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.…
15 Comments The 2008 Puhoi-Wellsford Study
The TVNZ website is reporting that a 2008 study into the Puhoi-Wellsford project, before it became a “Road of National Significance”, highlighted that it was an expensive and rather unnecessary project – at least in the immediate future. Here’s a snippet of the story:
Four years ago a roading consultancy group now working on the upgrade wrote: “The scope for substantial economic growth…is limited.”……
Other RoNS to cut back?
Yesterday’s announcement by NZTA that they are scaling back the Otaki to Levin section of the Wellington Northern Corridor Road of National Significance, from a four-lane highway to an upgrade of the existing road, has some really interesting implications – as Matt commented on in his post last night.…
Is the NZTA starting to scale back the RoNS?
An interesting development was announcement today by the NZTA. For the Wellington Road of National Significance they have decided on what they will do between Otaki and Levin. Here’s the press release: The NZ Transport Agency has today announced its plans for the next stage of the Otaki to Levin section of the State Highway 1 Wellington Northern Corridor Road of National Significance, proposing a staged upgrade of the existing highway, starting with a series of safety improvements between Otaki and SH57.…
Being Rational About Transport Spending
New Zealand spends a lot of money on transport. More than half our rates are spent on building and fixing roads and footpaths as well as funding buses, trains and ferries. Further to this, close to a third of what we pay at the petrol pump is tax, with the bulk of that money – around $3 billion a year – also being spent on transport, an ever increasing proportion going to State Highways.…
More information about the RoNS
A couple of further documents relating to the Roads of National Stupidity Significance, prepared by NZTA, provide a bit more information on where each of the projects are at.
Ministerial Briefing – February 27th
Investment Outcomes – March 16th
There’s also a good Radio New Zealand piece on the documents, in which both Phil Twyford and Julie-Anne Genter (Labour and Greens transport spokespeople) highlight their fundamental concerns with the RoNS package, whether they’ll actually be able to be funded, whether they’re value for money and so on.…
Puhoi to Warkworth Video
Another state highway project and another pretty animation, this time it is the turn of Puhoi to Warkworth.
http://youtu.be/k9hceuyND-0
Some of the earthworks in this project are going to be absolutely massive although in this video doesn’t really show them as well as the previous video due to it being zoomed out a bit more.…
NZTA Confirms Puhoi to Wellsford Route
The NZTA has announced its preferred route to build a motorway from Puhoi to Warkworth which is part of the Puhoi to Wellsford Road of National significance. The route makes a few changes to what was announced about a year ago and said to be due to them having refined the engineering and environmental issues along feedback from locals from consultation.…
Solving the “Warkworth Problem”
One of the amusing things about me and the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” is that my family actually owns a beach-house at Mangawhai Heads and our trips to and from that house would very much benefit from this highway being put through.…
Transport in 2011: some steps forward, some steps backwards
Trying to get my head around whether 2011 was a good year or not such a good year for advocates of a more balanced transport system like myself, is a bit of a challenge. There were a number of good things which happened, but at the same time there were also a number of steps backward.…
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