Brownlee is a Roads Scholar …
It’s been quite sad watching some of the recent exchanges in parliament.
The Minister of Transport Gerry Brownlee, and the Associate Minister Simon Bridges, have been swimming furiously against the arguments put forward by Julie Anne Genter from the Green Party.…
56 Comments NZTA spends $8m on RoNS promotion
A press release by Smart Transport notes some interesting information released to them under the Official Information Act:
Over $8 million has been spent by the Government on promoting a series of wasteful motorway projects, according to documents made available through the Official Information Act.…
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.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFl2mqCDc_M]
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJMfYwXIk3Y]
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLEQgszao-Y]
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.…
Should NZTA be allowed to borrow for the RoNS?
A media release by the Green Party today noted that upcoming changes to the Land Transport Management Act (the bill was tabled in parliament today by the sound of it) will allow NZTA to borrow much more money than they have previously been able to:
Having repeatedly insisted that there is no transport budget crisis, Gerry Brownlee is now seeking the power to borrow to build uneconomic motorways, Green Party transport spokesperson Julie Anne Genter said today.…
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.…
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.”……
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.…
The Tide is Turning on the RoNS
We have been pretty critical of the Roads of National Significance over the last few years for a number of reasons. The key reasons being that many of them will have very poor economic performance and that are sucking up huge amounts of transport funding which means other areas in the transport budget are being neglected.…
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.…
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