One of the hazards of a monthly publication is trying to cover an evolving news story.  There is a high risk that timing means you’ll get it wrong. Your story is accurate when you go to print but by the time your paper gets distributed, it’s old news or the facts have changed.

For the past five months I’ve been waiting for an announcement about the ‘second’* Mt Victoria tunnel, and wondering if this month is the time to write a story about how late that announcement is.

(*Pedants will tell you that there are already two tunnels through Mt Victoria, if you count the bus tunnel, so another tunnel will be the third.)

Another Mt Victoria tunnel has been on the cards since the 70s, and the current National-led Government came to power promising spades in the ground to build it before the end of their first term.

But meanwhile the idea of a ‘long tunnel’ arose, going all the way from the Terrace, under the mountain and through to Kilbirnie, burrowing through four kilometres of Mt Cook.

The Transport Minister Simeon Brown promised that a decision would be made around ‘the middle of the year’. But the ‘middle’ of the year has come and gone, and I think that most people would accept we are now closer to the ‘end’ of the year, and still we wait. 

(Of course I will have jinxed it by writing all this, and no doubt you are reading this having heard the outcome of that decision-making.)

Mt Victorians have been waiting decades to find out what will happen to Paterson Street.

There is some kind of irony in the fact that just as the most determined of road-building governments approaches with its shovels, the idea of the tunnel changes so that once again Mt Victoria is off the hook.

At time of writing, we don’t know what choice the government has made, but my money is on the long tunnel – too much has been made of the benefits of this project for the Minister to backtrack on it now.

What will it mean for Mt Victoria NOT to get a tunnel – or rather, NOT to have the side of the suburb bulldozed away?

This is the really interesting question, and one I’m keen to dig into in future editions of The Local, along with many more tunnel puns. It won’t be boring, so stay tuned!