Congratulations to our Abley team members who have recently been promoted as follows:
This year’s social club weekend expedition was to Kaikoura, around 150km north of Christchurch. Kaikoura was devastated by the 7.8 magnitude earthquake on 14 November 2016, which killed two people, lifted the seabed and caused several massive slips, closing road and rail links for over a year. Today Kaikoura seems to be getting back to its old self, with just the odd closed bar and an earthquake exhibit in the town’s museum hinting that the wildly successful tourist town was virtually shut down due to a lack of tourist trade. A lot of hard work has got the town back on its feet. This included dredging the harbour, the floor of which was raised by the earthquake until it was so shallow the whalewatch boats could no longer berth. In addition, several major construction projects to re-open the road and rail links to the town which were closed after massive slips are still underway.
Congratulations to Becky Tuke who was awarded Highly Commended for the Rising Star Award at the annual Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport NZ (CILT) awards on Friday 18th October 2019.
The Spatial Glitterati were out in force at the 2019 New Zealand Spatial Excellence Awards (NZSEA) held at Te Papa in Wellington on Thursday 17 October. The annual awards, now in their 6th season, were attended by Hon Eugenie Sage, Minister for Land Information, Conservation and the Environment and Andy Foster, the newly elected Mayor of Wellington, for whom this was his first official engagement.
Recently I had the opportunity to be on the Future Transport panel at the Innovation Expo held in Christchurch. In preparing for the panel, we were asked to consider the future developments in transport. My first consideration was for the highly publicised fully autonomous vehicles driving around on the roads without an actual driver. Then there’s the idea of ‘flying cars’ which propose to have us moving around like the Jetsons! While these are exciting and promising views of the future, they are just that, the future – they are not ‘here’ now.
The Abley rowing team had a great time taking part in the Canterbury Rowing Club 2019 Corporate Challenge.
Last week, several of us at Abley were lucky enough to attend the Australasian Road Safety Conference in Adelaide. Adelaide is a beautiful city, being surrounded by parks and with trams bustling through the main city streets. Directly north of the Adelaide Conference Centre is the River Torrens, the riverbanks of which provide excellent views of the city skyline and Adelaide Oval. The city has an easily navigable grid layout, very similar to Christchurch (apparently designed by the same city planner!). We were lucky enough to experience some of the excellent South Australian wines and cuisine on offer through the various social and networking activities held during the conference.
Our People & Places team hit the streets of Christchurch recently, on a technical tour led by Jeanette Ward, the team’s technical director. The tour looked at the elements that contribute to great places for people in the central city, the following pictures provide a snippet of what we saw.
Earlier this year I was privileged to be invited to take a lecture at Auckland University for the students doing Undergraduate study in Geographic Information Science. Following on from this, on Tuesday 17th September I lectured 60+ students who were enrolled in this course. My role was to talk to them about what its like to work in the spatial industry, what the future looks like and my personal experiences working for a professional services consultancy.
With a theme of ‘leading the way – towards zero’, the Australasian Road Safety Conference (ARSC) 2019 will showcase the best researchers, practitioners, policy makers and industry experts in the road safety industry from across Australasia. Abley has a strong presence at this year’s conference with the following presentations taking place:
