You voted for them!
April 30th, 2006 at 8:09 pm by David FarrarThe Auckland City Council transport committee chairman, Richard Simpson, wants to demolish the Aucjkland Harbour Bridge.
Yes he is serious. I think it is part of the let’s congest the roads as much as possible, so people will abandon cars philospphy.
April 30th, 2006 at 8:24 pm
David, you missed the point! He called car parking the “most powerful tool we have in our arsenal.”
WTF! POWERFUL TOOL IN THE ACC’S ARSENAL!!
Someone needs to point out to this guy that maybe building more roads fast may be better than the local authority declaring war on its citizens – but then what would we know, we’re the terrible, evil peasants that drive cars.
Vote:April 30th, 2006 at 8:27 pm
These hybrid cars… would they be amphibious?
Vote:April 30th, 2006 at 8:56 pm
DPF – you’re spinning this one pretty crudely – he also talked of tunnels under the Waitamata and a new bridge with bike, pedestrian and rail on it.
Vote:April 30th, 2006 at 9:06 pm
Yeah and that will happen at the same rate as Transmission Gully which looks to be a 75 year project.
Come on, you really think with all the under-funding that somehow there is funding for knocking down the existing bridge, building a new one and some tunnels!
Vote:April 30th, 2006 at 9:10 pm
Oh dear – so Mr Simpson would have the Auckland City Council declare war on the travelling public? I did wonder whether he was prompting council-sponsored terrorism in his plot to destroy the Harbour Bridge! But I note Mr Simpson’s comments do not, as yet, reflect official council policy. So we may as well keep our powder dry at this stage – sorry, bad pun – and look forward to his future foot-in-mouth contributions to the transport debate.
But this might actually be an issue on which the not-so-hardworking Judith Tizard (Minister of Auckland Issues AND Associate Minister of Transport) could usefully comment. Her most recent utterances on the subject of Auckland’s transport, on 21 April, is available at http://www.beehive.govt.nz/ViewDocument.aspx?DocumentID=25518. Unfortunately, as we’ve come to expect from Labour’s media releases, it attacks the previous National Government and talks up the current Government without actually saying much else.
Vote:April 30th, 2006 at 9:15 pm
i certainly did not vote for him!!
Vote:April 30th, 2006 at 9:30 pm
Ha, what a hard case, looks like the same Richard Simpson I was at varsity with in the 80′s, I always wondered what became of him! I thought he would’ve ended up doing something more ambitious than that.
Vote:April 30th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
His prime concern is Auckland’s extremely high rate of car ownership, with 1.7 per household instead of 1.4 for the likes of San Francisco, a city he says he admires.
So this is why the whole country needs to pay for AKL roads. Thanks AKL !
Vote:April 30th, 2006 at 11:14 pm
“Cities really move forward when you’ve got people with imaginative ideas. Say one in 20 comes home to be a winner and away you go.”
Vote:I’d say this was one of the other 19/20.
May 1st, 2006 at 1:23 am
lol Linda, what could be more ambitious than demolishing the Harbour Bridge?!
Vote:May 1st, 2006 at 3:50 am
While it does appear a little hasty to destroy the existing bridge before another form of crossing the harbour is in place, it is a FUGLY bridge.
We could do with something a little more aesthetic crossing the harbour (say, hire British architect Lord Norman Foster (Millau Viaduct) to design its replacement).
But a tunnel would also be welcome and I can see that as being a better initial option, before retiring the current bridge and building a grandiose new one in its place.
Instead of hybrids-only carparks they should develop carparks for smart cars (www.smart.com), and build underground carparks that are stacked like the japanese have come up with (www.giken.com). Especially for universities and inner city areas, as well as park & ride facilities for public transport in the suburbs. But hey, those are just pie in the sky ideas.
They need both:
Vote:*Decent auckland wide integrated public transport system with park & ride facilities in the suburbs. Rail, bus and ferry. Electronic ticketing and GPS on trains and buses to advise of wait times at stations.
*A completed roading network.
May 1st, 2006 at 5:57 am
I would kindly refer you to Richard Simpson’s Action Hobson former website, where you can see some of his other ideas and political activities.
http://www.actionhobson.org.nz
Vote:May 1st, 2006 at 8:11 am
Never trust anyone who argues with false statistics.
Vote:He quotes car ownership rates for San Francisco which is a smallish centre on the end of the peninsula _ a bit like calling the Auckland Isthmus “Auckland”.
The Auckland figure is for the Auckland region which includes all the farms of the Auckland region and naturally farms have high vehicle ownership.
From that point on you don ‘t trust anything he says – because he knows he is spreading false statistics.
May 1st, 2006 at 8:21 am
Why demolish the bridge?
Vote:People much prefer driving over bridges (they like the view) to driving through tunnels
May 1st, 2006 at 8:38 am
Tsunami affecting an underground tunnel? How?
The earthquake risk in auckland is very low, when was the last time you felt one there? Volcanism is a risk, albeit fairly low, but nevertheless there will be quite a lot of warning before any eruption that would threaten the tunnel.
The current harbour bridge wont last forever. It is steel, but it will fatigue over time. In fact, from wiki:
“The clip-on sections have a lifetime of 50 years and will need to be replaced by 2016. Before the clip-on sections are replaced, another harbour crossing will have to be constructed to cope with the ever-increasing volume of traffic that uses the bridge every day. Several solutions have been proposed, including another bridge built alongside the existing bridge or a tunnel under the Waitemata Harbour.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auckland_Harbour_Bridge
2016 is rapidly approaching, given the consent process will surely be hell and take a good 10 years!!!
Vote:May 1st, 2006 at 9:14 am
“Tsunami affecting an underground tunnel? How?”
Water flows into underground tunnel…people drown.
You needed that explaining to you…?
Vote:May 1st, 2006 at 9:32 am
I’ll bet 1$ that as long as Sydney still has a bridge, envious little brother AKL will keep theirs.
Vote:May 1st, 2006 at 9:46 am
James Said: “Water flows into underground tunnel…people drown.
You needed that explaining to you…?”
No. I did consider it as it is obvious, but then so would anyone designing said tunnel. The entrances to the tunnel should be far enough inland that this did not occur (i see they are thinking Ponsonby/ Grey Lynn on the south side), or providing earth embankments with a suitable runup height to the entrance if it is on low lying land (eg north shore).
Vote:May 1st, 2006 at 9:54 am
maxvp – I don’t think you’re right that we will necessarily have alot of warning before an eruption in Auckland. However I’m also pretty sure that if one of our lava domes does blow again then it won’t really matter if it was a bridge or a tunnel…
Vote:May 1st, 2006 at 10:28 am
Naturally the linked article is much less hysterical than DPFs post:
“There are serious fatigue issues with the harbour bridge,” he said. “We should be having a bridge connection that can have rail and pedestrians.”
Vote:May 1st, 2006 at 10:33 am
Do you know where he lives? Maybe we could demolish the bridge and divert the highway through his house?
Vote:May 1st, 2006 at 11:47 am
He’s already wanting to build a bridge across the Auckland Domain at a cost of $50 million.
Vote:May 1st, 2006 at 11:51 am
Which I hasten to add, would be approximately 20 seconds down the road from where Cr Simpson first lived when he proposed the domain bridge idea. I understand he has now shifted to a new home around 5 mins away.
Vote:May 1st, 2006 at 12:03 pm
C’mon, this stuff’s all just brainstorming. You have to have some ridiculous ideas to make sure you’ve examined all options. I can’t see the bridge going. Quite the opposite, it will probably be expanded. Our complaints of traffic problems are an absolute joke compared to any city larger than Auckland. I lived in Melbourne for years which is about 3 times larger than Auckland, and it had great public transport. But traffic was still a great deal worse than here, commute times much higher. And yet Melb still gets voted as one of the most liveable cities in the world, because everyone knows that one of the consequences of having a big cool city is more traffic.
As Fred Dagg said, “we don’t know how lucky we are”.
Vote:May 1st, 2006 at 12:18 pm
That’s the crap thing about cities (not that AKL is a city)…people.
I’m moving to where there is a train line into the CBD, but no trains and they took the station away.
And LTANZanagram won’t let you build houses or businesses because that would mean more people and they would use the roads in their evil vehicles.
Welcome to the Wild West.
Vote:May 1st, 2006 at 7:02 pm
iiq374 said: “maxvp – I don’t think you’re right that we will necessarily have alot of warning before an eruption in Auckland.”
The movement of a large magma body towards the surface will create lots of localised seismicity before any eruption. So you will know its coming
I believe the difficulty in predicting eruptions is with existing magma chambers that are still active -eg Taupo, Ruapehu etc.
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