Viaduct cost

The Tories are claiming victory for Auckland motorways:--NZ National Party‏ @NZNationalParty

The newly opened Newmarket Viaduct marked the end of over a decade of improvements through Auckland’s Central Motorway #NZQT

--No. No. No. It's a decade of squander. The Newmarket viaduct blew quarter of a billion dollars for the total gain of one extra lane. That's the relevant fact about the viaduct project. The oft-peddled lie - and I heard it again on the radio yesterday - that it was demolished because of earthquake risk is simply not true. The San Fransisco based engineers who drew up the first viaduct certainly did not build an earthquake risk in the mid 1960s, and it had not deteriorated to any great extent over the period. The official reason it was demolished and replaced, buried amid the spin about earthquakes (of which the maximum ever experienced in Auckland in my lifetime being a pathetic 4 on the scale), was to allow for over-sized trucks, ie. the trucking lobby getting its way and imposing their costs on everyone else. Those are the facts. The other facts surrounding this massive and pointless spend make even sadder reading: all that money blown on motorways at the insistance of the lobby-captured NZTA could have been spent on Auckland's CBD rail loop tunnel.  Right now a tunneling machine for a motorway extension through Waterview is in place:--Tunnelling will be carried out using a custom-built ‘Earth Pressure Balance Machine’ (EPBM), which will bore twin tunnels as deep as 45 metres beneath the surface, to pass below the hard-rock legacy of the region’s volcanic activity. At just over 14m in diameter, the machine will be the 10th biggest ever built globally, and will create Australasia’s largest ever tunnel.-- The place it should be tunneling is the CBD rail loop. Mayor Len Brown where are your priorities? Hopeless.