You can tell council elections are coming up, because that’s the only reason the Christchurch City Council is going to start using high friction road surfaces at pedestrian crossings, instead of speed humps.

Even though it knows that speed humps are safer. Even though it knows that it won’t slow down traffic. But you’ve got to keep people sweet when there’s an election coming up.

They’re starting with a pedesttian crossing Halswell, with the local councillor saying they’re doing it so that people don’t get brassed off.

Andrei Moore says: "We are putting safe infrastructure in without pissing everyone off.”

And there’s your evidence that this isn’t being done for safety. It’s being done to try and calm down all the whingers ahead of October's election.

Talk about shallow.

I know when these speed humps things started appearing, twe all thought “what the hell are these things all about?” And, since then, it's become incredible fashionable to slag them off.

But this is the problem when you get a bunch of people sitting around a council table all thinking they’re road safety experts when the only thing they're expert in is pandering to voters.

Apparently, the plus side of these high friction surfaces is that vehicles are less likely to skid, but they do nothing to slow traffic down. When some muppet is screaming up to a pedestrian crossing and has to slam on the brakes, they’ll be at less risk of skidding.

At least with the speed humps, even the muppets are forced to slow down – that’s not going to happen with your high friction surface, is it?

Cost is another thing in favour of the high friction surfaces, as opposed to the sped humps. A report I’ve seen says installing a speed hump —including the aspahalt, the road marking, and the signage— costs somewhere between $30,000 and $55,000.

Whereas, the anti-skid, high friction road surface costs between $25,000 and $35,000. The fly in the ointment there though is that this special surface costs more to maintain than your speed hump.

But are these speed humps really that much of a problem? What’s so bad about something that forces drivers to slow down – especially when they’re approaching a pedestrian crossing?

There’s nothing wrong with that.

And, if you are totally honest with yourself, do speed humps really have that much of a negative impact on your life?

Or do you think you might have fallen into the trap and followed the crowd in your opposition to speed humps? Because I reckon that, in the grand scheme of things, they aren’t a problem at all.

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Local politicians from both sides of the political divide are slamming police process around the proposed restructure in wider Canterbury.

Federated Farmers, City Councillors, and schools are concerned at the lack of community consultation.

Banks Peninsula MP Vanessa Weenink told John MacDonald the communication, for a start, hasn't been well managed.

She says police will need to do a lot to assure her, and the community, that what they're doing is the right step.

While Labour's Tracey McLellan says the community's rightly concerned about the internal-only consultation, which is not at all in line with expectations.

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When I heard Transport Minister Chris Bishop talking about the Government’s changes to the road user charges system, I had a bit of a Max Bradford moment.

Max was the National Party minister who told us back in 1988 that his reforms of the electricity sector were going to mean cheaper power prices.

Which is what Chris Bishop was saying yesterday about the plan to ditch petrol taxes and move all vehicle owners to road user charges which, at the moment, are only paid by people with diesel, electric, and heavy vehicles.

He said: “From a cash flow point of view, it’ll help people. At the moment, when you go and fill your car up you pay petrol tax at the pump, right there at 70 cents per litre, roughly.”

The part of yesterday’s announcement that really caught my eye was NZTA not being responsible for collecting and processing the road user charge payments. Instead, that’s going to be farmed out to private operators which the government says will encourage “fairer competition”.

And, in saying that, the Government is trying to sell some sort of idea that by not having NZTA involved, these charges are somehow going to be cheaper.

Which is why I had Max Bradford ringing in my ears. Because he was talking nonsense when he said his reforms back in 1988 were going to mean cheaper power prices.

And Chris Bishop is talking nonsense if he expects us to believe that contracting private outfits to take over is going to mean cheaper costs for vehicle owners.

The minister says it’s possible we’ll pay our road user charges through an app, which is why the government wants to get private operators involved. Because it doesn't want to spend the time and money developing the technology and the systems.

But will this “fairer competition” it’s talking about really mean things being cheaper at our end? Of course not.

And this is not me having a dig at any of the companies who might have heard that announcement yesterday and saw an opportunity. Because that’s what business is all about: seeing opportunities.

And, again, this isn’t me having a dig at businesses, but they don’t do these kinds of things for free.

Being in business is all about clipping the ticket as much as possible. And no business is going to want to get involved in the new road user charging system if it can’t clip the ticket. That’s just how it is.

Which is why I don’t like the Government's plan to take NZTA out of the picture.

Yes, I support the shift to everyone paying road user charges, because that makes sense. Because when you use a road, it makes no difference whether you drive an old dunger or something more modern – you’re still using it.

With road user charges, you pay depending on how many kilometres you drive instead of how much fuel you buy.

And if you’ve got the most fuel-efficient vehicle on the market, why should you effectively pay less to use the same road as someone who can only afford an old gas guzzler?

You shouldn’t. So the move to us all paying road user charges will get no argument from me. What I am pushing back on, though, is the plan to get private companies running the new system.

To let private companies clip the ticket which, as far as I can see, will only lead to us paying more.

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