Thursday, 17 June 2004

Auckland Road Pricing study

The Government today confirmed it was making progress across phases one and two of the Auckland road pricing work programme.

This includes work to better define differing conceptual approaches for modelling purposes, early work on some technical feasibility issues and to outline a prospective evaluation framework.

The next stage is to fully develop the evaluation framework to ensure that it takes the objectives of the New Zealand Transport Strategy and issues around; demand management, revenue potential, social distributional, socio-economic; public acceptability, privacy, administration, technical feasibility and implementation, land use, mitigation and legislative impacts into account.

It is anticipated that this work will have been progressed to the extent that it is ready to be reported back to cabinet from the middle of next year.

The ARC will be represented on the official steering committee and will be invited to establish a local authorities advisory group to facilitate their input to this work

No decisions have yet been made to go ahead with any road pricing mechanisms.

ENDS

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Gordon Campbell: On the Sony cyber attack

Given the layers of meta-irony involved, the saga of the Sony cyber attack seemed at the outset more like a snarky European art film than a popcorn entry at the multiplex.

Yet now with (a) President Barack Obama weighing in on the side of artistic freedom and calling for the US to make a ‘proportionate response’quickly followed by (b) North Korea’s entire Internet service going down, and with both these events being followed by (c) Sony deciding to backtrack and release The Interview film that had made it a target for the dastardly North Koreans in the first place, then ay caramba…the whole world will now be watching how this affair pans out. More>>