Land transport

A reader emails about road transport in relation to the Labour/Green commitment to introduce state control of power.

After huge success with power control models it must be time the Greens looked at nationalising the road freight and passenger transport industries.

This was done in the UK in 1947 with some success according to some old died in the wool (now dead)  poms consulted 60 years ago.

This will allow us to make sure that all in inefficiencies of the rail system are equally shared by the road freight system. It will ensure that all trucks are reduced to 5 tonnes capacity and that any deliveries over 50 miles will be done by rail.

This will mean that people travelling from town to town (cities will also be reduced in size) will be able to happily travel in buses without trucks blocking their view.

As a result supermarkets will reduce their stock items, and only one approved brand of any product will be sold.  Read more »

There is further confirmation that Labour and the Greens do not want to complete the Waikato Expressway.

Should they win the next election, we could see the most major intercity highway in the country detour into a 2 lane highway through the shittiest town in the country.

NZTA’s Waikato-Bay of Plenty regional director Harry Wilson said the agency had spent $28.9m buying properties along the designated route of the Tamahere-Cambridge section.

The agency has a total purchasing budget of $50.3m and, to date, had made both full and partial property purchases.  Read more »

The road toll is about as low as we are going to ever get it. Last year 306 people died on the roads…

The 2011 toll is the lowest since records began in 1952.

“Although the 2012 toll is one of the lowest on record, I’m saddened that it is an increase on the 2011 toll,” Associate Minister of Transport Simon Bridges said.

“While the full reasons behind the 2012 toll won’t be known for some time, we do know that both the number of crashes with multiple fatalities and the number of motorcyclist fatalities increased.”

The number of crashes in 2012 with three or more fatalities was eight (resulting in 30 deaths) compared with one (resulting in three deaths) in 2011.

The number of motorcyclist fatalities increased from 33 in 2011 to 45 in 2012. That equated to 15 per cent of all road deaths in 2012.

Read more »

The Herald on Sunday continues their wonky jihad on drunk driving by attacking the government.

New Zealanders are dying and being seriously injured in crashes that could have been avoided with a lower drink-drive limit.

The Government has refused to move on a lower blood alcohol limit until it has proof it would make a difference – but the whole time that evidence has been available from the Ministry of Transport and Cabinet refuses to consider it.

Statistics obtained by the Herald on Sunday under the Official Information Act show in the last four years 20 people have been killed in road accidents involving drinking drivers just below the legal limit.

Another 281 people have been seriously injured in crashes where a drink-driver was also tested and found to be just under the limit.

That is all well and good, but their hypothesis is flawed. If the stats are as they say..and since they haven’t released them then we can’t know for sure, that these people died with a blood alcohol level of just under the current limit, then they would still be dead if the limit was reduced..except now they would have been over it.

To blame the government for poor decision making and driving skills of drunk drivers is pathetic.

The Herald on Sunday cannot claim that those 20 people would have still been alive if the limit had been lowered.

I knew it. Public transport is the greater evil not cars. Autonomous, self driving cars is the way of the future, not buses or trains.

[Consider] autos with but one passenger and compare them to transit vehicles in which every seat is full. (For example, see this.) But in the real world, this is emphatically not the case. At any given time, the average auto has somewhere around 1.6 passengers, and the average (typically 40-seat) bus has only about 10. Rail vehicles typically have more passengers (on average about 25), but then again they are also typically much larger. Thus their average load factor (percentage of seats filled) is also not high, at about 46 percent for heavy rail systems (think subways in major cities) and about 24 percent for light rail (think systems that mostly run at street level).

It is not clear that moving around large and largely empty vehicles is much of an improvement over moving around smaller ones. In fact, it may be worse. According to the Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book, in 2010 transporting each passenger one mile by car required 3447 BTUs of energy. Transporting each passenger a mile by bus required 4118 BTUs, surprisingly making bus transit less green by this metric.