Freedom by any means is freedom
Auckland’s transport system is clogged up, and as it’s our largest city, the whole country will benefit from freeing it up.
The solutions already exist and are achievable. Please join me, and our transport spokesperson Julie Anne Genter, this Sunday afternoon at the Green Party Auckland office to launch our new transport campaign Reconnect Auckland.
Green transport solutions, like the City Rail Link, will help build a smart, green city of the future.
via Free up Auckland | Greenweek, the newsletter
Whenever new lanes, tunnels and bridges are proposed to accommodate more vehicles and alleviate Auckland’s transport woes, the Greens oppose them, even though it always becomes faster to get around.
Now they argue that the “whole country” will benefit from the “green” solution of a few more buses and trains, seeming not to realise that’s also the aim of the extra motorways and tunnels. Also seeming not to understand that public transport is no solution.
That’s because we already have private transport, which we control. We can already go wherever we want to, whenever we like.
A bus or a train cannot take a person where they want to be, because nobody (beyond a few sex “workers”) has business at a bus stop or railway station. Sure, in the city there’s no difference between a short walk to the office from the bus stop or the car park and it’s a trivial thing. But we’re talking about every trip, not only into a crowded city, but also around the suburbs and even, oddly, into the far more spacious countryside, where no bus can serve everyone. Each of these trips must negotiate the perilously crowded main roads in and around the city.
Importantly, buses and trains don’t use the most efficient route, or go at the right time, so they are more expensive — and less convenient — than a private car.
But don’t try telling the Greens that people insist on going where they want to go, right when it suits them.
Because the Greens know little about serving the people and don’t seem to care.
Big roads and private cars are the “greenest” of transport solutions, because they keep the big dangerous bus monsters off our roads.
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I attended the public meeting on the Zero Carbon Bill in Tauranga last Monday. A team from the Ministry for the Environment (MfE) presented details as part of public consultation on the bill. About 80 people (mostly old ones) turned up, but the Environment Minister, the Hon James Shaw, though expected, did not turn up. 
