Month: October 2015

Funding Kiwirail and Trucks

Matt L | October 30, 2015 | Streets & Roads
Yesterday Kiwirail released their annual results and once again they lost a significant amount of money – $167 million for the year. The shortfall obviously has to come from the Government. They were also keen to point out that the main reason for the loss was the cost of maintaining the rail network which includes 4,000 kilometres of track, 1500 bridges and 150 tunnels.…
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Population Growth in 2015

Matt L | October 30, 2015 | Data & Analysis
Last week Statistics NZ released their provisional population estimates as of 30 June 2015 and there were some interesting results. All regions in NZ with the exception of the West Coast saw their population increase with the largest increase both in total number and in percentage occurring in Auckland.…
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The Original Harbour Bridge

Matt L | October 29, 2015 | Streets & Roads
If you follow us on Facebook or Twitter then you may have seen some of these the other day. If you haven’t, here is a collection of some great old colour photos of the Auckland Harbour Bridge and St Mary’s Bay before they both got fatter with more traffic lanes.…
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Do public golf courses “crowd out” public housing?

Peter Nunns | October 29, 2015 | Policy & Technology
Last month, I took a look at the costs and benefits of publicly owned golf courses (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). A few key findings from that analysis: Golf courses are different from public parks, as they can only be used by a small number of paying customers The benefit of redeveloping golf courses to offer a mix of new neighbourhoods and public parks could be as much as nine times higher than the benefit of the status quo to golfers Publicly owned golf courses don’t pay their fair share of rates, meaning that the rest of us have to pay higher taxes.…
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Millwater Intersection Safety

Matt L | October 28, 2015 | Cycling & Walking
This is a guest post from reader Bryce P The safety of children walking and riding to school has been in the news this week with another crash resulting in severe injury while a child was walking to school. Back in April, local Hibiscus Coast media wrote a story about red light running near some local schools.…
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Impact of last weeks bus changes

Matt L | October 28, 2015 | Buses & Ferries
Last week saw two big changes to buses in Auckland. In the city bus routes changed avoid the area where the first of the CRL enabling works will happen and on the Hibiscus Coast the new network was launched. At the end of last week Auckland Transport provided some information on the changes.…
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Minimum parking requirements in Parliament

Matt L | October 27, 2015 | Politics & Governance
Minimum parking requirements have been getting some long-overdue attention at central government level after the release of the Productivity Commission’s report recommending their removal from district plans. Finance Minister Bill English has also expressed his support for binning minimums. So last week Green Party transport spokesperson Julie Anne Genter – a longtime advocate of removing MPRs – asked Housing Minister Nick Smith whether the government had any plans to legislate to remove them from district plans: Smith’s responses were a bit evasive but there were still a few interesting points raised in the back-and-forth: Smith said that it would be complex to legislate to remove MPRs as they are in district plans rather than the RMA.…
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