Competition Winners

Attentive readers will recall the little competition we ran some weeks back, well Labour Day has given us the chance to sort through the entries and make some choices.

This exercise has shown that the City Rail Link is a difficult project to summarise and it is hard to feel that we’ve quite cracked it yet, but here goes…

While I for one did particularly like Stu’s CRL: Centre Right Legacy but as there is no sign of this actually happening I think we have to discount that one.

For originality we felt we had to include Mike F‘s: Auckland’s wormhole – a shortcut in time

On the important need to reach out to drivers about the project we also chose:

Greg N‘s CRL – Auckland’s Traffic Decongestant

and

Spartan‘s witty acronym CRL – Congestion ReLief

And finally there’s Nick‘s City Rail Link: Building Auckland’s Regional Metro which he expanded on more fully in a comment on a post earlier today. This is as good a summary of how to better communicate the value of the project as I’ve seen:

They should make a clean cut from the tarnished CRL ‘brand’ and start calling it what it actually is, something like ‘Regional Auckland Metro Rail” (or a snappier alternative). Don’t sell it as a two billion dollar CBD tunnel with two stations, sell it as a two billion dollar metro system with four lines and 40 stations serving 3/4 of metropolitan Auckland, with trains running every five or ten minutes to every station between Swanson, Onehunga, Manukau and Papakura.

Did NZTA sell the Waterview connection as the means to drive from Owairaka to Waterview? Of course not, they spend far more time talking about completing the motorway system, creating an efficient network and delivering a western bypass from Manukau to Albany.

AT seem so intent on hiding all the benefits and potential from the public, so risk averse as to shoot themselves in the foot. Sell the damned thing FFS! get the public excited, have them banging on the beehive door saying hurry up and get on with it. In my experience the only people against the CRL are those that have a mistaken understanding of what it does, or rather doesn’t, do. Those that do understand can clearly see it is the most efficient spend of transport funds possible in the city. That is squarely ATs fault in terms of marketing.

Give it a new name, them stick signs and billboards out next to main roads and motorways showing the travel time and frequency to various places. Put one by SH1 in Manurewa with the travel time to Silvia Park and Aotea, one near Orakei with the time to Eden Park, one in Mt Albert with the time to Henderson and Aotea, one in Howick village with the combined bus and train time to the city centre etc. Hell stick one up in every neighborhood within ten minutes of a rail station.

…and give it a new brand, a regional, metro branding.

Thanks again to Madman Entertainment for the DVDs.

So congratulations Mike, Greg, Spartan, and Nick and stand by for an email from me requesting a physical address so I can send out the DVDs

No correspondence will be entered into etc….

Share this