How “green” is public transport?
Last night I came across an interesting post on HumanTransit.org which discusses the question of “how green (environmentally friendly) is public transport?” The post responds to the claims that empty buses that operate during off-peak times are likely to counter-balance any environmental benefits that public transport provides over cars during peak hour.…
17 Comments Rudman on Waterview
A great article by Brian Rudman on the Waterview Connection in the NZ Herald today:
Long, twisted road to tunnel backflip
Think of a figure, double it, add your age and subtract the number of eels in Oakley Creek: that, it seems, is as good a guess as any for the price of completing the Waterview Connection.…
Gridlock in Herne Bay
Just caught a rather long-winded bus home, as it got a bit caught up in the gridlock that seems to have descended upon Herne Bay in the past couple of weeks. This is generally related to the roadworks that are currently going on along Curran Street in Ponsonby/Herne Bay.…
The Dominion Road Corridor
The Dominion Road corridor is probably the most well-served bus corridor in Auckland (except for ones like Great South Road where you have a tonne of disparate routes converging) with over 30 buses along that route reaching the CBD between 8am and 9am during the week.…
Local road funding “crisis”
A rather strange lead story on One News tonight about ‘roading jobs around the country being under threat’. Here’s the video for the story, and TVNZ’s full story is included below:
There is more grim employment news with roading jobs around the country under threat because of a lack of local government funding for planned projects.…
Newmarket Station visit
After writing a fair few blog posts on Newmarket station over the past week (and not all of them particularly complementary) I thought I should go check it out for myself. Arriving from Broadway, I do think something needs to be done to improve the connectivity of “station square” with the main street.…
Why Oil Prices aren’t higher
Apparently recently petrol prices in New Zealand were at their highest levels in about 14 months, until a 3c a litre cut in the price. However, prices are still about 50 cents a litre short of their mid 2008 peak. As I have outlined in the past, in my opinion (which is backed up by a reasonable amount of research) the price spike that we saw in 2008 was largely the result of oil supply hitting a peak in around 2005/2006, but demand continuing to grow between then and 2008.…
Avoiding the end-change at Newmarket
One the biggest hassles about the old Newmarket Station (the old old one, not the Newmarket West or South stations) was the “shunt” movement that has to be used to get trains from Britomart out to the west. In 2006 I used the train service between Britomart and Avondale for a couple of weeks after writing off my car, so experienced the “Newmarket shunt” first hand.…
New Public Transport Book
Most regular readers of this blog would know I’m a huge fan of Melbourne based transport academic Paul Mees and what he has to say about transport policy. In particular, the work that he has done on finding ways to improve public transport in dispersed cities like Melbourne and Auckland, is fascinating and utterly essential reading in this field.…
A few questions about Waterview
I was just thinking about various developments that have happened recently around the Waterview Connection route – in particular the new alignment announced in December, and the use of the ‘call-in’ process announced a couple of days ago, and a few questions came to mind.…
Processing...