Total price tag for a bunch of homely pets: $40-50 billion
Last year, The Infrastructure Commission lifted up the government’s favourite pet, took it outside into the daylight, and had a good look at it.
They eyed it from the front, from the back, side on and underneath.
Then they turned to the rest of us and said: this Northland Expressway is one homely critter.
Did that discourage the road-loving National government? Did it fuck.
Even though The Infrastructure Commission laid it on the line: this one single project will consume 10% of the nation’s entire infrastructure budget, not just roads, everything) for the next 25 goddamn years; this government of asphalt-loving car-humpers stared back unblinking and said: Sounds good, let’s do it.
Bishop, Brown, Chris-the-dimwit-from-Marketing, they’re all into it.
So when, last week, they did the big reveal of their latest incarnation of Roads of National Significance, their homeliest critter, The Northland Expressway, remained in pride of place.
Current price tag: Yeah nah $18.2... yeah nah make it $22.1 billion. Yeah, $22 billion. We reckon.
This is for a road that, for most of its length, carries just 10-15,000 vehicles a day.
Matt Lawrie has helpfully calculated that even if usage more than doubled to 30,000 vehicles per day over 30 years (which would be more than most of the Waikato Expressway), that still works out at nearly $70 per trip.
Want to hear the total price tag for a whole bunch of other homely pets added to the basket? $40-50 billion.
The Magic Trick
And do you want to hear the even more best part?
These are all roads that when they first tried to stand them up, all failed to yield Benefit Cost Ratios greater than 1.0. (The idea is that you don’t want to be building a road that doesn’t generate more benefits than it costs. Hence: BCR)
So what did they do?
These ugly beasts could do plenty of croaking, but they could not yield a decent BCR to save themselves.
If you’re familiar with the airport announcement Ladies and gentlemen, your flight is going to be delayed because the captain said there was something he wasn’t happy with, and so it’s going to take us time to get another pilot, then you’ll know the answer: they just changed the rules.
- They now assess projects over 60 years instead of 30
- They’ve slashed the discount rate from 6% down to 2%, dropping to 1.5% after 30 years
- There was a time when a BCR of 3.0 was the minimum for spending public money on this scale. Now they’re pressing go as long as it scrapes past 1.0
You can see it in all its gory detail here, thanks to aforementioned top sort Matt Lawrie.
The Opportunity Cost
Oh what couldn’t do with $40-50 billion!
- Build world-class public transport in all our main cities
- Lead the world in climate adaptation
Not while we have this bunch of fools, we can’t.
Addiction
When every question gets the answer Moar Roads, something is tragically whacked.
They seem utterly addicted to the idea that roads make the economy go better. More roads, more prosperity. Build it and they will come. It’s their unshakeable faith, their cargo cult, their morphine dream.
Sounds ludicrous to say it, but the more I look at it, no other explanation makes sense. They ignore expert advice. They cook the books to justify what they’re doing. They’re addicts.
I know a little bit about addictive behaviour, as it happens: your booze, your horses, your just one more. When you’re addicted, you can rationalise everything. You can talk yourself into just about anything.
Before I got wise I found myself doing some pretty reckless and just plain stupid punting. Crazy.
But I never did it with everyone else’s money.
