Well, whoop de doo. Harry Brasser has condemned Te Manawa, our new city focus (Letters, October 28). This is not surprising, considering that he has been a persistent critic of this project from the date of its conception and before it was even designed.
Brasser chooses to ignore the reasonfor Te Manawa; it has been made, and the old City Focus destroyed, at the request of inner city businesses so as to return a north/south east/west traffic flow to our CBD.
Could he perhaps explain how he would have achieved such an alteration in traffic flow while still separating cars from people (which Te Manawa does), and providing the seats, information kiosks, performance stages etc that he so misses.
JOHN PAKES Ngongotaha
With the new Government announcing a massive tree planting programme with re-establishing the NZ Forest Service to be based in Rotorua, attention needs to be given to expanding the rail network in this region to carry the massive amount of forestry traffic.
There is much need for a rail line to be built into the Rotorua and Taupo regions to serve the large number of plantation pine forests and two large mills at Waipa and Taupo, to help reduce the high number of large, heavy logging trucks on the roads in this region.
A new line between Kinleith-Rotorua-Taupo would link all these forests, mills and a dairy factory at Reporoa together along one line and could also be used to carry general freight and tourists between Auckland-Hamilton-Matamata-Rotorua-Taupo to help ease ever-increasing traffic volumes on State Highways 1 and 5.
A line to Taupo would also have the potential to be electrified, being powered by the many new renewable geothermal power stations recently built in this region, helping the Government to achieve its goal of reducing net carbon emissions to zero.
