Road transport

Len Brown wants a referendum on tolling motorists to pay for his trainset:

Auckland Mayor Len Brown is considering a referendum on tolls and congestion charges to finance the $2.4 billion inner city rail loop and other transport projects.

Tolls and congestion charges will be included in his first 10-year budget as alternative funding sources to rates and taxes to meet a $10 billion funding shortfall for major transport projects.

Mr Brown yesterday told a Herald Project Auckland business lunch that he was considering a referendum to get a mandate to introduce new charges on motorists as alternative funding sources to rates and taxes.

It is great that Len Brown is considering a referendum, and since he is, how about he adds on a referendum question about Maori seats on the Auckland Council?

It is a bit like all blacks wearing mascara. Or having their chests waxed. Most refined = gay.

Speaking at the Australian International Motor Show earlier this year, Holden boss Mike Devereux highlighted a trend that sees utes moving away from their traditional utilitarian purposes.

“There’s going to be a much cooler lifestyle edge to these types of vehicles rather than being  just a ute that goes off road, tows things and the tradies use,” Devereux said.

As such, GM says the Colorado is its “toughest, highest-performing and most-refined mid-size pick-up truck ever.”

Are Ford and GM competing for the gayest ute?

The Southland Times editorial has picked up what Labour has so far failed to…that their election campaign using illegal stop sign facsimiles has failed.

It was inevitable, of course. The only real surprise is that it has taken almost three weeks for Labour’s latest attention-grabbing bid to crash and burn.The “Stop asset sales vote Labour” campaign, launched in Auckland on April 4, effectively died of scornful, mocking laughter on Thursday. It should not be lamented, even by the most ardent of Labour supporters.

In itself, there was nothing wrong with the concept and a great deal to recommend it. National’s publicly announced plans to begin selling off state assets if (when) it wins the next general election have found so little favour with the electorate that even prominent business leaders have voiced their opposition.

Handled with skill, finesse and a little luck Labour’s campaign could have been, if not a winner, at least a long poll with which to poke the borax. It could even have become long enough to lever the party back up the popularity ladder. Few will look back with favour on the raft of sales of some of our most valuable state assets in the 80s and 90s by successive Labour and National governments.

So the concept was good. The only parts missing were the skill, finesse and luck.

And that scornful, mocking laughter was very loud at my place.

Whoever came up with the concept of plastering the message on imitation road stop signs should be led away to a disused shed out the back somewhere, put under 24-hour guard and released only after the next general election is over.

Whoever then came up with the idea of selling these signs to the party faithful at $10 a pop should be made to share the shed.

But a desert island, a really remote desert island, should be reserved for the genius who came up with the idea of putting the signs, signs with the same shape and colouring of real road stop signs, along the median strip of a road in the Hutt Valley this week.

And Labour still thinks everything is fine with their campaign and they will continue to run their Ponzi scheme. Sue Moroney was even skiting on Facebook about her illegal sign activities in Hamilton long after the issue was highlighted for all to see.

The Land Transport Safety Authority takes a dim view of any roadside signs that could distract drivers. The regulations are pretty clear: “A person must not install on a road, or in or on a place visible from a road, a sign, device or object that is not a traffic control device, but that may be mistaken for a traffic control device.”

You’d think that even if someone was a sheep short in the top paddock he or she would realise that slapping big stop signs along a busy road might have caused a few problems for motorists, but no.

Up they went. And within an hour, down they came again, courtesy of the Hutt City Council, responsible for controlling the roads in the area. The signs, the council noted in a press release, did not meet any road signage requirements and following a complaint from the public they were removed.

Labour still insists that every thing is ok and they are #winning. Unfortunately, no matter how hard they spin the facts the law is the law and their signs are illegal and can’t be displayed.

Unfortunately, the Labour Party still didn’t get it. General secretary Chris Flatt huffed that it was all a dastardly plot by National Party bloggers and right-wing groups to ruin the campaign. “Any reasonable person would see that the nature of the writing and the `vote Labour’ on there indicates they’re not traffic control devices,” he insisted, and vowed party supporters would continue using the signs, though they had been told to be more cautious near roads.

We have some advice for Mr Flatt: throw the signs in the shed, or ship them off to the island. Consult Marketing, 101. Get rid of the negative Stop the asset sales. Be positive. Try something like Save our assets. On a sign that does not look like a road stop sign, or a give way, or even a pedestrian crossing. Do not erect the new signs anywhere near roads. Let’s try to keep the road toll down.

Perhaps some Labour MPs are getting it, they have started removing the avatar from their Facebook profiles, although their transport safety spokesperson was a little slow to grasp the problem for her. She still has the sign in her profile pictures though making her position on anything remotely connected with road safety somewhat tenuous. Especially when there is a photo of her standing ON a road waving an illegal sign.

Annette King is a former transport Minister, you would think she would get it? Nope, not likely:

Andrew Geddis keeps pointing out Labour’s folly:

There are none so blind as those that will not see.

Despite their leader saying this morning that the signs would be staying, Labour is now busily removing the signs. NZPA reportson Labour’s sign U-Turn:

A number of Labour Party campaign signs have been removed from a Hutt Valley street after being found to be in breach of road requirements.

The signs, which emulate road stop signs in shape and colour, but contain the message “Stop asset sales vote Labour”, had been erected along the median strip of a road in Petone….

…The Hutt City Council, which is the road controlling authority for the area, said this afternoon that the signs had been taken down.

“The signs did not meet any road signage requirements and following a complaint from the public they were removed,” the council said in a statement.

General secretary of the Labour Party Chris Flatt said the party had not been formally told of any rules the signs had breached.

“We were told they were taken down within an hour,” Mr Flatt told NZPA.

“Any reasonable person would see that the nature of the writing and the ‘vote Labour’ on there indicates they’re not traffic control devices.”

Mr Flatt said the party would continue to use the signs and had told members to be cautious near roads.

“We’re aware of these things but we think this is a little bit of a campaign by National Party bloggers and right-wing groups to take the issue away from the actual campaign.”

So they take the signs down and now say they will continue to use them despite them being a) Against the law and b) a safety hazard.

Labour still isn’t getting it.

There are very serious reasons why there is an international consensus and convention on road signs. For Phil Goff to brush aside the law and say it does not apply to Labour is cavalier to the point of recklessness.

Wikipedia makes it clear why signs have been standardised around the world:

“countries have adopted pictorial signs or otherwise simplified and standardized their signs to facilitate international travel where language differences would create barriers”

As mentioned there’s an international convention on signs:

Road sign standardization was set since language differs in every country so an international road signs was developed and adopted. In fact, during the Vienna Convention on Road signs and signals of Nov 8 1968, 8 main categories were defined.

Why it is important not to copy road signs:

“The shapes and colors of traffic signs have specific meanings and you have to be able to recognize them immediately.  Why? Even if a stop sign is damaged or blocked by dirt or snow, you know by the octagonal shape and red color that you must stop.”

And in the US, three chaps who removed a road sign that led to a triple fatality crash were sentenced to 30 years prison on manslaughter charges.

The reason I mention all this – is because this year, when Labour is ‘blanketing the country‘ with its illegal signs – we’ll have more tourists travelling on our roads than ever before for the Rugby World Cup.  This is a recipe for serious confusion and the NZTA should act.

In a great voting winning strategy Len Brown has decided to tax the crap out of private transport, meaning only the wealthy will be able to afford to drive. he has many nefarious schemes to do this including congestion charges, taxes on private transport, regional fuel taxes and perhaps most nefarious of all he will stop funding roads.

The Auckland Council’s spatial plan proposes funding public transport improvements with congestion charges, network access charges, a regional fuel tax and levies on private parking spaces.

Sure, this will win him a lot of votes in the chardonnay socialist parts of central auckland but will cost him a lot in his power base of South Auckland.

Yesterday I destroyed the presumptuousness of Wendyl Nissen’s “Green Goddess” tag. Today I will go further and suggest that perhaps she should be driving a Hummer instead of a Toyota Prius if she is serious about claiming her car is “green” and she doesn’t like “nasty chemicals”.

and then there is this Australian view of the “green” Prius.

When will car manufacturers start advertising and sponsoring more muscular cars and commentators, having them drive manly cars/trucks?

I bet my audience slays Wendyl’s any day of the week. So if you want to look like a goober, lose money, and yet feel “good” about being “Green” then follow the banal touting of Wendyl Nissen.

Oh and about those nasty chemicals she won’t have in her garage?  She forgot to mention the 45 litres of petrol sitting in the fuel tank.

The material safety data sheet for unleaded gasoline shows at least fifteen hazardous chemicals occurring in various amounts, including benzene (up to 5% by volume), toluene (up to 35% by volume), naphthalene (up to 1% by volume), trimethylbenzene (up to 7% by volume), Methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) (up to 18% by volume, in some states) and about ten others.

The ExxonMobil MSDS for unleaded petrol in New Zealand shows the following “nasty chemicals” that most demonstrably are in Wendyl Nissen’s garage when she parks her “very green” Toyota Prius there.

Nasty Chemicals in Wendyl Nissen's garage

It seems that Toyota and Glitrap City toyota along with Wendyl Nissen are prepared to willfully lie, and lie utterly about the fact that there are “nasty chemicals” in the Green Goddess’s garage.

The “death free” Queens Birthday weekend had terrible weather conditions, and as a result there were less accidents because people tended to drive to the conditions, or didn’t drive at all. In other words the weather was the educating and common sense factor, not the vaunted crack down on the policing tolerance of the speed limit.

From what I can see of the deaths in the weekend they were not merely as a result of speed, but of poor driving and poor vehicle control and knowledge.

By definition every motor accident is a result of speed, as two stationary vehicle will not hit each other or anything else.

The battle that needs to be fought is the poor standard of driving, not a battle against exceeding an arbitrary speed limit.

In France or Germany a piece of straight motorway is safe at 130 kph, while a similar straight piece of road in NZ is unsafe at 130kph. How does that work?

Is a French or German driver safer at 130 than a Kiwi? Doubtless the answer is yes, because Kiwi’s can’t drive. It is too easy to get a licence, and the Police are only interested in revenue rather than education.

The only thing that has reduced road deaths in recent years is the improvement in vehicle and road engineering. The Police speed campaign can not lay claim to any gains, as has been clearly demonstrated this past weekend.

NZ Road Toll 2004-2008. Statistics: http://www.transport.govt.nz/research/road-toll/

Peter Cresswell is perhaps one of the best thinkers in the NZ Blogosphere. Today he has a post on the failure of the Police campaign to scare us into driving safely on the long weekend.

Eight people killed on the roads over one long weekend is a tragedy.

The tragedy of this weekend’s road toll is that police were led to pursue a flawed traffic policing policy this holiday weekend on the basis of believing their own headlines.

They were put off by the statistical anomaly of Queens Birthday weekend, when a weekend with no deaths on the roads followed the announcement for that weekend of a traffic policing policy of “zero tolerance” for speed. (A policy that also generated a huge uptick in revenue.)

All the authorities trumpeted that the policy caused the triumph with the road toll. They were so certain they re-imposed the policy this weekend, and re-ran all the ads and notices warning motorists to watch out for policemen watching them.

But they forgot that correlation is not causality.

Trying to convince drivers that speed is everything—that driving a few kph over the speed limit is going to kill us all—and convinced themselves by their own publicity, they  succeeded only in fooling themselves, and being surprised this morning at a number they thought they had no right to expect.

Eight people killed is a tragedy.  Perhaps some of those drivers might not have died if police over the weekend had focussed on dangerous driving instead of sitting on their bums to collect revenue from motorists driving a few kph over the speed limit.

A serious re-think over the focus on speed alone needs to be done in PNHQ. Focusing on speed fails the logic test, especially on a weekend where the weather was good and the roads were dry.

Accidents do happen and for a whole lot of reasons, not all of them are because of speed. The Police need to realise this, unless of course their big focus is for revenue reasons rather than for safety reasons.

It also stands to reason that there is an inherent number of deaths that will always be associated with roading and driving. We must surely be approaching that number of annualised roading deaths now, meaning that spending millions advertising to stop more deaths will do nothing. In fact the case can be argued that non-governmental initiatives like side intrusion beams, air-bags, collapsible steering columns, better suspension, better roading technologies and crumple zones have done more to alleviate road deaths than any government advertising campaigns.

Peter Cresswell raising an interesting point about the thinking of the Police. That if “the statistical anomaly of Queens Birthday weekend, when a weekend with no deaths on the roads followed the announcement for that weekend of a traffic policing policy of “zero tolerance” for speed is correct” then now the reverse must be true, that putting more Police out on the roads actually caused more accidents.

From the Earthquake zone via the tipline.

When you own a house with a mortgage or a car and have a loan there is a requirement to maintain them in an insured state. For cars that means making sure they are registered and warranted. The owners of these two cars are in for a shock when they trot along to the insurance company.

The Subaru Impreza, it seems it didn’t have a WoF. Maybe it was left there deliberately! Even if not, it shouldn’t have been on the road.

The BMW in the other picture also didn’t have a WoF, and its licence expired on Sunday.

There are calls, from the pinko and the mendicant classes, for the government to bail out those who didn’t have insurance. I will maintain my consistency and call bullshit on that. The government shouldn’t have bailed out SCF and they sure as hell shouldn’t bail out the uninsured. If the government bails out the uninsured then every insurance company may as well just close their doors as there is no need for insurance anymore, the state will have effectively nationalised the whole industry.

Subaru Impreza - no warrant for 3 months

BMW - No warrant for two months

Toyota Corona -No rego for over a month

Boy-racer cars and dodgy unlicensed cabs, crushed and off the streets, there are some blessings amongst the carnage.

There is nothing more annoying than when you travel on the motorway and discover some halfwit is going at 70, or on state highway one and there is moron travelling at 80, with a huge tail back being caused by one driver’s selfish decision to drive below the speed limit.

Slow drivers on open roads cause crashes. They force people that just want to travel at the speed limit to take tough decisions about passing, and some of these cause accidents.

So the Whaleoil transport policy is that there will be minimum speed limits on motorways and main roads. If you drive more than 10 km under limit when there is no good reason too (being old, dopey or useless is not a good reason) you should be fined for holding up traffic and creating anger among fellow tax payers who expect you to drive at the speed limit.

Given that the ratepayers of Albany Ward overwhelming favour using their cars for transport this is a sensible policy for them to support.

Responsibilities come with along with rights. If you want the right to drive on the main road, you have the responsibility to ensure you travel at a speed that allows traffic to flow.

Under Whaleoil’s transport policy people whinging about a minimum speed limit are classed as other people, and will be forced to become mandatory users of public transport.

And the impact of slow drivers on productivity is huge, so we need to stop slow drivers from wrecking the driving experience for the rest of us, as well as costing the economy.