Hard News: Some Week
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Some background reading on the induced demand created by motorway extensions. Take-home point: arguments that new motorways decrease congestion don't add up.
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with all due respect
Sir Humphrey: Minister, with the greatest possible respect ...
Jim: Oh, you're going to insult me again?- The Greasy Pole episode of Yes, Minister
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(one cannot help feeling that if Mt Albert had voted national, like Auckland Central did, we would get a tunnel like Victoria Park).
I thought that myself whilst on the other thread last night. That was the only difference I could see, and what are it's costings? Let's compare one against the other. Joshua? :)
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Per kilometre the Vic Park Tunnel is VERY expensive. More expensive than the full Waterview Connection per kilometre. The total cost of the Vic Park Tunnel project is around $430 million.
However, most other CMJ work was predicated upon having the Vic Park Tunnel upgraded, and simply doesn't work until that time (like going from Sh16-SH1 northbound in the evening peak and waiting 20 minutes at the ramp signal). However, if the Vic Park Tunnel had been built as a widening of the existing viaduct it would have destroyed even more of Victoria Park. This park is used by people all over Auckland as it is so central.
I don't think it's really a political issue - the Vic Park Tunnel got consent when Labour was in government. It also got confirmed funding at that time, the only thing National has done is not cancel it.
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with all due respect
Worf (to Data): With all due respect, BEGONE! , sir.
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Rich:
As far as I can see Transmission Gully is only of use to a small number of (possibly SUV driving) commuters from Paekakariki and points north to Wellington. Who value their creature comforts too much to use the perfectly adequate train service.
Ie, Too Bourgeois To Bus, or Too Vain To Take The Train. Then again, would there be a market for an Orient Express-type service?
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Over the last decade the flavour and conduct of politics in NZ has become markedly dodgy and a lot less than one should expect from our elected representatives. Both sides of the house have problems.
The issues surrounding "Mr Bakshi" need to have legs; the way the figures are likely to stack up could prove interesting. It all seems to lean heavily towards a situation underpinned by dishonesty.
Is it as “bad” as “special interests” sponsoring legislation, gaining appointments or favours through donations to political parties?
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An in Guatemala the military police are reputedly hunting down and arresting twitterers - well at least it's not Fiji .....
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"If I want to spend $500,000 on a Ferrari but spend $20,000 on a Suzuki because that's all I can afford, have I really saved $480,000?"
Did you finance it ?
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Are you going burgling in it?
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If you want a nice shirt, go to Strangely Normal. They're wicked.
Russell - nice product placement : )
Great to hear that they are still around, (proof that a good product will persevere) I remember doing their monthly ads in RIU way back when, and dining near their shop whenever we had enough money from mail orders on Duran Duran books - ta Murray! : )I *love* customs at Auckland Airport
Not Customs per se - but what about the scanning security at airports these days?
Having just put my defacto father-in-law on a plane back to Napier, I warned him about not taking his treasured Swiss Army knife in his pocket, (they don't check on the provincial flights out). When scanned he rang all the bells and they tried to confiscate his Leatherman, pliers, and crescent - luckily we were there to retrieve them for him (but if we hadn't been... - why don't they have bubble bags you can buy and post these items to yourself instead of just taking them to do god knows what with? - it's called customer relations!)
But then they let him totter on to the plane with his hardwood cane with the pointed handle - easily able to puncture a pressurised aluminium shell, perspex window or cranium!!
go figure...I go bespoke.
So that's who the new cycle ways are for!
Me, I go side on (Cleanly)yrs
Ayn Rand Om-Factor -
If you want a nice shirt, go to Strangely Normal. They're wicked.
agreed, I live in them (saves on rent). I get asked all the time where I buy my shirts, so much so I'd thought about asking Michael and Claire for cards.
I'm not sure about 5th Ave, they always look a little too much like the knockoffs you see in the markets here. I know they're not, but it's a bloody fine line...
And why is this sort of labelled stuff so much more to buy in NZ than anywhere else (Dubai aside)?
If you happen to go to Strangely Normal you could always pick up one of the last cheapo tickets to this:
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near their shop whenever we had enough money from mail orders on Duran Duran books - ta Murray!
I felt we were well due the dinners since a) we'd had to listen to Murray's Duran Duran and Bob Seeger records, and, b) We were the ones who had to pack the bloody things up and take them to the Wellesley St PO.
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I have been watching Parliament TV. This is the best I have ever seen.
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I have to say one thing for NZ scanning of carry on stuff - every single time in NZ I have to explain my harmonicas (apparently they look like something evil and what that is is a state secret) but in the US no airport security (other than Seattle every time) notices them.
Probably it's just that most American TSA people are so jaded they don't notice anything (attn TSA people in Oakland, I still want my ethernet tools back)
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Are they still going sofie?
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We were the ones who had to pack the bloody things up and take them to the Wellesley St PO.
All of a block away from Darby st, phew! - just opposite Blue Beat wasn't it ? ; ) (and DKD Upstairs, yum) and on a lucrative trip to to the PO box we could go to Dominoes - I haven't had better deep fried Tofu since.
And lest we forget at least 2 Rheineck Rock Award winners were part time mail order packers - No one from Ardijah though!
(Rheineck is still quite a quaffable ale and $5.99 a half dozen at my local supermarket)We'd had to listen to Murray's Duran Duran and Bob Seger records
...and a power of Motown, I can still smell wax whenever I hear the Four Tops or The Temptations!
yrs Pavlov Stogs
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why yes they are. 9 to 12 everyday 'cept Sunday. so if be all next week
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I just Emailed Phill Goff to thank him for an Auckland governance voice. I think his reshuffle works.
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Rheineck is still
made? I didn't know that. We don't get it in Bali
...and a power of Motown,
I think you came along after the Bob Seger era. It was not an easy time upstairs in Darby Street. Hal, Mark and Ngila all had words. Dave Perkins, may he rest, wasn't quite so fussed.
Dominoes
the labyrinth old skool coffee shop under Darby Street had killer steak and cheese pies (in that the fat in them would likely get you in the end)
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under Darby Street ...would likely get you in the end
The place in that block that really got me was the Gallows Grotto - when ya went out the fire escape and up onto the roof and onto the next building (the old Police barracks / building centre facing onto Eliot st) and in the middle was a large green mossy well (like an ancient South American sacrificial cenote) which had no current access from inside seemingly - it was the old gallows yard, complete with cat walk around the sides, an eerily silent and desolate place, palpably cold on even the hottest day - it never failed to raise goose bumps when I was in proximity to it - even through the wall of the underground carpark (Where the Headless Chickens had their practice room. To this day I still think it was a contributing factor to the dark current that took Johnny Pearce away - RIP)
I sometimes wonder what that part of the modern high rise, that occupies the site now, feels like?
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I sometimes wonder what that part of the modern high rise, that occupies the site now, feels like?
It's a bank so probably just as desolate at times.
I remember the spot well. There is a similar spot between Queen and Elliot St, or at least there was, between Smith & Caughey and what is now mid city, but was an old 19th Century pub and the courtyard had been bricked in. I'd been doing some work in S&C (don't ask) When we climbed down the old fire escape into it, it looked like it hadn't seen people for decades and there were some ancient (empty) beer bottles. It felt like we'd gone back a century.
Like Darby St, all gone now of course, along with the bulk of 19th Century inner AK in a Tizard Flash. I don't think anything of the city I grew up in exists now.
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Those nostalgic Box and Celebre pix are great, Simon, ta.
And I note for others that I can get a few made-just-for-me shirts from Strangely Normal for the price of one from that spot on Ponsonberry Rd.
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Andthanks to a National closure motion, they're now sitting past midnight. And its still Wednesday in there.
If this goes on much longer, the Great Race of Yith will have to turn up to clean up the mess...
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It will probably be the last big-arsed motorway, anywhere in the world, to be shoehorned through suburbs where there has been no route protection.
True, dat. I live in the city that was the poster-town, literally The Model City, for 1950s-60s "urban renewal." Which consisted largely of bulldozing established neighbourhoods to make way for motorways... including a much touted ring road, complete with tunnels that would have gone through or under my local park.
(That last bit, thank God, was never completed - they wound up putting playing fields and parkland on the area that had been cleared in preparation. Oak St, on the other hand, was a goner.)
Now, in a fit of 20/20 hindsight, the city is planning to rip up the orphaned strip of motorway at Rt 34, rebuilding mixed housing on the land reclaimed thereby to reunite downtown with the neighbourhood to the south, and reinstating streetcars (which were removed in the late 1940s to make way for cars). Meanwhile, cycle paths are underway across the city, and cycle commuting is steadily rising.
It's going to be a struggle - cars rule the roads, the interstate has carved up the city but good, and some neighbourhoods never really recovered from the original "renewal." But the way forward is pretty damn clear.
(Gonna go blog this properly, now that I've worked up a head of steam...).
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