- By Andy Baker, Franklin ward councillor
Politicians used to be accused of being willing to go to the opening of an envelope; that isn’t so common now with such little mail being posted like it used to be.
Recently attendance at the opening of an email could be appropriate, with the flurry of activity across Auckland from the opening of the massive central interceptor underground waste pipe built to prevent sewerage flowing into some of our most popular beaches and the Waitemata Harbour, to the new railway stations at Paerata and Drury.
These stations have now been open for a handful of weeks and already are proving popular.
Figures from AT show nearly 3,500 boardings at the two stations during the first week of opening but most encouraging was that whilst some (like me) have shifted from other stations to these new ones, patronage at both Pukekohe and Papakura stations has also increased in that time and the data shows there is a spike is new AT Hop cards and users of train services which shows when we have public transport that is accessible, attractive and affordable, people will give it a go.
Our challenge is to make it a more attractive option than driving, which seems to be working in these early days, hopefully it can be maintained.
For those who might be thinking the services are unreliable, punctuality of trains at the stations was between 97 percent and 99 percent with reliability at 100 percent, according to AT.
At the opening of the Te Mahia and Taakanini station overbridges, I stood alongside Transport Minister Chris Bishop as our mainstream media showed absolutely no interest in the projects that will save lives and badgered him for around 20 minutes about party politics, ignoring his answers and just yelling the same questions repeatedly.
I heard every answer which was later cut and pasted in amongst articles and stories that were so far from what was said that it almost made me sick.
Later that day I was told by a breakfast TV reporter that they wanted me to come on their programme but wanted to know my opinion on something and if I wasn’t hard enough, they didn’t want to interview me.
Didn’t matter what the truth was, they just wanted the headline story. I am amazed at the lack of integrity. For what it’s worth, after their email, I turned down the offer to appear.
