Dear Editor
The letter you published proposes a solution which is planned to evict me and my family from our home.
We are to be offered NO COMPENSATION for this action by a dictatorial government.
NZTA talk about market value – but with one monopoly purchaser that is not achievable.
Our home and pension nest egg, is effectively worthless.
In the insurance industry they use the phrase “like for like replacement cost” – fat chance here.
There is a designation, 150 meters away from our home.
This has always been reserved for a road, yet NZTA have chosen to diverge from that route.
Their own documentation in October 2009 said “zero homes affected”.
They should be forced to stick to this statement.
This is not the same road as was proposed in that consultation.
Now it is planned to have additional intersections where none were mentioned in 2009.
Intersections mix local and through traffic, the very antithesis of NZTA’s proposal in 2009.
That was their reason for not allowing using the eastern route, to reduce accidents.
It turns out that according to KiwiRap this stretch of road is not even in the top twenty for what they call “personal risk”.
NZTA are changing their rules to suit the desired political requirements.
They should be forced to redo the consultation with all the options, including th local WLR available.
Two thirds, circa 66% of respondents in 2009 wanted alternatives to the one chosen by the NZTA board.
The same board who did not even read the KCDC submission.
The same board who would not allow the WLR local option as part of the consultation.
The recent DomPost poll showed that 75% of its readership object to what is being proposed.
I object to the proposed expressway because it can not fit in the WLR designation.
That is why in Waikanae and at Leinster Ave the only option is to plough through private homes.
Nathan Guy has stated that the current SH-1 must be upgraded anyway.
This will improve the existing route and so why aren’t they doing this right now?
This proposed expressway solution alongside the upgraded SH-1 is over capacity.
Together they give us a 400% increase.
All this is adding more and more delay so that it is taking longer to build, so any “get on with it comment” is nonsense.
Seventy percent of day time traffic would use the local WLR which is proposed to have a higher capacity than Kāpiti Road.
SH-1 on the eastern route will never be a local road.
However KCDC will have to stump up, from our rates, the one million per year that NZTA say it will cost to maintain.
Why reroute SH-1 one three kilometres away from the new train station in Waikanae?
Through traffic will be encouraged to by-pass this new facility.
Any kind of strategic, joined up thinking puts the transport corridors in close proximity.
This is out dated seventies thinking of the worst kind.
Nathan Guy and Bill English have indicated that there are other priorities.
Yet NZTA have put the Kāpiti expressway as a higher priority the Transmission Gully.
So we will have to continue to live with delays because of this government’s inaction.
The proposed expressway is Stephen Joyce’s vanity project.
The man is suffering for an edifice complex, the desire to build a monument bigger than his ego.
There is a very real probability that they will not have started the construction by the election in 2014 !
The $550 million price tag (2008 dollars) is already blowing its budget – we can not afford it.
Xmas 2012 the WLR was due to open at a price to $120 million.
The proposed expressway does nothing to sort out Elizabeth Street.
I am told that each of the two supermarkets in Waikanae has 70 trucks visit every day.
These trucks will use the expressway and travel up and down Te Moana Road.
This road is going to become another choked up local route just like Kāpiti Road.
An expressway does not make economic sense.
That’s why the recent Chamber of commerce advert omitted any mention of figures.
If they took that proposal to the bank they would be given short shrift.
If that;s how they run their businesses it’s no surprise that we don’t have enough jobs locally.
The recent SHAH report shows that this proposal will not drive jobs to our region.
It will not even provide a positive return on investment.
It will cost more to build and maintain than the benefit it proposes to provide.
There are better ways to spend money we don’t have.
If they think it can make money, let them build and run it through private industry.
Make them finance it and run it as a toll road.
This will not happen and simply proves that it is our tax dollars that are being siphoned off in to their profits.
I am not anti road, I used to own a sports car and I am a big F1 fan.
We chose to live 70 kilometres away from Wellington to be away from noise and pollution.
This expressway proposal is not wanted, it is not needed and it is not affordable.
I feel sorry for those of you left behind.
Colin Baxter
Waikanae
