Huge public support for City Rail Link
As I mentioned in this post recently, I feel that generally the public understands Auckland’s transport situation and wants better public transport. However, the big problem is that they generally only consider transport when voting in local elections (not national elections), whereas it’s central government that holds most of the transport purse strings.…
16 Comments NZTA struggling to pay the bills?
There was an interesting media release from NZTA a couple of days ago, in relation to their decision to delay moving ahead with a reconfiguration of a major bottleneck in Warkworth – the Hill Street intersection. Somewhat unsurprisingly, NZTA have made the decision to delay this project – presumably because they’re working on advancing the Warkworth bypass section of the holiday highway and it would be pretty crazy to continue to spend tens of millions of dollars on upgrading the existing road when you’re going to bypass it soon.…
Where did the four new RoNS come from?
The draft Government Policy Statement document, that was released for consultation a couple of months back, was a highly perplexing and depressing document. Focusing an even greater amount of money on building new motorways, slashing (already slashed) spending on public transport infrastructure and capping money for new local roads and even the maintenance of existing roads is just plain stupidity – and is completely ignorant of recent transport trends both here in New Zealand and overseas.…
Outlining why Puhoi-Wellsford is a stupid project
It was good to read in yesterday’s NZ Herald that the Labour Party has committed to cancelling the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” if they’re elected at the end of the year. While the polls indicate that the chances of Labour actually being elected are reasonably remote, if we assume that they retain this policy into the future, the long timeframes for actually planning, consenting and eventually constructing Puhoi-Wellsford should mean that the project never goes ahead in its current form, as eventually Labour will become the government again.…
Top economist questions RoNS
It was heartening to open up the newspaper this morning in Wellington and read this opinion piece on the poor economics of the “Roads of National Significance” (RoNS), prepared by Dr Michael Pickford, the former chief economist at the Commerce Commission and now an independent economic researcher.…
Scaling back?
Although it will (justifiably so) be quite some time before we get past the initial human tragedy of last week’s Christchurch earthquake to think about the financial cost of the disaster, clearly it will be an extremely expensive disaster to recover from.…
Auckland Council’s submission on holiday highway
The latest meeting of the Auckland Council transport committee includes, for information purposes, the final version of the council’s submission on the Puhoi-Warkworth section of the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway”. I previously blogged about the draft version of the submission, but as there was plenty of discussion on the matter at the last Transport Committee meeting, it’s worthwhile following up on the final form of the submission.…
Transport discussion in parliament
Green MP Gareth Hughes took on Transport Minister Steven Joyce in another Question and Answer session in parliament today – with the initial topic of conversation interestingly similar to a blog post I wrote a couple of days ago. A transcript of the debate can be found here.…
Auckland Council’s submission on Puhoi-Warkworth
The next meeting of Auckland Council’s Transport Committee is at 1.30pm next Tuesday in the Reception Lounge of the Town Hall. Compared to past meetings, the agenda for this one is fairly small – not surprising given that they had a meeting just before Christmas and most of the time in between has been holidays.…
More secrecy from NZTA
My second to most recent OIA request to NZTA finally arrived today. There are a number of interesting documents that I will read through over the next few days and potentially pick out parts that I think are worthy of discussion.…
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