Three Waters Infrastructure Part 4 – Green Streets
One the major prerequisites we need to build the houses we need to combat our housing crisis is infrastructure, without it, the development can’t occur. This post is about a highly but often forgotten element of infrastructure Three Waters – Water Supply, Wastewater & Stormwater focusing in this part again on Stormwater.…
15 Comments The Third Main business case – the un-redacted version
The section of track between Westfield and Wiri is one of the most heavily used in the entire country. On top of serving both the Southern and Eastern lines, it is also sees more rail freight pass over it than any other stretch of track in NZ.…
Auckland Airport’s Growth Plans
The Airport over the last two months have made their plans for what they call Auckland’s Airport of the Future more concrete.
The AIAL Masterplan is a few years old so let’s first start with a refresh/recap as it is quite interesting.…
Research: Pedestrian Connectivity and Economic Productivity in Auckland’s City Centre
For several decades productivity in New Zealand has lagged behind leading OECD countries. A couple weeks back Peter (Connecting cities: it’s a matter of scale) mentioned Phil McCann’s great paper that convincingly explains New Zealand’s productivity problem (“Economic geography, globalisation, and New Zealand’s productivity paradox“).…
Is Parnell Station Fixable?
A couple of weeks ago Harriet kick-started a pretty big discussion on whether Parnell station is fundamentally flawed in its current location. The post was picked up by The Spinoff and provoked much interest in the comments.
In essence, because the station was located up the Parnell valley, its walk-up catchment is far smaller than if the station had been located further down, towards the rail bridge over Parnell Rise.…
Can value capture help pay for new infrastructure?
When we build new infrastructure that connects places to useful destinations or opens up development opportunities, it lifts the value of properties in the surrounding areas. This is pretty intuitively sensible: Holding all else equal, most people would be willing to pay a bit more for the convenience of having, say, a fast and reliable public transport route nearby.…
Streetfilms: Nijmegen
A great new video from Streetfilms on Nijmegen in the Netherlands and something particularly relevant for our smaller cities like Hamilton, Tauranga and Dunedin
This Streetfilm was a pure joy to make, and it really snuck up on me. Nijmegen, a small Dutch city, was never on my radar.…
New Govt Housing Company – Paerata and Drury West Confirmed
On Sunday Bill English announced a co-investment of up to $600m for network infrastructure needed to support more greenfield growth in north and south of Auckland. This will be through a Crown company called Crown Infrastructure Partners (CIP), formally Crown Fibre Holdings.…
Battery trains to be approved for Pukekohe
On Wednesday, the council’s Finance Committee is being asked to give urgent funding approval to purchase 17 new battery powered trains, or Independently Powered Electric Multiple Units (IPEMUs) as they’re referred to officially. The council paper and the full business case notes that the urgency is because a deposit needs to be made by September this year to ensure delivery of these new trains in 2019 which is when the capacity constraints really start to bite.…
Sunday reading 23 July 2017
Welcome back to Sunday reading.
Here are a bunch of housing stories starting with one from the Yale professor Robert W Shiller on the supply constraints responsible for the housing crisis in the States. Robert Shiller, “Why Do Cities Become Unaffordable?“, Project Syndicate.…
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