Guest Post: RoNS questioned again
This is a Guest Post by “Mr Anderson”
An article in Stuff today questions the Roads of National Significance programme and its economic benefits:
The Government’s $12 billion roads of national significance programme is upgrading routes used by as little as four per cent of the country’s traffic.…
18 Comments The Holiday Highway’s health and education benefits?
Some more debate over the merits of the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” in parliament today, this time with Associate Transport Minister Simon Bridges answering questions from the Greens’ Julie-Anne Genter: You can read the transcript of the exchange here.
It’s refreshing to see someone actually try to answer the questions, rather than just throw abuse around, like Brownlee often does.…
NZTA use of consultants questioned
Radio NZ broke a story on Monday about the amount of money the NZTA had spend on consultants to look at the Roads of National Significance showing that all up just over $200m had been spent on consultants. Here is the story:
Some $216 million has been spent since 2009 on investigation and design work for five of the seven roads – Puhoi to Wellsford, Auckland’s western ring route, the Waikato expressway, Wellington’s northern corridor and Christchurch motorways.…
Govt: We don’t care as long as the roads are built
Julie Anne Genter was been back in action in parliament yesterday asking questions of the government, this time around what it plans to do about future shortfalls to transport funds that are being predicted by the Ministry of Transport. The answers are quite frankly shocking and reveal that the government really care about the future impact the current expenditure as long as they get the roads built.…
Our Next Transport Minister?
Green Party transport spokesperson Julie-Anne Genter braved Kiwiblog to post a Guest Post recently:
Let me just start with what this post is NOT saying:
I am not saying that people should not, or will not, continue to use cars for many trips.…
The Poor Quality of our State Highway Spending
It has been really refreshing to see transport discussed so much in parliament this week – with the results of the exchanges spilling into the media, as evidenced by the interviews on Breakfast TV a couple of days back.
What seems to have really kicked this off are numbers coming out of the Ministry of Transport, and in a series of answers to written questions, highlighting the ever-increasing dominance of our transport budget by projects that have very low cost-benefit ratios.…
Traffic Volumes in Parliament – part 2
This week we have have seen Green MP Julie Anne Genter attacking Gerry Brownlee on transport spending, that attack continued again yesterday in parliament. You can read a transcript here
Gerry’s answers seem to be getting worse and worse. Now he seems to be saying that the party that sold itself as having sensible solutions to solve the economy shouldn’t get hung up on how well a project stacks up economically.…
Traffic Volumes in Parliament
Stu has recently been raising the issue that traffic levels have been flat and even decreasing over a number of years and yesterday the Greens spokesperson, Julie Anne Genter raised the issue during question time in parliament. Here is the video of the exchange: You can get a transcript of it here
What this really confirms (as if we didn’t know it already) is that the government is really running with a build it and hope strategy which to me definitely isn’t what we should be doing when the costs are in the billions.\…
Talking Transport in Parliament
Green party transport spokesperson and transport expert Julie Anne Genter pointed out in parliament yesterday how spending money on public transport can save us a whole lot of money and uses one of the best examples there is: the Northern Busway.…
Transport in the next parliament
I discussed yesterday that early signs are not looking particularly great for public transport, as the government continues to plough ahead with its road-centric transport policies. Something else which is quite interesting is to start thinking about which MPs will be playing the crucial roles on transport matters in parliament.…
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