How should we fund transport?
The excellent Captain Transit blog has a very interesting post on the fundamental question that all those interested in transport need to have a good think about – what is the best way to fund improvements, maintenance and upgrades to transport infrastructure.…
10 Comments Newmarket Viaduct: a symptom of our auto-dependency?
I talk about the issue of Auckland’s car dependency quite a lot on this blog. About how over the past 60 years our very unbalanced transport policy has led to a situation where the city has grown, developed and become very much dependent upon being able to drive anywhere, any time.…
Carpool parking space priority
An article in the NZ Herald today notes that North Shore City Council is looking to utilise the park and ride spaces the feed the Albany busway station a bit more effectively by giving priority to those who arrive at the station in a “carpool” with two or more people sharing the car.…
Joyce on rail in Auckland
There was an interesting radio interview of Transport Minister Steven Joyce on Radio NZ this evening, with the topic of conversation being his response to the various large promises being made by mayoral candidates for the Auckland Super City. The interview is available to listen here, and it’s certainly worth having a listen to.…
“Operation Lifesaver” – a better solution for Puhoi-Wellsford
Today I helped present to the ARC’s Transport and Urban Development Committee an alternative to the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” that I have been working on, in conjunction with the Campaign for Better Transport. As regular readers of this blog would well know, I do not think that the current proposal – a 38 kilometre “off-line” motorway between Puhoi and Wellsford is a good use of $1.7 billion that it is likely to cost.…
Integrated ticketing: latest news
We are still yet to hear anything much from ARTA about the progress of integrated ticketing, aside from a rather bizarre press release from NZTA a few weeks back that some agreement had been reached on a technical standard. Big questions like whether we will have zoned based ticketing, whether we’ll have free transfers, whether we’ll have time-based ticketing and so forth remain unknown for now, although hopefully ARTA will decide at some point in the near future to share their grand plans for integrated ticketing with the rest of the world.…
Bus changes: Q&A
A week or so back I blogged some preliminary thoughts on the changes to bus routes that ARTA is currently consulting on. In general, I supported the changes as they provide some level of simplification – although I noted that it could be argued the changes didn’t go far enough and some level of unnecessary complexity remained.…
How do you actually integrate land-use and transport?
It seems these days that just about every transport policy document and every land-use planning document talks about the need to integrate the two. I have discussed the importance of integrating land-use planning and transport on many occasions before myself, but I do worry that we are starting to bandy about this integration in a somewhat meaningless way.…
Bus lane debacle: damaging to PT?
While it seems (hopefully) that the big “bus lane debacle” is finally coming to an end, I think it’s probably time to take a look at what the effects of this completely unnecessary and avoidable issues have been. ARC Chairman Mike Lee, as quoted in an NZ Herald article today, highlights the potential for long-lasting damage from this issue:
Council chairman Mike Lee said yesterday that a public backlash against bus lanes might undermine support for public transport.…
Where is this (and can it be fixed)?
In this spirit of last week’s post on the car-centric design of Botany Town Centre, here’s another bit of Auckland that seems to have been dedicated entirely to the parking of cars. Strangely enough, the area is actually superbly served by public transport (which should be a bit of a clue about where it is).I…
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