Hard News: Some Monday Things
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the Opera House - after all, that was only delivered 10 years late at 14 times the cost
When the end goal is to have the Opera House, does it matter if it's horribly late and terribly over-budget? No, it doesn't. With the waterfront stadium, though, the end goal (pardon the pun) was to have a venue for RWC 2011. If it's late, it doesn't matter how spectacular it is, how great the area around it is, it's still too bloody late. It has to be ready right on schedule, preferably before, and history in this country is not conducive to attempting any such thing on such a tight deadline.
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Matthew, I'm certainly not proposing that North Harbour is preferrable to Mt Smart. Simply that if Mt Smart was removed it wouldn't be as horribly awful as some believe. Although putting the Warriors there would be... absurd? death knell? pointless?
This is partly an overhang from the RWC discussions when I heard the North Harbour Stadium CEO give a very good dissection of why they were a good contender. Not strong enough for me to prefer it over Carlaw/waterfront/hell-even-Eden Park but he made me realise it's quite doable. Twickenham ain't exactly central and accessible for example.
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I just don't believe that getting to the North Shore is the traffic abomination most people make it out to be, although admittedly this arose as a train of thought for me re RWC stadium discussions
I think RWC is an OK comparison for a full stadium. At North Harbour, it's the traffic load/unload volume in such a short time. Planners are talking about needing something like 160 buses - and there are no alternatives other than cars. By comparison, raceday in Melbourne manages about four times the total public transport capacity just from trams.
In terms of rail at the other Auckland RWC venues, Kingsland station is getting the ability to load both platforms at once, and a new station at Morice Road was proposed for Mt Smart. I guess we'll see after the dust clears from the current regional shakeup.
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is not conducive to attempting any such thing on such a tight deadline
Couldn't agree more.
As a wise man once said, "http://www.lyricstime.com/charlie-drake-my-boomerang-wont-come-back-lyrics.html"
So where are all these recent infrastructure failures? That's right, there's sod all, but unfortunately mainly because people get shouted (or rather worn) down (whether officially or in the Court of public Opinion) before we even find out if it could have worked.
The reason we think we are crap is because we persist in thinking and behaving like we are crap. Many people were watching Greece building for the Olympics, almost hoping for them to fail. But they managed. If they'd based their bid on their track record, they wouldn't have bothered. But now they have some confidence. I bet what they learned more than anything else was what can be achieved if you stop asking every man and his dog for his opinion, and stop making excuses for your own inaction.
When New Zealanders go overseas and break all the local rules (because the don't know any better) then they often do remarkably well.
Our biggest problem is not that we're incapable, but we think it's clever to whine, criticise and pick holes in every idea. It's easier to just give up and not mention it in the first place.
So I agree, NZ is not conducive to big infrastructure projects, but the root cause is the attitude that assumes failure from the start, not any innate lack of ability.
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a new station at Morice Road was proposed for Mt Smart.
Once the Onehunga branch line is completed, and it's certainly looking very "done" at the moment, moving large volumes of people by train for events at Mt Smart becomes very do-able indeed. The line runs within 500m of the stadium, largely through mixed-zone residential/light industrial. Smacking a station at Maurice Road would be a very easy, clever move.
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The BDO might be better off relocating to Wellington.
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slarty, how long did it take to build the upgraded national transmission system through the Waikato? Oh, that's right, it hasn't even been started yet!
Can we build things on time, to budget? Sure we can. Once we've spent years studying it to death, planning for every last eventuality, and getting tripped up on the odd taniwha. The issue isn't with the actual construction, it's with getting construction commenced in the first place. The Eden Park upgrade is running on a pretty tight timeline, and it's only an upgrade . Starting a stadium from scratch, accounting for the fact that it's on reclaimed land in a seismically-active area, in a culturally-sensitive area, would be cutting things so fine that you could read a legal document through it without difficulty. Greece started planning for the Olympics nearly a decade before they opened, and still they got right down to the wire. We were only going to have five years to build, from scratch, the largest stadium in the country using a totally novel idea.
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Mt Smart is only 10 minutes walk from Penrose Station - haven't you people got legs?
(ISTR that the trains stop before the end of BDO, though. Which is nothing to do with the line?)
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I agree that it would be a shame if the Warriors were to move to Eden Park. Mt Smart is earthy and has a nice vibe to it.
And, as you pointed out, it's in the area where league is most popular -- and it's cheap, too. However, I'm not sure it is a "dream" to get in and out of. You can pay $10 (up from $5 last year...) to pay in an illegal parking lot being run out of an auto-body shop or you can park in the stadium or on the street quite a walk from the stadium. Getting back on to the motorway after the game takes eons.The problem really is that all the stadiums in this city are dogs. I've heard from a town planning expert that the general rule for a stadium is that there needs to be roughly 10,000 parking spots within a 5 minute walk of the stadium. I'm not sure any of them measure up to that.
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Can we build things on time, to budget?
Project West Wind is due to deliver first electricity this month
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quite a walk from the stadium
And not to labour the point, but people will go and watch an 80 minute rugby game, but 5 minutes walk to the car is quite enough exercise, thank you?
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Moving on, don't you think Clark and Cullen would have been ripped to shreds if they'd been as far off-message with each other as Key and English are with respect to economic recovery? Or even the cycleway?
Ah, but this assumes that Key and English are playing for the same team. Insider gossip suggests that the divide is as great as ever between the offices of the PM and Deputy PM. What better way to keep your face and name in the public eye than to constantly and gently undermine your leader?
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Judy, As they say on the Antiques Roadshow, provenance can increase the value of anything exponentially including gossip... So immortal words of an Antiques Roadshow expert, "firstly tell me a little about how you came to possess this nugget of insider gossip???"
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Mt Smart is only 10 minutes walk from Penrose Station - haven't you people got legs?
10 minutes? YFR! It's 1.5km, which would equate to a walking speed of 9km/h. That's a moderate jog, not any kind of walk.
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Ah, but this assumes that Key and English are playing for the same team. Insider gossip suggests that the divide is as great as ever between the offices of the PM and Deputy PM. What better way to keep your face and name in the public eye than to constantly and gently undermine your leader?
The other possibility for why they're off-message is that they genuinely have no idea how to deal with the recession and are just making it up as they go along.
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And not to labour the point, but people will go and watch an 80 minute rugby game, but 5 minutes walk to the car is quite enough exercise, thank you?
Yes, pretty much. The spectators aren't the ones on the field. And once you've spent 20 minutes getting out of the grounds, why would you want to spend another 20 minutes walking to your car? That's half the game time just getting away from your seat and into the car!
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The reason we think we are crap is because we persist in thinking and behaving like we are crap.
And so we get the government we deserve?
Project West Wind is due to deliver first electricity this month
and then Two wind farm projects mothballed and another goes ahead despite an All Black apparently.
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Slarty:
So I agree, NZ is not conducive to big infrastructure projects, but the root cause is the attitude that assumes failure from the start, not any innate lack of ability.
Too true. Think Big gave state-led investment a bad name, and Fay Richwhite & Equiticorp gave private capital a bad name. As it stands we're basically stuck with the worst of both worlds.
ScottY:
The other possibility for why they're off-message is that they genuinely have no idea how to deal with the recession and are just making it up as they go along.
Forbes-Coates v2.0 release notes: largely unchanged from v1.0, but now available on Twitter, Facebook, and RSS.
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Hi Judy,
Ah, but this assumes that Key and English are playing for the same team. Insider gossip suggests that the divide is as great as ever between the offices of the PM and Deputy PM. What better way to keep your face and name in the public eye than to constantly and gently undermine your leader?
You have to wonder. It does puzzle me that the gallery wouldn't be writing about it already, though. The Blair-Brown template is right there.
I've heard more than once from other journalists that English isn't a believer on the broadband project.
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Forbes-Coates v2.0 release notes: largely unchanged from v1.0, but now available on Twitter, Facebook, and RSS.
That was so postmodern.
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I was going to say, that time..
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Even Labour supporters have friends in strange places, Tom!
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In the absence of a better place for it, and given the disjointed nature of the opening post, a study of online sexual predators has shot down a bunch of myths. Including that posting pictures of kids online encourages stalking. It's also very, very murky as to whether or not there's been any real increase in the risk to youngsters from being online.
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The station is about 10 minutes from the back gate of Mt Smart, as opposed to the Beasley Ave route that google uses.
Also, I just find it amusing that so many sports supporters are corpulent sofa dwellers. (UK soccer is the worst for this!)
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Woo, the back gate. For events like the Big Day Out, the only entrance is the front one.
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