The “PT effectiveness project”
As I noted in yesterday’s post, NZTA has been undertaking a significant amount of work into finding out ways to get “better value” out of public transport investment. As I also noted yesterday, NZTA currently gets around $4.40 worth of road user benefits for each dollar they spend on subsidising public transport in Auckland, so they’re actually doing pretty well at the moment.…
5 Comments Auckland’s population density: killing off the myths
One of the common excuses for why public transport supposedly “won’t work in Auckland” and why we need to continue to plow money into motorways, is that Auckland is supposedly “too low density” for public transport. In fact, aspiring Auckland Super City Mayor John Banks went so far as to say that Auckland was the “second most spread out city in the world” (after Los Angeles) in a Guest Post on Aucklandtrains.…
NZTA’s strange public transport “problem”
Thanks to the good old Official Information Act, I have managed to get hold of some interesting information from NZTA on public transport, and in particular a full overview of what they called the “Public Transport Effectiveness Project”. There’s a huge amount of information in this document, so I will probably take a few blog posts to work through it all.…
Northwest Busway – update
Somewhat as the result of my pleading, the Regional Transport Committee back in April resolved to take a further look at the best way to provide public transport along the Northwestern Motorway in the medium and long-term future. As I have outlined before, SH16 is to be upgraded by NZTA over the next few years – at a cost of over $800 million.…
Subway on the Streets
An interesting article in the New York Magazine about that city’s embrace of bus lanes over the past few years, and how they are providing excellent public transport “bang” for a fairly limited “buck”.
Here are a couple of parts (but the whole thing is well worth a read):
You would never guess it from the dispiriting news coming out of the MTA, but if you want to see the future of New York, then head up to the Bronx and take a bus.…
Anti-Spam issues
Over the past few days my anti-spam mechanism seems to have been getting a bit over-excited, and has been catching a lot of “false-positives” for some reason. Hopefully it sorts itself out after a while, as I really do need an anti-spam (otherwise the comments really would be flooded with spam).…
Is there a place for light-rail in Auckland?
Land-based public transport in Auckland is currently provided in two ways, through buses and trains (don’t let anyone tell you that taxis are public transport, they’re for-hire private transport that don’t offer any of the efficiency gains of real PT). Over the past 10-15 years there have been on-off arguments in Auckland about whether there’s a place for something to sit between trains and buses: in the form of light-rail.…
Electric trains suppliers short-listed
KiwiRail have released a short-list of four potential suppliers of Auckland’s electric trains, which are supposed to start arriving from mid-2013. Here’s the media release:
KiwiRail has announced a short list of four potential suppliers to build Auckland’s new electric trains.…
Holiday Highway: the dodgy business case
In October last year I did what was obviously a very rough cost-benefit analysis of the Puhoi to Wellsford “holiday highway”, and I came up with a cost-benefit ratio of 0.19. Of course my analysis didn’t have all the traffic models that various consultancies that do these things for real use, and I must admit my understanding of NZTA’s economic evaluation manual is fairly limited, but there was a bit of method in my process, as you will understand if you read the post.…
Dominion Rd T2: give your feedback
Auckland City Council has opened up consultation to the general public on their utterly stupid idea of allowing vehicles with one passenger to use the bus lanes along Dominion Road. Give your feedback here.
Here’s what I’ve said:
1A: Overall, what do you think of the proposal?…
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