Tony saves the day
My No 1 pick is Tony Randle. I have known Tony since university but that is not why I am so excited he is standing. Tony is an expert on public transport. He is hugely pro public transport but even more hugely pro good analysis. Whenever NZTA or GWRC or LGWM puts out a business case for something, Tony gets hold of the detailed work sheets and literally picks up all their errors, their misguided assumptions etc. The ability of WCC to scrutinise transport projects would be hugely enhanced if Tony is a Councillor. If you want public transport decisions based on reality, not fantasy, then Tony is your person.
And boy was I right. We should all be very grateful that Tony got elected to Council because the Council was planning to lower the speed limits on almost every street in the city by 20 km/hr – 60 to 40 and 50 to 30. This would have increased travel times by 50% or more.
There are some streets that should have lower speed limits. I support 30 km/hr for Lambton Quay as it is teaming with pedestrians. But a blanket reduction over the city was always about ideology.
Anyway Stuff tonight reports:
It’s back to the drawing board for the plan to reduce speed limits to 30kph across Wellington, after one of the city council’s own discovered a serious error in the council’s cost-benefit analysis.
The mistake – first spotted by councillor Tony Randle – meant the benefits of reducing the speed limit in terms of reducing crashes was overstated by more than $250 million. …
The mistake was “a small but significant error”, Randle said. He had experience as an analyst and discovered the error after he asked council staff for the spreadsheet of cost-benefit analysis.
Councillors should not have to put through scores of pages of spreadsheets to check they are accurate. They should be able to trust what is put to them. This is a major failing by WCC, and should have employment consequences for some. I don’t necessarily mean the analyst who made the mistake. We all make mistakes. But a well funded massive entity like WCC should have rigourous processes of checking, and auditing and peer review. The senior management team need to explain why this all failed.
This is an error of monumental proportions. They told Councillors that making this change would produce $7,700 of benefits for every $1,000 of costs, but the reality is that the costs will be almost double the benefits.
Remember, that if not for one Councillor picking this up, the majority of the Council probably would have happily voted to lower speed limits across the city by 20 km/hr.
Staff involved in this area should have been sceptical from the beginning at the claimed 7.7:1 BCR. Such a ratio almost never exists in the real world with transport projects. Anything with such a positive BCR would have been done years ago.
The suspicion is that as the ideological agenda from the top is that cars are bad and we must make it as unpleasant as possible for people to use them, that no one wanted to question a paper which told them what they wanted to hear.
I hope Councillors don’t just shrug their shoulders and say oh mistakes happen. They should be angry. They should be holding the Chief Executive and the SLT to account and demanding an independent audit of their processes.
Council chief planning officer Liam Hodgetts said the error was “very disappointing” in a benefit-cost ratio which was externally and independently peer-reviewed.
“I apologise for the error – this should not have happened.”
Was it also internally checked by anyone? And who was the external independent peer-reviewer? The company should be named. Will the Council stop using them? What was the brief to them?
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