Ilovethebomb

He is a very strange dude, isn't he?

You may be thinking of the cycle bridge across the harbour, they spent fifty mil or so on that, mostly on consultants.

Wellington light rail was to be run along existing streets, so the amount of land purchased was going to be very low, I think most of the land purchased wastes to be for the new tunnels.

I honestly can't explain what happened with Wellington light rail, they did public outreach and surveys almost ten years ago, had overwhelming support for both light rail and a secondary Terrace and Mt Vic tunnel. The council was taken to court over the flyover project, and then... Nothing happened for about a decade.

I'm honestly at a loss to explain it.

I disagree with you there, the sunk cost fallacy is a real problem, and we are very much prone to it. If light rail had been under construction already, there would have been a solid case to make for keeping it, but Wellington had been planning and consulting for nearly ten years without laying a single piece of track.

The ferries were perhaps less of a good idea to cancel, but the whole project was massively over speced, in my view. One vessel would have been almost the same size as their entire current fleet.

To be fair, Labour made an absolute pig's ear of almost every infrastructure project they had a go at during their term, it seems a bit churlish of them to complain about National turning around and building roads.

If they and our councils had actually been competent at delivering infrastructure, we'd have trams in Auckland and Wellington, new ferries arriving next year with new terminals waiting for them, as well as better rail infrastructure.

But no, that's not the world we live in unfortunately.

According the last census, there is roughly 200k residential dwellings in the Wellington region. I can't imagine you'd get much change out of 100k to do a bulk mail out like that.

Possibly, although if an identical envelope went out to every single address in the Wellington region, they'd know something was up.

I can't imagine sending out addressed mail like that would be cheap though. How many households are there in the Wellington region?

Yup, there's a balance to be struck here. Refusing to deliver something that is contrary to your morals is something that would very quickly lead to religious conservatives refusing to deliver all sorts of things, but if the pamphlet makes claims that are blatantly false, that's a different story.

The headline kinda set up for something more dramatic, I think that's part of the problem.

I actually expected worse than 11%, to be honest.

How do you know that? You're launching an entire rocket to kill one satellite, that can't be cheap.

Starlink launches forty-ish Starlink sats every other week, Russia could deplete it's entire arsenal of missiles and, if they're lucky, cause a hole in their coverage.