Light Rail: How we got here
Over the last few weeks we’ve seen numerous articles and opinion pieces about Light Rail and the airport. A common and incorrect theme amongst many of them has been the suggestion that the choice to use light rail was a political one and that it’s a vanity project that we can choose not to do or do something different.…
51 Comments The advice Auckland has ignored for 50 years but must now heed
Engineer planner Lt Col Sir Colin Buchanan is rightly famous for his 1963 report Traffic in Towns and 1964 book of the same name. The report looks ahead to wall of traffic heading to British streets in the post war period and sets out principles and plans to ameliorate the negative effects as much as possible.…
How “easy” is a Puhinui-Airport rail spur?
One of the key things that I think attracts some people to the idea of an Airport-Puhinui rail spur is that it seems, intuitively, to be a relatively easy and therefore cheap piece of infrastructure to build. After all, it’s not that far and most of the land between the rail network and the Airport is currently undeveloped farmland.…
A new waterfront stadium proposal
A few weeks ago there were rumours about a new, privately funded stadium proposal for Auckland. The proposal has now been released and it’s far more than just a stadium with its backers saying it will become New Zealand’s largest ever infrastructure project and could be delivered within the next 10 years.…
Transport Growth Networks – Northwest
We’ve recently written about consultation in the North and South about future transport networks as part of a project to designate the corridors before the growth starts occurring. Back in August they consulted on Warkworth and in the North around Dairy Flat and Silverdale.…
Developing Park & Ride sites
Park & Ride is always a hot topic of debate, being seen by some as the key to get more people on public transport. We believe the issue is much more complex, in large part because they take up a lot of land, cost a lot to build and don’t provide all that many extra trips.…
Lime e-scooters launch in Auckland
Overseas e-scooters have very quickly become a disruptive player in urban transportation in many of the cities where they’ve launched. Being powered and relatively easy to use and taking up even less space than a bike, they’re ideal for short trips around cities.…
Viewshaft E10: A Billion Dollar View on Auckland
This is a guest post from Geoff Cooper, Director of Economics at PwC, on work he’s done looking at viewshafts.
The Journal of New Zealand Economic Papers recently published ‘City With A Billion Dollar View’ by Geoff Cooper (Princeton University, but now at PwC) and Kabira Namit (World Bank).…
Fuel Prices an opportunity for change
Increasing petrol prices have unsurprisingly remained a hot topic of conversation. Brian Fallow wrote an excellent piece on the subject last week.
So why not give drivers a break?
Because fuel prices are too low, not too high.
This week we also received the latest, sobering report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), spelling out the adverse impacts we can expect from even another half a degree of global warming beyond the 1C we have generated already.…
Flashback Saturday: If you want more consumption choices, live near lots of other people
Every weekend we dig into the archives. This post by Peter was originally published in March 2015.
One of the many reasons that people choose to live in cities is that cities offer variety. As Stu Donovan has argued before, being around more people sometimes seems inconvenient, but it also exposes you to new ideas, new people, and new consumption choices.…
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