Posts by Sacha
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TransportBlog addressed the Herald's blatant lack of balance in its coverage of Auckland's Unitary Plan process.
One of my own comments in that thread:
The stakes are big, so the Unitary Plan process understandably reveals spectrums of views about who our city is for and what it will be like as it evolves. Community or landowners. Drivers or riders. Owners or renters. Current residents or future ones. That sort of thing.
Councils are charged with balancing those perspectives in consultation with citizens and other stakeholders like businesses and advocacy organisations.
Understanding all the views and deciding what to do requires better storytelling than we are seeing, deeper appreciation of the beliefs that drive various positions, and knowing whose voices are not being heard. We can help with that.
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Palino is reflecting poor advice about urban planning. Worth asking who he's getting that from and what their interests and beliefs are.
However, opponents of the Core Rail Link are given an easy run when the agencies and people tasked with communicating it to the public fail to do so. Thank goodness for TransportBlog, whose latest post explores the CRL's benefits for the whole region.
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net better-informed by simply knowing nothing
It's bliss, I tells you.
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Lot going on. #kiaora
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Hard News: You can Roughan but you just…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
you'd have thought they could just download the data
Not yet. For years, law has meant that private transport operators 'own' the data for the passengers we all pay them to transport. Integrated ticketing will be quite an improvement for transport planners, not just pasengers.
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Angus, the Core Rail Link is not only about the central city - though it is being incompetently communicated in ways that allow that impression to be spread, so I understand how you may have formed that impression.
A Transportblog reader has today produced a pair of diagrams of the impact on train service frequencies across the region the CRL project would bring. Lord knows what the people whose job it is to create that sort of material are doing.
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Hard News: You can Roughan but you just…, in reply to Angus Robertson,
You do not need the CRL to do any of that.
Sans-CRL there could be trains going West-East for much less investment than buying a tunnel. There could be trains running West-South today if the funds were cleared to do so.
But the funds are not there, instead they are committed to building a tunnel
Simply not true, I'm afraid. And if funds were already committed to the CRL do you really think its right-wing opponents would still be kicking up such a fuss?
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Hard News: You can Roughan but you just…, in reply to Rodney Hide,
We are a little lucky we don't have the log rolling and the pork barreling on the scale of the USA. But on the downside being small we tend just to accept weighty reports rather than have them torn to shreds and put back together to see what's driving the results.
I may disagree with you politically (rudely at times), but I would likewise love to see more independent engagement with official policy work. Unfortunately, previous governments have prohibited state funding of NGOs for any 'advocacy' work so it becomes an add-on or the preserve of those with other funding streams like churches and business groups. That needs to change.
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Hard News: You can Roughan but you just…, in reply to Rodney Hide,
I figure the Ombudsman is so backlogged it would be months before they would get to it which I guess is what government departments and local councils are now banking on.
Sometimes letting the agencies know that you know the rules is enough to induce a response. I wonder in this case if conveying the caveats and linkages involved in interpreting the data is concerning the officials. Perhaps there's some way of reassuring them that can unlock swift action?
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Idiot/Savant explains concisely how the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act applies here.