Exploring the web of “wider economic benefits”
Steven Joyce’s main response to the release of the CBD Rail Tunnel business case seems to have been to immediately question the accuracy of the study. In particular, he has questioned the validity of including broad urban regeneration – or employment based – wider economic benefits of the project.…
4 Comments Examining the CBD Rail Tunnel business case
After waiting months and months for the business case of the CBD Rail Tunnel to be released, it’s quite weird to now have literally so much information on the project at my fingertrips I don’t quite know what to do with it all.…
Critiquing motorway economics
I was having a read through a number of submissions on the Waterview Connection project today and came along a very interesting submission by Auckland University Associate Professor of Economics, Rema Vaithianathan, that is worthy of sharing. The useful thing that Rema’s submission does is include an article she wrote for the Road & Transport Research Journal back in September last year on the economics of urban motorways – with the Waterview Connection as a case study.…
Rod Oram on the holiday highway
A really interesting article by Rod Oram in the Sunday Star Times today, discussing the cost effectiveness of the government’s various roading projects. Here are a few sections:
The government told owners of 55 properties last week that their homes or other buildings could be bulldozed to make way for its $1.65 billion Puhoi to Wellsford motorway.…
“Operation Lifesaver” discussed in parliament
I’m never quite sure whether to be pleased or completely freaked out when something that I largely wrote ends up being discussed in parliament’s question time. Thanks to Peter for pointing out a discussion on the Puhoi-Wellsford Road in parliament yesterday that ended up discussing the “Operation Lifesaver” alternative to the hugely expensive “holiday highway”.…
What The Kiwirail Announcements Make Clear
Today’s KiwiRail announcements make it clear that the transport arrangements in New Zealand are a mess. The various streams of funding, the lack of comparison of projects of different modes, the competing subsidies and our Benefit to Cost Ratio (BCR) process, are all contributing to some very poor outcomes.…
Holiday Highway confirmed – despite low BCR
There were some interesting announcements yesterday on the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway”. While the first stage to Warkworth is being brought forward for completion within 9 years (that may sound like a long time, but at least half of that would be construction time, so the first step of construction might happen within the next four years), the second stage between Warkworth and Wellsford seems to have sensibly been pushed off into the never-never.…
Can you build your way out of congestion?
Whether or not it’s possible to “build your way out of congestion” is a fundamental question that transport planners all around the world grapple with. On the one hand, we seem to have been building a lot of “transport stuff” over the past few hundred years yet our cities seem as congested as ever; while on the other hand it seems quite crazy to suggest that building transport projects is pointless as no matter what you build, you’ll never actually be able to make a difference to congestion.…
Benefits of Rail Transit
In my searching for interesting academic studies into transportation issues I came across an excellent analysis of the benefits of rail transportation by Todd Litman, an Australian transport academic. It’s a very detailed study, running to around 60 pages long, and I certainly haven’t read the whole thing yet.…
Probing Cost-Benefit Analyses
A couple of months ago I stated that if there were two things I could change about transport, it would be creating one pot of money for transport – and also to change the way that transport projects are analysed. This post focuses on the second of those two issues, and it based around a journal article that I came across today that makes for interesting reading.…
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