A Final Word

A local paper, the Norwester, recently published a letter from me about the busway. I'll quote from that letter here, to summarise my view on the busway decision.

Firstly, some comments on what is perhaps the pivotal event in this whole debate:

In parliament on September 14: Mr Dunne quoted a cost of $115m for the busway and $5m for rail. In response the Minister of Finance said Labour would not support the busway. Dr Cullen went on say, "If we did receive a proposal with that sort of cost, I doubt very much that we would want to give it very serious consideration at all" – implying that his decision was based on Mr Dunne's costs.

But Mr Dunne’s rail cost was false. It included widening the tunnels but not buying any trains!

Even the Council’s new "base case" rail option costs 12 times the figure Mr Dunne gave in parliament! (Base case = $60 million over next 25 years).

Regrettably, when Kerry Prendergast and Ian Buchanan asked for written confirmation of Dr Cullen’s view, he restated it without giving any evidence that he had first sought out unbiased costings.

As I've noted previously, most of his reply (pdf) consists of an attachment written by ONTRACK.

Finally, I wrote these concluding remarks on the busway issue:

I support the busway because it offers more benefits to more people than rail. I’ll never convince the skeptics, but I would have liked to convince the general public in the Northern Suburbs. Local residents stood to gain a lot from the busway. Unfortunately, rhetoric has drowned out the facts (and I’ll accept my share of the blame for that) so let me conclude by quoting the November 10 report from the Regional Council’s Passenger Transport subcommittee:

"In addition to the [main technical] report, WCC commissioned a report from Derek Kemp, an urban design specialist, [on] public transport choice, public transport use, public transport operational efficiency and urban densities, land use planning, urban design and urban form. It found that the busway scenario was clearly superior in terms of the 'qualitative' benefits considered in the report."

In other words, a lot of good would have come from the busway. It's a shame local residents never heard the details, since they never received comprehensive unbiased information [e.g. a detailed mailout from the council to every house in the area]