Mees on Transit: keep it simple
As I detailed a few days ago, transport academic Paul Mees – in his most recent book – outlines why it is essential to have a “transfer-friendly” public transport system – using the example of Squaresville. Mees notes that in conventional transport planning, transfers are treated as barriers, whereas if you take a “network effect” approach to public transport planning – the transfer actually becomes an opportunity.…
7 Comments Fixing the Great Mistake: Autocentric Development
A couple of great videos from Streetfilms on steps New York City is taken to reduce the dominance of cars within Manhattan. “Fixing the Great Mistake” is a new Streetfilms series that examines what went wrong in the early part of the 20th Century, when our cities began catering to the automobile, and how those decisions continue to affect our lives today.…
What should I ask Steven Joyce?
ARTA have invited me to attend the opening of the New Lynn rail trench on Monday morning. If I can get myself out of bed at 4.30am I will probably go along. Monday’s event is not about the completion of the New Lynn project, as that won’t be done until September this year, but a lot of progress has been made in the last few months on this project and the next step is to get the trains through the trench – on one track – so that the other track in the trench can be built.…
Didn’t quite turn out that way…
A 1950s book that we discovered at work has some really interesting aerial photographs of Auckland overlaid with some of the transport plans at that time. One plan in particular I find quite interesting, because it shows how Auckland’s spaghetti junction was envisaged to look.…
Transport in the Super City
The Auckland Transition Agency has today released a document that outlines how the functions and roles of the Auckland Council are likely to be structured – what is likely to be done by the local boards, the “council-controlled organisations (CCOs) and the council itself.…
Waterview Consultation – if you have 7 hours free
NZTA have announced the details of the Waterview Connection expo to be held over the next couple of weeks. It seems like a lot of further information on the latest alignment will be unveiled at this expo: I must say this does seem to be a rather strange way to undertake consultation with the community.…
2 million Aucklanders by 2031
A press release by Statistics New Zealand today indicates that Auckland’s population will be pretty close to 2 million by 2031 – only 21 years away. Here’s the press release in full:
Auckland home to 38 percent of population in 2031
The Auckland region is projected to account for 60 percent of New Zealand’s population growth between 2006 and 2031, with an increase of 570,000 from 1.37 million to 1.94 million, Statistics New Zealand said today.…
Cracking open a nut with a sledgehammer
There’s a quite remarkable opinion piece in the NZ Herald today by Maungaturoto resident Danielle Williamson. I say remarkable because she actually gets close to making the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” sound like a sensible option for funding priority. Here’s the article in full:
Danielle Williamson: Highway more than holidaymakers’ getaway
The Auckland Regional Council chairman calls it a holiday highway.…
Jane Jacobs on Downtown Planning
Courtesy of “Going Solar“, here are a number of extracts from an address made by famous urban writer Jane Jacobs, to the New York Motor Bus Association in 1958. 52 years later, her words still seem incredibly appropriate. I swing between being incredibly inspired and incredibly depressed by what Jane Jacobs writes.…
“Squaresville” and the network effect
Over the last few weeks I have been putting together a series of posts about Paul Mees’s new book Transport for Suburbia: beyond the automobile age. It really is an excellent book, and I am getting to the real ‘meat’ of the book about how we can actually make our public transport systems drastically better.…
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