Improving buses in Auckland’s city centre – part II
There was so much interesting discussion on my blog post a couple of days ago about how to make Auckland’s bus network operate better in the city centre that I thought it was necessary to do a secondary blog post to discuss some of the issues raised.…
4 Comments Audio announcements on trains
A great announcement by Auckland Transport today, that we’re going to join the realms of having a “proper” rail system by having automatic station announcements on board the train:
A new audio information system Auckland Transport is introducing on trains next week is expected to make a big difference for blind and vision impaired people.…
RoNS Videos
There were some videos from the NZTA that admin posted around the beginning of the year looking at the Puhoi to Wellsford RoNS and there was also a video of the Waterview Connection that was posted last year. Looking around online it appears there are a few more for other RoNS projects that were released.…
May 2011 Transport Projects Update
The May Auckland Transport business report has (finally) been uploaded onto their website. It’s well worth a read as there’s plenty of interesting information in there about progress on the various pieces of work Auckland Transport is currently involved in – as well as an interesting insight into how the organisation is functioning.…
IEA: Peak Oil happened in 2006
There was a fascinating interview on Radio NZ this morning of the International Energy Agency’s Chief Economist Fatih Birol, about increasing oil scarcity. You can listen to the interview here.
Mr Birol talks a lot about things I’ve mentioned many times on this blog before: that there are two underlying key factors behind higher oil prices – continually increasing demand (particularly in developing nations) as well as the geological constraints of peaked oil supply in many countries.…
Waterview Connection decision released
A draft decision of the Board of Inquiry into the Waterview Connection project has been released today, confirming reports from a couple of weeks ago that the Board has imposed some reasonably significant changes. These include requiring the relocation of the tunnel’s southern portal building, the shifting of the northern ventilation stack to the other side of Great North Road and the requirement that NZTA contribute $8 million to the construction of a cycleway between SH20 and SH16.…
An example of why we need good PT
Auckland Transport put out quite a weird press release late last week, highlighting that the point of their $14 million carpark at Manukau City is to “free up land”.
A new multi-storey car park building about to be built in Manukau will provide 680 parking spaces and free up valuable land in the city centre for future development.…
Improving buses in Auckland’s city centre
It is becoming increasingly obvious to me that as the number of public transport users increases in Auckland there’s a growing need to sort out how we handle buses in the CBD. The Auckland city centre contains approximately 81,000 employees, 21,000 residents and 50,000 students.…
Outlining why Puhoi-Wellsford is a stupid project
It was good to read in yesterday’s NZ Herald that the Labour Party has committed to cancelling the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” if they’re elected at the end of the year. While the polls indicate that the chances of Labour actually being elected are reasonably remote, if we assume that they retain this policy into the future, the long timeframes for actually planning, consenting and eventually constructing Puhoi-Wellsford should mean that the project never goes ahead in its current form, as eventually Labour will become the government again.…
Solid Patronage Growth for April
Auckland Transport has (finally) uploaded the public transport patronage report for April 2011. The results are pretty solid, if not quite as spectacular as March’s patronage. Here are the highlights:
The headline figures above are pretty much bang on what would have been expected.…
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