Live tube map
A couple of people have put together a real time tracking map of all trains on the London Underground. It is extremely awesome: This wouldn’t have cost a single dollar in public money to put together, and from the sound of it the people who put it together just needed the raw data, ran a clever program and came up with something exceedingly useful in just a couple of hours.…
12 Comments The Harbour Crossing Debate
There’s a very interesting article in today’s “The Aucklander” newspaper (which gets included in the NZ Herald every Thursday) on the future harbour crossing options for Auckland.
Here’s an extract from the article:
Now The Aucklander can reveal another chapter to throw into the concrete and steel mix of our city’s beloved icon.…
Fighting yesterday’s battles?
There’s an irony in urban planning that most planning rules fight against problems that existed 100 years ago, and in general no longer exist today. In particular, most planning rules seek to focus on separating uses – which is a legacy of the industrial revolution when smokestack factories ended up next to houses – and on limiting the density of development: once again a legacy of 100 years ago when densities were far too high for what was sanitary and healthy.…
My thoughts on “b.line”
Tomorrow ARTA will launch the next step in improving Auckland’s bus system – their “b.line” project. I first got wind of this concept a few months back, and I did a hopeful post that it seemed as though we were starting to see the rollout of the “Quality Transit Network” that ARTA have been promising for many years now, but haven’t got around to actually implementing.…
So why are we wasting billions on these motorways?
There’s a really good opinion piece in today’s NZ Herald that refutes the widely held assumption that roads “pay their way” while rail doesn’t. Here it is:
Dean Scanlen: Billions wasted on roads while rail is run off the tracks
Several commentators, including Luke Malpass and John Roughan, have complained about spending by the New Zealand taxpayer on KiwiRail.…
B Line Appears
I haven’t posted for a while but some of you may remember I gave up my car about 4 months ago and after 2 weeks of withdrawals it has been a really great experience so far. As such I am now very dependent on my Dom Rd buses which takes me into the city.…
Avondale: nice station but where’s the shelter?
On the weekend I finally got around to visiting the newly opened Avondale train station. The station is fairly simple, but I suppose that’s all that could be really expected as it’s not a major interchange station like New Lynn or Newmarket.…
Newton
Newton in 1959: Newton today: While spaghetti junction certainly is something of an engineering marvel, I really wish we had built the western ring route back in the 1960s instead of destroying what would have become a fantastic inner city area and turning our CBD into an island surrounded by motorways.…
The need to “unbundle” parking
In typical fashion, I am reading about 14 different books at the moment – one of which is the excellent “The High Cost of Free Parking” by Donald Shoup. In some respects, this is one of the most important planning/transport books that has been written in many many years in my opinion – because it looks at an issue that has a huge impact on the structure of our cities and on the way transportation functions, but for some reason has been almost completely ignored by both land-use planners and by transportation analysts.…
Tearing down highways to fix congestion
There’s an interesting post on “The Infrastructurist” blog that proposes a counter-intuitive, but seemingly very successful method of reducing congestion on motorways: tear them down. Here’s part of the post:
Though our transportation planners still operate from the orthodoxy that the best way to untangle traffic is to build more roads, doing so actually proves counterproductive in some cases.…
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