Gareth Hughes on the GPS
I’m still digging through the details of the Government Policy Statement myself, but here’s a good interview on TVNZ 7’s News at 8 programme with Green Party transport spokesman Gareth Hughes (click the image or here for the video):
While it may seem like he said the word “balance” a heck of a lot of times, looking at the funding allocations in the GPS for various different parts of the transport sector, it really is the lack of balance that shines through:
Even really basic stuff like maintaining state highways (funding frozen for the next 6 years) and building & looking after local roads (funding effectively frozen for the next 6 years) are getting screwed over in order to splurge more and more money on new state highways.…
15 Comments Final 2012 GPS released
Just a quick post for now – more detail later.
The final version of the 2012 Government Policy Statement has been released today – and yes, it’s unsurprisingly bad. Really bad. By my calculations, between 2012 and 2018 the policy will have the following spread of funding:
When public transport use is booming, state highway traffic volumes have stagnated for a number of years and oil prices are high and likely to go higher (imagine the price of petrol if the NZ dollar was at its usual 60 US cents) having such a huge focus of spending on state highways (and $8b of the state highways total goes to new ones) is just downright stupid.…
Guest Post: Can Auckland do a Perth?
This is a Guest Post from regular commenter Patrick Reynolds
Rail boardings in Auckland are now approaching about 10 million annually. Setting aside issues of kilometres traveled and reports of under-counting on the existing network I thought it might be useful to look ahead to try to see where this number might be heading.…
See me talk transport in person
Tomorrow evening I’m giving a public talk about public transport in Auckland, organised by a group called Generation Zero. Here are the details from Facebook:
Unreliable, expensive, slow, inconvenient, useless are just a few of the words that might come to mind when one thinks of public transport in Auckland.…
Herald wants a pedestrianised Queen Street?
I’m generally quick to criticise the NZ Herald for its backward thinking on transport and urban planning matters, so I feel a bit bad for taking so long to comment on what was actually an exceptionally good editorial from Wednesday last week, that pushes the case for further pedestrian improvements to Queen Street.…
Contested Streets: Breaking New York City Gridlock
Here’s a really interesting video on the history of transport issues in New York City. What’s quite fascinating about New York is the fact that, despite an extremely extensive public transport network and the kind of densities that work so well with that transport system, the city has spent much of the last 50 years trying to destroy itself to make life easier for cars to get around.…
Analysing Auckland’s patronage gains
With the release of the June 2011 patronage information, we now see the complete picture for the 2010/2011 financial year for patronage data. The results are pretty amazing. Total patronage increase by 8.5% – the biggest percentage patronage increase in any of the last nine years, bus patronage increased by 7.4% (which translates to a whopping increase of 3.5 million extra bus trips), rail patronage increased by 16.3% and ferry patronage by 5.3%.…
Exploring our planning problems
A couple of days back I proposed that we need to look differently at the way in which we intensify in Auckland – because a simple focus on building apartments hasn’t seemed to work particularly well over the past decade. Ironically, although most of Auckland’s ‘high level’ planning strategies and policies strongly promote intensification – in a variety of ways – when it gets to the “nitty gritty” District Plan rules, these actually pretty much do everything possible to stop intensification and promote urban sprawl.…
Tweaking HOP
So the HOP card has now had a good six or so weeks (at least) to bed in, and it’s interesting to see how things have gone. Most of the time people seem to use their cards as the system intended: I don’t hear too many “penalty fare applied” or see too many people forgetting to tag off.…
AT’s bus lane review
Auckland Transport has been spending much of the last eight months putting together a comprehensive review of how bus lanes operate around Auckland. I must say that I was pretty worried about the possible results of this review: because it arose out of yet another NZ Herald war on bus lanes and because there was quite a bit of talk about “alignment” between what the various old councils did.…
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