In Transit July 1994

In Transit No 54 July 1994

In Transit No 54 July 1994

In Transit No54 July 1994

In Transit No.54 July 1994

In this issue:

• Expansion of competitive tendering to all minor and ancillary work, including that for local authorities, and including what is needed for Local Authority Trading Enterprises to be eligible to tender for such work.
• "Adopt-a-Highway" programme for local communities to support landscaping highways
• Removal of the designation for the Christchurch Northern Arterial
• Electronic road pricing trials in Singapore

The latter two points may be of more historical interest. 

Christchurch Northern Arterial designation removal

The removal of the designation which was originally for a motorway is significant as it meant that there was next to no likelihood of a motorway/expressway heading to the northern edge of the Christchurch CBD. No doubt had it remained, there would have been some resistance to a motorway extending to Bealey Avenue.

The reason for the removal was that Transit NZ believed Cranford St would be adequate to meet demand over the long term along with a belief that an arterial road that included the cost of removing the housing on the designation would be unlikely to be economically viable. It was noted that the designation would remain to the north (in largely rural land), which of course was subsequently used for the Christchurch Northern Corridor motorway extension.

The designation was one of the many motorway designations placed in New Zealand cities in the 1950s and 1960s, except of course in Auckland, many were built, whereas Christchurch's Northern Motorway in the 1970s was at the city outskirts and largely consisted of a bypass for Kaiapoi.

Singapore Electronic Road Pricing trials

In 1994 Singapore had been operating a manually enforced paper-based congestion pricing cordon in its CBD since 1975, but at this point was trialling electronic road pricing to implement wider corridor based congestion pricing using electronic On Board Units, with prepaid smart cards for payment. These trials led to full implementation of the ERP system in 1998, which remains the world's most efficient and effective congestion pricing scheme.