TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS
BOARD OF INQUIRY
MacKays to Peka Peka Expressway Proposal
HEARING at KAPITI COAST on 14 JANUARY 2013
BOARD OF INQUIRY:
Sir John Hansen (Chairperson) Environment Commissioner David Bunting (Board Member) Ms Glenice Paine (Board Member) Mr Mark Apeldoorn (Board Member)
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[9.29 am]
CHAIRPERSON: Thank you. Good morning, just to remind submitters before 5 we start that this is an opportunity to speak to the submissions that have already been filed and I think the first, Ms Hawken and Mr Mansfield.
MS HAWKEN: Thank you, your Honour, and members of the Board for giving me this opportunity to speak about the expressway proposal. 10 My name is Dinah Hawken and I live in Paekakariki because of the quiet and the beauty of the coastal environment and the satisfactions of living in a small community. I identify strongly with others who live on the Kapiti Coast for the same reasons and who would be affected by the building of an expressway through their neighbourhoods. 15 I have worked as a social worker and counsellor. I am also a poet and have recently been teaching a course at Victoria University called “Writing the Landscape”. I am grateful that you are hearing personal and general responses to the proposal because I think the whole range 20 of opinion from the most technical and detailed to the most broad and personal are relevant and of value.
[9.30 am]
25 I will give my reactions in a brief and forthright way knowing that you are also hearing many other points of view. I am also grateful that you are hearing representations from those of us who oppose the proposal in full because I agree with Mr Richard Fowler in his oral submission on the second day of the hearing that the scale and enormous 30 consequences of NZTA‟s plan require that alternatives are seriously and adequately considered.
At the end of my written submission I refer to NZTA‟s proposal as major surgery and to the main alternative, the two lane Western Link 35 Road with a bridge over the Waikanae River, upgrade of State Highway 1 and improved public transport as minor surgery. Both are for the same condition and many of us differ in our judgements about how serious that condition is. As you will know by now the alternative for minor surgery has been seriously and adequately considered and 40 was the option of choice by the Kapiti community, the KCDC and NZTA itself in 2009 when the present proposal came out of the blue.
For me there are three general questions that need to be asked and answered and they have an ethical underpinning because the costs of 45 this project are very high. (1) is the expressway necessary, (2) will the building of the expressway through Kapiti be more destructive than it is
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constructive and (3) if it is too destructive is there an adequate less destructive alternative?
The purpose of the RMA is to sustainably manage our natural resources 5 in a way that enables people and communities to provide for their social, economic and cultural wellbeing. We need to ask which of the two alternatives would do that best.
From what I have heard and read as an ordinary citizen taking a non- 10 expert interest in these questions it seems that some of the benefits of the expressway are certain and some are uncertain. The clear beneficiaries of the expressway would seem to be people travelling from Wellington through Kapiti on their way further north. Those private car commuters in Kapiti who live near an interchange and the 15 trucking industry, their benefits would be decreased travel time and greater road safety. Although they represent only some of us they are our greater good.
I expect the Minister and NZTA would argue that the greater good is 20 the national economy but whether there would be national, regional or local economic benefits seems to be quite uncertain, there are various and contradictory reports. The benefit cost ratio is very low. I have been wondering if the proposed expressway truly is of national significance or, to put it another way, if New Zealand‟s economic 25 future would suffer significantly if this expressway did not go ahead.
What is certain is that the building of a big project like this is destructive, there is no getting around it, sometimes quite literally, whatever the mitigation, however well intentioned the mitigation, a 30 major expressway is destructive. It is destructive of settled landscapes, of soils, waterways, wetlands, air quality and the life of plants, creatures and people. That is why the Minister has sent NZTA‟s application to a Board of Inquiry. NZTA‟s non-technical summary of the assessment of environmental effects emphasises mitigation and 35 positive benefits in a way that is convincing on a first read but avoids the overall issue of the destructiveness of such a huge project on communities living on a narrow strip of coastal land.
The assessment slants away from the adverse effects. The photographs 40 on the cover exemplify this tendency in all their informational material which, to my mind, has been dishonest. On this cover there is an overview of the Kapiti district and Kapiti Island without an expressway in site and two small slices of a distant over bridge surrounded by green, one with a cycleway beneath it. There is not a car in site in 45 either of them.
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[9.35 am]
NZTA makes much of the walkway/cycleway but I wonder if many of us who live in Kapiti would choose to walk alongside an expressway 5 when we can walk by the Waikanae River on Whareroa Farm or for miles along the beach. A cycleway is important however, for cyclists commuting between towns, as was envisaged in the plan for the Western Link Road.
10 In comparison to the benefits of the expressway the benefits of the Western Link Road are fairly certain, less cost, less destruction of the environment, less noise, less disruption during construction, less displacement of people and property, less severance of communities, less intrusion of wahi tapu sites, the creation of jobs and some 15 decreased travel time on a less congested and upgraded State Highway 1. These benefits may seem less dramatic than those of the road of national significance but accumulatively they add up to a significant package and deserve to be considered seriously.
20 I have been puzzling over why I feel so strongly about this proposal that I would uncharacteristically make a presentation to a Board of Inquiry. On investigation, internal investigation that is, I realised that I am both angry and sad. I am angry (a) because of the sudden ill considered imposition of the expressway plan on the community 25 without respect for the history of the Western Link Road decision, which had been settled and was ready to go. It put our Council in an impossible position. And I am angry (b) because of the confusing and seemingly manipulative nature of the first submission process which gave the community no choice for the negotiated Western Link Road 30 but only choices about the location of an expressway, one of which was over the Western Link Road route. People were either confused or forced to put in a submission that had no weight. It has been hard since then to trust the genuineness of NZTA‟s consultation process. However, I think the open attitude of the Board of Inquiry has restored 35 some faith in the overall process of consultation.
I think it would be true to say that many or most of us who live on the Kapiti Coast do so because it gives us a quiet, low key outdoor lifestyle close to the beach, the hills and the natural world generally. I am very 40 sad for those many people whose lifestyle will be disrupted by the intrusion of a hard, ugly, unceasingly noisy major highway. I am sad for those whose community life will be severed where homes are divided from schools, families from the beach, their local activities and their local shops, for the kids who will no longer be able to walk or ride 45 easily to school or to visit friends. There is no doubt that an expressway is a barrier. We lived 150 metres from one in Yonkers,
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New York for a year and almost instinctively did everything possible to keep our life and activities to our side of the divide.
We also lived for three years in New York City adjacent to the East 5 Side highway with the constant stream of cars reflecting in our bedroom ceiling light. I can tell you that living near a motorway is stressful and wearying. People who have not had that experience might be more easily seduced by NZTA‟s leafy pictures. A more accurate picture to see in your mind‟s eye is the motorway between Porirua east 10 and Porirua or between Newlands and Johnsonville.
[9.40 am]
I am sad also that this proposal again puts economic growth like a God 15 above all that matters to most people. What really seems to matter to us most and gives us a sense of wellbeing is good health, good relationships, a sense of place, a sense of community, peace of mind and a strong connection with the natural world. Travel time and speed and their link to economic growth seem to be given a predominant 20 value in this proposal. Why is that? Is it really so crucial to save five or 10 minutes through the Kapiti Coast? Is it really so awful to slow down through Mana and Pukerua Bay or along Centennial Highway? There are advantages to reduced speed such as safety and time to see the uplifting view of the ocean and island from the top of Pukerua Bay 25 Hill.
Another disappointment with the proposal for me is the lack of consideration of climate change. It is not mentioned in the summary of the assessment of environment effects but is mentioned by the Minister 30 of the Environment as an issue to be considered under the RMA. Some of the large general effects of the proposal, like the general destruction of the physical and social landscape I have talked about earlier, tend to become almost invisible in the investigation of more specific issues. Building a major expressway contributes to global warming not just by 35 encouraging private car use but by taking money away from improving public transport. I do not have the knowledge to assess whether sea level rise and therefore water table rise, accordingly to Dr Manning‟s evidence, has been take fully into account by NZTA in terms of design of the expressway but global warming, sea level rise, coastal erosion 40 and severe weather effects are certain to occur in the future and we know that carbon emissions contribute to them all. You would expect a government agency to be taking that into account as in most other western countries where public transport and rail travel into cities is being encouraged. 45
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Finally, to be frank and probably embarrassing, I want to tell you why I am really here. I am here because it breaks my heart to think of a huge four lane road roaring through the quiet dunes and low key properties of Raumati South. I am here because I love my home in all its senses, 5 my actual house and garden, my particular landscape and community, these small islands we live on and the planet we just happen to have appeared on and, until recently, thrived on. We have now done a lot of damage to this home and I can‟t bear to stand by and watch us deliberately do more. If we do it must be absolutely necessary. Thank 10 you.
CHAIRPERSON: Thank you. Now, are you presenting your husband‟s submission as well?
15 MS HAWKEN: No, he is presenting his own.
CHAIRPERSON: All right, well, we will come to that after we have dealt with the next one then but I would have thought from the same the address you could perhaps have done a joint submission. 20 MS HAWKEN: We are quite different people with quite different views.
CHAIRPERSON: All right, well, we will hear it in due course, thank you. Mr and Mrs Neilson? 25 MR MANSFIELD: Your Honour and members of the Board my name is actually William Mansfield and my wife, from whom you have just heard, Dinah Hawken.
30 CHAIRPERSON: I am sorry, I called the second on the list, Mr and Mrs Neilson, are they not present?
MR MANSFIELD: Well, we were just - - -
35 CHAIRPERSON: Okay. All right, Mr Mansfield, well we have yours in front of us so you go ahead.
MR MANSFIELD: Thank you. As I say, my name is William Mansfield and my wife, from whom you have just heard, and I live in Paekakariki. I 40 do take your point, your Honour, that there was a question of whether we should make a joint submission but we do, as you will perhaps hear, we are very different people with very different perspectives so we come at the thing from a different angle.
45 [9.45 am]
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CHAIRPERSON: All right.
MR MANSFIELD: Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you. I have no particular expertise on road transport, nor have I been able to 5 read and follow all the expert evidence that‟s been presented to you, and although I am a resident of the Kapiti Coast, our property in Paekakariki is not one that will be directly affected by the proposed expressway.
10 But on the basis of personal experience, I believe the proposal has the potential to have quite profound effects on the Kapiti Coast communities that are not widely appreciated, and I felt I should not pass up this opportunity to outline my concerns and the questions to which for me they give rise, to note with appreciation the careful 15 inclusive and considerate way in which this Board is approaching its complex task, and to express support for that approach in view of the potential long term implications for this region.
I have lived beside a freeway in New York State and above one on 20 Manhattan, and have seen at first hand the divisive effects on local communities of early expressway development in the United States, where the authorities seem to have been almost Romanesque in their straight lining of freeways regardless of effects on local communities.
25 The results in many instances are that people on either side of these expressways may as well be living across an international border for all the practical day to day contact they are likely to have with each other.
Now, to say that is not to argue that all expressways are bad, they are 30 not. There are many situations where they are both justified by traffic volumes and well designed to minimise the effects on local communities.
I have also lived for extended periods in Switzerland and have 35 observed many situations there where expressways have been well planned to carefully skirt villages and towns and to ensure continued linkages between villages on either side of an expressway by way of underpasses or overpasses.
40 In many instances the authorities there have also gone to great effort and expense to reduce the noise of high speed expressway traffic by means of complex sound baffling systems, including, for example, walls of glass many metres high. But on the basis of my observations I do believe that the introduction of an expressway through an area 45 potentially creates a major qualitative change in terms of the divisive effects and noise experienced by local communities.
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This qualitative change can have long term implications for the overall desirability of an area as a place to live and the development or decline of its economic, social and cultural life. An expressway is not just 5 another road.
It may be possible to mitigate some of the adverse effects of an expressway, but if this mitigation work is to be done to the best international practice standards, then the full costs involved must be 10 carefully factored into the final decision as to whether to proceed. And a separate consideration is the potential adverse effects on the local environment and whether they can be mitigated.
All in all, my general contention is that the introduction of an 15 expressway through an area is a decision that should be taken very carefully on the basis of thorough analysis of the full costs of designing, building and mitigating to international best practice standards, and of the anticipated public benefits to be derived from such a major investment. 20 This seems even more important in the singular circumstances of the Kapiti Coast from Paekakariki to Peka Peka, a narrow coastal strip in which it is not possible for an expressway to completely skirt local communities, and which for that reason alone might well be considered 25 unsuitable for an expressway in some other countries, in Europe for example.
[9.50 am]
30 In regard to say that I was surprised by the announcement of the proposal MacKays to Peka Peka expressway would be an understatement. It seemed to fly in the face of the careful work undertaken over several years by the Kapiti Coast District Council on the two lane western link road with associated upgrades to state 35 highway one. That proposal was developed in consultation with the local communities and was designed to link them rather than divide them while significantly reducing traffic volumes on state highway one. It would have the immediate benefit of reducing traffic congestion on state highway one in contrast to the proposed expressway that 40 presumably will lead to an increase in the bottleneck at MacKay‟s from the north until such time as Transmission Gully is built, something was rather obvious this morning.
It was certainly my understanding that this western link road proposal 45 had been developed in consultation with NZTA and had their support. I have seen various estimates of the amount of traffic the western link
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road was expected to divert from state highway one, but the minimum seemed to be about one quarter. The estimated cost of that road and associated upgrades to state highway one was obviously a fraction of the costs of an expressway. 5 Accordingly, I have always wondered about the paper NZTA presumably presented to this board providing its advice for this fundamental change of direction. I do not know whether that paper is in the public domain. I certainly have not seen it, but it presumably 10 exists as the implications for long term good government process if the decision was taken without such advice does not bear contemplation.
If I was surprised by the announcement of the proposed expressway, I was astonished by the subsequent consultation document put out by 15 NZTA, it did not contain an option for the western link road but nor did it make clear that this option had been excluded, and from my own conversations at the time it was clear many people were confused. It seemed that many residents believe that in indicating a preference for one option they were in fact supporting the western link road. 20 Even more importantly, the document did not set out the cost benefit analysis that suddenly justified the introduction of an expressway with its major additional costs and all its potential adverse effects on the local communities. In this regard, I am aware that an earlier report, the 25 so-called SAHA Report, assessed the costs as significantly higher than the benefits and that a later analysis prepared for NZTA arrived at a similar assessment.
Again, I have no expertise in cost benefit analysis, but I assume that at 30 least one relevant factor must be the anticipated increases in traffic volumes over the route in question. If that‟s correct then here too I am puzzled. I have looked at the NZTA website on this issue and noted a report prepared last year for NZTA on monthly state highway trends. As I read that report, it indicates that total vehicle volumes have 35 declined countrywide in recent years, including in the Wellington region, despite increases in population and that this seems to be true, although to a lesser extent for heavy vehicles.
The report does not proffer any reasons for the decline, but it seems to 40 me not difficult to speculate that factors such as changing work patterns, working electronically from home for example, preferences amongst younger people for urban living, and increases in fuels prices may well be altering New Zealanders longstanding interest in cars and keenness for car travel, as seems to be the case in other developed 45 countries.
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I‟m sure the Board will examine this issue in an appropriate level of depth, and that expectation provides me with a level of comfort because on the admittedly superficial level at which I have been able to look at it, I cannot see that the basic case for the expressway has been made, at 5 least in comparison to the much less expensive western link road. I recognise that the profitability of the road transport industry might well be enhanced by an expressway as it would avoid the increased fuel usage involved in stopping and starting at lights, and presumably reduce point to point travel times to some degree. 10 [9.55 am]
But surely to justify the level of public expenditure involved in building the expressway, let alone the adverse effects on local 15 communities, there should be clear evidence of a benefit for the public at large, and with apparently static or declining vehicle volumes I find this benefit hard to identify.
My concerns about the adequacy and fairness of the NZTA‟s 20 consultation document also lead me to have some concerns about the assurances they have been giving about the mitigation efforts they intend to make, particularly in respect of noise and the visual impact of the proposed expressway. I know they have a difficult job and I am sure their intentions are good, and again I must enter the qualification 25 that I have not been able to follow the discussion on mitigation measures in any detail, and I am accordingly grateful we are able to rely on this distinguished Board to look into these matters.
But the first of my concerns is whether the mitigation measures they 30 have in mind will in fact correspond to international best practice. The best mitigation measures I have seen overseas look to me very expensive indeed. I have not seen similar measures anywhere in New Zealand. If the intention really is to follow international best mitigation practice measures, as it should, if this can be documented by 35 persons who are familiar with such measures, and if the costs of such measures have been included in a proposed budget, then that would provide some level of reassurance in the community, but I need to say that my fear is that the cost of such measures will make an already very costly project prohibitively expensive, and we will find that NZTA is 40 later told that the costs are too high and must be cut and we must live with a lower level of mitigation.
In any event, as I have already suggested, the full costs of international best practice measures should be included in the budget estimates so 45 that the overall cost benefit ratio that would inform a final decision is as accurate as possible.
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My second concern relates to the effects of the construction of the proposed expressway on the local environment. On the face of it, these effects would seem likely to be considerable. I understand the Board 5 has already received or will be receiving expert evidence in relation to these potential effects. For my part I would simply say that I am unconvinced by the very brief and general reassuring comments in NZTA‟s non-technical summary of their assessment of the environmental effects, and it is reassuring to know that this important 10 aspect of the proposal will also be considered carefully.
In summary, I believe the potentially divisive and other adverse effects of the construction of an expressway on local communities means it should not be undertaken without first the most careful analysis of the 15 potential benefits of the project for the wider public against the full costs of designing, constructing and mitigating the effects on local communities and the local environment to international best practice standards.
20 Second, the balancing of those costs and benefits against the costs and benefits of other less drastic and costly options.
In this particular case I have indicated my concerns as to whether the huge costs and adverse effects can be justified in the light of apparently 25 static or declining traffic volumes, and social trends here and overseas suggesting this many continue, and the existence of a much less expensive and disruptive and fully developed alternative, the Western Link Road.
30 I have also expressed my hope that the Board will closely examine whether the proposed mitigation work in respect of adverse effects on the local communities and the local environment corresponds to best international practice and whether the costs of meeting international best practice have been fully factored into the overall cost of the 35 proposal and the calculation of the cost benefit ratio.
May I again express my thanks for the opportunity to speak to you and my appreciation for the considerate and inclusive way in which you are carrying out your complex and difficult task. 40 Thank you.
[10.00 am]
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CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, Mr Mansfield. Well, firstly an apology for a Monday morning error, I forgot to ask if there was any questions of Ms Hawken. Any questions of Mr Mansfield?
5 MR APELDOORN: Just one if I could, thank you. I‟d just like to assist my understanding of what you are describing around international best practice. I just wondered if you could give me an indication of what you actually mean by the term international best practice?
10 MR MANSFIELD: Well, I am basing that comment on what I have particularly seen, I would say, in Switzerland, some parts of France and Italy, where if you look at the way the roads are designed, they have been, for example, from Geneva through to Monteux, which is a highly travelled route, you have a local road, but you also have an expressway, 15 and that expressway has been designed to skirt the relevant villages, and there‟s a considerable number along the lake side there, and also to ensure that those villages have not been disconnected from each other by a series of quite complex underpasses and overpasses, so that there is connectivity between both sides of the expressway. 20 I suppose some of the most dramatic and, what seemed to me, some of the more expensive options are some of the sound battening systems, which again I have not seen elsewhere, where they can be literally walls of glass higher than the ceiling of this room, which avoid the loss 25 of views and reduce problems of visual impact, loss of light, for the local communities and the housing that is in even some reasonable distance away.
So that‟s where I would say is the sort of benchmark for reducing and I 30 can‟t, I‟m not a technical expert, but it‟s clear to me that they are reducing the sound levels dramatically, they‟re also avoiding the visual impacts and they‟re ensuring the kind of appropriate connectivity which, again, I have seen no evidence of so far in these discussions here, and I haven‟t seen similar extended measures elsewhere. 35 Does that help? But I say again, I am no expert in these matters.
MR APELDOORN: So you mention some of the more expensive options, and I guess the second question I had was how do you see the financial 40 implications impacting on international best practice decisions?
MR MANSFIELD: Well, my argument is that in New Zealand if we‟re doing this kind of thing and if we were to go through this particular narrow corridor, and I‟ve said that in some other countries you would be trying 45 to choose some other way through here or it would‟ve been designed at a much earlier point, but if we‟re going to do it and through this area
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where the impacts are inevitable, then we should surely be trying to mitigate to the best international practice standards and they are going to be expensive, and my concern is that this project is already a very, very expensive one and if we are to mitigate fully to international best 5 practice standards, as we I believe should, then I think the cost will be enormous and the cost ratio will be driven out of sight and I guess my real worry is that we‟ll be given assurances that this mitigation will be taken to that level and then subsequently we will find that the budget simply doesn‟t extend to it and we say, well some other important 10 roads or whatever that have to be given priority and they cannot mitigate, we cannot mitigate to those higher levels with the consequent effects. That‟s my concern.
MR APELDOORN: Have you had the opportunity or do you have a concern 15 about whether New Zealand standards or the standards that are adopted in New Zealand are at an adequate international best practice level?
MR MANSFIELD: I haven‟t done the research in that. As I say, I am no expert on road transport, I am simply making a general submission as a 20 citizen based on what I have seen and my impressions overseas. I have not seen mitigation measures comparable to those that I have seen overseas. They‟re the ones I am talking about and which I think would be appropriate through this area. I have not seen them in New Zealand.
25 [10.05 am]
I acknowledge some of the work that NZTA and its predecessor agencies have done. I congratulate them for the kind of work they have done in terms of revegetation of areas with native vegetation, I think 30 some of those have been superb. But in terms of sound baffling techniques and reduction of noise and impacts on local communities, as I say, I have seen nothing similar to that which I have seen overseas.
MR APELDOORN: Thank you very much: Thank you, sir. 35 CHAIRPERSON: Like others, a number of submitters have talked about the combination of the Western Link Road and upgrading State Highway 1 but what do you mean by “upgrading State Highway 1”, two lanes, four lanes, expressway or exactly what? 40 MR MANSFIELD: Well, I was really going from the basis of what was proposed at the time. The Western Link Road was a package which included some upgrading to State Highway 1. I cannot now, your Honour - - - 45
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CHAIRPERSON: So it‟s the complete former package, if I can put it that way?
MR MANSFIELD: Yes. 5 CHAIRPERSON: Right.
MR MANSFIELD: That was my understanding.
10 CHAIRPERSON: Okay. Thank you very much.
MR MANSFIELD: Thank you.
CHAIRPERSON: Now, do we have Mr and Mrs Neilson. 15 MR ALEXANDER: In fact my name is Neville Alexander, my wife‟s name is Rosemary Neilson
CHAIRPERSON: Oh, I am sorry, yes. Is she with you as well? 20 MR ALEXANDER: She is but I will be speaking on behalf of both of us.
CHAIRPERSON: Well, come forward, you may come and sit next to your husband anyway. Thank you. 25 MR ALEXANDER: This is all very new to me and a little bit overwhelming so if I don‟t observe the correct protocol please accept my apologies now. But thank you for the opportunity to speak here and I hope that all these bits of paper I have got link together and make sense in some 30 way.
So basically we are affected parties because of the location of our property alongside the proposed motorway. The expressway will border our eastern boundary, which is probably best described in your 35 terms as from what you call chainage, 8,000 through to about chainage 8,200 on some of your sketches and drawings. It‟s a lifestyle block of one hectare, it is surrounded by trees and set back on Mazengarb Road by a right of way. It‟s proposed to pass our property at an elevated height which we thought would be approximately eight metres which 40 means it will overlook us. We believe it will expose us to excessive levels of noise and fumes and we are concerned that it is going to destroy the peacefulness and privacy that we currently enjoy.
We were aware of the proposed construction of the expressway when 45 we bought the property but little was known at the time about the details of the proposal. I‟ve been aware of other projects in the area
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like, for example the Dowse Drive motorway region, which was a major construction, so we had faith that a similar standard would be in place with this expressway. So we did know about but we didn‟t know a lot about it. 5 Having lived here for almost two years and experienced the location first hand, we now believe that to place an expressway of this type in amongst this density and arrangement of private residences in Paraparaumu is a mistake and we believe that the inevitable negative 10 consequences far outweigh any perceived benefits.
And we are submitting our objection to the proposal because of the following reasons starting with concerns about health impacts of a motorway passing so close to our property, in particular noise and 15 carbon monoxide and diesel particulate pollution from traffic on the expressway. Newly published findings of the British Heart Foundation which was published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine state that even low levels of carbon monoxide can be fatal by disrupting the hearts rhythm and levels common in 20 heavy traffic could affect the way the heart resets itself; for example, my wife has a condition resulting from rheumatic fever in childhood and a high susceptibility to tonsillitis associated with air pollution and so we have concerns about that.
25 [10.10 am]
The predominant wind in the area where we live is the nor‟wester and it funnels straight through past our place and if the expressway is placed in that position, there‟s a huge band of pine trees through there 30 that provide a lot of shelter from that at the moment. The subdivision at Waterstone, which is to the east of us, if the trees are gone and if the expressway is there we believe that that subdivision will be pretty much bombarded with pollutants.
35 Whereas the main highway at the moment, for example, the predominant wind, the nor‟wester, comes through and pollution from the main highway is blown by the northwest wind and it actually hits the hill and blows up into the air and it dissipates and it doesn‟t actually go over a subdivision we believe. 40 The noise we are concerned about, and I‟ll try and collate this as best I can, some of the information that I‟ve taken from the website, from the MacKays to Peka Peka proposal. There‟s a section here I have noted, sector 3 scenario 1. It says, “West of the proposed expressway 45 Mazengarb Road area…”,which is right where we are. It talks about the do minimum scenarios and it also describes a thing called the BPO
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which I assume means the best possible option. It says that at our location, “The do minimum scenario includes the use of low noise road surface material, referred to as OGPA, on proposed expressway and 1.1 metre high concrete edge barriers on the proposed expressway 5 bridge over Mazengarb Road. The introduction of the proposed expressway into…” - what they describe for themselves – “… as a currently quiet noise environment results in a significant increase in noise level by between 11 and 17 decibels. Noise levels at the eight…” - they call them PPFs and I did look up what that means but it basically 10 means the directly affected properties – “… as assessed are predicted to range from 56 to 62 decibels”.
So then they go on to say, section 2, which is what they are actually going to do because they‟re not proposed to use the low noise road 15 surface material. It says category A, which is the decibel level of up to and including 57 decibels, so category A at all PPFs west of the proposed expressway can be achieved by means of a two metre high barrier immediately adjacent to the proposed expressway, extending from the bridge across Mazengarb Road…” – which is almost at our 20 property – “… to chainage 8,420” – which I assume means 8.42 kilometres from the beginning of the expressway and, as I said, our property basically starts at eight kilometres, 8,000, so it‟s about 420 two metre high barrier. “Noise reductions between three and six decibels are predicted to be achieved at all PPFs assessed with an 25 average mitigation of four decibels. Noise levels are predicted to vary from 52 to 56 decibels which is an appropriate noise environment for residential use”.
The EPA put out a guideline for safe dB decibel levels and it says, “For 30 the protection of public health the Environmental Protection Agency propose these levels. Neighbourhoods during waking hours 55 decibels maximum”. So that exceeds that just. “Neighbourhoods during sleeping hours 45 decibels”. So once again it exceeds that. I have read also somewhere in there that it says that 42 decibels can wake you from 35 sleep. And then down here, once again in the EPA guidelines, it talks about, for the workplace, “The Occupational Safety and Health Administration propose these permissible noise exposure times…” - blah, blah, blah – “… for easier understanding” 90 decibels which is, for example, a lawnmower, a hairdryer or truck traffic. So we‟re not 40 sure quite what noise levels we‟re going to experience at our point.
So I went further and I had a look at drawing No EN-NV-060, which once again is from the proposal, the MacKays to Peka Peka proposal, and it shows that our property will be exposed to noise levels in the 45 category B range, which is 57 to 64 decibels. And then they move on to say that in drawing No EN-NV-061 shows that with a two metre
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barrier from Mazengarb Road to Chainage 8420 will drop us to category A which is a range of up to and including 57 decibels, which we still have concerns about.
5 [10.15 am]
Then if you scroll down, we come to drawing number EN-NV-062 which show in option B, and option B is a much lesser wall from approximately Chainage 8100 to 8200 that shows our outbuildings will 10 fall into category A, which is up to and including 57 decibels, but our dwelling will subsequently fall into category B which is 57 to 64 decibels, which will surely require double-glazing for the house. But then we wonder how unpleasant will it be on the grounds around the house. 15 And forgive me I forget your name, but the gentleman before me was talking about his concerns about the mitigation changing should the budget blow-out. I note that its already proposed that it‟s going to be $670 million or over $700 million, I think for the expressway. And it 20 concerns, is it likely that in the likely event of a budget blow-out that option two will be invoked to save costs, in which case our property will be adversely effected acoustically and devalued further by the resulting higher noise levels, so we ask that option B as outlined in the drawing EN-NV-062 be struck out. 25 We note also that while OGPA surface material is recognised as an effective means for reducing road noise, it is note proposed to be utilised despite being recorded and identified as the best possible option in this location of the proposed expressway; and we request that if the 30 expressway does go ahead that OGPA be regarded as essential.
So that‟s the noise aspect and the health. We have concerns about damage to our land from water run-off and drainage from the expressway. The north-eastern sector of our property, which I guess is 35 about an eighth of our property, is low-lying and its wet and it‟s manageable, and it flows basically into an enormous blackberry patch which is in a low-lying area which goes right through to the Council depot.
40 I‟m not sure exactly where we got the information from, but we understood – I think it came from a phone call, there was a meeting of some sort or there was a discussion somewhere and we phoned – I don‟t know if it was EPA or Transit or someone like that, we phoned and asked if we could be given an indication of how high the motorway 45 would be as it passed our property and we were told approximately eight metres, and roughly a metre and a half higher than our property.
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Since then we discover, once again by looking at the website, what we thought would be eight metres, and this is at Chainage 8000 through to 8200, as according to drawing number CV-EW-214, actually 14 to 16 5 metres high plus the two metre wall. Now, having seen what happened at MacKay‟s crossing and having seen what happened at Lindale surely this is going to require an initial laydown of fill even higher than that to allow for compacting and settling over the top of what is currently a two metre plus peat bog. 10 We have seen various people going through the forest there over the last two years, you can see them quite easily, they‟re wearing fluro- orange uniforms, and me being a little bit nosey I‟ve gone and spoken to some of them, and they were putting probes down. They did have a 15 truck that drilled down but they couldn‟t get the truck in there, so these people went through and they‟ve gone through and they‟ve put in a number of probes. And talking to them they‟d got down I think one point seven metres at these various points before they struck sand, but the rest of it was just peat. The peat is soggy enough that a pine tree 20 falls over, as a number of them fallen over already.
I don‟t know that one point seven metres is even right through there, it could be deeper, I doubt that it‟s less than that, but it could be even deeper than that from what I believe, and I‟m not an expert by any 25 stretch of the imagination. Lindale became an awful lot more complicated because the peat was deeper and more extensive than they thought, so I have concerns that we‟re going to strike that sort of thing there.
30 [10.20 am]
16 metres, I don‟t know how much more they need to place in there to allow for it to compact down to what they want. I gather that 16 metres is the final anticipated height at that point. From Mazengarb Road, 35 where there‟s a bridge proposed to go over, there‟s a deep gully and in that deep gully is a drain, and the drain comes from the stormwater catchment ponds which are on Arawhata Road, round towards the Council. We‟ve been for a walk round there and we‟ve seen that that‟s where they start and they flow and flow through past - actually flow 40 through the boundary of our property and the property nextdoor, they flow under our right of way driveway and it seems that at that point that drain is going to be buried, presumably, with a huge pipe 16 metres down, and then there‟s a hill, and then there‟s another dip, which is the one I talked about, which is the huge blackberry patch which is full of 45 peat and bog and that is also going to be 16 metres deep.
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We have concerns about how long it‟s going to take for that to settle. We believe it could take up to a decade to settle. Again, I‟m not an expert, but based on what we saw at MacKays Crossing, MacKays Crossing still seems to be undulating and up and down and it seems to 5 be weeping in a number of places. I think it‟s on the southern direction before you get to the railway under bridge, there often seems to be a crack in the road there that they seem to repair on a regular basis and water keeps coming out of it. Don‟t really understand that.
10 So with a 16 metre high motorway going through where at the moment there‟s the peat bog, we have no idea what‟s going to happen to the low area of our property, we are concerned that it‟s going to become unusable, wet, we just don‟t know.
15 The visual impact of the expressway, I mean if it‟s all planted out and tidied up, then I guess you couldn‟t ask for more than that. We also learn now that there‟s going to be a cycleway going through there and from the drawing, once again I think from memory the drawing might have been one of the earlier one‟s I mentioned, the one that shows the 20 barrier, we are concerned about the possibility of the security aspect of our property. So we would hope that some sort of security fencing and some sort of privacy measures from the foot traffic and the cycle traffic going through there, which we didn‟t know about, would be taken into account. If not for that, people wouldn‟t even know our property exists. 25 The safety risks, we‟re also concerned about the safety risks associated with the movements of construction machinery around our property and driveway, and the noise and the windblown particles during construction, it just depends on how long it takes for it all to settle 30 down. The information seems to be changing as things progress to the point where we actually have no certainty about the final scenario or the finished product. We have no idea how it‟s going to affect our property in terms of its value. The stress from that is bordering on significant I would say, and it looks like it‟s going to be ongoing. 35 I mentioned the flooding, the saturation. I‟ve done that, I‟ve done that. I‟ve done all that.
So we consider the cost of building the expressway is disproportionate 40 to the benefits it will bring and the amount of disruption it will cause to people‟s daily lives during construction and to their immediate environment. It just seems unnecessarily intrusive and evasive. We‟ve done our best to try and absorb and understand the information that‟s come to us since we put in our proposal, our objection. It is clear that 45 an awful lot of work has gone into it. I don‟t think this is something that NZTA has taken lightly, there does seem to be an awful lot of
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information, almost to the point of being overwhelming. I haven‟t been able to get my head around the volume of stuff that‟s been coming through, but you do your best and I understand that it is necessary.
5 [10.25 am]
We consider that there‟s already a traffic corridor through Paraparaumu, what the expressway will do in terms of our region, is it will provide four lanes through from where we are to way up further 10 north, but we do already have four lanes to the Paraparaumu lights. Immediately north of the Paraparaumu lights, and I‟m winging it now, immediately north of the Paraparaumu lights, from the Paraparaumu lights through to the over bridge is two lanes, so a bottleneck exists there where people try and merge two into one, and that causes delays. 15 Now, four lanes from that point, from the lights through to the over bridge would certainly help that, and indeed most of the properties down that stretch are for sale at the moment, so I don‟t think those people would object to that property being bought up. 20 I am a layman, I admit that, I‟m not an expert on roading or town planning or any of that sort of stuff. To me I wonder why is it not possible to then, at the point of the railway over bridge, go over the railway over bridge, once again with four lanes, and continue through. 25 There‟s a motel in the way, but I don‟t know that the motel does that well, I‟ve heard that it struggles from time to time, so I don‟t know what their thoughts would be about selling, and then we come to the Lindale complex where the Council is currently using the Lindale complex, Whitireia were using it for quite some time, but Whitireia 30 have moved out, so I don‟t know what the fate of that complex is after the Council move into their new building.
Lindale is struggling. I don‟t know how Lindale would feel about an increase from two lanes to four lanes through there. Then we come to 35 Southwards, and the houses down the main road, and I don‟t know what happens there, but I don‟t know how hard it would be to get four lanes, but we‟re almost at Waikanae and the possibility of four lanes almost to Waikanae without carving through Raumati South, Raumati, Paraparaumu, seems possible to me. So I guess that‟s being looked at, I 40 don‟t understand why it couldn‟t be done to be honest.
Once again, from the pollution point of view, the nor-wester would come through and blow any fumes and so forth up and it would be dispersed, so it seems to make sense to me. 45
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So the corridor is already there that could be readily adapted to allow increased traffic flows without impacting on the local community, and the environment to the extent that the proposed expressway will. The upgraded rail service offers an efficient alternative for commuters to 5 Wellington. I don‟t drive to Wellington if I can avoid it these days. My wife prefers to take the train these days. More trains would help.
The suggested time savings of 15 minutes for motorists travelling from Otaki at peak hour don‟t seem to warrant such an expensive and 10 disruptive project going ahead. I wouldn‟t be surprised if it doubled. Apart from the peak hours and at the start and end of holiday weekends traffic movements don‟t seem to be high, not high enough to warrant this expense and this amount of disruption, and there seems to us to be an insufficient traffic flow overall to require an Auckland style 15 motorway through what is still a relatively small and unspoilt town.
Further to that, and the gentleman before me mentioned this as well, as Transmission Gully is not yet built the proposed expressway is likely to efficiently deliver an overwhelming volume of southbound traffic to 20 the town of Paekakariki and the Coast Road and beyond on a regular basis. Any time saved because of the existence of the expressway would be lost because of this, and we would suggest as a better alternative that if the Wellington northern corridor does go ahead, that Transmission Gully should be built first, and then the existing State 25 Highway strategically modified from Raumati to Peka Peka.
So we would hope if the expressway does proceed, for our property we would hope mitigation such as dense vegetation to restore the privacy and reduce noise and the visual impact. We would hope for security 30 standard fencing between any walkway or cycleway and our property to prevent opportunistic intrusion from passers-by who, as I said before, if not for this new road would be highly unlikely to even be aware of our property.
35 The concrete barriers seem to be proposed. The 1.1 metre one, which was mentioned in the first scenario, we don‟t think would be adequate. The two metre one, we would suggest would be adequate but, as I said earlier, in option two where it is proposed a much shorter one, our concerns are that if the budget did blow out that the proposal would 40 change from the 4.2 - no, from the 420 metre one, which would reduce our dwelling to unpleasant, but manageable maybe, level of sound. We would suggest that option two be struck out.
We would also ask for the smooth road surface, COGBA, to be used. 45 We feel that double glazing would be essential on our property, on our home, our house is elevated. I don‟t really want to wake up every night,
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and the drainage to reduce any runoff or any flooding effects to the at risk low lying areas of our property, or corrective groundwork, re- levelling or any other mitigation would be considered essential.
5 [10.30 am]
And I think that‟s it, do you have anything to add to that?
MRS ALEXANDER: No. 10 MR ALEXANDER: So – I think that‟s it.
CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, Mr Alexander.
15 MR ALEXANDER: Thank you for your time.
COMMISSIONER BUNTING: I am just looking at the options - - -
MR ALEXANDER: Yes. 20 COMMISSIONER BUNTING: - - - I thought that option – is it option 1 that you are - - -
MR ALEXANDER: Option 1 with a long barrier. 25 COMMISSIONER BUNTING: Yes, because it does show OGPA - - -
MR ALEXANDER: It does as well as - - -
30 COMMISSIONER BUNTING: - - - kink with what I‟ve got, yes.
MR ALEXANDER: Okay.
COMMISSIONER BUNTING: Yes. 35 MR ALEXANDER: I just – this is the bit that I printed off this morning, which is taken directly from that website, which says that option 1 – it mentioned OGPA and it said “BPO” and it said “no”, but if OGPA was in there then that would be – that would be a little bit better. 40 COMMISSIONER BUNTING: Okay, thank you. Thank you, sir.
CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much.
45 MR ALEXANDER: Thank you.
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CHAIRPERSON: Mr Downie?
MR DOWNIE: Good morning and thank you for the opportunity to speak to you this morning. 5 The problem I‟ve had with this – I – John Downie is my name, I live in Puriri Road in Waikanae and I‟ve been there 10 years – the proposed route is within 150 metres of my property, just so it doesn‟t impinge on my property in direct ways, in the ways expressed by the previous 10 person, but obviously the entire environment is destroyed effectively in a beautiful part of Waikanae and the river.
My own – and I was very intrigued of how to actually speak to this issue, because obviously the areas which are most familiar to this 15 hearing centre around the idea of expertise. And as far as I‟m concerned any community – whether it‟s a city or a small town – there‟s a diversity of expertise, and said “a differences of expertise”. And when the expertise is centred in one area, it‟s the political questions which arise out of that are profound, and we do have 20 problems of communication and connectivity within our culture, which are to do with the separation of expertise.
My own expertise is in the performance arts. I‟m an artist and teacher and I‟ll expand on that, because I‟m going to ask for a certain – to 25 suspend a certain thought experiment for the next 30 minutes.
And when I made my original submission I put it into three headings, is a personal – the sort of thing I‟ve just said – as a taxpayer and citizen, which with its own implications, around costings and to viabilities and 30 civic life and so forth, and the third one I wanted to exploit my own area of expertise.
My expertise is to do with moving people and it‟s to do with transportation and it‟s to do with shifting the spirit and the soul as well 35 as the mind. The – in fact, I‟ve used – beneath the first picture I want to convey here – I‟m going to speak through this by the way, I‟m not going to read it, it‟s a pretty solid piece of writing – I‟m just going to pick certain things.
40 And I want to convey here and contribute something of my expertise, is with the performative aspects of human emotion, how we feel and to subsequently how we act. Current research in neuroscience (which is one of my own specific interest) and from a scientific perspective, and I‟ve cited Antonio Damasio‟s, the feeling of what happens and self 45 comes to minds which are mind, which are very profound cutting edge
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areas of research in the scientific field on linking mind and brain – brain and mind together which is one of the most interesting research.
[10.35 am] 5 Damasio is director of the Salk Institute in California and Professor of one of the Midwest universities. And his suggestion is that feeling and emotion are uniquely central to the creation of consciousness, conscious and culture. The ethical and moral are central to this 10 humanism, government louting (ph 00.33) are not special cases, and I‟ve picked those three out because they relay to the particular aspects of this inquiry.
I‟m a teacher and an artist, I‟m an artist who teaches, and I‟m 15 concerned with shifting the ground educari (ph 00.48) to lead out. My motivations in a social and political sense are to engage with people in all kinds of areas and to promote the idea that things can be thought about and acted upon differently.
20 The highest aspiration as a teacher is philosophy, as you know, the PhD still expresses that. The highest aspiration as an artist is imagination, philosophy and imagination.
So the experiment that I‟m going to do here, in terms of presentation, I 25 - you must understand, I probably have a theatre company or a film or whatever, but I don‟t have the budget or the time and you don‟t have the time either, but that would be my preferred area of expression of personal presentation.
30 It‟s important to say, however, that I work through image, analogy, metaphor, engagement and feeling, and I could add paradox, ambiguity and so forth, all the languages which attend to philosophy and imagination, as of course do most human beings most of the time. It was probably Bernard Shaw who talked of “lies, damn lies and 35 statistics”, though he didn‟t get to know the worst of it. Detail is one thing, vision is and rational are something else again. Surely there should be time and space to encourage thinking in an opposite direction to the precise technical and factually based investigations supplied by different kinds of expertise as we‟ve heard in this hearing. 40 Why am I here to express something of my dismay at the proposal that is ill-considered, badly managed, ideologically tainted, expeditiously arrived at, socially destructive, environmentally disastrous and most of all profoundly out of date. Why is this project so lame in all its 45 presentation so incompetent? And I‟ll use a term from my own area of
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expertise. The word I‟d invite – I haven‟t actually got it down here, but the word is “dramaturgy”.
Dramaturgy is a word I – which is used in all the making of novels and 5 films and theatre and so forth, it comes from Greek, “drama-ergon”, it means “the weave of actions”, “the weave of performance”. And so, in this presentation I‟m intrigued by the play and the weave and the working of ideas, and this is provocation, it‟s a performance I‟m giving. And the principle that underpins it, we're very familiar with 10 narrative dramaturgy, so when you go to a film you understand dramaturgy, the weave of actions through a narrativity, a character who inhabits a set of actions and we follow those through, that‟s a narrative dramaturgy, and I‟m using a montage dramaturgy which is often much more politically astute and direct and consists of bringing one thing in 15 connection with another thing, so that you can travel quickly and immediately from one domain to another.
And my particular setting up here in this thought experiment is the link of past with the present with the future, it always is in imaginative 20 work, it always is in philosophical work. One has to kind of think how these things relate to the nature of our consciousness and our experience, what is the past, what is the present, what is the future, and I also put out four or five examples in the body of this paper.
25 The first one is a book which I bought in 1970 by two very imminent thinkers, a husband and wife, Paul and Anne Erleck who published incredibly adventurous, multidisciplinary inquiry into the nature of social and political reality called “Population Resources and Environment”. It was the study really, or one of the studies is the form 30 – the setting up of the Club of Rome in 1972, which I mention later on.
And the Club of Rome‟s own – sorry, 1968, the Club of Rome was set up – but it‟s first publication “Limits to Growth” was published in 1972, and that document really sets it up, tunes the whole of the world, 35 it‟s a global document which sets the whole of the world up for some of the things what – well it would have to be considered very seriously.
[10.40 am]
40 I‟ll just take a couple of quotes from the book I mentioned, written in 1970 here is three quotes. The second sentence of the book reads: “Three and half billion people now inhabit the earth and every year this number increases by 70 million. In 2013 that number is seven billion.” In my own lifetime the population of the earth has increased from two 45 billion to seven billion. In the life of my children that increase is projected to be 10 to 12 billion. This is not a small matter for us.
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To the question later in the book: “Why have we let our environment deteriorate?” It concludes with this fact: “Both science and technology can clearly be seen to have the historical routes and natural theology, 5 and the Christian dogma of man‟s rightful mastery over nature”. And both man and mastery are very important terms here as I‟ll go on to develop.
Finally, in considering the personal freedom and quality of life, which a 10 section later in the book, which is an eventual American report called “The Agenda for Tomorrow” published by the United States government in 1976 quote: “We have no environmental index, no census statistic to measure whether the country is more or less habitable from year to year, the tranquillity index for example or a 15 cleansiness index might have told us something about the condition of mankind, but a fast-growing country preoccupied with making and acquiring material things has had no time for the amenities that are the very heart and substance of daily life.”
20 And I‟ll upgrade that, because obviously I‟m taking historic – there‟s thousands of publications, thousands of forums, thousands of conventions in that forty years since 1970, and still we have an endlessly increasing problem, it‟s just critical, it‟s a crisis – a monetary crisis and environmental crisis and so forth, and we don‟t address them. 25 I‟ll take a recent article by Suzanne Moore in the Guardian on the 5th of December last year, and she just brings it up to date rather playfully with the issues.
“With (INDISTINCT 2.11) politics it faced the end of growth would 30 have to take on mass delusion, it would talk about how we are to live with depleted resources. It might, as many have argued, involve a move back from global to local production to increase jobs, it might mean work be even more evenly spread out between age groups, and it would deal with inequality because the costs will be too high. 35 Economic downsizing always sounds hippyish, we may have to borrow less and make more. We may have to factor in care of the old, the ill, the young as part of the economy and not continue to see it as an undermining of the economy.
40 The alternative though, and this is still where we are at, is to be minded in nostalgia for the world with a maxed out credit card.
So I would suggest that most of the opinions being expressed over the current two or three weeks of this hearing are coming from this range 45 of emotional inputs which are touching on our sense of this immediate and local issue in relation to global thinking.
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I won‟t talk any more about theatre particularly, except I need to set up a little phrase used a great deal in the artistic life, as well for physiological life, but we set up models, it‟s a modelling system, it‟s 5 research is based on modelling and one of the propositions, for example in relation to experience of the world of writers and artistic makers obviously trying to express in certain ways in formal ways, truth is stranger than fiction but fiction is truer. It‟s a bit of a cliché these days but it‟s a very important aspect of the way that we can deal with the 10 paradox of the evidence of our own eyes in relation to the soul, the collective sense of being that we all have as ancestors and inheritors as well as citizens. That‟s a sense of time again.
So here, in relation to the next image, the one with the flowers on it, 15 last year my 21 year old daughter, Lada, spent two months in residence with Bread and Puppet Theatre Company on its farm in Vermont. Now Bread and Puppet are a contemporary with the Earlex(ph 4.27) book and they were very significant players in the public protest against the Vietnam war, and some of them you probably have seen the very giant 20 puppets that led parades in American cities during the American Civil War, a fantastically direct kind of theatre, still existing. Jim Schuman, the director, is now 75 years old and walks on stilts every year at a festival, which are some incredible height.
25 Bread and Puppet have been in existence for more than 50 years as a political community centred ecologically conscious organisation of practitioners who can create disruptive large scale spectaculars.
[10.45 am] 30 They were involved in Vietnam, and they have a farm which they have an international camp every year for two months and my daughter was part of that. My daughter returned educated and politicised. She gave me a Christmas card that year with one of the simple banners and 35 mottos carried by Bread and Puppet, “Resistance of the heart against business as usual”. Everybody in this room understands what that means. What is felt and dreamt is ultimately stronger than was merely thought or measured.
40 I have to remind you of the meaning of the word “aesthetic” as a heightening of the expectation and display in performance. Human performance, we talk about theatre and film and so on, but of course performance is part of everyday life and this is a performance space, this is a theatre. No outside light, a particular kind of lighting, an 45 arrangement of tables and directionality, costumes and so forth. All inform the theatre of things and the performativity of things. It‟s a
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heightening of the expectations of display and performance as a direct human expression of the intelligence of being. Now, the intelligence of being is a standard definition of aesthetics, how we feel translated in how we shape, that‟s basic and, as I‟ll deal finally with, architecture 5 and design and road design and so forth, that becomes a very important aspect. Feeling is central, feeling is not removed, feeling is central. How we feel, everybody, about something and I won‟t deal in any great length. I‟m going to take a film though.
10 The thought experience for me is to give this presentation as if we‟re entering my area of expertise and how we deal with the world and we deal with the world directly. If I‟m with a group of students who are highly motivated students, I‟m head of theatres. I‟ve been head of theatre and film at Victoria University for the last 20 years, I‟m now 15 retired. I would take examples, this is a provocation to the condition we find ourselves in to explore certain ideas as part of the dramaturgical montage of ideas. So a current film Arbitrage, a film starring Richard Gere in which he plays an American plutocrat who is a hypocrite basically but also a man of extreme power who has a fatal 20 flaw, he is responsible for the death of someone, he tries to cover up the death, this is the plot element, the narrative element.
But actually the thematic of the film, which is not an experimental film, it isn‟t a political film it‟s a piece of genre melodrama which everyone 25 can see in the cinema. I saw it in the cinema in Palmerston North. But it‟s basically about this problem of the successful man, the successful male. The film is a perfect demonstration of the Republican campaign at the last American election. It‟s also illustrative of the Obama campaign as well. But various slips that the Republican candidate 30 made during the course of the campaign revealed the nature of his hypocrisy, it was pretty available and I think eventually the voters spotted. He was assuming he was going to win the election and actually he was defeated very heavily.
35 But from Arbitrage I wanted to take, and I‟ve written more fully about it, I won‟t talk about this. I‟ve taken the promotional sentence of the film, which I think is profoundly interesting. The film perfectly illustrated, it‟s a very good film, power is the best alibi and there‟s a photograph of Richard Gere. And I‟m just translating now as a thought 40 experience, that film touching the immediacy of American political intuitions and put it out as a popular form, in a popular form with our current issue here. We could make a film about this issue. There‟s no money available in New Zealand to make real films so we can‟t deal with things on a big scale like an American film can. 45
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We can sense, through Richard Gere‟s character, we can sense patriarchy and paternalism is still at the heart of everything and proceeding from it authoritarianism and, if you‟re unlucky, tyranny. Don‟t we know that the selling off and gross reduction of public assets 5 is essential for our own survival? Don‟t we know that roads of national significance are vital for sustaining infrastructures of power and the status quo? How might that narrative have passed through the ages? Truth is stranger than fiction but fiction is truer so maybe let‟s just fictionalise it a little bit and see what might have occurred because 10 something occurred to bring us into this room.
[10.50 am]
How was that narrative set up? Who was in the rooms at the time? 15 Which of these were lobbying? Which meetings were vital for outcomes? But isn‟t this the fundamental business of Arbitrage? We sanction it, it‟s a wonderful thing business and dealing, it‟s very important. But if you entertain the fiction you begin to experience the truth. Watch the film you begin to experience some aspect of the truth. 20 So why are we in this room and not in those other rooms?
Now another example, a third example here, so I picked the film Arbitrage as an example from the present. I‟ll take an example from the deep past from 2 and a half thousand years ago and the Oresteia a 25 trilogy of plays. The first trilogy, the first collection of plays which still come down to us from the past and an amazingly sophisticated document. It‟s Aeschylus‟ trilogy about how the chaos of social disorder, expressed through bloodlust, through murder. Essentially, yes, blood kin murder is translated by the presence of the goddess 30 Athena into the rule of law and the creation of Athens, the creation of the city, which is the root of all western cities. It‟s a magnificent piece of work. I sometimes think how could this one person have created this extraordinary work and placed it in front of an audience often 8 or 10 thousand people at a time in a community which, at the time, was 35 around about 100,000.
The great playwright Aeschylus, this is after the first photograph. Incidentally the photograph is from the National Theatre of Great Britain‟s production of the trilogy in the 1980s in a production by 40 Sir Peter Hall. The great playwright Aeschylus was writing this fall of the house of Atreus and the creation of the city site of Athens in the 5th century BC. The subject reminds us most immediately of recent events in Libya, current events in Syria, for example, tyranny reigned and reigns in those countries and continues to reign as civic order unravels 45 itself. Present day Athens itself perilously close to that too.
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Aeschylus was writing and directing this huge play in order to show this change in sensibility that was necessary for the citizens to understand the social and political changes happening in their own midst and this is the time when Athens was experimenting with a 5 culture with no leaders, a culture of representation, male dominated, but we haven‟t got time to go into that. But at the same time Athena is a female deity, a female intellectual deity who springs from the head of Zeus fully formed, is not Mother Earth, is not the standard definition of what the female principle is in most cultures but is a power entirely 10 different.
And I wish we had some time to go into what Athena represents at the moment in our own cultures as an Englishman of birth, you know, Britannia is Athena, for example. 15 Now, we‟re always in the presence of ancestors and I just want to remind you about the ancestry which is present in this country, the blood stained recent wars, whether it‟s the tribal conflicts, utu or the era of the musket wars, the various Arbitrages being carried on and I make 20 a little reference to Te Rauparaha, as a successful masculine identity, what I call a masculine testosterone will with instinctive quick reflexes and fearful certainty and that power is the best alibi.
Out of these kinds of examples I think in the present era, in relation to 25 the text that I put up first, we have begun to realise that for all our planet dwellers we need to find ways to cherish rather than to exploit our natural environment. So if we look at the history of this area we can pretty much say that it was being exploited, certainly in recent history. 30 And then I make a reference to Pallas Athena and then I come back to Paul Ehrlich in a more recent book, in the early 90s, where he says “fusing technical and social material”, which is the way of combining the book, and I think this Inquiry is fusing social and technical material. 35 It‟s a very well used method and a sane method in terms of rationality.
[10.55 am]
But they make the conclusion, “We believe the time has come to take 40 our own evolution into our own hands and create a new evolutionary process. A process of conscious evolution.
The human predicament requires a different kind of education and training to detect threats that materialise, not in instance, but in years or 45 decades. We need to develop slow reflexes that supplement the quick
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ones. We need to replace our old ones with new ones. I make a reference to technologies.
Now, in my next example I‟m looking at the future and I‟m now 5 looking at motorways, and we‟ve had a little bit of talk about motorways, and you were asking, sir, about half an hour ago about practice, contemporary practice.
So I will draw your attention, if you don‟t know about it already, to the 10 Millau Viaduct, opened over the Tarn Valley in Central France in 2006. I used to live in Montpellier in France and I used to see it in construction during 2004/2005. It is now complete. It‟s built, and there‟s a picture of it, it‟s built to bypass the town of Millau, which was a weaving town, a working town, a weaving town - - - 15 CHAIRPERSON: A glove town I think.
MR DOWNIE: Which town?
20 CHAIRPERSON: A glove town.
MR DOWNIE: A glove town, yes, thank you.
And as you probably know if you‟ve travelled in that part of the world, 25 it was a famous bottleneck for summer traffic when the French all go on holiday in July and August, and also was a bottleneck at all other times. It simply was a hopeless situation which had to be resolved.
The option finally they came to was to traverse the valley between two 30 limestone escarpments at a distance of 2.5 kilometres. At its highest point the viaduct is 200 metres, it‟s higher than the Eiffel Tower. At the time of construction, the highest bridge in the world.
Whatever else on the basis of utility, the engineering takes the four lane 35 expressway totally away from the human population and depending on timing cuts at the very least more than an hour, it‟s an hour and a half on a typical day, off the journey that you might be making from Paris to Barcelona, say, and that‟s not insignificant. You can see the outlay might be worth it in all kinds of ways. 40 Its completion costs was about 400 million Euros. Its completion costs were 400 million Euros, which is the same as the proposed cost of the Kapiti expressway. The figures are available, you can look at them.
45 It has a toll now, it has something several million traffic a year, so it can pick up money very quickly. The estimated pay back of the entire
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cost to the French Government is by 2044. The minimal lifetime expectation of the viaduct is 120 years.
But there‟s more to it. The two main designers were French Engineer, 5 Michel Virlogeux, and the British Architect, Sir Norman Foster. Foster refined the original engineering designs - Foster or Foster and Partners, one of the great design companies in the world currently - reduced the number of pillars, it changed it from an engineering concept to an artistic concept, and the idea was to make the structure fly, reducing on 10 every level the weight of the building, but also the spiritual weight of the building as well as the material weight of the building.
He asked himself the question, direct quotation, “How do you make something which has to be so immensely strong against the forces of 15 nature look very gentle, very delicate. How do you weave something on that scale into the most unbelievable landscape?” This structure is a work of art. As delicate as a butterfly supporting the weight of five Eiffel Tower‟s in gale force winds through all seasons. It is aesthetically beautiful, it is mind bogglingly beautiful as a human 20 experience.
It‟s constructed with intelligence feeling. What is felt and dreamt is ultimately stronger than what is merely opinionated about. We are all struck when we see it. Our souls sing. In the environment it makes 25 traffic flow vanish and there‟s obviously no need for mitigations here.
I then make comparative notes about the Kapiti expressway which basically doesn‟t need 2.5 kilometres of direct distance, maybe 2.5 would be a good working model for horizontal distance, but the 30 height is certainly not 200 metres, probably - - -
CHAIRPERSON: I don‟t want to draw you short, Mr Downie, but that is 30 minutes. So if you could move on.
35 [11.00 am]
MR DOWNIE: Okay. I am going to end with one of - then I follow Foster‟s career, and Foster is a wonderful mane to be inspired by, and I put an image in there which might help us think a little bit about 40 transportation. The car Foster actually thinks of as essentially in the next 50 years not a problem, basically SATNAV will control all traffic, and we will dial up the automatic car, and follow the developments of this in the next 10 years, and electromagnetics within city environments. 45
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So you will stop having the individual wilful driver, as it were, the individualised driver, and that‟s part of his notions of things are profound I think.
5 Finally, a personal and direct analogy. I recently had an operation, I won‟t try and pronounce these bloody Greek words, of a gall bladder surgically removed. I suffered initially a severely painful pancreatitis, a kind of malfunction of my digestive transportation system caused by immovable congregation to small hard masses of bile salt. It took 10 several feverish weeks to get traffic moving again under my own steam and in the right direction.
However, given the chronic nature of these symptoms, the pain and the malfunction would inevitably recur. During the period of recovery from 15 the first attack I got to know my surgeon, my surgeon told me about these things, as surgeons do, specific to my own chronic symptoms, he asked me to understand the procedure and possible need for an open operation. This message was the common one until comparatively recently. 20 A large transverse abdominal incision is required for open access to the organs. This increases the risk of infection, greatly extends the pain and recovery period, and leaves a seven inch lifetime scar on the body. The laparoscopic procedure, the one I had, requires only four small 25 openings in the abdomen, a sort of four lane highway, and is performed by small instruments precisely calibrated, delicately and skilfully operated like a butterfly, minimising intrusion and pain with fact post- op recovery, and in my case same day return home from hospital.
30 Philosophically, imaginatively, one‟s own body is an analogue for natures body. there is still a very strong image in that, and also for the social body, for the human ecology involved.
So I ask everyone, finally, in this room, which operation would you 35 choose to have? Would you have the one from the 1950s, the one which opens up your body and risks all the things I have mentioned, or would you have the procedure that I have, as appropriate to 2013?
Thank you. 40 CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, Mr Downie.
Mrs Scott?
45 MRS SCOTT: Well, that was a startling metaphor the last speaker ended up on.
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I really don‟t feel comfortable doing this, and the fact that I‟ve come is just an indicator of how strongly I feel about the - you know, and how sad and how angry, as another speaker said, about the effects that this 5 whole expressway is going to have on our community.
I am a retired school teacher living here on the Kapiti Coast for the last 10 years, and in my brief submission I oppose the current proposal of the NZTA. I support what all the previous speakers said, and I‟d also 10 like to honour the amount of time and the amount of learning that has gone into so many of these submissions. I think, you know, it‟s just amazing.
[11.05 am] 15 I haven‟t been able to do that, but I did want to come just to sort of give a brief sum up of my current feelings at the moment. I‟m not against all motorways. I know State Highway One has got to be upgraded to the best possible standards, but what I am against is putting in motorways, 20 expressways continuously from say Auckland to Wellington without any regard to local geography and local sediment patterns, and I do not believe that it‟s detrimental to have a variation in the types of highway coming from one destination to another, and in fact I was quite intrigued with some research I was reading done in the States about the 25 relationship between motorways and people‟s attention, and what it was saying was that although initially motorways keep people more alert and awake initially, as the length of the journey goes on people become more and more – you know, they become less and less alert, and that in actual fact it‟s an advantage to keep varying the types of 30 driving that you‟re doing over a long distance.
I enjoy being on four lanes, you know, beautiful four lane highways where it‟s appropriate and where there‟s room, but obviously there is not room here in Kapiti. 35 I think if drivers have to go 80 k an hour in single lanes for short distances, so what - it‟s just changing your mode of driving for a short while. But I do feel quite strongly that opposing lanes need to be separated. 40 So this hearing is nearing its end, we‟ve had some really good presentations this morning, and there really isn‟t anything new that I can say to you, I‟m sorry, so this is not going to be a riveting address.
45 And I‟m not good at processing data, I keep forgetting numbers, and I haven‟t had time to reference what I‟m saying, which I‟d originally
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intended, but everything I have to say has already been verified and referenced in the submissions that you have already received, which I‟ve been really interested in reading. So I intend to do two things, one, just to sum up why my opposition to this proposal is even stronger now 5 than it was when I first sent in my submission and, secondly, to discuss my personal concerns about how the proposed expressway will affect me as a retired person living on the coast, and I don‟t expect this will take much more than about 15 minutes.
10 Now, since I‟ve put in my brief submission originally, I‟ve had access of course to all these other submissions, and I‟ve also had another look at relevant sections of the RMA and I‟ve learned heaps. But what I‟ve particularly noticed in the process is something many others have, and you of course have also. First, is the fundamental confusion and 15 misrepresentation which has been created because all the impact reports and the public statements submitted by the NZTA use a baseline of what exists now, excluding any alternatives such as the already approved western link road along with an upgraded state highway one. 20 So this obviously convened section 171 of the RMA, and is grossly unfair given the years of planning and the financial resources which had already been committed to the WLR and the expectations of the community that it would be starting almost immediately. It has just 25 created so much confusion because people have not been able to make the proper comparisons and judgements, which in my opinion we have been entitled to do.
I was particularly interested in Dianne Buchan‟s description on her 30 submission of the timing involved in the scoping exercise meant to analyse alternative route options, she says “it is difficult to regard the scoping exercise as anything other than a mopping up exercise undertaken retrospectively in an attempt to meet statutory requirements.” And later on, “I find it difficult to believe that the 35 environmental effects of each of the options, including that of the KCDC, were assessed with an open mind, and Adam Pekol for „Save Kapiti‟ says the assessment of alternatives is too broad to adequately identify as an optimal solution.” That‟s been my general impression of this whole process. 40 [11.10 am]
The second thing that I‟ve become very aware of, is how many unpredictables there are in this whole expressway proposal - I don‟t 45 think that‟s actually a word, but never mind, you know what I mean, ranging from estimates of traffic flows and future economic benefits to
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the unpredictable engineering outcomes of building on sand and peat and changing water tables and water quality, disrupting delicate ecosystems, in particular there are unknown social consequences as a result of splitting communities and drastically changing human 5 environments and patterns of behaviour.
The assessment on environmental report (the AEE) acknowledges these latter social consequences, but I can‟t find any evidence that they‟ve done an actual survey of the residents most affected, or they often 10 dismiss concerns of being mere perceptions or temporary, which I found quite disturbing.
I think once its express a proposal it – what makes this expressway proposal exceptionally questionable is its timing. It‟s out-dated as a 15 previous person already said, in a world of rapidly diminishing and increasingly expensive world supplies and a population increasingly knowledgeable about carbon emissions and the advantages of public transport.
20 There‟s no reference in it to the innovative thinking being implemented in Europe, such as carbon neutral transport corridors, sea highways, green highways which coordinate all possible modes of transport door to door with a minimisation of environmental impact. It doesn‟t take into account the smart new technologies now available for controlling 25 traffic or the inevitable shift to electric vehicles with their specific requirements.
It presumes that more expressways will lead to economic development, when overseas research and experience prove otherwise, Greece and 30 Spain made the same presumptions and their motorways are now empty.
It basis its impact reports on the old EEM (the Economic Evaluation Manual) which according to Mary Anne Gentry in her submission, is 35 deeply flawed, decades old and not conversant with the newest research which questions the benefits of expanding highway capacity. And what‟s more, according to Mrs Gentry – and did enjoy reading her submission – there have been paradigm shifts in transportation and land use planning due to huge advances in economic analysis. 40 Now at the same time that this proposed expressway seems to be out of step with modern technologies and new ways of thinking about transport, it also seems in some ways to be too early because many of the technologies needed to implement the requirements of the RMA are 45 still in development and even still – and even controversial. The whole economic, environmental and social context in which this expressway
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is being planned is in a state of flux right now, which makes certainties about outlines impossible to predict and judgements about adherence to RMA inquiries extremely difficult.
5 Now the third of the major flaws I‟ve noticed in this expressway consents process, is the inadequacy of the environmental effects report, is described in the submissions of Dianne Buchan and Mary-Anne Rivers. And even I have no qualifications in this area, have been shocked by the number of dismissive statements in this report. Some 10 people would desire quietness and no lighting. People are less likely to swim, fish if water quality is perceived to be affected.
Construction works, especially those with long timeframes, can be socially disruptive and have the potential to represent an annoyance to 15 surrounding residents and road users, what kind of language is this, and no social – sorry, I need a break here – new paragraph.
No social impact report can be valid obviously without an in-depth survey of the population being affected which as far as I can make out 20 has not been done. The elderly, you know, these are the people who are living within 200 metres of the motorway whose house values have dropped, who can‟t move, who are they? Elderly, disabled, asthmatic, people who are light sleepers, mothers at home with young children, people working from home, low incomes, limited choices, these are the 25 people who are going most affected by this proposal.
[11.15 am]
They are mentioned in the EEC as being vulnerable during the 30 construction period, but they‟re – but concerns about their long term welfare does not seem to have been addressed in that report. I just can‟t imagine what it would be like, I just couldn‟t tolerate it if I was caught in that situation, unable to get away from light, noise and air pollution and without necessarily having the financial resources to be able to 35 upgrade because house values are obviously going to drop so much.
And what the NZTA are saying to compensate for all this social devastation, quote: “Significant economic and transport benefits from having a new transport option. Better access, shorter travel times to 40 educational and social services, reserves and recreation,” and that of course is absolutely extraordinarily, given that one of the main reasons for putting this expressway through in the first place was to separate local and through traffic. And now it‟s spent – we‟ve been told that this will be a sort of compensation that we will have, for having to put up 45 with the motorway.
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So, I don‟t really know what justification is left for this monstrous intrusion on our lives. Latest cost benefits are down to 0.02, as you know. The number of vehicles on our stretch of highway is down and still dropping. Several of your submitters, professional engineers and 5 traffic experts say that predictive traffic flows within the next 30 years is not nearly enough to justify a four lane expressway, and there is an alternative.
Well that‟s the bulk of sort of what I wanted to say. I‟m also interested 10 in a lot of other things, in particular the ecological impact reports and the submission which seek to mitigate ecological systems and preserve untouched ecosystems that back onto a wetland and I really care about this very much indeed, but I haven‟t got sort of time to do any more in that area. As I point out in my submission, replacement wetlands 15 cannot replace the ecosystems of the originals, and I‟m really concerned about that and I really want to emphasise that the reports you receive from ecologists, which I‟ve read with interest, are in my opinion, a very important part of this whole assessment process.
20 Anyway, I think that the failure of the NZTA to properly assess alternative designations or to do a proper social impact report, are both reasons enough alone to reject this MacKays to Peka Peka consents application, which doesn‟t conform to the principles of sustainable management, which quote: “Enables people and communities to 25 provide for their social economic and cultural wellbeing.”
So in some, I think the best solution for moving people and goods through Kapiti is still a return to the original plan of the WLR and an upgrade of State Highway 1 and I‟m even prepared to put in four lanes 30 in that upgrade if there‟s room. We tried and tried at meetings to get some response from NZTA about why the route can‟t go along the old alignment, and we‟ve had no answer, ever, except to say there isn‟t room.
35 [11.20 am]
So it‟s really difficult to make these calls and I can‟t actually believe I‟m saying “let‟s go back to square one”, because it‟s appalling, isn‟t it, with a waste of time, the cost involved, it‟s just devastating to think 40 about it, but I still think it will be better than going ahead with the proposed scheme that NZTA is proposing at the moment. We owe it to the future generations of people who live here, it‟s a matter of, what‟s the term – inter-generational equity that the resource management talks about, and safeguarding that resource as an option for the future. 45 Otherwise this expressway is going to lock us into a high carbon way of living for generations, destroy precious ecosystems, trap many
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people in an urban environment they don‟t want to live in and destroy the ambience of a pleasant natural living environment, as so many other people have said before me.
5 I‟m actually quite lucky, I live in Poplar Avenue, Raumati South on the northern boundary of Queen Elizabeth Park overlooking the newly restored wetlands, and only 100 metres also from Matai Road. Although I‟m not directly affected, the Poplar Avenue Inter-chain will totally change the ambience on the neighbourhood and have a major 10 impact on how much noise I get and the number of vehicles using Poplar Avenue because this will be the main access into Raumati and Pharaparaumu Beach.
The vibrations too are going to be quite a problem because as it is at the 15 moment every time a small delivery truck goes passed, you know, I‟m built on sand, and the whole house shakes, my computer shakes, everything, so I can‟t imagine what it‟s going to be like when they‟re putting in the foundations down at the interchange in Poplar Avenue. I‟m really not looking forward to that at all. 20 I don‟t think it will be the volume of the noise either that will affect me so much as the continuity of it, the amperage, at the moment I have periods when the traffic is heavy, I do hear quite a bit of noise at peak travel times, but there‟s always a gap in mid-afternoon, the morning, 25 the nights are quiet. I‟m going to lose that, I‟m going to have that continual background noise, which I‟m really sad about, and I can‟t help being disappointed, I‟ve only just got through a difficult 10 years renovating the cottage and building an organic garden, and I‟ve been looking forward to the next decade to enjoy a quite environment close 30 to nature.
I would like to point out that many people in Kapiti, and there is about 24 percent of us over 65 living here, that the coming years of construction might be all the time we have left to enjoy retired life out 35 here. And given the problems that NZTA have encountered with Lindale and other upgrades recently, I very much doubt it‟s going to be done in four years. Originally Stephen Joyce was talking about 12 years, and okay two or three years have gone by already, but that‟s still another eight years or so. I can‟t see it all happening in four years. 40 I‟m not looking forward to the extra distances I‟m going to have to travel, and keeping in touch with friends of course is increasingly important as we age, and here in Kapiti that means a lot of driving. Most organisations which cater for retired people have got 45 memberships scattered all over the district. My garden group for
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example travels at least once a month somewhere between Tahoro and Paekakariki.
And we‟re going to have to come to terms whether we‟re going to drive 5 on the motorway or not, and roundabout routes we‟re going to have to take, but I‟ve really been trying to work this out and I can‟t. The information is terrible. I still really don‟t know what‟s happening at the partial interchange at Poplar Avenue, and there are no pictures that describe it. I must admit there are people I could phone and I just 10 haven‟t managed to have the time to do it yet, but this is not easy information to absorb or to get hold of.
I asked about a dozen members of my garden group about their feelings about how the whole expressway is going to impact on their lives and 15 what they sort of understand about it, and to be honest I was really, really disappointed. One person immediately sort of went – “Oh, it‟s appalling, imagine the light and height and visual impact and the noise, she had it all off, she knew straightaway what was involved.
20 [11.25 am]
But the others hadn‟t really bothered, you know, they‟d just checked, it didn‟t really impact on their immediate environment. They didn‟t really understanding what the impacts were. One lady said, well, she 25 was really totally against the expressway but she did admit that it would be great for her friends to be able to drive on it all the way from Wellington out to Waikanae Beach. But if only we could have our local bridge, that‟s the one thing everybody in the community agrees about. If any of this ever comes up for discussion we want our local 30 bridge over the Waikanae River and not as part of a great expressway which is also being used by heavy, very fast through traffic.
I will just finish this little bit, I haven‟t got very much to go, it‟s sort of about my own personal concerns. I‟ve been driving pretty confidently 35 for over 50 years and have had no major accidents and members of my extended family continue to drive into their 90s so maybe I‟ve got another 20 years ahead. And although I prefer to go into Wellington by train I‟m still confident driving across Wellington to visit family in Newtown, that‟s okay but I should also go into Johnsonville more often 40 to visit a disabled friend and I‟m afraid I don‟t, I hate Johnsonville. In fact I hate driving through all those communities off the Wellington- Porirua motorway. I hate the underpasses, I hate the roundabouts, that access lanes, the complicated signage. I find it confusing and extremely stressful. 45
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Johnsonville is a community caught between a railway and a motorway, just like Paraparaumu is going to be, and it‟s attracted the sort of businesses the NZTA are hoping that we will enjoy and benefit from here in Paraparaumu. It‟s an ugly, confusing, over developed 5 centre. And although I acknowledge that NZTA in conjunction with KCDC are doing their best to mitigate the worst of the effects of the expressway on our town centres, we can‟t guarantee the sort of controls future Councils will have over development especially when they‟re going to be under such huge pressure to reduce rates and we don‟t 10 know how well the landscaping will be maintained as well. It‟s awful around that whole area.
I have also got friends in Petone and Lower Hutt but negotiating the on and off ramps at the new Lower Hutt interchange is a nightmare and I 15 try to avoid it, sometimes aborting intended journeys because I can‟t cope with it, especially at night.
And I have already mentioned another major concern that there is going to be that mixed use on the expressway which is what the NZTA 20 wanted to avoid in the first place. You know, 25 percent of the population are over 65. A big percentage of it I mean are young new drivers and I just think it‟s just not going to be safe.
And the visual impact of the whole thing, for me, is going to totally 25 change my feelings about the place. I‟m a really, really visual person and I chose Raumati South because it retained vestiges of being a little seaside community and driving along the Raumati straights and turning into Poplar Avenue was a pleasure and I‟m losing all that. Now, I wouldn‟t mind, because I really think that sometimes terrible things 30 have to happen to people for the greater good, if this expressway was necessary but I don‟t believe it‟s justified with the evidence that I have been able to glean and there is an alternative.
[11.30 am] 35 I haven‟t mentioned the schools. I haven‟t mentioned no longer being able to have the expectation of a little railway station at the end of Poplar Avenue, which is what we‟ve been asking for for 10 years. So that, you know, my family could come out on the train with their bikes, 40 and to visit me and bike around the Queen Elizabeth Park. Also that I can walk down to the station and catch the train into Wellington, I mean that‟s something that I had expected when I first moved in here.
Also you can pretend you‟re not hearing this if you like, but really feel 45 it‟s important to the whole country that we have some reassurance that there is a process which can stop or make governments rethink what
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they‟re doing when they attempt to put in place, you know, projects of this size and impact and change the environment and burden the economy for generations to come. So I do have faith in you as a body so thank you. I reject the NZTA‟s application for resource consents 5 primarily on the grounds of inadequate research into an alternative designation, an inadequate assessment of the social impact on the environment and also on the risks inherent in mixing community journeys with fast, heavy through traffic. Thank you.
10 CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, Mrs Scott. Thank you, we will take the morning adjournment.
ADJOURNED [11.32 am]
15 RESUMED [11.48 am]
CHAIRPERSON: Yes, thank you. Yes, Mr Gardner.
MR GARDNER: Thank you, your Honour and the Board for allowing me the 20 opportunity to participate in this process. While I am here I would also like to thank the project team who have been exemplary in their efforts to contact me, keep me informed, inform me of the logistics of this process all throughout the last few months and I would like to thank the people this morning who have showed pride and passion in their 25 presentations, so much so with the points that they made that I can perhaps be brief in mine rather than going over the same ground.
As a bit of background, I am a technology manager in the finance services industry. I settled back in the beautiful Kapiti Coast in 2000 30 after doing by OE of 20 years working in Europe and London. And I came back here specifically to raise a family in this beautiful environment of ours.
Since 2000 I have commuted daily from Waikanae to Wellington and it 35 is fair to say that I could write a humorous book on some of my commuting experiences. You know, it‟s true and it‟s obvious that State Highway 1, particularly between Paraparaumu and Waikanae, is not fit for purpose on occasion. I see two distinct problems. (1) is the congestion on a Friday night when the local traffic meets the traffic 40 travelling north and on the first day of a public holiday and (2) we don‟t have a disaster recovery route. If that road is closed it‟s shut, okay.
However, in saying that, you know, in my experience of 12 years 45 travelling on that road forward and back every day, and that‟s the expertise that I offer to this Panel. There is approximately only
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5 percent of the total travelling time, outside of this that road hums along. The volumes of traffic on that road are easily met by the road itself. So, in my mind, to put forward a multimillion dollar expressway right through the heart of our community to solve that problem is a 5 sledgehammer to nut solution.
[11.50 am]
I‟m not qualified to speak about the environmental issues of such a 10 road, but I can speak about my experiences of travelling on it, and really it‟s about the congestion of when the local traffic meets that traffic going north, particularly at those peak times.
It is kind of interesting, even since the simple improvement of dropping 15 the two lanes to one lane between Paraparaumu and Waikanae has greatly improved that congestion because it keeps it flowing. So that simple thing that‟s done it points to me that there are many things that can be done to solve this problem.
20 In thinking about this, my question is simply, will an expressway solve this congestion problem? What are the guarantees? What if after we‟ve built this thing it becomes, you know, an elephant and we still have congestion problems in those areas, and I am going to give you an example, and that‟s at M25. 25 In my mind this expressway is all about making great time rather than having great times, and my challenge is that this expressway, will it actually achieve this? I mean we live in a country of four million people, most of whom reside in Auckland. We have a single lane dirt 30 track highway between here and Auckland. On this highway we have speed limits of 25 km around corners around Taupo.
All it takes is a logging truck to pull out of Tokoroa, all it takes is a farmer‟s tractor to be on the road between Shannon and Bulls, all it 35 takes is a traffic officer with a radar to be on the Himatangi straights and any of the time made up by the proposed differential on the Kapiti expressway would be lost.
So the point that I am making is that a road that we have is fit for 40 purpose for us. It is not a million dollar solution.
So to me the key is Transmission Gully, and I think that the benefits that we‟re going to get out of the Kapiti expressway will not be felt until Transmission Gully is built. 45
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From my experiences, I have seen many road improvements and I have named a couple of them, MacKays Crossing is a terrific road improvement. I can remember the days that we used to try and dodge trains to get through there. I think the Plimmerton roundabout is a 5 terrific improvement. But what it‟s done is it‟s moved the bottleneck further north, if you‟re travelling north to Pukerua Bay.
And I think believe it until the Transmission Gully is finished, I believe the Kapiti expressway will provide the same thing. All it would do is 10 push people faster to the bottleneck that is Centennial Highway and Pukerua Bay.
I was unfortunate enough to live in London during the construction of the M25, and as you‟re aware, at completion the original construction 15 of the M25, a two lane highway circling London, was not fit for purpose and it became the world‟s biggest carpark.
Now, in my humble opinion, the reason for that was because there was a gross underestimation of the behavioural habits of the local traffic. I 20 think that many people thought that he existing infrastructure would still be used and it allowed the M25 to free up to provide traffic circling around London, but humans being humans, we‟re going to take the easy way out, and so local Londoner‟s jumped on junctions and as soon as they did, just to go from one village to another rather than use their 25 existing routes, as soon as they did it created a merger problem on the M25, and that‟s where the bottlenecks occurred.
Now what occurs to me is, is will the same thing happen between the Kapiti and Waikanae junction? 30 For my mind, when that expressway is built right through the centre of Kapiti, but where is the population base? Mostly beachside. Now, for me, you know, I have a lot of connections with Waikanae and so do most of the people in Paraparaumu. They‟re relative for families, for 35 children‟s, for sports, for employment, for recreation, but we currently get to Waikanae by going all the way up Kapiti Road, all the way across State Highway One, and then all the way down Te Moana Road. A journey that can take 20-25 minutes, where in reality I can throw a stone across the Waikanae River to where I start and to where want to 40 end up.
[11.55 am]
So for me it doesn‟t take a rocket scientist to suggest, well, maybe 45 that‟s the thing that would give us some great times, rather than make great time, you know? To create a road that travels from Raumati South
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all the way to Te Horo it would be a pleasurable experience for everybody on the Kapiti Coast, and maybe that‟s the thing that will take the local traffic off the State Highway One, because they won‟t - people will not go under a junction on Kapiti Road to use the existing 5 State Highway One, they will jump on that expressway, and in doing so they will create the carpark imagine that I talked about relating to the M25.
Now, that being the case, I just wonder are we still going to have the 10 same congestion problems with the new expressway that we see every morning when you‟re going into Wellington at the interchange, there‟s a nice big motorway down there, but when you‟re travelling into Wellington at peak hour, sure as (INDISTINCT 1.03) at the interchange when the Hutt Valley and the Kapiti Coast meet, you‟ve 15 got a bottleneck. The same thing happens coming out at night.
So despite all that infrastructure, you still have those issues, and I can still see those issues post the Kapiti expressway, and I can see the existing State Highway One becoming a ghost road because people 20 won‟t use it. People won‟t use it, and the maintenance of that road by our beloved, our Kapiti Coast District Council, I think is going to become the monkey on their back. They will need to retain it because that‟s a disaster recovery route, but it won‟t be used.
25 So, all in all, you know, just in summary, I think there‟s two distinct issues we‟re really trying to solve. One is the congestion issue for five percent of the time of those peak periods, and the other is we desperately need another route in the cases of a disaster. Is the Kapiti expressway the answer to that? I don‟t think it‟s guaranteed. I don‟t 30 think it‟s guaranteed at all, and I think that to benefit the community of Kapiti, the Western Link Road is the viable option.
Thank you.
35 CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, Mr Gardner.
Ms Frost-Evans?
MS FROST-EVANS: Hi, hello. 40 CHAIRPERSON: Good morning.
MS FROST-EVANS: This is John, who is just my support person.
45 CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.
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MS FROST-EVANS: In case I lose track of time.
So thank you for this opportunity. My name is Judy Frost-Evans and I live in Pukerua Bay. I noted in my original submission about 10 points 5 on which I objected, but I just wish to focus on three or four of those this morning.
Just as a little biographical background, I grew up in Seatoun beside the sea, but even so, you know, living in Seatoun, we came to the Kapiti 10 Coast for our summer holidays, we stayed in friend‟s baches or in a holiday camp, remember a caravan we rented one year, and so I grew up with a love of the sea, both here and on the Kapiti Coast, and later on when my mother was widowed quite young, she was really looking for community and she moved north to the Kapiti Coast and settled in 15 Rosetta Road and found her community there.
She had a beautiful soprano voice and she sang in the local church, she sang at my friend‟s weddings, she sang for the old people in the Mariri retirement home - I‟m not sure if I‟ve spelt that right, it‟s not there 20 anymore.
So then when John and I and our son became a family we moved to Pukerua Bay. John grew up in Eastbourne, so we wanted to be by the sea. We love the sea, the sand, the waves, the air, light, very strong 25 elemental forces in both of our childhoods and now we choose to live in that environment.
About 13 years ago we went to England to visit my brother who‟s an expatriate Kiwi, and we went for a few years and ended up staying, so 30 we were there for 10 years and have been back for three years now, back into our cottage by the sea. Around about the time that the local road was about to be approved and suddenly became the expressway.
[12.00 pm] 35 So during my time in England I did a – I was an IT professional up to that point. I became interested in storytelling and became a personal counsellor, so on return to the Kapiti Coast that – there was a school (INDISTINCT 00.24) over there and you could go to a school, it was 40 great, you know you - here you kind of have to learn it from wonderful people and follow their model, but there you could actually go to workshops and school.
So I learnt a lot and then when I came back I brought the teachers over 45 several – they‟re about to arrive tomorrow actually from England – to
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come and teach again here. And I created a little school of storytelling on the Kapiti Coast and this is my kind of new love.
So I would actually like to start by telling you a story. The text of the 5 story is actually an appendix, but I‟ll just tell it to you.
So ole Joe, this is a North American story, set in the sort of backblocks of probably Missouri, something like that, a farming rural environment in the late 1800s, early 1900s. 10 So ole Joe lived on a farm and his wife and he had had children and the children had grown up and left home, and then his wife had died and they had one very good neighbour, it was quite isolated. There was a farm nearby with a similar family. Children had grown up and left and 15 his neighbour‟s wife had died, so now Joe just had himself, his farm and his neighbour, his very best friend and all his life.
But just in the last week or so a dark cloud had settled over Joe, something wasn‟t right, and it all started over something really small, it 20 was a calf. This calf had wandered onto the neighbour‟s property and claiming proprietorial rights, his neighbour had said “well it‟s mine, it‟s on my land”. But Joe looked at that calf and he thought “those markings that‟s my prized cow, I know that‟s my calf” and they argued.
25 And being stubborn they wouldn‟t – couldn‟t come to an agreement and they fell out and stopped talking, so it was now a week and Joe was pretty miserable actually. So he was sitting in his farmhouse one morning, “knock, knock” at the door, very unusual in this backblocks of Missouri, someone knocks on the door – usually you kind of see 30 them coming, hear them coming, they‟ve made an arrangement to come.
He opened the door and there was standing a very pleasant young man with deep dark set eyes and carrying a bag of tools. The young man 35 looked at Joe and said “well I‟m a carpenter and I‟ve come looking for work, I wonder if you‟ve got anything I can do for you”.
Well Joe wasn‟t the kind of person just to take someone right there and then on first sight, so he invited him in and offered some hospitality, he 40 had a good stew cooking on his hob, he was about to have lunch so he sat him down and they shared lunch, homemade bread, home churned butter, homemade jam. And over the course of this lunch they got to know each other a little bit and Joe decided he could trust this person, he was a very pleasant young man. 45
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So he said “look, I do have a job I want you to do for me. See out my window, see where my neighbour lives over there, see between us now there‟s this crik …” American for „creek‟, “… that neighbour of mine, that god damn guy he got up there the other weekend and furrowed 5 down through the hillside and created this crik and then he pushed through the dam at the top, the pond and now it‟s flooded with water, and nothings ever come between us before, I don‟t want to see that, I don‟t to see that crik. I don‟t want to see my farmer friend. I don‟t want to see his house. Build me a fence.” Mm, the young man looked at Joe 10 and said “well I think I can do a job that you‟ll like if you‟ve got the material”.
So they went down to the barn and there were all the materials for a fine looking fence, so they got them out and Joe set him to work and he 15 had his tools and off he got.
Joe needed to go into town for supplies so he hitched up his horse and wagon and off he went, he left the man to it. And that young man he worked beautifully with timber, you know, he just had a feel for it, you 20 know, the grain of the timber and the way he showed it up and when he swack the nails the beautiful hit, you know it was just gorgeous the work he did.
Well it was quite a long job and it was getting towards sunset, the sun 25 was setting in the sky and Joe was coming home looking forward to seeing this beautiful fence. And as he came around the corner of his house and expecting to see a fence his jaw dropped. There was no fence there. He got off his cart and he went over to the young man, he was about to tear a strip off him, because instead of a fence that young man 30 he‟d built a bridge, a beautiful bridge with a beautiful railing all over it and the most gorgeously worked wood.
And coming across the other side of the bridge was his neighbour with a big smile all over his face, hand out “oh Joe, Joe only you could do 35 something like this, I‟m so glad we're gonna be friends again”, so Joe dropped all his objections about the young man not following orders. Put his hand out to his neighbour, it felt really good, they were friends again, “well it was your calf”. “No it doesn‟t matter”.
40 [12.05 pm]
So Joe looked around and he thought “well this young man‟s quite talented really, perhaps I‟ve got a few more jobs he could do for me”, but the young man was packing up his tools and about to go and she 45 said “look, I have got a few more jobs I‟d like you to do, could you just stay?” And the young man looked at ole Joe and he said “you‟re a
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really good man and I‟d like to stay, but I can‟t. I‟ve got a lot more bridges to build” and off he went.
Well, how does that relate directly to this situation that we're looking 5 at?
For me it relates to inspiration. The carpenter‟s solution was inspired. He didn‟t follow orders, he was inspired. The solution met a situation, not through division, but through community building. I really feel that 10 the NZTA solution to traffic in this area is uninspired. It‟s like a bulldozer coming through our community, it lacks inspiration, it hasn‟t come out of a community need. It‟s almost like an ideology that‟s being imposed on us.
15 If it goes ahead and when it‟s bulldozed through, it will destroy environments and those environments really can‟t be recreated. Some environments can. I don‟t think sand dunes, peat lands can be. But I would like to tell you about a project in Wales, when we were living over there. There was a pipeline going through the countryside and it 20 was actually quite flat, uncomplicated countryside, rather beautiful.
And where the pipeline went through the requirement for the ecologists who were assigned to this job were that they had to remove a strip of the land (the topsoil) – and I‟m not sure to what depth – of the entire 25 place where the pipeline was going through, and keep it aside, keep it growing, keep it living and then when the pipeline was buried, bring it back.
Now that was in the areas where the environment was deemed to be 30 unique, they didn‟t have to do it through the whole – if the pipeline was going through a paddock that had been altered and had wheat planted every year that was fine. But where there was an ecology that couldn‟t – that had developed over time then they had to do that. That‟s the extent to which some projects will go in order to preserve an 35 environment. I don‟t see any evidence of any attempt of this sort of “putting back” in the Kapiti Expressway. And that‟s as other people have said this morning, that will add to the cost should it prove to be the case.
40 Then there‟s the example of – I‟ve heard about “saving five minutes on a trip from Levin to the Port” for example on a - for a logging truck. Well, I guess that gets multiplied by a hundred thousand trucks per year and turned into, you know, and then we turn that into money and say that it‟s going to save X amount of dollars”. 45
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But, the inspired solution could be thinking newly about this. I just don‟t think we should be building a road for a logging truck, when we have a perfectly good railway line that goes right to the Port of Wellington which is where most of the logs end up and they sit there 5 for a while until the ship comes. So a five minute or 10 minute or 15 minute saving on that logging truck, to me does not justify building a road to facilitate that movement.
Rather an inspired idea might be to create a hub somewhere between 10 Wellington and Levin, say where the State Highway 1 is kind of close‟ish to the railway, to create a hub, to allow logs to be delivered to that place and hey presto, the logging trucks save an hour each way and we send the logs on rail.
15 I think it‟s out of step with the time, other people have said that and I‟ll say it, it‟s out-dated the solution, it‟s – the time is over for this kind of solution. The time is, we're looking at, the sustainability of the planet, we're looking at the future and we really need a more inspired solution. I‟m not saying that logging trucks are everything, you know, that there 20 are other vehicles being carried, but that‟s one example.
The other point is the division of community. I just can‟t imagine that this won‟t divide the community. It‟s like a big wall, like a fence, like a barrier that‟s coming through. 25 Now during our 10 years of living in England we got used to traffic, and so the previous person spoke about the M25, I wasn‟t there for the building of it, but we were certainly there to experience it, and I‟d heard that story about it, you know, becoming the world‟s largest car 30 park. I thought it had started at six lanes, it was interesting to hear it started at four. It went to six, went to eight, now it‟s at 10, so always it‟s been expanded. It‟s just not – it‟s never sufficient.
[12.10 pm] 35 But what I‟ve found on returning to New Zealand, I think we‟re a fairly friendly, open, good lot of people, but it seems like when we get into our cars we become different, and I‟ve experienced so much impatience, anger and rudeness here I can hardly believe it. I would set 40 aside London, I would say London is like a little country of its own, there‟s a lot of anger there, but the rest of the United Kingdom the general kind of driving mode is friendly.
There are streams of traffic going everywhere, so everyone knows that, 45 so if you come out of a side road to join a stream of traffic there will never be a gap, very rare for there to be a gap, an end to the stream. In
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my experience I found as soon as I appeared at a road with all this traffic going past, like it does at Pukerua Bay, and I might wait three or four minutes, within five seconds someone on English road had flashed their lights, just held back a little bit and waved me through, and then I 5 could join the traffic. Then I‟d wave back, and it became actually quite a nice event, it was friendly, it was enjoyable actually. So even though the traffic situation was quite congested the experience of it was a lot more humanly warm and friendly. I really miss this waving thing.
10 So at Pukerua Bay where I live I deliberately when I‟m about to go off the main road, I deliberately slow down because I can see someone us trying to get out, and there is a separate lane that I could go into, in which case everyone can just go through at the same old speed. So sometimes I deliberately slow down just let them out. When I do that, 15 I‟m more likely to be tooted by the person behind because I‟ve slowed down, and then the person in front, even though they might be my neighbour, they just take it as a right, they don‟t tend to sort of wave and say thank you. When it happens to us we do go a bit overboard, we kind of put our hands out and wave – thank you so much. But that‟s all 20 it takes. It‟s a bit like that game of variables, you know, there‟s nine blocks in the variables – was it nine, however many in a little wooden thing, and there was one that was spare and you moved them all around. Because you had one spare space you could move all these others around. 25 I think we need to learn to become the variable to become the space, to become the pause, the breathing space to allow movement. It‟s a bit like the other chap said once the passing lane had been removed the flow works better. I think the flow works better when we actually 30 allow people to join queues, to pause.
So more efficient to me doesn‟t necessarily mean faster, and I think our expectations need to be managed. I feel that we‟re being fed a little bit faster, better, five minutes saved, whatever, and actually I don‟t know 35 that that‟s a healthy way that we should really be promoting this, because actually the future might be slower. In other areas there‟s a movement towards slow food, you know, grow it properly, don‟t speed it up, and I think slower movement around the countryside is possibly the way that we need to look at. 40 So I don‟t know how we can – we lived in England for 10 years, many other people of course you‟ve all lived all over the place, I‟m not saying we‟re the only ones, but I‟m just wondering for people who haven‟t how we could sort of give this experience of what it‟s like to sit 45 on the M25 for three hours and not move. The worst experience I‟ve had coming into Pukerua Bay is a 20 minute hold up. If I look at when
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I slowed down to when I actually got into Pukerua Bay, 20 minutes. We were always moving, we just moved a bit slowly. On the M25 you would come to a stop.
5 So I‟m just wondering if I could take you on a little journey, it might be a typical journey. We decide to set off and go for 50 miles, 80 kilometres to see friends and family, so we live our village and we enter onto a motorway 10 miles away, and as we come around the first major curve of the motorway we look ahead and see those read lights, 10 those brake lights – ah, oh, always the warning, brake lights. Overhead they lower the speed limit to try and facilitate flow. There‟s a whole study of speed and flow. So it might be saying 40 miles an hour rather than the maximum of 70. Not everyone will do that, but if you slow down to that sometimes you will keep moving. Eventually you come 15 to a stop, so we stopped and there we are. Everyone stopped, so we turn off the engine, open the windows, chat with people, start playing games, talk to people, look at the map.
Half an hour has gone by – “mm, if we get off at the next exit we could 20 take the over bridge and we could get a little detour through and get there that way”. The traffic starts to move slowly again, half an hour later we‟ve got the exit. We decide to go off. We go off the motorway and over the over bridge, but lots of other people have decided the same thing, and that traffic‟s moving very slowly. You can look down 25 and see on the motorway that the trip home is actually quite clear. It becomes very tempting to just go home. Well, perhaps we‟ll just try a bit more, so at the next roundabout we turn left and go off into the next village, but that‟s chocker, everyone‟s doing the same thing.
30 So we stop and pull over and and reassess things. Have an ice cream and think about it and watch the ducks in the pond. Think we‟ll go home, an hour and a half has passed.
[12.15 pm] 35 We turnaround and we get our way back to the roundabout, onto the motorway home, two hours later we‟ve arrived home, we haven‟t got there, but these things are quite common, and I‟m not saying we want this to happen in New Zealand, but it just lowers your expectation. So it 40 means that when you say “I‟m going to go to Foxton”, that‟s 80 at the round – 80 kilometres from Pukerua Bay – optimally that will take an hour.
If I was living in England I would allow an hour and a half two. Here 45 we almost expect to get there in an hour and then get really angry if someone sort of interrupts us and we're delayed by five or 10 minutes.
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So I think our expectations need to be managed and I don‟t think the promises that have been made for the expressway help with that. I think we need to be more realistic. And there‟s also the traffic inducement as was mentioned before, once you a motorway through you invite more 5 traffic on and people use it.
A few things, have you looked in there?
MR……….: Yes. 10 MS FROST-EVANS: So in conclusion, I wish to affirm that I oppose the proposal in full. I support a re-examination of the Kapiti Link Road, along with other supporting improvements to the whole transport system, to the rail, to the bus systems, to the cycle routes – I don‟t think 15 cycle routes alongside roads are necessarily the best way, they should really be in their own environment, and we need more railway stations.
We live in Pukerua Bay and it was a joy to walk for seven minutes through bush – we had to cross that main road, but you know, that was 20 okay, people are friendly and they let you through and then through the bush to the Muri Station, that was closed, not enough people were using it and then new units required some modification of the platform, personally I don‟t think that was the case.
25 I think there was an ideological reason to close it, which is that, the journey – of course it was wonderful that we electrified up to Waikanae, made the journey right up here fabulous, but that meant that the whole journey became longer so an hour from Waikanae to Wellington. From what I‟ve heard, when a train travels longer than an 30 hour it needs to provide toilets and if they kept in the stop of Muri and Kenepuru and others it would kind of be an hour in two or three minutes and will require toilets on board, so the real reason why it was to keep that journey within the hour.
35 We all went through, you know, trying to say how many people use Muri, there was never a question, it was always going to be closed.
We need to reopen it, we need to change the rules about toilets on trains, well let‟s look at that. Add Raumati South, add a station right 40 here and we could all now go home by train.
Thank you very much for this opportunity.
CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, thank you very much. 45 MS FROST-EVANS: Thank you.
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CHAIRPERSON: Ms Sherley.
MS SHERLEY: Good afternoon, thank you for the opportunity to speak. I 5 will – I‟ve highlighted several concerns in my submission, but I will just speak about two today.
My name is Marion Sherley and I live in Paekakariki. I work in Paraparaumu as a community and Respiratory Physio for the CCDHB. 10 My family moved to Raumati Beach in 1965. It was small and underdeveloped as it was still mainly used by Wellingtonions just for holidays and weekends.
Communities – we‟ve heard a lot about communities this morning – 15 they grow organically, slowly but surely. People would have looked at the natural beauty of the Kapiti Coast environment in the early days when I was there, beaches, sand dunes, native bush, rivers, as my parents did. What a wonderful place to bring up a family, to retire, safe, fresh clean air. 20 Rail transport in (INDISTINCT 4.37) improved and the population of the coast started to grow and with it the need for services and facilities. Local people started to recognise these growing needs and with vision and tenacity developed the services and support and facilities to cater 25 for the expanding population. We all know how much voluntary effort is required to support such development, both in part and in full.
[12.20 pm]
30 I certainly can, as I have lasting memories of the numerous meetings my mother would attend in the evening and the many community projects she would spend hours organising and developing – I have listed some of the things my mother was involved in, and the community I have listed the awards that she received for her 35 involvement in the community, both community awards and public awards, for example a QSM.
So with this huge voluntary effort from many local people, including my mother, you saw this beautiful community grow before your eyes. 40 You saw it become a thriving, vital and connected community with well-established services and facilities. You saw young people, old and alike, families enjoy an outstanding quality of life in a superb environment.
45 We have a duty to respect, remember and honour the hard work and vision of these amazing people that made the Kapiti Coast what it is
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today. They knew that strong and connected communities underpin a healthy society and bright future. We need to remember what they did and why.
5 The expressway will be a highly visible barrier brutally splitting our coastal communities, as has been stated many times before this morning. Creating the poor east-west traffic flow and increasing the stress on families as they struggle to transport their children to and from school, sport, cultural and recreational activities. This stress isn‟t 10 to be underestimated.
It will be harder for horse riders, cyclists, pedestrians, there‟ll be a huge disincentive for physical activity and in my area of work this is a very worrying thing in the light of the obesity epidemic – we need to 15 encourage physical activity. It will be harder for horse riders, cyclists, pedestrians – I‟m sorry, I‟ve already said that – homes will be separated from the beach, shops, schools, recreational activities and friends.
20 Only one kilometre from the actual beach at Raumati, there will be an intrusive noisy, high speed traffic corridor. The ambience of Kapiti and its unique character of being a safe coastal community will be changed to living around a four laned motorway.
25 What happens when we have this brutal splitting of communities? There is a substantial loss of quality of life. There will be social and environmental degradation and gone is a bright future. EPAs own wording about the potential effects of the expressway reads thus: “The proposed expressway will run through the three Kapiti communities of 30 Raumati, Paraparaumu and Waikanae and is likely to result in significant and irreversible changes to the existing social environment and urban design.”
Our communities are being sacrificed. A lot of hard work is being 35 destroyed for the questionable benefits of a few who largely live outside the area. The so-called economic benefits are unproven and unsubstantiated and I‟ve expanded on this point in my submission. Common sense tells you that commuters will effectively bypass Kapiti to travel to larger towns. I feel local businesses and town centres will 40 suffer.
There is no doubt, in my mind, that the proposed MacKays to Peka Peka expressway will be a tragedy for the Kapiti Coast. The brutal splitting of these communities, by the expressway, will do irreparable 45 damage. I believe there can be no mitigation against this damage, no mitigation whatsoever.
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I would like to briefly go over my concerns regarding the health impacts of the expressway in my capacity as a Respiratory Physio for adults, mainly the older adult. One in four residents of the Kapiti Coast 5 is over 65. The proposed expressway passes close to three separate retirement villages. We know that the coast with its clean fresh air, proximity to the sea is ideal for retirees. It‟s perfect for maintaining good health and ameliorating existing health conditions, that‟s very important. 10 In my work as a Respiratory Physio I see people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, known as COPD, there is perception perhaps that most COPD sufferers are ex-smokers but that is not the case – many have lung disease through no fault of their own. I also see 15 younger adults with pulmonary disease but I don‟t see children, but asthma – we have a very high rated asthma in New Zealand for children.
[12.25 pm] 20 COPD is debilitating and prevalent on the Kapiti Coast. We run rehab programmes and outpatient clinics throughout the year. We have a respiratory nurse specialist, a position developed in response the growing numbers of COPD patients. The demand on health resources 25 from this group is huge, and already our resources are stretched.
It is imperative that this group of patients stays well away from petrol and diesel emissions. Dr Marie O‟Sullivan‟s health impact assessment describes the adverse effects these emissions have on the respiratory 30 health of these patients. The vascular health of the older adult is also under threat from this kind of pollution.
One only needs to talk to COPD patients and they will tell you how vehicle fumes, even the slightest amount, will pay havoc with their 35 disease. It‟s a very serious problem for them and can greatly affect their quality of life, and probably their length of life. There is no doubt in my mind that increased exposure to emissions will result in an increased incidence of respiratory disease and hospital admissions.
40 The settings of our neighbourhood are precious resources, integral to sustainable management of health. We can‟t afford, in more ways than one, to degrade them through poor transport planning.
We have a perfectly planned and well thought-out sustainable 45 alternative, the western link road, and upgrades to state highway one. This plan has taken 10 years to develop and perfect. The western link
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road passes respectfully within our communities, carefully connecting and uniting them, not dividing them.
The vision hopes and hard work of those who have gone before is 5 honoured and continued so our children and our children‟s children can look forward to a bright future, enjoy some of the outstanding quality of like and look back on their predecessors as we can now with gratitude and respect. Thank you.
10 CHAIRPERSON: Thank you. Mrs Leonard-Taylor. Good afternoon.
MS LEONARD-TAYLOR: Thank you very much.
I‟m Jane Leonard-Taylor, I live with my husband in Kauri Road, 15 Waikanae. I‟ve been coming here since my school days, and I purchased my section in 1963. My present situation is an example of the impact that this expressway can have on the social wellbeing of some who live beside its route.
20 I share my west boundary with the proposed designation and to the South is River Reserve. The area is quiet except for the sound of the abundant birdlife, which has only now returned to the levels experienced before the stop bank was built over 15 years ago. The stop bank is on our south boundary. 25 Since the announcement of the road it has been impossible to sell, and house prices are predicted to remain well below current valuation after the expressway is built. The garden is getting away from me and I get giddy spells when I cannot get out for my shopping. I had hoped to 30 move before now to a retirement village or near my daughter in Levin, where help is available if necessary. I now will live with no control over my future and little to look forward to.
My dependent husband suffers from congestive heart failure, and for 35 the last six months he has only left the house for medical attention. He does not like being alone, so I try to shop when he is sleeping. This now occurs for much of the day, and he is hopefully still sleeping now.
I have struggled with my computer and not found the information that I 40 know is there. I am grateful to those at EPA and the submitters have been very helpful, while some at NZTA have been excellent, the overall impression I‟ve got is that I was a nuisance to them and they were not interested.
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Regarding the flooding, in my submission a lowered road with river realignment and the raising of land under the Waikanae Bridge to prevent scarring increases the likelihood of flooding at our ranch home.
5 [12.30 pm]
I collected three grandchildren from the camp yesterday with calls of “See you again next holidays” and “Have you got my phone number”. The district will lose an asset if the camp becomes unviable to continue 10 and the children will lose even more as they are the ones who will be paying for the road.
My personal concerns are vibration and camp access from Kauri Road. I understand the report on conditions for construction vibration is due 15 shortly. Relocation is mentioned in the last report I have seen but temporary accommodation would not be possible for my husband. He is also concerned about reinstatement for any damage if it eventuates.
The latest copy of the cycleway/walkway, CVSP119A, that I received 20 from the EPA last week, clearly shows work on the new El Rancho road starting just east of the entrance to the cycleway to the bridge. I spent 30 minutes watching traffic enter and leave the camp last Wednesday. Two cars can pass but their outside wheels were on the rough. There was no room for cyclists or pedestrians. Cars had to 25 follow the only cyclists I saw. All existing cars, I stopped counting after 50 in the first 40 minutes, except for one owned by El Ranch, had their driver side wheels over the centre line at my gate. This was three metres from the kerb where pedestrians must leave the footpath to proceed to the camp. Buses crossed to within one metre of the kerb. It 30 is not safe for a cycle-walkway to use this route to get to the Puriri Road to Te Moana Road section.
I access my property on the wrong side of the road but have had some close calls. The main problem is that the camp road was originally a 35 farm track with a cattle stop and has a surface width of 3.9 to 4.6 metres at the eastern end. This is aligned on a blind corner with the south side of Kauri Road which is eight metres in width. This is probably due to the camp‟s early days when the Sandhills motorway would close the eastern entrance for one from the west and temporary 40 works were considered unnecessary.
Large construction vehicles entering the site are also concern for a safe exit and entrance to our property but I really am concerned about the safety of children as a lot of children use the road for access to the 45 Otaihanga Bridge to get to school in Paraparaumu. Thank you very much.
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CHAIRPERSON: Well, I am sure those comments have been noted.
MRS LEONARD-TAYLOR: Thank you. 5 CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.
MRS LEONARD-TAYLOR: Thank you very much.
10 CHAIRPERSON: Mr Hamilton.
MR HAMILTON: Your Honour and members of the Board, my name is Wayne Hamilton and as a little bit of background I have spent a lot of time in the outdoors hunting and tramping extensively throughout 15 New Zealand and particularly in Fiordland National Park. In addition I have done some climbing and sea kayaking.
Now, over the years I‟ve noticed a gradual decline in the coastal environment caused by development such as boat ramps, parking for 20 trailers and so on. Even mangrove swamps have been covered over and used for marinas.
Now, it has been said many times but I would like to reiterate what we have lost. In 1998 the Kapiti District Council put forward a proposal 25 for a Western Link Road connecting Raumati, Paraparaumu and Waikanae. The roading authority at that time had given up the right to build a major road on this link. Construction was to start in 2010. The design was tailored to meet community needs and, most importantly, a connecting local bridge. 30 Now, the expressway along the Western Link Road. I would like to point out that this option was ruled out by NZTA in the original proposal in 2009. This was ruled out as it would create too great a diversion through the centre of Paraparaumu. Also it was reviewed by 35 the Urban Design Review Panel, 3 December 2009, and their preferred option was expressway along the railway corridor and the concurrent construction of a local road along the WLR. Now, it is a pity that the NZTA did not follow their own advice.
40 [12.35 pm]
Now cost. The budgeted cost will probably rise. Already the next link north has been scaled back. I am concerned that the Transmission Gully project could be delayed because of the current economic climate 45 and this expressway be left in the middle with no real connectivity at
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either end. Kapiti could be faced with a huge motorway serving very little purpose.
NZTA are proposing a further tax on petrol to fund these projects and 5 this is not allowing for outside influences in the price of fuel. If this happens people may be forced to reconsider their use of vehicles and this further reduces the need for the expressway. In addition the mixed funding proposal for Transmission Gully has yet to be worked out. The private sector will expect a good return but what happens if they pull 10 out or are unable to invest in the required funds.
Now, the Australian experience does not fill one with confidence and I have noted some examples here, there‟s an attachment on the back. The project, the CLEM7 Tunnel in Queensland, forecast 1.2 billion, 15 actual 3 billion. The traffic forecast was 60,000 and actual use was 34,700. The company failed.
Lane Cove, New South Wales, 1.1 billion forecast, 1.6 billion actual. Traffic forecast 110,000, actual 40,000. That company failed. 20 Further, NZTA could be tempted to save costs and therefore reduce standards so I urge the Board, should this project go ahead, to ensure the highest possible standards are complied with. In this regard perhaps the project should be delayed until Transmission Gully is 25 constructed or at least well underway. I would like to return to the subject of costs later on.
Now, addressing the need of cyclists. Road cyclists are not catered for. Cyclists are not encouraged to use the expressway and I cannot see any 30 real provision being made and in this regard I fully support the submission made by the Kapiti Cycling Group, especially in regard to provision of fine surface and rumble strips. If these are not provided for then it is a clear indication that cyclists are not wanted on the highway and this brings into question of what is really being built. 35 The existing State Highway 1 is cycling friendly. The only connection point is across the footbridge at Otaihanga. The roads leading to Otaihanga are comparatively narrow, have a high speed limit and there is no or very little verge to act as an emergency escape route. In 40 addition it is very difficult for cyclists exiting from Ratanui Road onto Mazengarb Road.
Even when State Highway 1 reverts to a local road it is still not suitable as it will be perceived by many as a main highway. Transport 45 operations, buses et cetera will use it to service town centres. I cannot
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see the local delivery people going all the way down Te Moana Road and negotiating the roundabout at Kapiti Road.
Now, Te Moana Road. There is debate over the design of the 5 interchange at Te Moana Road. Motorists exiting the expressway will be primarily focusing on motor vehicles not cyclists. As a matter of safety when I‟m out cycling many motorists are not often aware of the speed cyclists are travelling and often overtake only to pull over or make a turn right in front of you. This applies especially at 10 roundabouts and shopping areas. I have experiences where people overtake you, they see a car park, “Ooh, I‟ve got to park”, bang. It happens frequently. It seems to me that a combination of what Waikanae on One propose and traffic lights might be a good solution for the Te Moana Road area. 15 [12.40 pm]
Now, to emphasise this, whatever is finally decided upon really must meet the needs of the community. For example, I know of one 20 gentleman who has a problem walking and he rides a Segway. I cannot find any survey of who uses Te Moana Road. There‟s traffic surveys but not others. I often ride Te Moana Road and in my observations there are many people walking, running, mountain biking and, of course, cyclists. The use of this road for recreational use cannot be 25 over emphasised. The road is wide, good verges and is easy terrain.
And, as an aside, I could see the traffic being split. Those on the west towards the expressway will use the expressway, those on the east side will use State Highway 1. So the traffic flow will be split between, you 30 know, the two roads.
Monitoring and mitigation. Now, throughout NZTA‟s submission and hearing these terms appear rather frequently. If a problem arises we will monitor it and mitigate it if necessary. Either all the experts and 35 engineers have a handle on this or they haven‟t and it seems rather open ended to me especially when the viewpoints, such as made by Mr Alexander in his submission, when addressing sand and peat. Mr Alexander acknowledges that there are uncertainties involved in the prediction of sediment on peat and, as a result, he has adopted a 40 conservative approach in accessing the extent and quantum of sediment that is likely to occur. In other words we don‟t know exactly what will happen but we can mitigate it if necessary. If I lived in Waikanae I would be fearful what would happen in the future if water starts bubbling up. Whom do they turn to? 45
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Now, I would like to raise an interesting point here. We have the spectre of the super city looming. It could well be in place before the project is finished by 2017. The Greater City Council and KDC may not be around as we know it. The super city might not want to have 5 anything to do with it, not their core business to monitor motorway construction. It could end up in a political nightmare. So someone somewhere should be sorting this out. So I imagine it‟s yes and perhaps the Board could get the ball rolling so to speak or am I just worrying unnecessarily? 10 Now, I would just like to turn to loss of quality of life. I would like to mention here that the expressway could severely limit recreational activities. Local roads - that is Kapiti, Mazengarb and Te Moana Roads – are used from time to time for racing. 15 CHAIRPERSON: Do you mean cycle racing?
MR HAMILTON: Cycle racing. I have got maps on the back.
20 CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.
MR HAMILTON: Now, holding of these events could be jeopardised. In addition the route affects east-west access for horse riding, bikers and pedestrians. It would act as a disincentive for physical activity. Now, 25 one of the main reasons I go cycling is to take part in these events, I lie to have something to aim for.
Now, the environmental destruction. Streams will be modified both during and after construction by culverts, diversions and reclamations. 30 While taken individually the modifications may appear relatively minor but the total impact is significant and they should be viewed collectively as a whole.
Further, the route cuts through wetlands and sand dunes. I probably do 35 not need to repeat this but I would like to make known my dismay at the loss of habitat of birds, native flora and fauna. Besides high visual impact the peace and quiet and other high values placed on open spaces, which many people enjoy, will be taken away.
40 [12.45 pm]
Now, as I mentioned in my opening statement, I spend a lot of time in the outdoors. I work on my property, walking, cycling and running. In one of my trips to Fiordland we traversed the range taking in 45 Mounts Bradshaw, Sparman and Mount Evans. You‟re up about 3,500 metres. Below you is the Sound, or Cook Channel to be precise, and all
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around is mountain ranges and peaks. You are this tiny spec amongst this vast wilderness area. It certainly altered my perspective of what open spaces and areas and how really precious they are, and this is even more so in rural areas. 5 Now, I‟d like to refer to a statement by Ms Meade-Rose. She stated that “over time I think people would begin to accept it and while it is still there they will just accept it as being part of the community in which they live”. Now that‟s part of her cross-examination by Mr Bennion. 10 Now I was rather surprised by this statement, this assertion, because I know my reaction, instead of accepting it, I will resent it. Somehow I will have to tolerate it, but there will probably be many others with the same reactions. The whole point of being in the outdoors around the 15 Kapiti Coast is enjoyment of the environment. This expressway will be in your face and far from accepting it and getting on with it, resentment and anger could begin to manifest itself. Ms Meade‟s did not even address this aspect. She just looked, you know, well, get on, get over it, but the negative effects ignored. 20 Adding further to the negative effects is noise. I am referring to the background hum. Now, while it might not be loud, it is always there, you cannot turn it off or get away from it. There could be cumulative adverse health issues. 25 My sense of enjoyment around this area would be destroyed, wiped out. I do not think that nearly enough weight is given to this. Open areas and rural areas are becoming increasingly rare and should be protected. 30 Now, enhancement. Development is meant to enhance the environment. The expressway, whichever you look at it, does the opposite. It destroys wetlands, streams, cuts through residential areas, adds noise and will adversely affect the lives of many. 35 Now, I‟d like to turn my attention to Raumati South Railway Station. The future of the railway station at Raumati South could be in jeopardy. Acknowledgement has been made by NZTA but nothing has been incorporated into the design for pedestrians or parking. Funding 40 for the station was provided for, but was subsequently used for double tracking. Also, land that was earmarked for parking has now been taken for the expressway.
I would like to bring the Board‟s attention to paragraph 51 of NZTA‟s 45 proposal, and the statement made by Mr Murray. It would be prudent to maintain the generous designation footprint in the vicinity of Poplar
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Avenue to allow for a future scope for capacity enhancement. I understand from Mr Murray‟s cross-examination that there may be need to alter the intersection at some time. What I was unable to ascertain was whether this would prevent pedestrian access to the 5 station if we ever managed to get one. Respectfully, I think this needs to be explained further or followed up.
In respect of land taken for parking, perhaps NZTA should be directed to replace the land. If the principle off setting applies in other rear 10 sections, then it should apply equally to the southern entry.
Now, I wish to divert a little here. Last year our street formed a green street, the intention being to lower our carbon footprint. We managed to do that, and even I managed it. What it did was focus my attention 15 on the use of the motor vehicle. As I result I automatically ask myself “is this journey necessary, can I walk, do I get the bus”.
Now, I use the car sparingly and do all my running around in one trip, which leads me back to the station. The buses stop about 7 pm. If I 20 return to the city after that time I take the car to Paekakariki, another trip, so I can get home. Others do the same as there is no parking left at Paraparaumu.
[12.50 pm] 25 Now, here is the conundrum. The perception I get is that NZTA‟s main focus is on the motorways, with just enough effort in public transport to get by. It is in their interests to get vehicles onto the road, this helps to increase revenue and goes some way in making the BCR look better. 30 However, it goes contrary to what many in the community are trying to achieve, and the growing grounds towards a more sustainable lifestyle.
Now, returning to Transmission Gully, according to the timetable it should be completed by 2020. The price of petrol, there will be a rise, 35 together with toll, the increased taxes, could ultimately force many people off the road and onto public transport. This adds weight for the need for a station at Raumati.
Perhaps I should also mention that many residents during the 40 consultancy period wanted the station built first. This was ignored and is still being ignored by NZTA.
So in summary, taken all together, the total impact on the environment, destruction of homes, noise, and loss of wellbeing seems a very heavy 45 price to pay. The problem is a relatively small section when viewed in the total length of State Highway, many other proposal and suggestions
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have been made to improve the situation. However, NZTA have directed all their efforts into putting a four laned expressway through the designated WOR to an exclusion of everything else.
5 I, therefore, urge the Board to decline this application in full and direct the Board, NZTA look at other options.
So I thank you, the Board, for the opportunity to present this, and we‟ll see what happens. Thank you. 10 CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, Mr Hamilton.
MR HAMILTON: Thank you.
15 CHAIRPERSON: Well, thank you, we will adjourn until 9.30 am tomorrow morning.
MATTER ADJOURNED AT 12.52 PM UNTIL TUESDAY, 15 JANUARY 2013
Kapiti Coast 14.01.13