The article missed the part where NZ sold its national railroad to private equity after tax payers bailed it out of debt. The government has since bought the railroad back but the damage was done.
Why don’t they just add another lane? /s
If we’d just kept one or two more refineries we could have helped them out a bit
Both of us need to up the EV takeup.
It is what it is
No, it absolutely is not “what it is”.
This is definitely a problem that can and must be fixed.
It’s a quote from Donald Trump, when he asked about the effects of the war.
How?
With infrastructure.
What infrastructure?
What you think? Balloon animals?
Why dont you just say what you think would help
Why?
- make using public transportation more feasible and more comfortable than it is now
- maximize the walkability of people’s everyday environments
- the part of private car usage that is not necessary should be heavily taxed
- enable people to commute by bicycle in a way that is actually comfortable
- make sure villages’, towns’, and cities’ development is done in a way that supports building good public transportation (especially: don’t build cul-de-sack neighbourhoods)
- the part of car usage that is necessitated should happen with electric vehicles
These are measures that are being taken in various other cities around the planet. The Netherlands started doing moat of these in the 1970’s and is now a tourist destination because of that. People really like the urban environment that has produced.
Nz is completely different to the Netherlands. We are a young country, have low density and are far away from the world which makes building cost a ton. A lot of the things youve suggested would just never be able to happen quick enough to avoid this.
We are doing majority of the things you listed already but its taking time. Even if we’d already completed it we would still be hit very hard due to how spread out the population is. We’ve switched to electric buses and ferry’s. We’ve switched our zoning to high density. We’ve done electric vehicle rebates and built out a charging network in cities. Our cities are fine to walk. This is pretty new tech you can’t just say bro why havent you gone 100% electric yet.
NZ has a lot of places where its not economical to get the required infrastructure built out. And all these infrastructure projects place a huge burden on our low tax base.
The only realistic solution to reduce the impact would be to increase the minimum fuel storage requirements but who would have the foresight to do that? Why would we expect our supply chain to get fucked like this.
We can cut of fuel to people in cities they can take public transport or work from home and rural people and critical infrastructure can use rhe 50 days of fuel reserves and well see what the situation is like in 30 days. It looks like we’ll be able to secure another ship of fuel from one of the Asian refineries so I doubt we’ll go without.
