Today marks 25 years since French Secret Service agents, allies of New Zealand, committed the first and only act of terrorism ever in New Zealand’s history when they bombed Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior ship while it was docked in Auckland killing one person; an act of war committed by an ally against a pacifist organisation.
I was born two years after the bombing, however, the bombing not only changed New Zealand history it also had an important role in shaping my political views. When I was at primary school during the 1990s the French resumed nuclear testing at Mururoa and during that time Greenpeace sent their replacement Rainbow Warrior II ship from Auckland to protest the testing. My connection to the two ships comes through primary school friends, the father of one of my friends was onboard the Rainbow Warrior when it was bombed in Auckland harbour in 1985 and parents of other friends were onboard the Rainbow Warrior II and other ships when they were detained by the French in 1995.
So 25 years on where are we? Once France had finished “testing” aka bombing the shit out of an island in the middle of nowhere because apparently no one would care they signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty, since then France has not detonated another Nuclear Weapon. However, Pakistan has, India has, North Korea has. The work of Greenpeace has slowed the Nuclear Winter but I don’t think we are out of the autumn yet.
KiwiRail says the platforms are of a shorter length because of “constraints on keeping the line away from nearby apartments”, electric trains could run to Onehunga but people would only be able to travel in the front two of the three car trains.
Not only is Auckland 100 years behind most of the developed world in getting an electric rail system (remember that Britomart is the only underground diesel railway station in the world!) we can’t even get the size of the platforms right. This would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
Meanwhile in Sydney next week sees the commencement of the 4th Metrobus route from Bondi to Chatswood with 80,000 people per week capacity. The Metrobus system in Sydney has been a great success with bus running so frequently they don’t need timetables. In Auckland there has been the Link bus for a number of years working on this system, but how about seeing it on routes like the Northern Express, Dominion Road (ARTA are launching the “B.Line” here), Great South Road, New North Road, Great North Road.
There is a reason why “Public Transport” in Auckland has been called an oxymoron and this stuff up in the length of the train platforms is yet another example of it.
Over at Auckland Trains Jon C notes: “the Western Line performance stats for January were 36.1% punctionality. Southern was only 73%.”
In other words on the Western Line 2 in every 3 trains is late. And on the Southern it is better but still 1 in every 4 trains is late. How can this be even remotely acceptable performance?
I did a quick check of the Sydney train performance stats, for January they had a 97.4% on time performance. 1 train in every 40 is late. That is 10x better performance than the best that Auckland can deliver. And yet people in Sydney are constantly moaning about the poor performance of the rail network.
A major shakeup needs to happen with Auckland’s rail network. Being electrified by 2013 is too far away, by then no one will be left to use the service.
I was surprised to learn that NZ Bus has decided to reject the Athiest Bus Ads that were to run on the buses in Auckland.
The ads were to read “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
However Auckland bus operator NZ Bus is not going to run the ads because of complaints.
I find this move odd and think in the long run that it is sets a bad prescient. The ads are not worded offensively and they are not provocative either.
If christians and other religious folk are willing to scream when prayers are removed form school, parliament, and other places etc, then surely they should be willing to stand beside the athiests when they are expressing their views with the same freedoms that they demand at other times.
Overall this is a bad move and look for the religious folk.
Got to love the logic of Auckland politicians sometimes.
Mayor of Auckland City, John Banks today on the release of a report that suggests that Auckland’s Public Transport will not cope with the Rugby World Cup:
“$58 million was being spent on the Eden Park precinct and thousands were expected to walk from the central city well ahead of game kick-offs.” – NZ Herald
Google Maps suggests this is a 3.6km or 47 minute walk (see here). This is quite a long way, not to mention it is up a massive hill to the top of Queen Street, then over a series of major intersections that are not predistrian friendly then down a number of suburban roads. Quite basically the roads are not designed for the foot traffic that Mayor Banks suggests they could handle.
But coming back to the title of this post, walking is not public transport. What is more shocking is that the article where Mayor Banks is quoted also suggests that:
Nearly 2km of roadside parking had to be found around Eden Park for 130 buses and the entire fleet of 38 Auckland trains would be needed on match days.
If all the trains are being pressed into service to get people to Eden Park then how is any going about their daily lives meant to get about. Surely this should have been seen well in advance and more trains be ordered or borrowed or something!
It seems that now a year out from the Cup that there is a sudden realisation that Auckland is not ready for the cup. That either the waterfront stadium should have been built (at least there would be more and easier public transport to it), or North Harbour stadium should have been used. Sure North Harbour does not have train access but it has a dedicated bus way, and plenty of car parking. The closer that you get to the cup the more you realise that what a disaster it will be using Eden Park as the main game venue.
Who wants to start a little wager on how many days into the cup it will be before there is a signal failure at Newmarket or a massive meltdown with the train system that sees many hundreds late for a match?
I am a few days behind in blogging this as I have around 400 blog posts to work through as I get back up to speed after 4 days with no internet.
The video below shows the intersection of Wellington and Union streets in central Auckland when the power was out a little over a week ago. It is impressive just how much better the traffic flows with no traffic lights:
I find this video particularly interesting as it mirrors the results of my honours level research which showed the traffic lights performed poorly compared to Give Way intersections or Roundabouts unless traffic was extremely congested. It is nice to see the results of a simulation also play out in real life.
The sole power line to the entire Auckland region failed again this afternoon cutting power to around one million people. The only operating power station north of Hamilton is the Huntly coal fired station which cannot supply power to all of Auckland so Transpower cut power to all of Auckland except for essential services like hospitals, sewage and water supply.
However the reporting on both NZ Herald and Stuff reads quite funny:
Police say power has been restored to many of the 5000 Auckland homes left in the dark after a fire underneath power lines prompted mass power cuts from the Waikato to Northland and throughout Auckland this afternoon.
Now I am sure that there are more than 5000 homes in these areas:
Among the Auckland suburbs affected were Remuera, Ponsonby, Epsom, East Tamaki, Freemans Bay, Manukau, Mt Wellington, Newmarket, Onehunga, Birkdale, Beachhaven, Northcote, Glenfield, Manly, Helensville, Hauraki, Forest Hill, East Coast Road, Albany and Belmont.
In fact this image was posted on stuff.co.nz showing the extend of the outage:
David Farrar at Kiwiblog this morning posts that under the new structure for the Auckland council the total number of elected representatives drops from 258 to 147 and then proceeds to say “I’d say 111 less Councillors etc is a good start!”.
How is it that less representation is good?
Currently with 258 democratically elected representatives across the region there is one representative for every 5,426 people (from a population of 1,400,000 people). With only 147 elected representatives this drops to one representative for every 9,523 people.
However, what is worse is the drop in the number of councilors from 109 to 20. In other words from one councilor per 12,844 people to one per 70,000 people.
That is a massive drop in representation.
Community boards simply do not cut the mustard when it comes to representation. The reality is community boards are designed to feed a majority view into the council. However it is only a view, and only a majority one. They are essentially nothing more than people with good intentions who unfortunately will have the majority of their good views railroaded by the superiority of the much more powerful council. This is hardly good democracy.
The call for one united Auckland council was primarily focused around reducing bureaucracy rather than mucking about with the representative democracy. It is unfortunate that the National Government has overrun this process and turned it into a farce by playing politics with the biggest city in New Zealand. Pathetic.
Okay the power has just been restored to my flat on Auckland’s North Shore after a cut lasting around exactly an hour and a half.
I am not grumpy about the cut, they are a fact of life.
What I am grumpy about is the fact that it is not a storm so the reasoning for the cut seems to be a little odd. At first my flatmates thought a car had hit a local power pole. But as we have found out the cut is to 280,000 customers in West Auckland, North Shore, and Northland. Which would mean upwards of 500,000+ people would be without power this morning. So why is the power out:
“Just after 8.00am this morning a circuit on the Otahuhu to Henderson 220 kV line tripped while the other circuit was out for maintenance, causing loss of supply for North Auckland and Northland.” – stuff.co.nz
Sound familar?
Lets think back to 2006:
“The 2006 Auckland Blackout refers to the massive electrical blackout in Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand, on 12 June 2006. It started at 8:30 am local time, with most areas of Auckland regaining power by 2:45 pm local time. It affected some 230,000 customers had an impact on at least 700,000 people in and around the city.
The immediate cause of the blackout was determined to be a grounding cable falling across a 110kV transmission line at the Otahuhu sub-station. This was caused by the failure of a corroded shackle, as the result of unusually high winds.[1] This equipment is part of the national grid, owned and operated by Transpower.
Investigation of this incident found that maintenance of the electricity transmission system was not adequate and that this substation had major and minor design deficiencies.” – 2006 Auckland Blackout
Which in turn sounds very familar to this:
The 1998 Auckland power crisis was a five-week-long power outage.
Almost all of downtown Auckland in New Zealand was supplied electricity by Mercury Energy via four power cables, two of them 40-year-old oil-filled cables that were past their replacement date. One of the cables failed on 20 January, possibly due to the unusually hot and dry conditions, another on 9 February. Due to the increased load from the failure of the first cables, the remaining two failed on 19 and 20 February, leaving about 20 city blocks (except parts of a few streets) without power. - 1998 Auckland power crisis
So in eleven years have we learnt or done anything to stop these incidents repeating? It seems not.
