Monorail!

Written By: - Date published: 9:08 am, September 16th, 2019 - 26 comments
Categories: auckland supercity, elections, john tamihere, phil goff, public transport, supercity, transport - Tags: ,

As you may be aware in Auckland right now we have a local government election campaign. 

The most difficult job in New Zealand politics, the Auckland Mayoralty, is being contested fiercely.  The leading contenders are Phil Goff and John Tamihere.  There are another 19 lesser lights who are also competing for the top job.

It seemed that until recently it would be a two horse race.  But one of the other candidates has recently announced a new policy, one that audacious, that intrepid, that daring, that outrageous, that the mayoral campaign may be turned on its head.

The candidate is Craig Lord who up to now has marked his campaign by not having any policy, apart from beating up on public servants, burning rubbish and having multi story park and ride buildings.

And his policy is …

wait for it …

get ready …

A MONORAIL!

Here is what he is proposing:

Mayoral Candidate Craig Lord would like Council and Central Government to “get with the program” and look at the most logical solution to Auckland City’s public transport system – High speed Monorail.

From research done so far, Lord has found that Monorail is the only fast transport system around the world that is financially self-sustaining, and has considerable bonuses over any other form of mass transportation.

“I’m still doing the full research and there’s a lot to do, but firstly there are no rail crossings. The benefit of that goes without saying. Then there is the super advantage of being able to build it pretty much anywhere because it’s just poles. This solves the major issue of construction across the unique Auckland geography.”

The Standard has secured an advanced copy of his campaign video:

But in what could be a strategically bad move Lord is backing away from the idea.

Lord has a deeply thought through ascension plan.  The first thing he would do if elected would be to find out where the offices are, and the second would be to find out what time he could get a coffee.  Such deep commitment to the city is refreshing.

Time will tell whether his audacious plan succeeds.  Who knows, we could have Craig Lord Mayor of Auckland …

26 comments on “Monorail! ”

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  1. Dukeofurl 1
    16 September 2019 at 9:37 am

    With a name like Craig….. run Mickey, run while you still can.

  2. Sacha 2
    16 September 2019 at 9:54 am

    Another candidate who thinks the mayor is a thrusting CEO. How bad is our civics education?

  3. indiana 3
    16 September 2019 at 10:14 am

    You say a monorail is a bad idea, people said that about Kiwibuild too.

  4. mauī 4
    16 September 2019 at 10:20 am

    About all you need to know about Lord is that he does talkback on Newsquawk ZB….

    The monorail idea is likely based around his car loving ideas and getting public transport completely out of the way of cars at whatever cost.

  5. cleangreen 5
    16 September 2019 at 10:50 am

    Mono-rail is a single use modal that has not won favour globally sorry as rail should be used as a modal choice use of transport not just for passengers, as mixed trains are the modal now gaining attention again.

    So when there is still "capacity" on the rail infrastructure the use of freight can also be employed along with passengers, and has been found to make all modal use systems viable where as a single use model such as mono-rail is not viable.

  6. adam 6
    16 September 2019 at 12:50 pm

    When the two leading candidates are shit and bullshit – not fun times. No wonder bat crazy is the new normal. Mind you with a turn out less is than 40% the legitimacy is really not there anymore.

    https://www.lgnz.co.nz/nzs-local-government/vote2016/final-voter-turnout-2016/

    Time to admit the super city is a bad joke that failed. All the loony right are waiting for is one of their own to get in so they can sell everything off.

    Broken Ideology with no democratic backing – what a mess this country is.

    • Dukeofurl 6.1
      16 September 2019 at 1:03 pm

      legitimacy is there even at 40%

      A 40% sample in statistics makes it representative as once you go over 20,000 voters the margin of error doesnt change much.

      390,000 voted last time.

      Australian states mostly have compulsory voting even for Council elections, Depending on location doesnt make their elected people some sort of far left wing dream team.

      • weka 6.1.1
        16 September 2019 at 1:29 pm

        how is it representative? If Goff got 47% of the vote in 2016, where there was a 38% turnout, doesn't that mean that less than 18% of Auckland voters voted for him?

        • Incognito 6.1.1.1
          16 September 2019 at 2:42 pm

          By my calculation, we can state with 99.99 % confidence that 47.29 % of all voters would have voted for Goff within an error of ± 0.245 %. Purely based on statistics, that is.

          In other words, I think it is pretty representative.

          • weka 6.1.1.1.1
            16 September 2019 at 2:57 pm

            talk me through that? How does it take into account the possibility of the non-vote not being reflective of the vote (for all sorts of reasons)?

            • Macro 6.1.1.1.1.1
              16 September 2019 at 5:07 pm

              Here is a video that explains the relationship between sample size and margin of error.

              Incognito is basing the above statement on the assumption that the voting in the 2016 election was indeed a self selected sample – which it essentially was.

              We can't say that it was entirely random, but we can say with a fair degree of confidence that it represents the strength of vote for each of the candidates:

              • adam …
                16 September 2019 at 5:11 pm

                So one person, one vote, means nothing to you.

                How truly frightening is the depth of anti democratic belief on this site.

              • weka …
                16 September 2019 at 7:16 pm

                thanks, but I don't think that answers my question (although tbf I didn't get past the first 20 secs 😉 ).

                If I'm following this, some stats ppl were are making a theoretical maths argument which ignores how people act in real life.

            • Incognito 6.1.1.1.1.2
              16 September 2019 at 5:52 pm

              It doesn’t take that possibility into account or rather it assumes that the sample was taken from a homogeneous pool of voters, i.e. there’s no distinction in voting pattern between voters and non-voters except that the former vote and the latter don’t. That’s why I qualified that it was purely based on statistics.

              • weka …
                16 September 2019 at 7:14 pm

                In an abstract theoretical sense it might be representative, but we don't know because voting isn't a survey?

                • Macro …
                  17 September 2019 at 5:31 pm

                  In one sense, voting is a survey. It is a process by which the will of the people, who wish to be involved, is determined.

                  The question is – "Who do you want to be mayor?" In 2016 around 47% chose Goff. Those who chose not to vote, for what ever reason, deselected themselves from the survey. We cannot subsequently say that more would have voted for another candidate. We must assume that those who do choose to vote are a representative sample of the entire population otherwise any election process where a significant fraction of the population choose not to vote is meaningless.

                  BTW I could have voted in the Auckland local body elections in 2016 as I hold a property in the region – but live elsewhere. I chose not to vote and was happy that those who do live and work in the region could determine who they wish to be their Mayor.

                  • Incognito …
                    17 September 2019 at 6:28 pm

                    Thanks for that. I thought this thread it had been overtaken by other events.

                    I was going to reply in the same vein. An election is self-selecting, of course, and may not be truly representative of the whole population of voters. However, we won’t know the extent of any bias in the election result. Thus, an election result stands as representative, as it must by definition – as far as I know elections don’t require a quorum.

                    We could speculate that non-voters would not have voted for Goff in the same way that voters did but whom they would have voted for is even less clear. Goff won the plurality vote by a clear majority and even if the voter turnout had doubled, it would have been extremely unlikely to change the outcome fundamentally, statistically speaking.

                    In any case, the Mayor is the Mayor for all and does not (and should not!) need to represent a particular constituency or party.

                    Obviously, a low voter turnout is problematic for democracy as it might point to wider and deeper disengagement from the democratic process. In this sense, the actual election result may not be the issue so much but the process as a whole. A flawed process is unlikely to produce good outcome.

          • adam 6.1.1.1.2
            16 September 2019 at 3:23 pm

            Just wow, any other anti democratic rhetoric you wanna pull out of the rabbits hat.

            So people who did not vote, becasue of many reasons – now neatly defined by anti democratic forces.

            What a truly dumb age we live in.

          • Stuart Munro. 6.1.1.1.3
            16 September 2019 at 4:44 pm

            Doesn't that presume that the voting fraction are an unbiased sample? If internet polls are anything to go by, self-selected samples are anything but.

      • adam 6.1.2
        16 September 2019 at 3:19 pm

        Shit will believe any shit to accept the status quo as there shit.

  7. Dukeofurl 7
    16 September 2019 at 1:12 pm

    Even Seattle which has a 1.5 km working monorail opened for the 1962 Worlds Fair doesnt seem all that enthusiastic about extensions

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Monorail_Project

    Maybe it might make sense to connect Auckland Airport to Puhinui Station ?

    • tc 7.1
      16 September 2019 at 4:05 pm

      That's an excellent question for all mayoral candidates, that's where AIAL expect it with the land they reserved alongside Tom Pearce drive for decades.

      MSM gives these loons oxygen as it muddies the chance of a sane discussion on transport in akl.

  8. Ken 8
    16 September 2019 at 3:46 pm

    It's more of a Shelbyville idea.

  9. Peter 9
    16 September 2019 at 4:09 pm

    It's silly to think Auckland needs rail to move people around. It'll never work. We need more roads, more motorways, more overpasses, more underpasses, more parking buildings, more traffic lights …. Let everyone use their own car.

    Vancouver: population 2.5 million, daily ridership on trains 495, 000, annual ridership 160 million. (Daily 9000,000 on buses as well.)

    https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/translink-2017-ridership-statistics-part-1

    Anyone who thinks rail is an answer clearly needs their head read. 😊

  10. Macro 10
    17 September 2019 at 11:25 am

    Well Auckland has to do something about reducing the number of cars on its roads – almost all with only one person. I try to avoid driving there but on friday last week I had to visit a friend during the afternoon. It took and hour to drive from Hill Road, Manurewa to the Takanini on ramp – a couple of Kilometres.