In this morning Sunday Times was a great article by Rod Oram on the stupidity of Steven Joyce's Roads of National Importance.

What Oram showed was that none of them, including Kapiti's propossed autobahn made any sense in terms of cost benefits.

Oram comments, 'The government's unwelcome news about its uneconomic road projects in the work it commissioned from SAHA, an Australian-based consultancy. SAHA's December 2009 report, billed as its final one, showed the conventioal cost/benefit ratio of the Puhoi to Welford was 0.4, meaning that for every dollar invested the return was 40c.

The Norther Corridor which includes the Kapiti Expressway was 0.9. '

These, he adds, were very poor results.

So the question we must ask is this "Why in these straitened times does the government persist with its mania for building bigger and more destructive roads which no one (except the trucking industry) wants?

What on earth are the economic benfits going to be?

This is surely another argument against the RONs.

Take stock, Mr Joyce. Rethink this mania and talk to the communities involved - those ones you seek to destroy.