Where is this (and how on earth did it happen)?
It should be a fairly easy one to guess. Perhaps the better question is “how could we let this happen?” This intersection should be the focal point for a great town centre, but instead we have 10 lane wide roads, surrounded by more roads and then a bunch of carparks.…
41 Comments Mayoral candidates on CBD rail tunnel
On the TV programme Q+A this morning there was a debate between the three main candidates for the job of being mayor of the Auckland Super City. You can watch the debate here, or read through the whole transcript of it here.…
Roughan on CBD Tunnel
NZ Herald columnist John Roughan has written an interesting, if rather uninformed (he thinks we don’t yet have a Grafton Station) article on the CBD rail tunnel – and in particular on the support that it is getting among both local/regional politicians and also from Greens and Labour party politicians.…
New Lynn Station – progress
I went out to see what progress there has been on construction of the New Lynn train station today – and while there’s still a reasonable amount of work left to do, a lot of the scaffolding has been removed from when I was last there, so it’s now possible to get a bit better of an idea about what it will all look like when completed.…
France’s transport plan
The French government has just released for consultation its visionary transportation plan for the next 20-30 years, and while I can’t really understand French, if you are able to read French then it will probably make for quite an interesting read.…
Who wants to run the Transport CCO?
The NZ Herald today reports that the Auckland Transition Agency is having a lot of trouble trying to find someone to be the interim CEO of the new Transport CCO.
A London Transport guru is believed to have turned down the top transport job in the Auckland Super City amid reports of senior council staff fleeing the new set-up because of poor pay and conditions.…
Tauranga Eastern Motorway to be tolled
Today the government and NZTA confirmed that one of the “roads of national significance”, the Tauranga Eastern Motorway, will be tolled to advance its construction. I don’t really know too much about this particular project, other than one of its major benefits will supposedly be “to stimulate development east of Tauranga”, which seems to mean “to enable urban sprawl”.…
Public Transport & traffic congestion
Jarrett at Humantransit.org has another one of those “must read” blog posts up, this time exploring the linkage between public transport and traffic congestion – and seeking to answer the question “does public transport improvements reduce traffic congestion?” He starts off, quite interestingly, by stating this:
To my knowledge, and correct me if I’m wrong, no transit project or service has ever been the clear direct cause of a substantial drop in traffic congestion.…
Bus service changes
ARTA are in the process of altering quite a number of bus routes around Auckland at the moment, with the main idea appearing to be a simplification of the current route structure – a reduction of the number of routes, which means an increase in the frequency of the routes and an easier system to understand.…
Integrated ticketing: wow, some news!
It has been a while since we heard anything about the progress of implementing Auckland’s integrated ticketing system, so it’s welcoming to see a media release by NZTA today saying that some progress is being made in the establishment of the national ticketing standards that will ensure inter-operability between all public transport smart-cards in New Zealand in the future.…
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