Time to carpool
Waipā councillors and council staff have been challenged to carpool.
Mike Pettit
“If you are not modelling what you’re teaching you’re doing something else,” Waipā mayor Mike Pettit told a Cambridge Connections workshop in Te Awamutu.
“There’s many of us that arrive in this building every day from one town and we all pretty much travel in single cars. So, if we want to model what we teach we should be starting right here in this room.
“If we’re asking the community to make a change, I think we should be trying to lead it up ourselves.”
Cambridge ward councillor Roger Gordon wanted to know if the solutions to Cambridge’s transport problems could be prioritised to address current issues such as congested roundabouts.
Roger Gordon
Council transportation manager Bryan Hudson said: “This plan is a 30-year plan, but it will have short term, medium term, and long-term objectives.
“We are hearing from the themes and the public feedback, that they do point out particular intersections or places where there’s more congestion and they see the value of improvements.
“You will end up with a network plan where you will need improvements over time.”
Cambridge ward councillor Aidhean Camson wondered if there was space for a socio-economic lens to be applied to the Cambridge Connections plan.
Aidhean Camson
“We need to make this stuff accessible to everyone, not just necessarily someone with a car,” he said.
Pirongia and Kakepuku ward councillor Les Bennett asked when Cambridge’s high-level bridge would reach end of life.
“If you ask a bridge engineer how long is that bridge going to last, they’ll always say how much money do you want to spend, we’ll make it last forever,” Hudson said.
“In France there’s still traffic travelling across bridges that the Romans built 2000 years ago. It’s possible to make it last a long time by continuing to work on it.”
Hudson said new metalwork had already been installed and the concrete deck will probably need replacing in 2060 when it reaches a century in age.
