Transport

I don’t wish to make light of the potential tragedy of having your kid bowled by a car, and thank goodness it looks like he’ll make a full recovery, but why is it always someone else’s fault when people do stupid things, and why is it always the case that “something must be done”?

Then yesterday morning as I was driving to work I saw a nearly identical situation. Where a girl jumped out from her mother’s car, run around the back of it and across the lane of oncoming traffic without even looking, right outside Remuera Intermediate. She ran right in front of a 20 tonne truck who slammed on his anchors and nearly clipped her. She just kept on running and her mother drove off. The look on the truck driver’s face was something to behold. He nearly killed that girl, it was just a matter of a few inches…and she just walked on, and will probably do it again today. I felt for the truck driver because there was no way it was his fault.  Read more »

Shayne Currie and all the other “decent journalists, trained and skilled” at the NZ Herald are all cock-a-hoop that they won their fair share in the media duopoly awards on Friday night.

Even David Fisher, Kim Dotcom’s PR go to guy, got an award. Just goes to show just how far NZ journalism has sunk when an “embedded journalist” gets an award for re-writing what a lawyer has released as news.

But on the day that they are skiting to all their readers they visit this travesty upon us all

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Do-gooders campaigned to lower Northern Territory’s speed limit from unlimited to 130km/h…apparently to try to lower the road toll.

They dropped the speed limit and the road toll increased.

The Northern Territory could soon return to having open speed limits on remote sections of highway after its road toll failed to drop at the same pace as the rest of Australia.

Northern Territory chief minister Adam Giles is reviewing speed limits on the Stuart, Victoria and Barkly Highways as part of a pre-election promise. Giles has already flagged likely increases to the speed limit on selected sections of highway, and is expected to announce his decision shortly after delivering next week’s Territory budget.  Read more »

In the UK David Cameron is copping a flogging for pouring billions into a high-speed rail solution that only rich pricks are going to be able to use. Anyone who suggests rail is the solution of the future transport issues should be taken out the back of the bike sheds and given a sound thrashing. Driverless cars are the way of the future.

Anybody who still believes high-speed rail is the answer to our transport problems, rather than an unaffordably grandiose throwback to a bygone era, needs to take a trip to Silicon Valley.

Some of the world’s cleverest scientists and engineers, including those at Google, are pioneering a new generation of driverless cars that will change our lives as much as the internet has already done.

David Cameron likes to think that he is making Britain more like California but his embrace of the £35bn taxpayer-financed HS2 project linking London to the Midlands and the North is, in fact, shockingly outdated, making him sound more like a French bureaucrat desperate to build monuments to himself than an enabler of US-style disruptive entrepreneurship.  Read more »

Yesterday Rodney Hide busted Lyin’ Len Brown’s chops over the city rail loop. I know we covered it yesterday but it is worth a re-visit.

It is an outrage that he is trying to steal taxpayer and ratepayer money while his officials dane a merry tune around the Local Government Official information and Meetings Act.

… Tony Randle, who spent months trying to get the analysis underpinning the 2010 Rail Business Case, succeeding only after a complaint to the Ombudsman.

Once Tony got hold of the analysis he found:

1. Basic spreadsheet errors. The spreadsheet fails to calculate the running costs of the second purchase of 26 trains. That ignores $689 million on the train option.

2. Incorrect exclusion of costs from the rail option. The study excludes the necessary funding to extend the Northern Busway into the city centre. Building this access is a necessary part of the rail option.

3. Addition of a second bus tunnel without explanation, adding hundreds of millions to the bus option.

4. Unreasonable assumptions, including a prediction that under the rail option, present bus capacity into the city centre will carry another 20,000 passengers a day without any new bus lanes or busways.

The errors and poor assumptions total $1.5 billion. The bias is systematic; each and every mistake favours rail over buses. Correcting for the errors reverses the study’s conclusions and shows the CBD bus tunnel more cost-effective than the City Rail Link.

Tony Randle’s review is damning of Auckland Transport’s report. And it’s damning of the rail option. Auckland Transport’s response? Stony silence.  Read more »

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 »

The road hating Green Taliban reckons we should cancel transmission gully to pay for Len’s Rail loop.

Meanwhile, David Shearer doesn’t agree, and favours canceling the State Highway One Upgrade north of Auckland to pay for Len’s loop.  This is about the millionth reannouncement of this policy. BTW they have said they’d use that money for loads of other things too.

Shearer told talkback in Wellington today that Transmission Gully was way more important than the so-called ‘Holiday Highway’:

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Last night Patrick Gower did what bloggers the world over do, he asked a question he already knew the answer to…and boy didn’t Jacinda bite hard like the teeth of a gin trap.

I’m all up for a bit biffo and it is absolutely brilliant that politicians and other media do it on Twitter in full view.

Pedro obviously touched a sore point with Jacinda.

The Greens are owning Labour and owning the opposition agenda. Take a look at how the Herald pitched it after today:

The Green Party has launched a campaign it hopes will convince Aucklanders to support the proposed City Rail Link.

The Greens, who have the backing of the Labour Party, want their Reconnect Auckland campaign to bring “tens of thousands” of people together to pressure the Government into helping build the rail link.

The campaign was launched today at the Green Party’s Auckland office, a potential site for the Karangahape Rd station once the link is built.

“The Greens were proud to have played an essential role in forcing the last Government to commit to electrification of the Auckland rail network, which was necessary to build the City Rail Link. Next step is the CRL,” party co-leader Dr Russell Norman said.

Normally it is the other way round. The major party has the backing of the minnow…in this instance it is Labour backing the Greens…I bet Clare Curran will be spitting into her Cornflakes reading that…she probably still thinks the Greens are stealing “their” voters.

It’s always good watching someone take a haircut.

It looks like Airbus is about to provide a re-configuration for airlines wanting to have fat bastard seats:

The aisle seat is the preferred location for fat bastard seats.

The lack of space on flights has long been a bugbear of British holidaymakers. But now the majority of passengers face aeroplanes with even less wiggle room after manufacturers announced plans to shrink two thirds of seats to make space for overweight travellers.

Window and centre seats on Airbus planes could lose an inch of width while extra-wide seats may be installed to accommodate passengers who are too big to fit in normal sized chairs.

Airbus is offering the option of the extra-wide seats, which will be installed only as aisle seats, on A320 jets to accommodate what it describes as “trends in demographics”.

The larger seats will be 20 inches across instead of 18 inches – the standard width – and will cost more than the regular seats.  Read more »

As is usual these day another green tech company has pissed away millions in taxpayer subsidies as it goes to the wall:

Fisker Automotive, the struggling government-backed hybrid sports car maker, on Friday terminated most of its rank-and-file employees in what sources said was a last-ditch effort to conserve cash and stave off a potential bankruptcy filing.

Fisker, which raised $1.2 billion from investors and tapped nearly $200 million in government loans, has “at least” $30 million in cash on hand, according to a source familiar with the company’s finances.

About 160 workers were fired at a Friday morning meeting at Fisker’s Anaheim, California, headquarters, according to a source who attended the meeting. They were told that the company could not afford to give them severance payments.

Fisker confirmed in a statement that it let go about 75 percent of its workforce but did not specify the number of workers affected. It called the move “a necessary strategic step in our efforts to maximize the value of Fisker’s core assets.”  Read more »