Dom Post says Councillors fly in the face of reality
March 23rd, 2013 at 11:00 am by David FarrarThe Dom Post editorial:
Months of procrastinating, three and a-half hours of shambolic hand-wringing, $40,000 down the drain. All for nothing.
The stubborn, illogical and wasteful refusal of seven Wellington City councillors to accept their own officials’ finding that a flyover is the best solution for easing congestion around the Basin Reserve should be an eye-opener for ratepayers.
It is also something voters should bear in mind when they go to the polls to elect a new council in six months’ time.
Worth recalling that the seven Councillors were urged to do so by Grant Robertson and Annette King. They also are pro-congestion.
Councillors who oppose the flyover should have accepted that as the only possible outcome, no matter how unpalatable it might be for them. After all, the $40,000 report the council ordered at the end of last year to weigh the different options found that the bridge was the best solution. It also found that the underground “Option X” proposal the flyover’s opponents favour would in fact bring more urban development impacts that might not be possible to mitigate.
Yet having backed the spending of a five-figure sum at a time of great financial restraint to have a last look at the alternatives, Mayor Celia Wade-Brown and councillors Stephanie Cook, Paul Eagle, Justin Lester, Iona Pannett, Bryan Pepperell and Helene Ritchie backed a motion that the council ignore its findings by not endorsing the flyover.
They wasted $40,000 of our money on an un-necessary report. But having paid the money for it, you think they at least would not ignore it.
Ratepayers will rightly be asking why they shelled out $40,000 for a report on the Basin Reserve options if councillors who voted for that spending intended to accept its findings only if they accorded with their existing view.
That is the key. The report was commissioned in bad faith. Those seven Councillors are saying that we don’t care what the facts are, what the evidence is, we will not suppoty the flyover.
They have the right to have that view. But they should be upfront on it, and not waste $40,000 pretending to be open-minded on it.
In case some councillors have not noticed, buses run on roads. The less congested those roads are, the quicker and more reliable buses will be and the more likely commuters will be to use them.
Wellington needs councillors who are determined to get the city moving. Instead, it has got an elected body that has a significant faction of councillors who refuse to accept reality, even when they are confronted with evidence that they are wrong.
We can correct that problem in October.
Related posts:
- Dom Post on Basin flyover
- Is WCC value for money?
- WCC changes mind on Basin flyover
- Save the Basin misnamed
March 23rd, 2013 at 11:03 am
Just wait until they are in charge of Kapiti and Wairarapa too! It’s going to be a disaster.
It’ll be even worse if DPF’s regional parliament wet dream ever comes to pass.
[DPF: Stop trolling. I have never said the WCC should be in charge of the Region.]
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 11:10 am
$40 000 in Wellington?
That’s nothing.
In Dunedin, a poor and declining city ,councils have spent millions on frippery such as a Chinese Gardens,a new stadium (we had one already) museum upgrades ,global warming studies etc
The place is mired in debt.
And we have the cheek to laugh at Cyprus,Greece and Spain.
Same spending attitude.
Oh for the traditional values of conservatism and living within your means. Simple .
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 11:33 am
Just like the Binnie report, eh?
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 11:41 am
The Chinese garden was funded out of the Poll Tax Trust and by the Chinese government. Your argument is entirely valid for the stadium, but the gardens did not cost ratepayers a cent.
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 11:44 am
The deranged Wade-Brown will find herself out of a job after the local election. Rightly so!
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 11:55 am
As for ignoring reports, they must have taken lessons from the government.
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 11:57 am
Any councillor that defends the Basin is a hero in my view.
Who needs another road anyway.
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 1:06 pm
Haminda. The Basin is far safer with a flyover going past it than a tunnel underneath it. The tunnel under the Oval cricket ground was highly problematic and ended up far deeper than originally envisaged (which added to the expense)
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 1:13 pm
Why don’t you welly pushers do the obvious.
I mean NZ is shite at cricket and would we really miss the Basin?
Be like Dunedin and build a new one in a better place.
Avalon has plenty of spare space.
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 1:22 pm
Lloyd – “but the gardens did not cost ratepayers a cent” ???
What, apart from ongoing annual losses of around $400 K ?
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 1:25 pm
Thank you maxwell.
It’s all well and good to build palaces but then you have to staff and maintain them.
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 1:35 pm
You are being totally unfair to our beloved mayor David.
Vote:She is far to busy planning the new, temporary, $350,000 mayoral office to have the time to concentrate on unimportant things like Wellington’s traffic. She has to pick the exact shade of marble to go with the gold-leaf coated fixtures in the bathroom.
Please God let someone competent stand against her and someone else will occupy the damn thing.
March 23rd, 2013 at 1:43 pm
Vote them out!!!
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 2:01 pm
How the hell does a garden lose $400k a year? I can understand $30k a year for a gardener to maintain it, but once it is up and running surely the ongoing cost is minimal?
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 2:02 pm
Hamnida. How old are you? Roads are not evil. They are not even a necessary evil.
Vote:Believe me, any socialist cult will try and ring you in by convincing you that the vectors of trade are evil.
I’m not religious particularly but every day I get up I thank God for my IPad, my Iphone and my gas guzzling Chevy.The existence of these is what convinces me that we’re on the road to something greater; that it isn’t all futile. Technology is awesome and Luddites like you are on the way out with Celia Wade Brown. So if you need to feel comfortable, go hide under her skirts but don’t expect free thinking society to echo your anti-trade, anti-oil sentiments. It’s all job killing rubbish.
March 23rd, 2013 at 2:09 pm
If Wellington Councillors truly wanted to spend exorbitant sums of money on tunnels (even cut and cover) in the name of addressing urban blight they’d do more good under grounding portions of the Quays so their city wasn’t separated from the waterfront by 6 lanes of traffic.
Oh- that’s right, the Quays are local roads so the Council has to spend some of their own money rather than someone else’s.
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 2:21 pm
I am not trolling. You are a strong proponent of council amalgamation, and that will create a super council that will be based in Wellington. The WCC ethics will be forced onto the other councils and it will end up as a bureacratic nightmare.
Your idea of a regional parliament is exactly what I said it is, a wet dream for political tragics. New Zealand needs little mini-states like it needs a hole in the head.
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 2:27 pm
Hodor – How the hell does a garden lose $400k a year? I can understand $30k a year for a gardener to maintain it, but once it is up and running surely the ongoing cost is minimal?
The garden lost 1.02 million in its 1st 4 years and is expected to lose 585,000 in 2012/13 year.
http://dunedinstadium.wordpress.com/2012/08/08/chinese-garden-acklin-talks-utter-piffle/
http://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/220631/falling-numbers-prompt-shake
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 4:13 pm
Instead of the Palmer solution Lower Hutt should absorb Wellington and then you Capital folk could get a Mayor with a few brains!
God knows it been generations since you had one!
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 4:24 pm
Why would Lower Hutt council want to take on Wellington’s debt?
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 5:09 pm
Great comment from Monique Watson. Cities based on commuter rail and apartment blocks were tried in the former USSR. As usual with almost every feature of the former USSR, “planned” cities with apartments and commuter rail are assumed by a certain class of economic illiterates in the West, to be more efficient. However, they were an inherent part of the inefficiency of the Communist economy.
Western “planners” have a mantra: “build it and they will come” (i.e. build commuter rail systems and apartment blocks and riders and residents will come). But the minute Communism ended, even with the commuter rail systems and apartment blocks already there, everyone rushed to get a car and a decent house. Their infrastructure provision will spend decades catching up with genuine human demand and natural urban economic evolution.
Even the apartments and townhouses in efficient locations in Western cities are only “affordable” because there is genuine choice of housing under which the city can expand outwards onto lower cost rural land. In every city where there is not this choice, due to either corruption or “planning”, the cost of “housing” is relentlessly high relative to incomes regardless of how nasty the housing is. Look at China and all its ridiculously overpriced apartments.
Automobile based suburban development is an essential part of “economic” and socio-economic “development”. You can’t have this “development” without automobile based development. You might have some kind of perverted “crony capitalism”, as China has, but corruption and gouging in housing development is not “the free market”, and it is not “the free market” that is “ruining China”.
You might bowdlerise it by calling it “urban planning” but the effects are the same. Len Brown, Celia Wade-Brown, Fran Wilde, Bob Parker; the Greens; will all wind the clock back on ECONOMIC development by pursuing their mindless anti-car policies. Similar policies have made most of the UK’s cities what they are. Turn Auckland into Liverpool and Wellington into Luton and Christchurch into Manchester, what a great idea – NOT.
In contrast, numerous cities in the USA show that very low density, housing affordability, high economic productivity, and SHORT average commute to work times (yes, that last is not a typo) are all perfectly natural consequences of a more free market in urban development. International data bases of this information are a terrible inconvenience to the advocates of “more compact” urban planning. The correlation actually runs the opposite way to that assumed by these advocates.
When cities of similar population levels are compared, the comparison is even more stark. For a city-region of 400,000 people, I would wager that Wellington’s average commute-to-work times are an international outlier in the wrong direction. The kind of planning we have mistakenly pursued has got us the worst of all worlds – the worst possible traffic congestion AND the highest likely incidence of ultra-long commutes; by young householders “priced out” completely to the Wairarapa and Horowhenua. The same effect is being noted in Dorkland, with commuters buying in to places like Thames and Paparoa boosting the rural towns housing markets.
But I would also regard the chances of getting our powers that be to actually have an authoritative collection of average commute time data done, and publish the same, as similar to “snowball in hell”. Inconvenient data has a habit of being suppressed and buried, if it is even done – the planners will be running scared of it ever BEING done in the first place. Or it will be done fraudulently – there are numerous “by the book” tricks that can be used – a good auditor who is wise to them all needs to be appointed. For example, residents in Wellington itself might be surveyed – not workers, many of which will come daily from outside Wellington.
The simple reason that the US cities I refer to have the world’s lowest commute-to-work times, is that as they have expanded, businesses that employ people tend to move into commercial developments in the abundant undeveloped spaces that are left as suburban developers “leapfrog-develop”. Because road space is always provided as of necessity as a city expands, the overall urban area ends up with a lot more road-lane-miles per person; the lower density – the result of low land prices (half acre sections are less than half the price of our one-tenth-of-an-acre ones) also increases this road lane miles per person effect. Add the fact that most commuting to work is occurring in all directions within the area rather than most of it being “in towards the centre”, and you have minimal congestion.
Centralisation of employment, and commuter-rail-centric planning is the ultimate example of “tail wags dog” policy. Commuter rail should have died with the airship. It is no longer even as efficient per passenger km as a small car with one person in it, let alone with two. This, too, is not something the powers that be want anyone to know. Only in Manhattan and Hong Kong and Tokyo does it make any sense at all and even then the fares are heavily subsidised. No motorist gets his rolling stock and running costs subsidised, and even the cost of roads and externalities are far less subsidised for motorists than the subsidy to commuter rail. People who agonise over “leveling the playing field” in favour of public transport are making the egregious error of comparing the “subsidy” of ROADS with the subsidy of public transport. A fair comparison would be comparing the subsidy of the cost of the steel rails with the subsidy of the cost of the roads. Or comparing the subsidy of the total system of automobility with the subsidy of the total system of public transport. The playing field actually needs to be leveled back from the steep slope in favour of public transport via subsidies of the entire system.
The government is tackling all this now in the name of housing affordability – it is all connected. As I say, the UK’s cities show that what we are in danger of getting, is unaffordable housing of high density and low quality, high traffic congestion, high commute-to-work times, low economic productivity, low international competitiveness, shuttered industries, a permanent underclass, and an unsustainable “public housing” burden. The UK economy is stuffed because of these effects and ours won’t last anywhere near as long as theirs.
Take a look at the kind of policies followed by cities in “America’s Growth Corridors” to see the best choice we CAN make.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323549204578315714070017932.html
There is quite an overlap between the cities that fit Kotkin’s “Growth Corridor” definition, and those that score “affordable” for housing in the annual Demographia Reports.
The fastest growing cities also tend to be in this overlap.
http://www.newgeography.com/content/003569-americas-fastest-and-slowest-growing-cities
By the way, LA and San Fran; which our anti-car activists love to hate, are the USA’s highest density cities, have the most unaffordable housing, and are no longer “high growth”, just as most of the UK’s cities are not high growth and for the same reasons. Eric A. Morris points out, in “Los Angeles Transportation Facts and Fiction”:
“…….by the standards of U.S. cities, Los Angeles is not sprawling, has a fairly extensive transit system, and is decidedly light on freeways. The smog situation has vastly improved…..“……..Los Angeles’s traffic woes stem from the fact that it doesn’t sprawl enough and has overinvested in costly rail transit at the expense of developing its undersized freeway network…..”
http://www.freakonomics.com/2009/03/10/los-angeles-transportation-facts-and-fiction-driving-and-delay/
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 5:12 pm
So we can strike a special rate for those dumb enough to live in Wellington gazzer!
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 5:19 pm
Gazzmaniac, why wouldn’t Lower Hutt residents want to take advantage of Wellingtons rates base and the huge rates cross subsidy provided to residents by businesses located in Wellington?
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 5:22 pm
What are you on about Yogibear?
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 5:28 pm
Yogibear, the commercial property owners in Wellington benefit from the policy of centralisation of the focus of the transport network and zoning, it makes their property rents far higher than they would be if the urban form was more dispersed. So it is fair enough that they pay more.
The urban economy would be far more efficient if employment was decentralised, as per my post above, and who paid what rates would find its own level. The status quo is riddled with inequalities, especially against the young and non-home-owners. Robert Bruegmann calls urban planning that forces house prices up, “the greatest inter-generational wealth transfer scheme in history”.
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 5:38 pm
Do you have a website PhilBest?
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 6:07 pm
Philbest. Ever heard of agglomeration? Decentralisation discourages specialisation which makes people less efficient and productive. Pretty much economics 101.
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 6:22 pm
No, I put comments on other people’s. The one I frequent most is “Macrobusiness”. I gave up on NZ sites years ago because Greenie trolls bury any common sense arguments with endless off-topic reiterations of their “litany”. I even suspect they do a ring-in to swamp a thread when someone like me is looking too dangerous to their position. I just sneaked back onto Kiwiblog for a look on a quiet Saturday arvo. Watch for the unleashing of the trolls now….. or perhaps they’re not as vigilant now, having successfully got me and others like me to largely give up?
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 6:33 pm
There goes Yogibear now. Actually, the literature shows that urban growth containment PREVENTS the formation of agglomeration economies; because potential new participants in them are priced out, and there is no spare space for them to go. Nothing like Silicon Valley could ever have happened in the UK and nothing like it could happen in NZ right now.
Agglomeration economies are of multiple types, it is not necessary to concentrate all types in one place, it is far more efficient to allow each different type to form of its own accord where conditions are best. This also means congestion is minimised. Free markets bring about agglomeration economies, planners cannot do it. All they actually do is prevent them from happening.
All the best agglomerations that planners say they are wanting to duplicate; like London’s global finance sector, are not replicable. They happened not because of planning at all, but because of centuries of path dependent urban economic evolution.
Some types of agglomeration economy need cheap land, believe it or not. Farming needs cheap land, and also earns export income. Many “urban” industries also need cheap land and also are good export earners. Guess why many manufacturing exports from the UK have died?
The estimable Oliver Hartwich in the “Business Spectator” 14 Dec 2011, comments regarding Tobin tax proposals:
“……Merkel and Sarkozy could not have been under any illusions that Cameron would pave the road towards curbing the power and profitability of the City of London. Finance is the only major industry left in post-modern Britain.…..”
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2011/12/14/commodities/british-pawn-europes-game?OpenDocument=
Fortunately for the UK, it has a strong global finance sector (nothing to do with urban planning) that can survive ridiculously high land costs. We don’t. But a Tobin tax will finish London, and Britain.
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 6:40 pm
By the way, Silicon Valley has more recently pursued exclusionary policies that mean that new participants are priced out there now. New competing agglomerations are forming in places like Raleigh, NC, and Austin, TX.
This is an interesting read.
http://www.fcpp.org/images/publications/Cyprus%20letter.pdf
That’s a pissed-off Silicon Valley CEO telling the Bay Area Regional Council why he is shifting his business away.
There was a recent article in “The Economist” that actually was awake to the fact that the USA’s cities are the world’s most productive, and their freedom to grow was probably the reason. It is odd that if sprawl is so bad and growth containment is so good, that the USA’s cities are the world’s most productive rather than the least; and the UK’s cities lag by about 30% in productivity calculations.
Read the McKinsey Institute’s 1998 “Driving Productivity and Growth in the UK Economy”. And follow the London School of Economics “Spatial Economics Research Centre” Blogspot for a while – it will be an eye opener for you.
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 6:42 pm
Run out of time to keep this up today. Cheers.
I had a bit of a debate on this subject that someone else copied an posted HERE:
http://pn.org.ua/?san_francisco_s_high_tech_cost_advantage.html
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 7:06 pm
I thought that specialisation was more efficient, not less.
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 9:09 pm
Bit of a leap to accuse me of trolling Phil Best. Even more of a leap to infer I’m a greenie troll.
Your premise is that markets, namely housing and business location should be regulated in some form to decentralise. Or at least the regulation should be changed.
My premise is that in a free market people gravitate to where they can most efficiently and effectively operate. You say Silicon Valley, could never happen in the UK. I agree. Is also wouldn’t have happened in Silicon Valley if some town planner had pre-ordained it to occur there.
This is a thread about Wellington and by advocating decentralisation in this thread, you are effectively arguing against the agglomeration economies that already exist in the city.
By that logic we should replicate the failed economic development policies of the Blair government and shift half the government to our equivalent of Lancashire (Levin?).
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 9:29 pm
Gazzamaniac. Firstly thanks for acting as the grammar police and picking up my missed comma.
To address your question of what I’m on about. Opponents of the Wellington reforms carp on about WCCs debt but are really only picking one of the indicators that supports their world view without balanced consideration of all measures. My point was Wellington residential rate payers do face a high nominal debt, but also enjoy many advantages the rest of the regions ratepayers do not such as a large commercial base of ratepayers across which to spread costs
Vote:March 23rd, 2013 at 9:56 pm
And before anyone jumps in about my levin comment. I will say there are many sound reasons to ship a good chunk of them to Levin, with the worst offenders being sent further afield to, say, Wanganui. Just don’t expect productivity or efficiency gains from doing so.
For example, the location of the Auckland Council CCOs in the old town centres is verging on a disaster with recruitment problems, high turnover and many staff spending a huge chunk of time travelling round the city to meet with each other.
Vote:March 25th, 2013 at 12:31 pm
Yogibear, I apologise for inferring that you might be one of the Greenie trolls who have so frustrated me in the past. I actually do not recall your name. I have been absent from Kiwiblog for a long time, so you do not know what I stand for either.
A lot of what you are saying now, I agree with. Especially:
“……My premise is that in a free market people gravitate to where they can most efficiently and effectively operate. You say Silicon Valley could never happen in the UK. I agree. It also wouldn’t have happened in Silicon Valley if some town planner had pre-ordained it to occur there……”
Possibly we are on the same side anyway. I am just as against centrally-planned decentralisation as you are. “…..the failed economic development policies of the Blair government…..”. I absolutely agree that those policies were a disaster.
All the Poms need to do to revitalise virtually ANY one of their cities, is adopt policies similar to those of dozens of US cities, Houston being the most extreme example. Prof. Paul Cheshire of the LSE and his colleagues have for years been trying to persuade any one of several UK cities to be the first to try this.
You don’t need to plan decentralisation; it is what happens when you let it. It is centralisation of EVERYTHING in the urban economy that is unnatural and needs explanation by regulatory and planning interference.
Of course a capital city’s bureaucracy will be centralised. So will the global finance sector in the dozen or so cities around the world that have it. But there are dozens of other sectors of urban economies, that will literally exist, OR NOT, in your NATIONAL economy, to the extent that LOCAL central planners allow decentralisation “of the local economy” for which they are responsible.
The reason the USA has “urban economic” sectors – and thriving ones, BTW – that even Europe does not, let alone the UK – has a lot to do with the fact that “decentralisation” is simply allowed to occur by default – there is no grand central plan against it. A developer can literally float a “Municipal Utility District”, raise money on the bond market, and build a new city in the middle of nowhere if he wants to.
The “leapfrog” nature of growth of the urban economy because of this, is actually far more efficient. There are several authoritative papers that show this and none to my knowledge that show something different. The “cost of infrastructure” might be slightly less efficient in the long run but even this is highly disputable. But even if it is slightly less efficient, the avoidance of massive economic land rent and the numerous distortions that occur from this (and even from the growth containment urban planning itself) is a benefit several times greater than the “cost of infrastructure”. This includes housing affordability.
In fact, it is more likely that even the cost of infrastructure is lower under the conditions of free-market “leapfrog”. This is because the cost of land acquisition is lower, there is still spare space to play with, and the cost of access and disruption as expansions are necessary, is much lower.
Furthermore, centrally planned infrastructure is not necessarily even more efficient. Those in charge of it tend to be empire builders. When a developer himself is responsible for planning it for a new development, he will hook into an existing centralised system if it makes economic sense, but will do something else if THAT makes economic sense. Central planners of infrastructure, when their system reaches its limits, tend to just “ban any more growth” and a whole lot of efficient options for growth are left off the table.
There is hardly anything on which it is more justifiable to be a total iconoclast, than the mantra of “compact city” versus “sprawl”. Alex Anas (SUNY Buffalo) has entitled a recent paper “Discovering the Efficiency of Urban Sprawl”, which is an entirely appropriate title.
Where there is a role for “central” or regional planning, is in determining moderate amounts of land that are “off limits” for development. This includes rights-of-way for regional road and other infrastructure expansion. There should be a presumption that “most of the land is open for development EXCEPT…….”. Currently, it is the other way round: “you are ONLY allowed to develop HERE….” – and my secret buddy the land banker there would just LOVE to talk to you about how much you are prepared to bid for a bit of his land holding…….
In the context of Wellington, I am not saying that the sectors for which it makes sense for them to be central, should be forcibly “decentralised”; I am saying that the Wellington region COULD be a lot MORE than just a concentration of bureaucracy and its hangers-on with a 2-corridor commuter rail system tacked to it.
Even when it comes to “centrality”, the Wellington CBD is not even “central”. It is almost at one extreme EDGE of the POTENTIAL “Greater Wellington” metropolis. It is more like the “tip of the V” of a grossly inefficient 2-corridor urban form.
It is completely nuts to not have Porirua and Lower Hutt well-connected at multiple points. And there are numerous spots around the region where further connecting roads and tunnels would be no more difficult to do than the roads and tunnels around Northland and Karori were for our “can do” ancestors. What we have now is a “can’t do” syndrome. Ray Wallace and his Council are to be encouraged in their vision to connect Wainuiomata and Naenae.
And having a third world road connection from the “regional” airport to the hinterland – just pathetic – “playing first world nations” with our heads up our a—-holes. All traffic having to fight its way through the edges of a CBD on what is no more than a central-city road grid complete with numerous sets of traffic lights – BAH – this is a total LACK of planning of the justifiable kind. What we have, is none of the planning of the justifiable kind, and a surfeit of the obstructive and destructive kind. “Planning” to leave road access to the airport as it is, is not planning either, it is close to deliberate economic and socio-economic subterfuge on behalf of an enemy power.
Vote:March 25th, 2013 at 12:34 pm
Viking2 – spot on.
I can see a nice “cloverleaf” shaped intersection right through the middle of the basin… traffic flowing freely in all directions.. at least until it backs up from those stupid traffic lights in Evan’s Bay…
Vote: