The problem with network pricing

I’m not opposed in principle to congestion charging, road pricing or road tolling. It’s clear that congestion occurs because there’s too much demand for road space at certain times of day. It’s also clear that building more road space doesn’t solve the problem – because it simply ‘induces’ demand.…
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Labour releases Auckland transport policy

Hot on the heels of National’s transport policy comes the release of Labour’s transport policy for Auckland. The cornerstone of the policy is to cancel the $1.7 billion “holiday highway” Road of National Significance and replace it with a $320 million dollar package of safety and capacity upgrades to the corridor based on the “Operation Lifesaver” proposal developed by Admin and the Campaign for Better Transport.…
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A CBD Bus Tunnel?

An article in Friday’s NZ Herald noted that someone called Tony Randle had taken a detailed look at the business case for the City Rail Link, and by re-analysing the numbers has come to the conclusion that a bus tunnel option (which was looked at in the business case) Tony Randle believes a business case for Auckland’s $2.4 billion central city rail tunnel proposal under-cooked the costs to make it look more attractive than an underground bus system serving more people.…
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National releases Auckland transport policy

Somewhat surprisingly, National have decided to bury the release of their transport policy for Auckland to a Saturday afternoon – with almost no fanfare. There are few surprises in the policy, with pretty much nothing mentioned that we haven’t heard before – a lot of focus on current projects and very little on what will happen after that.…
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Te Atatu Rd upgrade: more “PT-wash”?

I just noticed today that Auckland Transport have come up with a bit of information on a proposed upgrade to the notoriously congested Te Atatu Road, between the motorway interchange and the roundabout with Edmonton Road. My understanding is that at peak times this is one of the most congested parts of the roading network – in some respects having similarities to Onewa Road on the North Shore as it’s the only connection to the motorway for a pretty large chunk of West Auckland.…
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September patronage details

About a week ago I blogged about some basic patronage statistics for September – which were pretty spectacular. Auckland Transport has now released the detailed patronage report for September, which confirms the huge numbers (partly due to the Rugby World Cup of course).…
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How to pay for the City Rail Link

A presentation by Mayor Len Brown today gave us some clues about how the Council hopes to fund the City Rail Link project over the next decade, with a target date for opening being 2021. Here’s a couple of key images from his presentation, with further detail in this document and also within these spreadsheets.…
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Election 2011: The Future of Auckland’s Transport

The general election is now less than a month away, and unsurprisingly things are starting to heat up. One event that you won’t want to miss is being put on by the Campaign for Better Transport: The Campaign for Better Transport has invited the main political parties in the forthcoming general election to tell us their vision for the future of transport in Auckland.…
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Integrated ticketing moves forward (slowly)

Further detail on the painfully slow implementation of integrated ticketing in Auckland was outlined in the October business report to the board of Auckland Transport. With the project being somewhat distracted by the silly A-Pass over the past few months, hopefully with the World Cup out of the way we might start seeing some real progress in the next few months: There are two interesting things to note in the paragraph above, first is that in February next year we will start to see something of a further rollout – with what’s called the “Limited Functionality Pilot”.…
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My Auckland Plan submission

Submissions on the Auckland Spatial Plan close on October 31st. I cannot stress how important this plan is in guiding Auckland’s future – as I outlined in more detail here. Auckland Council has put together quite a pretty video outlining the broad goals of the plan: My submission is outlined below.…
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