What will Warkworth to Te Hana cost us? And other burning questions
Last week, late on Thursday afternoon, Minister of Transport Chris Bishop announced that the government had signed the contract for a Public Private Partnership for Warkworth to Te Hana.
This answers our long-running question: are they seriously going to go ahead with this?…
93 Comments Five years to restore safer* speeds in Auckland?
Tomorrow’s meeting of Auckland Council’s Transport and Infrastructure Delivery Committee (TIDC) has some interesting items. One that particularly stands out for me is in the Auckland Transport update.
And it’s on the Safe Speeds Programme. Aucklanders yearn for a return to evidence-based speeds
A year on from Auckland Transport’s mindbogglingly widespread implementation of Simeon Brown’s 2024 Speed Rule, they report that they have recently been hard at work on – and making some progress on – returning some streets and roads to more safe speeds.…
Revised PC120 Passed by Auckland Council
After a five-hour long meeting yesterday, Auckland Council passed amendments to Plan Change 120, enabling greater intensity of housing in designated locations. (Below is the video of the whole meeting – at the end of this post clips breaking it into five parts, for your viewing at leisure.)…
Why the RoNS are even more unthinkable now
Our open letter to Chris Bishop, imploring him to bring some sense to the overblown Roads of National Significance juggernaut, has sparked a lot of discussion and some very good questions about the way ahead.
Once upon a time, the RoNS were a shiny election bauble, a vision of brand-new highways sweeping across the country.…
Our PC120 feedback to central Local Boards
Currently, Local Boards in Auckland are being asked to consider two different options when it comes to PC120. In our view, Option B is ideal as it focuses upzoning around existing infrastructure and strong transport links, within the central isthmus. (By contrast, Option A does only the bare legal minimum.)…
Presenting the Bridge proposal to Auckland Council
Yesterday, Patrick and I presented Nicolas Reid’s bridge proposal for the next Waitematā Harbour crossing to Auckland Council’s Transport and Infrastructure Delivery Committee.
We got a good hearing from councillors, and some great questions – you can check out the full presentation, about ten minutes followed by about twenty minutes of Q&A here,
You can see our presentation slides here.…
Top 10 politicians who made City Rail Link happen
This year will see the opening of the City Rail Link project.
A transformational change to Auckland.
CRL will double the potential capacity of trains that can run across the network, provide new stations in the city centre (Te Waihorotiu, and Karanga-a-Hape), upgrade the Maungawhau station at Mt Eden, and connect to Britomart.…
When transparency might stop a bad project
Six months ago I lodged a complaint with the Ombudsman, appealing a refusal by the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) and the Ministry of Transport (MoT) to release information related to the Warkworth to Te Hana Road of National Significance project.…
The Road Toll of the RoNS
How many people have been killed or seriously injured because of a myopic focus on over-scoped highways?
This isn’t a rhetorical question.
The Roads of National Significance (RoNS) – the name of which is a political slogan – are a number of State Highway projects first proposed in 2009, by then National Party Minister of Transport Steven Joyce.…
The nation’s most expensive road (so far)?
If built, it will be the most expensive road ever constructed in New Zealand.
$3,500,000,000 to $4,000,000,000.
Over twice the cost per km as Transmission Gully.
And it is not a good project, by any measure.
And it’s currently being rushed towards construction, with a Public-Private Partnership contact set to be signed by July, locking in a generation of New Zealanders who’ll be paying the bill over the next few decades.…
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