When I lived and travel overseas the one form of transport I absolutely love is trains. Here in NZ we HAD a proud history of train transport until the 80's. Now we have this obsession with roads and our cars which is not usual when you take into account the breath taking scenery NZ has which makes a good road trip just fantastic. It's a difficult problem we have got ourselves into with transport, do we spend billions rebuilding our rail network for the long term future or do we continue to put money into our excellent roads? (Compared to some other very rich nations go to the States and you will know what I mean though their obsession with heavy pick-ups does not help)How long has London had the tube? 200years (I think)? Can anyone really see Auckland or Wellington building a similar system with our lack of population?

Justice, there is a very big difference between light rail, like the tube in the UK, and "heavy rail" (intercity, not sure of the correct terminology. Intercity rail for passengers just hasn't worked, and usage has been steadily falling over time. We DON'T have good roads, our roads are appalling for the amount of use they get and I think it's important for safety etc that they are improved (plus there is the economic recovery which is predicated on infrastructure spending).

However, a modern light rail network in Auckand surely is the single most pressing issue facing NZ and NZers, for both an environmental and general growth perspective. The Rugby World CUp should have been a bonanza for long term infrastructure planning. Instead we have had arguing, mor talk and a lack of forward thinking which has left us with a hughe city with some of the poorest public transport in the developed world.

I think we need to accept that NZers will always drive between cities, we are conditioned to do it and have been doing so for years. It will take generations to change that behavious, and will likely fail. At the same time many people who live in cities will use public transport if it works. Right now it doesn't...get it right, and things may change.

Guys, can you fix the link to ecan please? I'd like to bookmark that so I can submit when it goes live.

If we build more roads, we'll use them more and we'll exercise/walk/cycle less.

A more effective public transport system is the answer and encouraging parents to remember how we used to walk to school rather than get dropped off. My cycle to work is so much quicker when the schools are on holiday and the roads are quieter

I guess I'm surprised that a publicly-funded enterprise can randomly divert vast sums of public money to projects that they had not originally sought the funding for. Isn't this a form of mis-appropriation? Typical though, petrol drops a few cents a litre and all of sudden the 'build more roads' brigade start up again. Clearly the evidence is overwhelming that we MUST invest in energy-efficient and long-term sustainable transportation alternatives. Stunningly stupid decisions like this one are the reason I stopped voting in local body elections - they are all a bunch of witless jobbernowls. All of them.

A major reason for Roads is to get Goods carried. Food to People. Raw Materials to Finished Goods. Etc.

You don't see much of this getting done by public transport. Containers on trains, yes. But not from grower, port, or supplier to factory door. Mixed mode is the universal rule. So That's why we need to keep doing Roads. Bit like the Romans. Cos, that stuff is Heavy.

Check out the costs per km of any sort of rail (fixed cost), the local population densities and hence likely markets, and do some basic sums on the back of an envelope. Frightening, innit?

Rail was a Factory age solution. Mass workplaces, mass housing, mass thinking, mass consumption. We're a bit past that, now. Too dispersed and diverse.

Imagine trying to keep Saturday Sport running with buses and bikes only! Inconceivable...

Waymad,

" Mass workplaces, mass housing, mass thinking, mass consumption. We’re a bit past that, now. Too dispersed and diverse."

Which planet do you live on?

One thing I would love to see is better use of the roads we have. The biggest problem by far is average vehicle occupancy at peak time is about 1.4 people per car. See http://www.pinnacleresearch.co.nz/research/vehicle_occupancy.pdf

Council and Government have ignored any efforts of individuals/companies with suggested solutions to this problem. We now have bus lanes running parallel to motorways at very high cost and yet have not opened them up to high occupancy vehicles.

Here is an example of a scheme to use the bus lanes for a flexible ridesharing scheme.

http://www.hoverport.org/

The cost of implementing such a scheme would be in the order of millions of dollars instead of the hundreds of millions or even billions which new roading costs.

Improve 1.4 people per vehicle to 2 or more and the need to lavish billions on new roads largely disappears.

I also forgot to comment about the pointlessness of spending more on the Puhoi toll road. Peak traffic on this road is largely during holiday season rather than the morning commute. Building a road to cope with 10 days worth of congestion is silly. There is another problem with it's conception though which is that it reverts to a single lane after the tunnel and before any major exits. The result is that while the length of the road is shorter and straighter i'ts capacity has not really increased. The first major turnoff feeds Warkworth, Snells Beach, Omaha, Matakana etc. This takes about half of the traffic at this point. The end result is that for the toll road to make any sense it needs to be double laned all the way to warkworth.

The Puhoi toll road is the major transport link to Northland and carries heavy commercial and tourist traffic throughout the week. Russell obviously hasn't spent much time grinding up SH1 hills at 35 km/h behind logging, stock, heavy machinery, merchant distribution or oversized tourist vehicles.

It is long overdue for SH1 to be four lane divided from Auckland to Whangarei at least, preferably to Kerikeri. A hideous amount of money has been wasted under the previous Government constructing 3-lane passing segments that should have been put into a proper 4-lane divided development plan.