Warkworth-Wellsford: in or out?
Yesterday NZTA released a map of their projects and priorities in Auckland, as part of the National Land Transport Programme release of information. The whole map (in case NZTA remove or update it) is shown below: As Cam’s post yesterday noted, there’s something in the way Puhoi-Wellsford is shown that really stood out – showing the Warkworth to Wellsford section of the road as a “possible” Road of National Significance.…
12 Comments NZTA borrowing discussed further
A lot of discussion in parliament yesterday around the news that NZTA will be able to borrow money to a greater extent than it has been able to previously.
It seems that Brownlee is playing down the impact of the proposed change – saying that it’s not much change from the status quo and perhaps even that the change is only related to changing the mechanism for funding toll roads.…
Brownlee really does hate the CRL
Another testy exchange in parliament yesterday between Phil Twyford and transport minister Gerry Brownlee over transport matters in Auckland: Firstly, it seems pretty obvious that the government is unlikely to support any scheme to raise additional funding through congestion charging mechanisms, regional fuel taxes and so forth.…
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.…
Integrated Ticketing in Parliament
The HOP Card fiasco has continued in the last couple of days, with articles in the NZ Herald, on the news, on the radio and now in parliament – with Phil Twyford asking some questions yesterday around whether Auckland Transport were pressured by the government to allow Snapper to launch its product as a rebranded HOP card back in the first half of 2011.…
Analysing Auckland’s VKT
VKT, or “vehicle kilometres traveled”, is perhaps the most accurate way to measure – in aggregate – whether traffic volumes are going up or down. It’s perhaps not quite as critical as ‘peak flows’ in determining whether and where our infrastructure is at capacity, but it gives us an overall picture that most other measurements can only hint at.…
Our unbalanced transport spending
The madness of our current transport spending priorities have been highlighted a lot in recent weeks, even getting a pretty good airing on the National Party aligned Kiwiblog, thanks to a superb Guest Post by Green Party transport spokesperson Julie-Anne Genter.…
Brownlee loses the plot
A few days ago there was an interesting piece on Radio NZ’s “Morning Report” programme, which highlighted the funding shortfall in the transport budget over the next decade – largely arising from the proposed $10 billion spend-up on the Roads of National Significance.…
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.…
Processing...