Deferring Transport Projects
So what do you do when you’re told you have to cut some of your $826 million budget for capital projects and that in choosing what to cut it can’t apply to public transport projects?
Well it seems if you’re Auckland Transport you start by cutting PT and active mode projects.…
17 Comments National’s Cycling policy
Some great news yesterday with the National Party releasing one part of the transport policy which is actually semi decent. They’ve said they will invest an extra $100 million into building urban cycleways over the next four years.
Prime Minister John Key has today announced $100 million in new funding will be made available over the next four years to accelerate cycleways in urban centres.…
Sign up to increase cycling funding
In June the Draft Government Policy Statement (GPS) on transport was released by the Ministry of Transport. The GPS outlines where transport funding will go over the next 3 years. Sadly it considered the business as usual of focussing on the handful of Roads of National Significance projects, with everything else left to pick up the leftovers.…
Should we charge tourists extra for driving on NZ roads?
There have been a few suggestions recently that international tourists should be paying more to drive in New Zealand, or have to pass a driving test, or things along those lines. Winston Aldworth, the Travel Editor at the Herald, wrote a column last week suggesting that we should charge a fee for tourists who want to drive on our roads, along the lines of a new scheme in Germany (which was also described in the Herald last week, although the article doesn’t seem to be online).…
Cut projects or Increase Funding
The issue of how we fund transport projects has been in the news a lot recently with discussions of the council’s Long Term Plan (LTP). The Herald have been running a campaign basically suggesting the council finances are perilous and almost saying are bankrupt and trying to shift a lot of the blame on to the City Rail Link.…
Council pulling out the knife
The council today are starting to get serious about the next Long Term Plan (LTP) which will shape the councils spending for the next decade. We’ve long criticised them for blindly holding on to legacy projects from before we had a single council and it appears a key feature of this LTP is that they will finally start making some difficult decisions over which projects to keep.…
The hypocrisy of the GPS
If there’s one thing – more than anything else – that annoys me about the government’s approach to transport, it’s the double standard they apply between state highway projects (particularly RoNS projects) and public transport investment. Getting any public transport funding requires analysis after analysis, proof that the timing of the project is optimal, proof that it’s definitely the most viable and cost-effective option, links with triggers around the level of use or growth in the area the project is located – the list goes on.…
We can (and must) afford both CRL & new network infrastructure
Former ARC Councillor Joel Cayford has recently criticised the City Rail Link as being unaffordable in the near future – largely it seems because of the need to invest in a number of pieces of bus infrastructure to support the new PT network that’s being rolled out over the next few years.…
CFN and budget transport announcements
In the May budget the Government announced they would fastrack yet another $800 million of motorway projects, partially financed by a $375 million loan. These were projects that had been identified in the Prime Minister’s Auckland speech in 2013. There were 3 main projects as outlined below.…
AA’s Auckland infrastructure issues newsletter
In May the AA created the first issue of a newsletter highlighting infrastructure issues in Auckland (5.5 MB). The AA say they have 1.4 million members nationwide of which 900,000 are personal members and of those 285,000 are in Auckland. Between November 2013 and February 2014 the AA conducted two different research projects to obtain the views of many of their members through two research projects on issues like infrastructure priorities and how to fund it.…
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