Greens release transport policy
The Green Party has just released its transport policy for Auckland – unsurprisingly the policy is excellent and a model for the kind of transport policy that Auckland desperately needs a supportive central government to provide. Here are some highlights: With Labour committing $1.2 billion to constructing the City Rail Link and the Greens committing $1.4 billion, we now have two of the three biggest parties in parliament having come up with some serious cash for this project.…
21 Comments Sustainable transport
Yesterday I was invited to speak on Sustainable Transport, as part of the “Friday forum” which is run by the Sustainability Society. My fellow speakers were David Warburton – CEO of Auckland Transport, and Julie-Anne Genter – transport consultant and (on currently polling) likely to be a Green Party MP after the upcoming election.…
Notes on the CBT transport meeting
Last night the Campaign for Better Transport ran a meeting of transport spokespeople from five different parties, asking them two key questions: How they think the government’s $3 billion a year contribution to transport should generally be split across the different modes.…
The Gotham City subway?
A post on Second Avenue Sagas alerted me to a fascinating little detail in the filming of the upcoming Batman movie – a highly detailed subway map that has been put together for the fictional Gotham City:The level of detail the map goes into is quite fantastic, especially if you compare it with the New York Subway map.…
Looking at bus frequencies
One interesting element of the new Outer Link bus service is that it operates at the same frequency all the time: one bus every 15 minutes. This is pretty unusual for a bus service, as typically you see a huge increase in service frequency at peak times and then a big drop-off during off-peak times.…
HOP implementation advances (slowly)
Auckland Transport announced this afternoon that we’re another step towards implementing a proper integrated ticketing system:
Auckland Transport has awarded the tender to supply smartcards for the full stage roll out of Auckland’s HOP integrated smartcard to a joint consortium comprising Placard and NZ Post.…
Speed versus throughput
Somewhat picking up on the point I was trying to make with yesterday’s post regarding how the biggest benefit of the City Rail Link is how it simply massively increases the capacity of Auckland’s transport network, particularly the capacity of the network for trips to the city centre, here’s an interesting article that analyses the issue of whether transport network improvements should be designed around making trips faster (time savings benefits) or whether they should be based around simply increasing throughput:
There’s an old joke in computer science circles: never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tapes.…
KiwiRail’s impending split: a good thing
A week or so ago KiwiRail announced that they would be changing the way they operate their business fairly significantly in the future: splitting off the infrastructure side of the business from the freight side to a far greater extent. This is reported on in the KiwiRail newsletter that was distributed at the time: There was also a fairly lengthy discussion of the plans on Radio NZ at the time, which is worth a listen.…
Re-analysing the City Rail Link’s benefits
It has been frustrating to see the assessment of the City Rail Link’s benefits become so politicised over the past few months. You would think that something like undertaking a cost-benefit analysis of a transport project would be a fairly objective task, but as we have learned there are so many assumptions made when assessing transport projects – that the objectivity of the process has really become something of a myth.…
AT taking cycling more seriously
Auckland Transports monthly board reports are great for giving us an insight into what’s going on in the organisation and they usually give some form of update on many of the big projects that are on-going but they doesn’t tend to give much information on the little projects.…
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