State Highway 1 through Whangārei, one of the sections which has been four-laned in recent years. Photo: RNZ
The Infrastructure Commission Te Waihanga is suggesting a phased approach to the huge cost of new highways, using the example of building three lanes - two one way, one the other - instead of four lanes at first.
MPs at the start of Scrutiny Week on Monday voiced concerns at the affordability of the government's Roads of National Significance or RONS.
Chief executive Geoff Cooper told them, "The scale of the transportation investment we see obviously exceeds our capacity to fund."
Affording RONS as-is and soon would require a 70 percent rise in fuel excise duty, he said.
The risk with projects was always of investing too little and slipping behind into congestion, or too much and ending up with assets to maintain that "you don't have the user base to pay for".
Cooper used the example of a four-lane highway versus a two-lane road.
"There's an option between that which is two plus one," he said.
"You can imagine a world where you sort of phase these things slowly so you are aligning your capacity with your demand and in so doing actually bringing the cost down ... more closely to an envelope that is affordable and thereby improving the certainty of the project."
If the upfront cost was so high it was hard to even sign-off on, that led to project delays and then public frustration of the sort that had been occurring, he said.
The commission planned to send its national infrastructure pipeline plan to the minister before Christmas.
This contained advice on the phasing of some of the biggest among the 12,000 projects the agency had been tracking every three months, to boost coordination.
Labour MP Tangi Utikere. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Labour MP Tangi Utikere asked what specific advice, such as the two-plus-one-lane option, had been given for each of the RONS.
"We have not given individual advice on those," Cooper said.
It did not have access to detailed information about each highway project, but went off media reports of figures.
Nor was the Transport Agency using the commission's new tool, called IPP, a standardised way of assessing the readiness of a project against measures like viability and value for money.
Making the IPP process compulsory was raised in Te Waihanga's draft pipeline plan but that had not happened.
Labour MP Kieran McAnulty asked how come, if IPP was designed to address the problems of failing to grasp what huge projects entailed, the RONS were not being subjected to it.
"Surely there is a massive gap here," he said.
"They are not getting assessed through the process that you have actually been asked to commence by this government," McAnulty said, asking what the commission could do to help the public assess the big roads' viability.
"We don't have a huge amount of tools but I suppose what we can do is make it known, you know, they are not there," said Cooper.
NZTA had its own systems and, like other agencies, was probably asking what it gained from submitting to the commission's independent IPP approach.
Instead of IPP for the RONS, which would've got into the details, the commission was applying high-level "triggers", such as around traffic demand, to get a handle of what could be expected.
The price of not getting all of this right was that cost estimates might well keep rising, as had happened on the northern highway between Auckland and Whangārei, Cooper added.
Committee chair Andy Foster. Photo: Johnny Blades / VNP
Committee chair Andy Foster wondered if for that northern highway, where reliability not congestion was the main issue, maybe the "two-plus-one" approach might be the right one.
Green MP Julie Anne Genter asked if the commission was advising the government on considering the impact of congestion charging on roads before "rushing ahead" with big capital works.
Cooper said using "demand management tools", like congestion charging to align capacity and demand, was something they had talked a lot about.
"It's just very noticeable that we don't have it and as a result we are building for peak [traffic demand] and building for peak is very, very expensive.
"So it's sort of unsurprising to me that we are looking at projects that are really high cost in a sector that we are not doing much demand management [in]. Those things just sort of go together."
Another major tool was housing people around existing transport networks.
Using such tools to suppress demand allowed projects to be reduced in size and other initiatives to be funded, too, Cooper said.
Substandard business cases had bedevilled new projects from health through to schools and roads, Treasury documents reported on by RNZ have shown.
Cooper said his fledgling agency had so far looked through 130 business cases from other agencies. "We are learning some things about what good looks like and what good doesn't look like."
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
