Gazette notice was issued authorising the construction of a motorway as a tunnel road. This was followed in 1952 by a survey defining the limits of the land required. Establishment of the Road Tunnel Authority The years following the end of the Second World War saw no further progress until in 1953 Sidney Holland, the member of parliament for Fendalton in Christchurch and also more critically prime minister, sponsored the Christchurch-Lyttelton Road Tunnel Bill, which established a seven-man authority to construct and control a road tunnel with authority to raise the raise loan, construct the tunnel and pay back the loan by levying tolls. The bill was subsequently passed into law in October 1956 with the Government guarantying the repayment of any loans raised by the Road Tunnel Authority. By 1956 the MOW estimated the project would cost £2.515 million. The Ministry of Works and Development (MOW) were appointed as consulting engineers to the Road Tunnel Authority; with the assistance of the Civil Engineering Department of Canterbury University they began the design of the road tunnel. A drilling programme was carried out in the proposed portal areas to locate bedrock. Various options were considered with an early tunnel design having a width of , consisting of a wide roadway with a 5 ft 6 in (1.68 m) wide cycle track on either side. As the cycle tracks were estimated to raise the cost by £500,000 they were dropped. The final design called for a wide roadway with wide kerbs on either side for use by maintenance personnel and to assist in keeping motor vehicles from scrapping the tunnel walls. Following discussions about the route and the width of the tunnel which allowed finalisation of the estimated cost the newly created Road Tunnel Authority under the chairmanship of Bill MacGibbon (ca. 1891 – 1962) applied to the Local Authorities Loans Board in 1959 for approval to raise a loan, only for it to be turned down. The reason given was that if the planned new harbour facilities at Lyttelton were not available before the tunnel opened then there would be insufficient freight moving through the tunnel in its early years to generate the toll revenue need to service the loan. After the sending of a deputation to the Prime Minister (Walter Nash) and the Minister of Finance (Arnold Nordmeyer) and then a written assurance from the Road Tunnel Authority that the