What matters for the Wellington region?

GWRC are asking for thoughts/opinions/ideas.

http://haveyoursay.gw.govt.nz/Long-Term-Plan

Don't waste your time.

Our local community has been asking for improved bus services between Waikanae and Otaki for two years. There are a bus load of kids who have to wait in Waikanae for 70+ minutes for the connecting bus to get home in the afternoon.

Last year they said it was going to be dealt with and on Monday the new timetable rolled out.

But instead of providing a connecting bus, as they suggested would happen, they moved the existing bus forward by 10 minutes.

Woop-de-fking-do.

@martyn  that covered by Greater Wellington Regional Council?

Yep

*smh*

You couldn't make it up.

GWRC are apalling they don't talk to anyone including the local councils. Even WCC doesn't get consulted and GRWC just steam rolls through whatever they think is best.

Public transport around Wellington is being revamped and not for the better and there has been hardly any meaningful consultation.

They should have been given the arse and councils amalgamated

Yeah if you want things done without everyone else looking out for their patch, a supercity would have been the way to go. The only reason why others are wary is because Auckland and its costs but thats come back to the fact that they didn't execute it properly. There is certainly no need for 238 marketing people in Auckland council.....

The whole super city thing was flawed in the boundaries. It makes sense for the contiguous urban area but not so much for the rural parts. 

Porirua, Wellington, and the two Hutt Valley cities all have blurred boundaries and butt right up to each other (the Wellington suburb of Tawa is pretty much in Porirua and you're talking all of a couple of hundred metres seperating Newlands from Petone).

Wairarapa though is quite far away, and being a rural area with towns they have completely different concerns from the larger urban city. It would be crazy to have a tiny village of a few hundred administered from a city a couple of hours drive (and a large mountain range) away.

You could make a case for Kapiti to be included in Wellington because by and large it's full of commuters to the city and Transmission Gully will probably lead to an increase in that and the population of the region, but you could also make an equally strong case that it too is a semi rural area made up of small cities and towns and is seperated from the Wellington urban area by a pretty inhospitable coastline.

It’d also lessen the number of actual morons who get elected to council. The pool of talented councillors is very limited, so merging councils would increase the overall standard of councillors elected by weeding some of the worst ones out. 

Possible. Or not impossible that you actually lose some of the good councillors and the overall standard declines... 

Yeah, just the scope was too big to work, I think the entire urban area so Porirua, Wellington, Lower Hutt, and Upper Hutt would make one council, then one Kapiti council and one Wairapa council.

I would say the most important issue is supermarkets getting their bollocks together and banning this "we don't sell alcohol after 22:00 at weekends" bollocks that seems to change weekly. 

Some nights you can buy it at  23:00 some nights you can't it's a lottery and people who work shifts are f**ked.. 

Allow us as consumers to make decisions. 

I would have used more swear words but for the crunting filter.  You bunch of crunts. 

No shark Sherlock, Patbot, Loveboat  or something.

Yes they have to work within the law but at least be consistent with when and how you sell your wares. Vickmeist asked a few employees and one said their alcohol policy "changes every week".

Surely you're taking the piss.

No, they want to take the piss but can't because of the trading hours!

I wish alcohol held less importance than it does in our society.

But what would the boof heads have to do with their time in between whistle breaks? Thugby, Racing & Beer. Been alive and well in NZ since WWII

Then of course the government would need to tax people more if they  stopped drinking as they take quite a bit of tax plus GST on alcohol.

That's one of the dumbest reasons for alcohol consumption that I've ever heard. For starters most information I've read suggests that the cost to society of alcohol abuse is far more than the total tax take on it. 

Not surprised of course. New Zealand's nation of alcoholics would do anything to justify the current situation. 

Just wait until the lobbying starts against the legalisation of marijuana, simply to protect the revenue of the alcohol industry, it'll be hilarious. 

You must be pretty  dumb  yourself if you think I suggested anything of the sort. I merely pointed out that without the tax on alcohol the government would have to make it up by taxing something else.

Anyway...before another thread turns into a slanging match...

What the Wellington region needs is less Man United fans...all they do is breed, spread fleas and decimate our native wildlife. Oh...rats...I meant rats.

My point was that if you take alcohol away (and therefore the tax take), the cost to society also disappears, so there's no need to make up for that tax. 

Obviously not a feasible thing since we love it so much, but just pointing out that your tax argument is not as straight-forward as you think.

Do you actually believe that any government would not use that as an excuse to increase taxes?

You didn't say it would be an excuse to take tax they don't need. Your actual quotes were:

"Then of course the government would need to tax people more"

"without the tax on alcohol the government would have to make it up by taxing something else."

Honestly mate just give it a rest. It's off-topic anyway. 

My apologies to the readers and moderators for my inability to resist making off-topic comments. Now excusing myself from this thread. 

Don't apologise, not off topic - alcohol availability and it's negative social and health costs is something that should be debated as what is best for a community such as Wellington. 

"The Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act 2012 allows local councils to develop local alcohol policies. A local alcohol policy (LAP) is a set of decisions made by a local authority in consultation with its community about the sale and supply of alcohol in its geographical area."

https://www.justice.govt.nz/justice-sector-policy/...

And, I agree with you - the tax take from alcohol ($907m in 2008 and $682m in 2012 - I can't find anything more recent in a short space of time, and this gives a range of high to low figures as I am not sure on the NZ Herald source and methodology for arriving at that figure) pails in comparison to the negative (over $4billion per year according to a Berl Study commissioned by ACC and MoH) cost of alcohol to NZ society.

Some additional fact sheets:

https://www.alcohol.org.nz/sites/default/files/doc...

http://ahw.org.nz/Portals/5/Resources/Toolkit%2020...

Wellington needs toilets on the trains. Given the length of some journeys, wanting to encourage more people to use public transport and the Wellington rail systems penchant for breaking down, toilets on all trains should be a given (and almost a human right).

Kids travelling in from some far reaching areas, people heading home (responsibly) on a Friday after a couple of drinks from work and just anyone who "didn't need to go before we left" would benefit.

I have no problem with alcohol, it's easy enough to avoid it if you have a problem with it as it's all confined to one location. Wellington has good public transport and infrastructure to deal with drunks, in fact the after midnight buses are more convenient than the standard ones. I'm kind of annoyed the government enforced  4am shut down though, I know the council fought them and tried to get an exemption for the CBD to be open 24/7.

It would be good for the government to use the Wellington CBD as a testing ground for dropping prohibition on Marijuana and allowing for the licensing of amsterdam style coffeeshops.

I think one of the reasons stopping the elctricification of rail further than currently is that trains would require toilets to the length of journeys 

"It is just too expensive, [and] cannot be justified," Mr Gabara said. New trains would be required, with toilets, as the trip to Wellington would take more than an hour."

So they already know it's an issue but I am not sure what advice they have on where to draw the line on time. They could work around this by changing the way ticketing works, rather than on / off train ticketing it should based on your start destination and your finish destination which should allow you to get off at stations that have toilets and catch the next train without any extra financial cost.

You have obviously not been around a long time. 

Is it really that long a trip? Maybe from waikanae. Should there then also be toilets on buses? 

Think I’m with the train company on this one, it isn’t really worth it. They’d also have to clean and maintain the toilets, which would get very nasty on certain weekend trips - people are gross. 

A piss jug with every ticket?

The problem is things like the other day there was some sort of issue and the train from Waikanae had to stop for more than an hour before they brought in replacement busses. For health and safety reasons people are required to stay on the train.

It is an issue though Tegal - if you have to take kids with you, have bladder issues (which can happen after child birth) or if the train breaks down or is delayed which is very common then toilets are needed on even the shortest journeys. As Bullion said, you can't just jump off the next station and pee (you'd have to pay for a new ticket AND very few stations have toilets). In the UK, this is easy as the underground had trains every few minutes, your Oyster lets you hop on and off with ease and every station has bathrooms.

For a public service (and this is public transport remember), you should look after the public and the cost of maintaining toilets on a train is a minimal cost across a large organisation - you could literally add cents to a ticket price and this would easily cover any cost.

Buses are a different kettle of fish given that you'd need large coaches to accommodate bathrooms, however, basis commuter trains already come with this design in place.

EDIT: Worse to clean a train carriage with vomit and pee all over the place if an accident happens than a toilet.

It's gonna cost a sharkload more than a few cents per ticket to replace all the brand new carriages with ones that contain toilets.

How often do people actually piss themselves on trains?