ACT is joining growing calls for Let's Get Wellington Moving (LGWM) to be scrapped and they want to see a second Mt Victoria tunnel funded by a toll road.
It comes after Wellington City Councillor Tony Randle criticised the multi-billion-dollar transport project telling AM on Tuesday it's not working.
If National is elected at October's election, it has promised to dump LGWM - including light rail - but is committed to building a second road tunnel under Mt Victoria.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins wouldn't commit to LGWM but is determined to fix Wellington's traffic woes.
ACT's deputy leader Brooke van Velden told AM Early on Wednesday it's "sensible" to scrap LGWM as a lot of money has been spent for not much production.
She told AM Early host Nicky Styris the transport plan is a huge waste of money.
"It's not anything realistic for how people live their lives. People want to get from A to B easily and instead Let's Get Wellington Moving is about forcing or bullying people into changing their entire lifestyles," she said.
"That just means that people are going to move out of Wellington when it becomes hard to move around."
ACT believes more investment needs to go into roading and is calling for a second Mt Victoria tunnel.
Van Velden said ACT would fund the second tunnel by making it a toll road or opening it up to private investment.
"I'm not convinced about once again saying, let's fund this tunnel. We've got to figure out how much that's going to cost," she said.
"I would say let's go back to the open market and see whether a private organisation, maybe that's the super fund, it could be a iwi trust would be willing to stump up the cash in a toll road of 30 years to actually get it off the ground and delivered because with a toll road at least it would get delivered now, rather than being a government promise that maybe could or could not happen 30 years from now."
The debate around LGWM has come after National unveiled its big new transport policy, promising $24.8 billion of new roads and projects over 10 years.
Labour has dubbed the policy "La La Land dreaming" pointing to a potential $4.8 billion hole in their costings.
Van Velden said it's one thing to announce a policy and roads, but the question is, how are parties going to fund it?
She told AM Early she understands why people might have questions about how National is going to fund the roads they have promised.
"Quite often, what we have are a lot of announcements and then when it comes to delivery, things fall over. What I think we need to see is a proper plan of how you get these roads funded," she said.
"We've [ACT] said we do need more roads, but instead of the Government having to fork out billions and tens of billions of dollars, why don't we come up with a plan that's realistic, have a central and local partnership regional plan, find out which roads could be funded realistically by Government and then go out to the open market to ask if other private organisations would be willing to stump up for the financing of the other nice to have roads in the form of a toll road so that you get the roads built, but it's somebody else's capital and risk being taken on."
Watch the full interview with Brooke van Velden in the video above.
