Can transport be an election issue?
Auckland’s poor transport outcomes over the years are probably the result of one over-riding factor: that while we vote on transport matters in local elections, local governments don’t have much money, central government holds the purse strings. Yet when it comes to national elections, we tend to have much bigger issues on our mind (taxes, health, crime, education, the economy etc.)…
33 Comments Blowing the motorways budget
Yesterday I received from NZTA all the board papers from their May meeting. There are probably a few posts to put together over the next while that share information from those papers, but one that stood out as particularly interesting was an update on how actual transport spending is tracking against expectations laid out in the 2009-2012 National Land Transport Programme.…
NZTA struggling to pay the bills?
There was an interesting media release from NZTA a couple of days ago, in relation to their decision to delay moving ahead with a reconfiguration of a major bottleneck in Warkworth – the Hill Street intersection. Somewhat unsurprisingly, NZTA have made the decision to delay this project – presumably because they’re working on advancing the Warkworth bypass section of the holiday highway and it would be pretty crazy to continue to spend tens of millions of dollars on upgrading the existing road when you’re going to bypass it soon.…
What does Wellington’s rail package mean for Auckland?
On Tuesday a quite important rail funding package for Wellington was confirmed by the government. This was originally announced a few months ago, and somewhat came out of the blue. Here are the details:
The package includes Government funding of $88.4 million to renew the rest of the signalling and traction assets on the network.…
National Infrastructure Plan
The government has today released its second National Infrastructure Plan, outlining its expenditure (and the principles behind it) on infrastructure such as transport, electricity, telcommunications, water and social infrastructure over the next four years. In terms of transport, as far as I can see there’s absolutely nothing new in the plan – but it provides an interesting and useful collation of information.…
PT Advocates: technicals & politicals
Alon Levy’s Pedestrian Observations blog has a fascinating post on the two group of ‘transit advocates’ in the USA, which he splits into the ‘technicals’ and the ‘politicals’. Here’s how he describes the two groups:
Politicals are the people who tend to trust the transit authorities, support a general expansion of all rail transit projects, and believe the primary problem is defeating oil-funded anti-transit lobbies.…
PT funding getting screwed over (again)
The agenda for next week’s Transport Committee meeting is online. Generally it’s a fairly light agenda, with the most interesting things likely to be presentations from Auckland Transport on the rail station upgrade program and on the final version of the Central Flagship Project bus changes.…
Where did the four new RoNS come from?
The draft Government Policy Statement document, that was released for consultation a couple of months back, was a highly perplexing and depressing document. Focusing an even greater amount of money on building new motorways, slashing (already slashed) spending on public transport infrastructure and capping money for new local roads and even the maintenance of existing roads is just plain stupidity – and is completely ignorant of recent transport trends both here in New Zealand and overseas.…
Steven Joyce’s revenge? Big changes proposed to LTMA.
The government has today announced some pretty big changes are being proposed to the Land Transport Management Act (LTMA). This is a pretty vital piece of legislation, forming the legislative framework around which most of the country’s transport plans, policies, rules and guidelines are created.…
AA Survey on Auckland Transport Issues
Other than the City Rail link, there was another interesting presentation at the transport committee on Tuesday, the results of a survey conducted by the AA. The survey was conducted in the middle of may and sent out to a selection of their Auckland members, they had 6030 responses and the results have a margin of error of +1.3%.…
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