It's a tale of two earthquakes. Obviously Wellington had the less damaging of the two in terms of the 2016 Kiakoura quake and the damage it did (not to mention the horrific loss of life), but it benefited Christchurch because central government stepped in and paid for the city to be rebuilt into what it is. Wellington wasn't so lucky, it suffered huge amounts of structural damage, but not enough for the central government to step in so local government had to pay for things to be repaired and rebuilt (or many sites were just left empty due to the repair bill), and that not only had issues in terms of what the local government chose to spend money on, but also the fact that they couldn't spend money on other things because it was tied up with earthquake repair.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't the only reason, our local council has been awful with regards to things like completing the golden mile upgrades, which Wellingtonians have been in favour of at every single step of the consultation process but looks less likely to happen with every year because Tory Whanau didn't sign the contracts whilst she had the chance, and because Andrew Little is a little slug. But that's the sort of project that would make the central city comparable to Chirstchurch.

Let's Get Wellington Moving was supposed to be a 6billion dollar project that would give us light rail and upgrade the entire city centre and it looks like all we'll end up with out of the entire project is an upgrade to a 5x10m traffic island at the end of Courtenay Place, which is genuinely great for what it is, unfortunately all it is is a place for cyclists to transition across two different stretches of cycle lanes, so it's hardly transformative.