What’s Best for Northland?
Pretty much every single time we hear the government talk about the Puhoi to Wellsford road of national significance they say that its crucial to Northland’s economy, even standing up and saying so in parliament here are a few quotes from different exchanges:
Dated 15 August 2012
Phil Twyford: Does it make economic sense to borrow to fund the Pūhoi to Wellsford “Holiday Highway”, which has a benefit-cost ratio that barely breaks even and costs $1.7 billion, when a $400 million upgrade would fix the congestion and safety problems?…
17 Comments Kapiti Expressway’s BCR is actually 0.2!
A great scoop by Campbell Live tonight showing that the cost-benefit ratio of the Mackays to Peka Peka part of the Kapiti Expressway – a key section of the Wellington Northern Corridor RoNS project – has been recalculated recently as being 0.2.…
Short and awkward with a big mouth
This is something that has always bugged me as I walk up and down Queen St. Take a look at the intersection of Airdale St. Airdale is a little left over remnant of a road that got sliced off by Mayoral Drive.…
Federal St upgrade announced
The council has finally released plans to create a shared space on part Federal St in conjunction with SkyCity. The upgrade has been proposed for some time and originally was going to be paid for by SkyCity and built in time for the RWC in return for getting the right to build another larger skybridge across the road.…
Government response to the productivity commission
The government has released its response to the Productivity Commission report on housing affordability and unlike ideological burp that the commission produced it seems the government has a bit more faith in what the council is doing (which in itself is odd given the history these two entities have had).…
Have your say on the Unitary Plan
The Auckland plan set the vision for the next 30 years but the council now has to turn that vision into reality which is why it is so critically important that they get the unitary plan right. The unitary plan is the combination of all of the individual district plans that act as the rulebooks that specify where and how development can occur.…
Reviewing NZTA Projects
One of the criticisms that we have had of the NZTA in recent years has been that there they don’t appear to go back and check if the what they predicted to happen turned out to be accurate. This is pretty important as they are spending huge amounts of our money on various projects and as we showed last week, it appears that sometimes they aren’t even using real data in their business cases. …
Are driverless cars the future?
I wonder if you can guess who wrote the quote below?
Cars are noisy, they’re dangerous, they emit fumes, they take up so much space that our cities seem to be built for cars first and people second, and they are not much fun to sit in on a jammed Auckland motorway.…
AT HOP is finally live
Its been a long time, sometimes it felt like an eternity but HOP is finally here for train which is great. I have been using the card for a couple of weeks and found the system painless an extremely easy to use and now thousands of others can get these benefits too.…
Traffic’s declining in Sydney too – so why don’t we get it?
Auckland is certainly not alone in experiencing a pretty dramatic drop in traffic growth in the past few years – calling into question massive roading projects relying on massive traffic growth projections for their justification. We have pointed out similar trends in the USA, Canada, the UK, Europe and now – Sydney:
Gavin Gatenby, the convenor of lobby group Ecotransit, said the NSW government’s support of the WestConnex motorway was “about supporting private vested interests that have sunk billions into building motorways”.…
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