Making headway on crucial policy

The Government has struggled with some major reforms, drawing opposition that has bogged them down. On Sunday it was forced to withdraw the entrenchment clause in legislation for the very messy Three Waters reforms. There’s also the state media merger, health system reforms, fair pay agreements and agriculture’s role in climate targets.

The Government also released details of funding to help councils with transport projects, which has significant backing from local body officials.

If there was a policy area the Government needed to make progress in to help its overall goals, it would be transport. The portfolio involves a complex combination of projects that aim to make up for underinvestment in the past but also need to collectively cut carbon emissions in rapid time.

Transport accounts for 17 per cent of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas gross emissions, according to the Ministry for the Environment.

With transport, the Government is making a decent stab at delivering long-term benefits. It absolutely needed to with New Zealand behind comparable countries on transportation systems.

The Government, the NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi and local authorities have managed to build momentum on transport through specific projects and the clear goal of diversifying choices.

There have been setbacks, criticism and decisions considered mistakes, such as the Waitematā cycle and walkway bridge proposal. Wider visions for transport often get stuck in disputes at a community level over what people who live locally prefer.

Yet the general direction of transport policy and what is trying to be achieved is clear.

The $350 million outlined on Sunday is for transport infrastructure nationwide to enable councils to provide new bus lanes and bus stop upgrades, cycleways and school safety measures.

The latest funding is a drop in the bucket in the context of the wider $8.7 billion being invested in infrastructure projects across rail, public transport, walk and cycleways and road upgrades. The National Land Transport Fund has a further $4.5b in annual funding.

In Auckland, the main project is the $14.6b light rail, with a second harbour crossing a likely future target.

In the midst of dense government changes that people struggle to understand, transport developments are bringing about changes people can make sense of in their daily lives. That would have seemed highly unlikely a decade or so ago.

On Friday night I was treated to a wonderful night out watching the play Shamalot. Some of my family came to the show too. It was a magical night: professional sets, beautiful costumes, hilarious lines/script, amazing singing/dancing, and acting. Well done Riverbank Theatre!

G. Thompson

Hikurangi

Speedy solutions

Seldom if ever have I read such a mish-mash and mash-up of rightwing comparativism, false dichotomy and transferred assumptions than John MacDonald's Op-Ed ‘Drop in speed limits a cop-out' ( Advocate

November 17) although Robert Brown's letter ‘Roads the problem not speed limits' ( Age November 24) comes close.

There is no comparison between speed limits on the road in a car and “passengers putting on lifejackets before they take off from the airport” in an aeroplane. None. This is 'ifLost in Space'“does not compute” material.

To make comparitivisms like this, or to simply assert “the condition of the roads is the problem”, due to road repairs, is effectively to renounce thought ; to negate one's own argument.

We know statistically that speed is the second highest killer on the roads after alcohol. This is a simple fact.

That cars have become faster and technically 'safer' at higher speeds doesn't change this almost regardless of the road surface condition. Indeed, the opposite may be true. Poorer roads that lead to slower driving may be safer?

Already at Mangamuka Bridge you can turn of SH1 in a 70 km/h zone and straight into 100 km/h through Mangataipa Gorge, a road that's arguable as unsafe as any section of

Mangamuka Gorge.

I'd refer these gentlemen to Bob Bingham's excellent recent Op-Ed 'The real reason for road failures' which, as I've been saying for years, is largely the result of trucking forester and Big H-Rig tandem truck damage, nowadays combined with much more frequent, severe and hardly unrelated climate events. Yet we are in the midst of ”No Harvest”, Carbon-Sink, Pine Tree PestPlant forest planting frenzy sure to keep this trucking travesty going for another 90 years, 83 of which we almost certainly cannot guarantee to our mokopuna.

Wally Hicks Kohukohu