Not surprised Al Weeks, Ōrewa The recent article on cost overruns on Penlink (HM June 16) must have raised a few eyebrows or even some computer rage. Actually, I don’t think there is any great mystery here. If we look at the numbers, the average cost escalation for a while now has been roughly 10 percent a year to build pretty much anything. I don’t know when the estimate for $400 million came in but let’s just say it takes seven years from ‘hey that’s a great idea – how much?’ to ‘I now declare this road open – snip’. This means that the original $400 million is now roughly $800 million. Add to this cost some fish hooks, these are ‘good grief there’s a big swamp in the middle that we didn’t see’. So, guess what? You have a billion-dollar project, and the only way to reduce this is to cut out the red tape and build it as fast as you can.