The Government has laid out the order in which it plans to build its flagship highways over the next two decades, and the picture it paints is far more cautious than the one National campaigned on in 2023. Transport Minister Chris Bishop released the New Zealand Transport Agency’s Major Transport Projects Pipeline on Thursday, setting out which Roads of National Significance and big public transport schemes come first and which now wait behind them.
The pipeline covers the 17 Roads of National Significance listed in the 2024 transport policy statement, along with major public transport work such as Auckland’s Northwestern and Eastern busways. Bishop framed it as a way of giving the construction industry certainty about the flow of work, but the effect for several signature roads is a slower path than voters were promised at the last election.
Four projects are already under construction. They are the Ōtaki to north of Levin motorway, the Hawke’s Bay Expressway, the first stage of the Takitimu North Link near Tauranga and the SH29 Tauriko West works. The first stage of the Northland Expressway is due to begin by the end of this year, and procurement is under way on the Cambridge to Piarere section in Waikato. Bishop said he expected six Roads of National Significance to be under construction by early next year.
Behind that first wave sit five projects that the pipeline places firmly in the slow lane. The Hope Bypass Stage 2 near Nelson, sections two and three of the Northland Expressway between Te Hana and Whangārei, Auckland’s East West Link, the Mill Road corridor in south Auckland and the Petone to Grenada road in Wellington are all continuing at investment case stage with no firm start dates. An infographic released with the announcement says their progression is subject to funding availability, which is another way of saying the money is not there yet.
Bishop was candid about why the plan has been trimmed back. He acknowledged that National’s 2023 commitments had been “very ambitious” and said economic conditions had shifted since then, pointing to United States tariffs and this year’s fuel supply crisis as factors that had materially changed the situation. “The pipeline shows why a phased approach to delivering the Roads of National Significance is important,” he said.
The core problem is money, and the numbers are stark. Bishop confirmed that building the full programme over 20 years would cost around $56 billion. If that bill were met entirely through road user charges and petrol taxes, those charges would need to rise by about 70 percent, the equivalent of adding roughly 49 cents to every litre of fuel. That is not a step any government would take lightly, least of all in an election year and in the middle of a fuel crisis that has already stretched household budgets.
The Minister said fuel excise duty had fallen 21 percent in real terms since 2020 while construction costs had climbed sharply, which has squeezed the National Land Transport Fund from both ends. He also indicated the Government was unlikely to raise fuel excise next year, though he said a decision would be made within weeks. For drivers already paying more at the pump than they were a year ago, that is at least a small piece of reassurance.
The opposition was quick to argue that the pipeline exposes a gap between what National promised and what it can pay for. Labour’s transport spokesperson Tangi Utikere called the document “a wishlist” rather than a plan, accusing the Government of over-promising and under-budgeting and now quietly walking back the certainty it had offered voters. Green Party transport spokesperson Julie-Anne Genter described it as “a pipe dream” with no clear funding pathway, and criticised the continued focus on motorways ahead of mass transit and other alternatives.
There is a genuine policy question underneath the political point scoring. New Zealand’s roading ambitions have grown faster than the fund that pays for them, and every government of both stripes has run into the same wall. The Roads of National Significance were sold as nation building projects, yet the pipeline is a reminder that even flagship roads are ultimately paid for by the same drivers who fill up each week. Deciding which corridors go first, and who pays and when, is one of the harder trade-offs in transport policy, and it does not fall neatly along party lines.
For the regions on the slow list, the delay carries a real cost. Northland business groups have already warned against being sidelined, arguing that the corridor north of Auckland is exactly the kind of resilience project the country needs after repeated storm damage cut the region off. Communities around Nelson, south Auckland and the Wellington region will be watching the funding decisions that follow this announcement closely, because a road at investment case stage can sit there for years.
Bishop’s argument is that a phased and honest pipeline is better than a long list of promises that cannot all be kept at once, and there is a reasonable case for that. The test will be whether the projects now sitting behind the funding line actually move forward in the next term, or whether phasing becomes a polite word for shelving. With the election set for November, transport funding is shaping up as one of the clearer dividing lines between the major parties.
If you want to see where each party stands on transport, tax and the other issues that will decide the 2026 election, you can compare their positions using our voting tool.
What do you think of the phased approach to the big roads, and would you accept higher fuel taxes to build them faster? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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