The roads we can’t afford, and a plan that will stall them anyway?

The National Infrastructure Plan is right that the country cannot pay for the roads it keeps promising. But its remedy — defer, stage, build later — is the very stop-start it was written to end.

  Strip away the thirty-year branding and the National Infrastructure Plan makes one blunt, correct point: New Zealand plans far more roading than it can pay for.

We already invest near the top of the OECD — about 5.8 per cent of GDP — and rank near the bottom for what we get back.

The seventeen Roads of National Significance, a new Waitemata Harbour Crossing and major rapid transit, taken together, far exceed the revenue likely to be available.

The Minister himself expanded the RoNS programme to an estimated $56 billion. On any honest budget, much of it cannot be built.

  The squeeze is real.

As much as sixty cents in every dollar of future investment must go on renewing what we already own as it wears out, before a single new project is funded. Land transport spending, on the Commission’s own numbers, should fall from about 1.3 per cent of GDP toward 1 per cent over thirty years.

There is not the money for the road map the country has been sold.

  So the plan prescribes restraint: defer the big builds, stage them, reach for low-cost fixes first, and time major roads to demonstrated demand rather than political announcement.

As budgeting, that is disciplined and overdue.

  As planning, it is a trap.

The plan’s loudest promise is to end stop-start — the Commission has even costed the pausing and cancelling of projects at $11.8 billion over 25 years. Yet staged, deferred, demand-gated investment is precisely the incrementalism it sets out to kill. The cure is a tidier version of the disease.

  The road north of Auckland shows where it leads.

The Puhoi to Warkworth motorway opened in 2023 at about $880 million. Its second stage, Warkworth to Te Hana, was split off, costed on its own, and left to stall. Proposed as a Road of National Significance in 2009, dropped by one government in 2017, and still only in procurement at an estimated $3.5 to $4 billion — soon the most expensive road the country has ever built.

Splitting one corridor in two created the off-ramp that stalled the dearer half for seventeen years and inflated its price.

  Then the plan repeats the error on that very road.

Its capacity chart breaks the route north into separate segments — Warkworth to Te Hana, Te Hana to Port Marsden, Port Marsden to Whangarei — and files each as unlikely to reach capacity before 2055.

The whole corridor is never weighed as one; each piece is judged alone and found easy to defer. A method that assesses fragments will always find a reason to wait.

  The losers are predictable.

While each segment waits for a forecast to tip it over the line, the bottleneck stays put: the Hill Street intersection at Warkworth, long rated among the country’s worst, has waited decades for a fix the staging keeps pushing over the horizon, and Northland keeps waiting for the four-laning that never quite arrives.

Deferral is not free. It moves the cost off the ledger and onto the people stuck in the queue.

  Meanwhile the politics runs the other way.

The Government has welcomed the plan as confirmation of work already underway, while pressing on regardless — a further $1.2 billion for the RoNS and a tolling regime to “build the roads New Zealand needs sooner.” 

The country is left with the worst of both worlds: a plan that says the roads are unaffordable, and a minister who keeps committing to them anyway.

  The Commission would say disciplined sequencing is exactly how a stretched country avoids the next Puhoi.

Perhaps.

But discipline that defers the build is the off-ramp, and discipline rarely survives a three-year electoral cycle. We have a generation of stalled roads to prove it.

A plan written to stop the stalling has made stalling the strategy: defer the roads we cannot afford, fragment the ones we can, and call the delay discipline.