Saturday, January 7, 2012

in proportion NZ spends three times as much on highways as the USA

In the Radio NZ interview with Bob Johnston of Trains magazine (USA) - see earlier post - the figure of $US 44 billion spent last year by the US government on its roads is mentioned.

How much gets spent in NZ?  According to last July's National Infrastructure Plan - downloadable as a pdf here - $NZ 6.5 billion ($US 5.2 billion) is planned to be spent in the three financial years 2011 to 2014, or $US 1.73 billion per year.

Adjusting that by a factor of 74 for the population difference, that is the equivalent of $US 128 billion in the US.  A good thing?  Not when you look at the simultaneous miserly funding of railways here: a mere $167 million ($US 134 million) a year. 

Whose notions are behind this massive spending on NZ's roads and almost no spending on railways?   You guessed it.

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