Letters: Watercare, bus lanes and sports reporting

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Opinion

Passing the buck

I see the council has ducked responsibility for the Auckland water debacle by passing the buck to a full-time "professional director" who has umpteen other directorship positions. What a farce. How could one person do justice to so many jobs?
I'm sure there are people in top jobs in the real world of commerce who would be willing to offer advice on how to run a big business.
The council and bevy of bureaucrats and hangers-on obviously can't hack it.
China has built 87,000 dams. You'd think that we could manage a couple of them.
John Clements, Orewa

Spot the dogged phone users

It was a fantastic move to put CCTV on bus lanes, resulting in the number of $150 fines doubling since 2017 and up from only 14,000 fines in 2015 to 190,000 fines in 2019 ("Bus-lane fines up dramatically", September 6).
We should also follow the example of Queensland, which put in CCTV to catch non-hands-free mobile-phone use by drivers.
It caught 1000 drivers in only 14 days for $1 million in fines, on one highway.
It was reported that: "A new highway camera has snapped more than 1000 drivers using their phones illegally in the two weeks since it was installed.
"The camera was switched on along a Queensland highway this month as part of a push to crack down on dangerous behaviour by motorists.
"Unlike speed cameras, the phone camera is not signposted and its location has been kept secret by the Department of Transport and Main Roads.
"Evidence shows that the danger of using of a phone while driving is akin to driving with a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.07 to 0.1 per cent." (Brisbane Times, August 27).
Bus-lane CCTV is cheaper and better than enforcers standing out in all weather.
Likewise, CCTV on mobile phones would allow police to concentrate on the major crime we endure.
Murray Hunter, Titirangi

Bus lanes total no-go zone

The communications manager of Auckland Transport is quoted as saying that it is not about reaping huge fines from errant drivers but rather that drivers should stay out of bus lanes, fullstop ... to avoid the unpleasant task of collecting many millions from mostly unsuspecting drivers. Perhaps he might consider replacing vague and hard-to-see signage with one large sign indicating, simply, bus lane — keep out.
But I'm not sure that the loss of a lucrative source of income for Auckland Council would be deemed irrelevant.
Ted Partridge, Māngere

Credit where it's due

When reading the sports reports about rugby games, I really quite enjoy the individual player assessments for each team — not least because I often disagree with elements of what is written — that's half the fun ...
But what really peeves me is that you only write assessments for the starting 15 players. The ones that come off the bench only get a number out of 10 and no comments.
When the replacements are only on the park for five minutes at the very end of the game, this might possibly be excusable.
But, personally, I think every player should be rated — because in today's game, players coming off the bench have a specific role as impact players and as such are as important as the starting players.
What is really unfair, though, is where a starting player only plays the first half and his replacement plays the whole second half. Surely they both deserve an equal amount of comment.
And then it becomes utterly and totally and completely absurd when a player goes off after 13 minutes because of injury (as did Braydon Ennor in Saturday's game) and his replacement ends up playing 72 minutes (the rest of the 80 scheduled minutes plus the five minutes overtime played after the siren) — and gets no more than a number as an assessment of his performance.
Give all the players their due, please.
Tony Forster, Mt Eden