Shared Streets
One of the few pieces of good transport news to emerge in recent weeks has been Auckland City Council’s plans to embark on a “Shared Space Concept”. The plans basically entail a number of quiet inner-city streets being redesigned to create a balance between pedestrians and cars, where the distinction between what is road-space and what is footpath-space is removed.…
2 Comments Backbenches
I certainly had an interesting evening last night, at the Backbenches Mt Albert by-election special in Kingsland. I hadn’t gone along to anything like this before, but it was pretty obvious even when I first arrived (quite a few hours early, somewhat by mistake as it was easier to find where it was than I had expected) that it would be interesting, and quite crowded.…
Stations Funded, Integrated Ticketing Questionable
There’s an interesting article in today’s Herald about the progress of sorting out the mess Steven Joyce left Auckland’s public transport in when he cancelled the Regional Fuel Tax a couple of months back. There’s some good news, some frustrating news and some potentially good news.…
New Train Timetable
An updated train timetable for Auckland has been released by ARTA, to take effect from June 29th.
ARTA’s summary:
From 29 June there will be a new train timetable in operation on all lines.
With the delivery of additional carriages over the last year, the Auckland Regional Transport Authority has been able to increase services and provide more capacity during the busy, peak times.…
Super-City Submission – Part One
Submissions on the Local Government (Auckland Council) Bill are open until the 26th of June. This is the bill that will establish the structure of Auckland’s future Super-City. It decides whether or not there should be Maori seats, whether or not there should be ‘at-large’ councillors, what the powers of the local boards should be and how they should be structured.…
NZTA’s Waterview Connection “options”
It’s always interesting to rummage through the agenda of Auckland City Council’s Transport Committee meetings, as they often throw up some quite interesting information. There are probably a few blog post’s worth of information in this month’s agenda, but for now I’ll focus on what it says about the Waterview Connection.…
Another Dream Train Network
I like coming up with fantasy rail networks for Auckland, as is pretty obvious from posts in the past. At the moment it seems like wishful thinking, but someone out there has to be aspirational for the future of Auckland’s railway network and why shouldn’t that be me?…
Improving the Northern Busway
By all accounts Auckland’s Northern Busway has been a huge success since it opened in February last year. The graph below shows quite clearly how its patronage has continued to rise in recent months: with March 2009 being up significantly on March 2008 (even though the full busway was open by March 2008).…
Another Nail in the Public Transport Coffin
Over the past few months I don’t think Steven Joyce could have destroyed public transport much more if he had tried (I guess he really is trying). Shifting hundreds of millions of dollars away from public transport and into state highway funding, cancelling Auckland’s regional petrol tax, delaying the ordering of electric trains, not making any commitments to funding integrated ticketing and so forth.…
On bFM – again!
I had another fun time yesterday doing an interview about Auckland’s transport situation on bFM. In particular, on rail electrification, PPPs, the regional fuel tax (RIP) and the Waterview Connection.
You can listen to the interview here: http://www.95bfm.com/default,191492.sm…
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