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Two more "other" people

by Whaleoil on September 18, 2010

Carol “Caropotamus” Beaumont and Darren “Private Dancer” Hughes have now clearly defined themselves as “other people”. Now the Onehunga line is open we can expect to see Carol on the train rather than using a state paid taxi for transport into the city. It is only fair since she is such an advocate fro public transport.

Darren Hughes should be offered the opportunity to say how often he has used the train in the last year, or if he also believes that “other people” should use public transport. Bet he is a frequent user of taxi chits for sure.

I see also that another advocate for “other people” to use public transport but not a user herself is buggering off after achieving nothing. Farrar is right about his comments about the Snapper card comment, I was there and videoed the meeting. I filmed for over 40 minutes and out of the waffle there was nothing useable at all. In the end I couldn’t be bothered editing it.

All these advocates fro public transport never seem to use it themselves. I was asked a question the other night in front of 50 people at an Albany Ward candiates meeting about public transport. Before I answered I asked everyone for a show of hands for those who took public transport to get to the meeting and not a single hand was raised including the the person who was asking all us candidates to commit to spending millions of dollars completing an underground rail loop so that, apparently, “other  people” can use it.

At the same meeting Len Brown and his deputy nominee Andrew Williams both committed to spending $4 billion of “other peoples” money in order to deliver rail to the North Shore. They are liars and thieves in even suggesting such an appalling waste of money. For the same money you could build 3 bridges and deliver better roads.

It is high time that we started holding politicians to account for what they advocate. Len Brown puts out a video of him sitting on a train, I want him to tell us how often in the past 3 years as mayor he has used public transport. I bet it is able to be counted on one hand.

As I pointed out to the meeting on Thursday, not a one took public transport, and not a single candidate did either, only two candidates were honest, me and another. We don’t advocate public transport and we aren’t hypocrites.

Vote Slater for the Albany Ward.

Vote Slater - Albany - Auckland - Keeping the Buggers Honest

Vote Slater - Albany - Auckland - Keeping the Buggers Honest

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  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1201173949 petal

    Top drawer stuff Cam.

    You just exposed the lie.

    We like to vote for people that say they will do something responsible so we can feel less guilty about not doing it in the first place.

    You have exposed the Green Party philosophy! :)

  • steve

    We don’t want or need trains on the Shore. Too unreliable and always late. North Shore people do not like being controlled by the flaky leftards. Start building roads for the future now instead of shifting bottlenecks

  • johnqpublic

    Don’t build roads? What the fuck do buses use. Haven’t seen any flying overhead lately, so I figure they must do. Build more roads and allow more buses perhaps, there’s a idea. That’s public transport isn’t it? But if you build too many roads they apparently spawn more cars, just like carbon falls out of a tree when you cut it down.

  • sam1

    I think rail to the North Shore is a complete waste of time… the busway is perfectly adequate, as despite patronage growth of over 20% per year, its going to be some time before it reaches capacity. Rail would offer no other benefit- in fact, along the current alignment it would be inferior to buses, which can feed into the busway from surrounding suburbs.

    It would be a good idea to extend bus lanes over the harbour bridge during peak time though, as buses do now carry well over 30% of its commuters during the peak. Getting people out of their cars and into buses means they take up heaps less space- effectively increasing the capacity of the bridge hugely, without any new major investment. Nothing wins commuters over to public transport more than a big time advantage!

    Also, with growing congestion on our cbd roads, we really need to reduce the number of cars…. almost 40% of cbd workers still drive to work- and as density increases, we obviously cant widen those skyscraper-lined roads!

    I also see CBD loop as pretty crucial actually- the fact is that trains are working for Auckland- a relatively small investment over the past decade has seen train patronage grow almost 2000%.. We are now in a situation where a overloaded 4 or 6 car train is arriving at Britomart every 3 minutes in the morning., and patronage is still growing strongly. We cant improve on this frequency, or make the trains longer until the loop is finished… time is really starting to run out here- all those ‘other people’ you speak of will be unable to free up the roads for us shortly, no matter how much they want to.

    And Steve, trains are actually doing pretty well at keeping to schedule these days…. I catch one about once a week or so, and have been able to set my watch to them every time since about June, when western line double tracking removed the last major bottleneck. I catch them because they’re comfortable, relaxing, reliable and I can get some work done on on the way. I’m also a guy who likes his freedoms… such as to answer/make a phone call when I like, not have to crawl home behind a bunch of rubberneckers in a jam, or have a beer or two after work if I like.

    I’m not sure I buy into all the greeny ‘catch the but to save the world’ stuff, but from an economic and efficency point of view, I think rail and busways are crucial to Auckland sucessfully transitioning into a large city. Also, the pedestrian environment in the cbd is crap at the moment….. I would love to one day not have to be controlled quite so much by vehicle movements when walking up Queen Street, and maybe even have some tree lined pedestrian malls with stalls and things around.