The Auckland Harbour Bridge is often remembered as a warning about building infrastructure too cheaply. The usual story is simple: Auckland settled for a four-lane bridge in 1959, then had to spend heavily on clip-on lanes just a decade later. But the history in the material provided tells a different story. The smaller bridge helped make the project affordable, and the later expansion delivered four additional lanes at a lower relative cost than building a larger bridge from the beginning, as per a report by Greater Auckland.
The result was an eight-lane crossing that grew alongside Auckland rather than requiring the city to pay for all of that capacity upfront.
