The New Zealand Labour Party and New Zealand Greens both make much of the fact that when you privatise a state-owned enterprise the taxpayer is no longer entitled to dividends from the privatised business. The fact that the sale price is the net present value of those future dividends is a rating fallacy that is not the subject of this post.
Source: New Zealand Treasury – data released under the Official Information Act.
What is the subject of this post is whether there are indeed any dividends paid to taxpayers after capital injections. 2007 was the last year in which dividends to the taxpayer exceeded capital injections. The reason was that dog called KiwiRail.
Bugger all Aucklanders take the bus (6.5%) or train (1.8%) to work. More Wellingtonians take the train (6.4%) or the public bus (7.9%) than in Auckland but more walk or jog than take either of those two publicly funded and subsidised conveyances. Hardly anybody takes a bike to work these days.
In responding to demands for police to crack down on windscreen washers, some of whom intimidate motorists to pay, the deputy mayor of Christchurch showed a cultured ignorance of youth courts. She has never read newspaper reports that show that youth court defendants are never named and their convictions are not held against them as adults. Furthermore, she is unaware of the spent convictions law in New Zealand that expunges most convictions after seven years, especially petty convictions.
If bikes were not invented until today, would they ever be allowed on the road by road safety regulators. Here is the business case: allow pedestrians to move around at high speed on the road including at night with poor visibility as long as they travel on a metal contraption.
I am surprised that the Guardian did not do this graphical analysis themselves. My analysis below shows the quite a few people were unarmed but many more were carrying guns, knives or other weapons.
You have to read through every individual data entry to work out how many of those killed had guns, and the many of these were shooting at police when they were shot dead. The same legwork is required to find out how many officers are on murder charges after killing civilians.
The average commute by public transport is 40 minutes as compared to less than 25 in a car. 74% of Aucklanders drive to work and another 9% are a passenger in a car.
No information was available on those who bike to work because only 1% of Aucklanders bike to work. Only 2% of all New Zealanders take a bike to work. The sample size was therefore too small. Yet another reason to ban bikes at night. Few commute on this mode of transport in Auckland.
The near identical commuting distances irrespective of the mode of transport except walking is further evidence that people are quite discerning in balancing commuting times and job selection as per the theory of compensating differentials. Indeed, average commuting times in Auckland are much the same as the average commuting time in America.
Improving the commuting times in one mode of transport will mean people simply take the mode of peak hour transport that is suddenly become less congested while others who were not going to commute at peak times or start commuting at peak times as Anthony Downs explains:
If that expressway’s capacity were doubled overnight, the next day’s traffic would flow rapidly because the same number of drivers would have twice as much road space.
But soon word would spread that this particular highway was no longer congested. Drivers who had once used that road before and after the peak hour to avoid congestion would shift back into the peak period. Other drivers who had been using alternative routes would shift onto this more convenient expressway. Even some commuters who had been using the subway or trains would start driving on this road during peak periods.
Within a short time, this triple convergence onto the expanded road during peak hours would make the road as congested as it was before its expansion.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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