NZ Herald loses the plot
In response to the Auckland Regional Council finally coming up with a transport wishlist that is not dominated by roading projects, today’s Herald editorial has completely lost the plot. I had actually been quite happy with the Herald’s coverage of transport issues lately, with the general feeling coming across in the paper that the path we’ve headed down over the past year quite possibly isn’t the cleverest way to go, but I guess when it’s the “bigwigs” of the Herald who write the editorials we see that old habits die hard:
The council, though soon to be superseded by a single city, is letting its transport committee proceed to publish an updated strategy notable for its divergence from the Government’s plans.…
22 Comments Joyce rethinking electrification cutbacks?
Well my post a couple of days ago has certainly led to some interesting results, with the NZ Herald reporting that Steven Joyce is “upset” at the proposal to nearly halve the number of new electric trains that Auckland will get.…
Government ruining electrification
There has been a flurry of activity since a post I made last week called for information on why the heck it’s taking so long to find out how the electric trains for Auckland’s rail system will be funded. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that the ARC finally got around to making a press release on the matter the day after I made that post, or perhaps after reading my post they went “crikey we’d almost forgotten about that!”…
25 year high for Public Transport
The Herald reports today that public transport use is at a 25 year high for the Auckland Region, and also that the results of a survey show that people’s experiences of public transport are improving – which bodes well for the future:
Use of public transport in Auckland has hit a 25-year high, with commuters reporting increased satisfaction with the service on offer.The…
Hamilton-Auckland rail service – good news?
Some potentially good news in a NZ Herald article today on the proposed Hamilton to Auckland railway service.
KiwiRail has agreed to present a proposal to Hamilton City within weeks on a trial daily passenger service to and from Auckland.
“We are refining a proposal to run a service using the Silver Fern railcars between Hamilton and Auckland on a trial basis,” spokesman Kevin Ramshaw said last night.…
An odd NZ Herald article
There is a rather strange article in the New Zealand Herald today, entitled “Aucklanders stick with cars as best way to travel”. I’m not quite sure how most popular equates to “best”, but that’s not really the issue here. The article is based around a media release by Statistics NZ on the ways in which people get to and from work:
A new analysis of commuting patterns, published yesterday by Statistics NZ, shows that the proportion taking the car to work in the Auckland region rose from 78.4 per cent in 1996 to 78.6 per cent in 2001 and 78.8 per cent in the last Census, in 2006.…
Bizarre Herald Article
Today there was a truly bizarre article on transport in the NZ Herald. Well, the article itself wasn’t that strange – largely bemoaning the government’s stupidity in forcing Auckland to adopt its roads building fetish, even though a lot of work has been done by councils to determine that people actually want better public transport a lot more than they want more roads.…
Jim Hopkins – the 1950s man
I just about choked on my coffee this morning while reading Jim Hopkins’ opinion piece: Supporters of rail are on the wrong road. With such proclamations as “…the fact there’s more voters in one Auckland electorate than there are in the entire South Island” I was certain this was just a joke, some funny sarcasm perhaps in there to just show what dinosaurs the supporters of roads-centric transportation policies are.…
Why is the Herald Scaremongering?
At first glance of the New Zealand Herald’s leading article today I was pretty worried, with rail electrification and integrated ticketing supposedly threatened by some fairly significant investment losses that the Regional Council (along with the rest of the world) has suffered in the past few months.…
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