The answer to an OIA request I made to the Ministry of Transport about – among other things – the work they’d done in relation to the CBD Rail Tunnel (largely their contribution to its review) suggest that the release of this review document is possibly not too far away.
Firstly, the sheer number of documents that fell within the scope of my request is quite interesting. In addition to a massive number of meeting minutes (it seems the review group met weekly), there are some quite interesting studies that have been undertaken:
As interesting as all these documents sound, unfortunately the MoT withheld the release of every single one of them. When I sent off an email, the response I got suggested that the main reason for the withholding of the document was to maintain confidentiality in advance of ministerial decisions being made.
We will be happy to advise you when key CBD Rail Tunnel documents are available on the Ministry’s website.
Should you require additional documents which are not already physically available we suggest you make an Official Information Act request at that time.
Interesting – seems like a large-scale “pro-active release” of documents might happen.
When the documents are released, I am guessing that the Ministry of Transport will have found some ways to pick holes in the business case. Some of their criticisms may have some validity (as I discussed in this post recently), but I suspect there are going to be a couple of fundamental flaws to any criticisms the MoT make.
- An ignorance of Auckland Council’s priorities to increase the pedestrian friendliness of the CBD, which in all likeliness will mean a reduction in the vehicle capacity of the CBD. My understanding is that the MOT’s analysis is fundamentally based on their assessment that the CBD is able to cope with close to double the number of cars it does now.
- A lack of understanding about wider economic benefits – particularly the productivity premiums that will arise from concentrating economic activity in the CBD.
I am looking forward to reading through all those documents though. And if they aren’t all put online once the government has examined the review of the business case, I sure will be making further OIA requests.
Processing...
Definitely some interesting documents listed in there which we will hopefully get to read soon. I suspect there is also a workstream going on separately from the MOT’s review which is basically getting pollsters to see what the political impact of not funding it would be.
One that is interesting is the fact they were investigating the impact of removing Parnell Station which would likely result in all trains from south of Newmarket to go via Grafton which could be interesting. It makes the decision announced on AKT that a Parnell station would be built this Christmas more interesting as it could mean one of two things, one that they concluded Parnell was worth keeping or that it wasn’t and Mike Lee has been pushing AT to get it built as a way to stick it to the government (might sound wacky but I’m sure stranger things have happened in the history of transport in Auckland).
I wonder whether they have updated their patronage stats to include the years past 2006 or if they’re still basing all their assessments on data that’s close to 6 years old.
That’s what stood out for me reading those headings above: changes from 2001- 2006, wtf!, why not say, 1860-1865?, could it just be that the more recent 5 year period shows such a pronounced change away from driving and onto PT? Joyce is in the paper today saying that declines in state highway use are temporary and will resume growth soon. What, forever? Till we all have 15 cars each and somehow manage to drive them all at once? I don’t want to make the same mistake of just un thinkingly extrapolating a trend, but it is likely that the changes we are seeing in Auckland are in fact structural, caused by the rising costs in both time and money of driving and the improving quality of the PT option. The challenge for AT is to keep that quality improving because I’m sure any slow down in the growth of PT use will be seized upon….. even if it meant looking at recent figures.
They seem to base all their patronage stats on the 2006 census. A cynic might say they do this deliberatly as it adds wieght to their case. Joyce does not want any government money spent on this project, period. He will do anything to stop that from happening. So either the council finds a way to fund this on it’s own, or we will have to wait for a change of government. Sadly that’s the reality here.
And with no Census this year the next will likely be in 2016. Thats a whole lot of population change before the next census data is released in 2017/2018
Yes but we have monthly PT data and state highway traffic so there’s no excuse to still be using 6 year old census data.
The next one will have to be held sooner than that. There’s too much forward planning that absolutely relies on the census data for it to be feasible to go 10 years without one. There’s a baby bubble that’ll need high schools in the fairly near future, for example, and without the census nobody knows for sure where they’re living.
I think they were right to cancel during earthquake though…otherwise results would have been super skewed. Like that survey which came out a few months ago showing people in Canterbury are way more stressed than in any other big NZ cities. It’s like “Really? Well, I certainly can’t think of any reason for that :)”