH1;
* Completion of the Auckland Western Ring Route;
* Auckland, Victoria Park bottleneck SH1;
* Waikato Expressway SH1;
* Tauranga Eastern Corridor SH2;
* Levin to Wellington SH1; and
* Christchurch motorway projects.

The seven routes potentially could be "called in" as projects of national significance, meaning they would get consents faster under changed Resource Management Act rules.

Mr Joyce said the agency would come back to government with recommendations for projects and they would rank them.

He could not provide costings for the routes as some had not even been designated yet but the figure was in the billions.

Mr Joyce said some roads such as Puhoi to Warkworth, Tauranga Eastern Motorway and Transmission Gully, if it was progressed, could be funded through private public partnerships which may see them tolled.

Mr Joyce said $400m the previous government tagged for the $1b Transmission Gully remained in the fund's pool.

"There isn't $400m sitting on the books currently, it wasn't when we arrived."

He said some projects would keep funding promised by Labour.

"If it was there fiscally separate in the books it's still there, but the Transmission Gully wasn't.

"The reality is, in terms of advancing Transmission Gully, that nobody had come up with any ideas of how to obtain $600m locally, tolling wouldn't have covered it and other options wouldn't have covered it. The councils didn't have the money."

Mr Joyce said the agency was considering Transmission Gully and a decision would be made soon on its future.

"I am very conscious that people have waited many many years for the answer to that question."

The Government's changed policy statement means that over 10 years the National Land Transport Fund will have $10.7 billion available for state highways rather than $6.2b under the previous government. The National Government would expect a third of the fund to go to state highway projects.

The reallocation of $420 million of transport spending is coming off other areas including public transport and the road policing which has caused an outcry.

Mr Joyce said because the previous government's statement anticipated a decline in state highway construction a lot of preparatory work has not been done.

"One of the challenges for the agency will be how much can be sped up and brought forward."

Labour transport spokesman Darren Hughes said today's announcement was a rehash of previously stated goals.

He said Monday's announcement about the scrapping of a regional fuel tax and increased national tax, of 3 cents a litre this and next year, meant many Auckland transport projects were up in the air and Mr Joyce was trying to deflect attention from that.

"National has scrapped the specific Auckland tax but made it clear that its priority for its new petrol tax will be funding more state highways. That leaves the future of Auckland public transport hanging in the air."

- NZPA