A Fish goes away for the weekend to get some peace and quiet, and all hell breaks loose – has this town gone crazy? Happy Fourth of July indeed! Five minutes off is all I ask for – and in the mean time a city gets landed with two options for a great snaking python of concrete slithering around the park, the natives gird their loins…
transit
The latest iteration of what was once Transit, now called the NZ Transport Agency, (obligatory maori moniker: Waka Kotahi) is now into publishing. Edition no. 3 of Pathways is glossy and cheerful, and like most of the recent publications from recently re-organised public service departments, entirely full of bumpf and platitudes with nothing much useful to say at all. One article however was worse than plain useless:…
In what seems like a record fast time for Public Consultation, Greater Wellington Regional Council and Transit have turned out results from the public consultation round. As Transit’s “Phase 2 Consultation Report” notes, there was a total of 4673 submissions, including 3750 Option 3 “Green Alliance” postcards and 482 Chamber of Commerce postcards received, and a mere 71 actual written submissions from various bodies and organisations….
It seems that the roadmap to congestion pricing is itself congested: gridlocked by an array of obstacles and opinions. We have a $200k report/proposal, dense legal obstacles, technical challenges, a mayor that is “not even lukewarm”, and a public that is overwhelming against the issue. So what happens next? Nothing? The first hurdle seems to lie with parliament, in the resolution of the various legal issues…
In my last post, I expressed concerns with the light-rail proposal as detailed in the Ngauranga-to-Airport (N2A) strategic study. Implicit in my statement at the end of the post that “I have a hard time getting behind this light rail proposal at this point in time” is the fact that a different time or a different proposal could indeed change my mind. As for better proposals…
The Wellington urban class really wants light rail. And why wouldn’t they? Light rail is sexy transit…cruise smoothly, comfortably, and quickly to the local tiki bar; no more lurching starts and stops, no more endless waits behind four other buses boarding at the stop on Willis Street, no more fighting with cars for road space. And so there seems to be a grumbling undercurrent regarding the…