Breaking down car culture
It is fantastic the regional council wants to expand bus services in the Bay. I understand that many parents will feel angry about the SchoolHopper service being reduced to subsidise the BayHopper service but let's look at the bigger picture here and what this means for our city.
We have the opportunity to raise the next generation to become dedicated public transport users. This means rather than our children hitting their late teens, buying vehicles and adding to congestion, they may not even have any desire or need for a car.
This is more than just adding to a service, it's creating a culture shift for the future.
Buses are cheaper than driving our loved ones to the school gates, too.
We need roads safe enough for all of our family to be on bicycles, bike parking at bus stops, hopper boats frequently darting across from Tauranga to the Mount and back again with stop-off wharfs along the way with bike parking there, too) and busses going everywhere, even to the rural stops.
The roads will then be clear for when we really need to drive.
This is just the beginning. We need to get behind this.
(Abridged)
Kat Macmillan
Tauranga
Lifting fee a key
My suggestion for the Te Puna roadworks is for the New Zealand Transport Authority to lift the toll on the Te Puna bypass until the Te Puna roadworks are completed and ready for use.
This will allow people who avoid the toll cost by driving through Te Puna to use the toll road and alleviate at least some of the congestion through Te Puna.
Chris Pattison
Papamoa
Market forces
Columnist Bryan Gould has a point about incessant human desire for material progress leading to the pollution of our waterways (Opinion, May 9). But he is wrong to blame capitalism, the pursuit of profit and the free market.
Capitalism is the system whereby ultimately the public, also called the consumer, is king.
No individual always gets what they want, but that is because the resources of the planet are finite, and we are all competing with each other for them, just like in nature. Clean water is one of those resources.
The free market works best when property rights are clear. So long as someone owns a resource, they have an incentive to use - or preserve - it according to the demands of the public.
Conversely, if a resource is free for all to use, because it has no specific owner, the market system cannot work and the resource will be squandered.
So we declare that such public goods belong to the state, which then allocates rights to take water or discharge into it. Bureaucracy and political whim are substituted for normal market forces as the rationing system.
So it is not the market, but the state, which has failed us here.
Stuart Pedersen
Mt Maunganui