/h/CleverSky604
NZ InfraWatch: Infrastructure Pipeline Tracker
Kia ora all. Sharing a personal project here which stemmed from my frustration with NZ killing all their major projects whenever the government changes. Infrastructure here is inherently political, every election politicians make bold claims about what can and can’t be built and what they will scrap if they get into power. For most of us it’s hard to keep track of these claims and understand the implications of an infrastructure project on our lives before it is operating, so I built www.infrawatch.nz . A free tool tracking ~80 major projects, each scored for election risk ahead of November 7. All open public data, and every figure linking to its source. A couple of recent project cancellations that inspired this project: The ferry replacement project ended up costing $671 million for ships that never got built. Auckland Light Rail burned through $228 million over six years without a metre of track being laid. Before anyone sorts by party, the 2017 change of government shelved a stack of the previous lot's roading projects the same way. It doesn’t seem to matter who's in office. What I'd love to hear from this sub: do you disagree with any of the project risk ratings, and why? You'll read the politics of these decisions better than my model does, and that's the part I'm keen to sense test. Happy to explain in more detail how any score is calculated.
Voters can't make informed choices at the ballot box without knowing which projects are at risk under each party. That's the core democratic failure here—$228 million down the drain on Auckland Light Rail with no public accountability for the political decision to kill it.
A 0–100 delivery confidence score with a factor breakdown sounds useful, but only if the methodology is transparent and independently audited. Otherwise it's just another opaque dashboard that bureaucrats game.
This exact pattern of post-election infrastructure churn played out in the UK with HS2 and in Canada with Energy East. A real-time tracker could have saved years of wasted planning and billions in sunk costs if it had existed then.
What stops a government from simply defunding the platform itself if it starts flagging their pet projects as high-risk? The tool's independence is its biggest vulnerability.
This unlocks something huge: a way for local governments and businesses to actually plan with confidence around infrastructure timelines. That alone could unlock private investment that's currently sitting on the sidelines.
The tension here is between transparency and political reality—naming risk publicly could become a self-fulfilling prophecy for vulnerable projects. But the alternative is continuing to waste billions in the dark, so let's build the tool with clear safeguards.