Posts from April 2026 (2)

• For the day between March 31 and April 2nd, Andrew Gelman takes on an app that claims to find patterns in lotto numbers and make you money.
• RNZ reports the plans for tolls on the Road of Northland Significance, a charge of $4.50 each way from Warkworth to Te Hana (you will see some quotes of $14.20, which includes current tolls on the already-existing road to Puhoi). They don’t report what fraction of the cost the tolls will cover. Greater Auckland looked at the NZTA consultation papers about the tolling and say 35 years of tolling will raise $391m. That would be nearly 10% of the (phase 1) cost if you didn’t include interest; it’s a much smaller fraction when you do. And this is phase 1 — there are two more phases in the planned road to Whangārei.  Whether the road is worth the cost isn’t my specialty, but it’s a lot of cost.
• Len Cook (former Government Statistician) is in the Otago Daily Times disapproving of the planned removal of the census enumerations. We’ve covered this topic before.  The changes to the Data and Statistics Act are up for public comment, as are the necessary changes to the Electoral Act.   The electoral changes are not intrinsically controversial but are needed because electoral redistricting is currently triggered by the census. The electoral changes are important because they need a 75% supermajority in Parliament.
• RNZ reports on an NZTA report on public consultation about road changes in Wellington. First, the usual whinge: please link to this sort of report, so we can read it if your summary gets us interested!  Second, and the StatsChat motivation, the NZTA report displays pretty graphics of the public feedback, which are systematically wrong! For example, on the question “will a second Terrace Tunnel make things worse or better for you?” the lower bar is from the report and the upper bar is correct based on the percentages.  The right end of the bar is “better”, and is exaggerated
  
  Or the next question, about Te Aro improvements (original above, correct version below). Again, the “better” end is exaggerated
  
  I don’t think this is likely to be deliberate, but it’s a bad look

The Ministry of Transport have put up a fuel monitoring dashboard. It shows estimates of demand, supply, and price.

At the moment, the reduction in demand is less than 10%, a level of demand that’s probably not sustainable in the medium when global supply is down at least 25%. On the other hand, we are still at level 1 of the alert system, and even level 2 doesn’t ask for any real reductions in demand.

What this display doesn’t show is any sort of “time to running out”.  That’s probably sensible, because it’s not even well-defined, let alone predictable. If you define “running out” as some petrol stations being out of supplies then it’s already happened. If you define it as “no fuel in the country”, it probably won’t happen. And if you define it as level 3 or level 4 restrictions on supply then it’s a choice by the government based on unknown criteria, and so is hard to forecast statistically.