NZTA revisiting their assessment of PT projects
One thing that came across most clearly in the excellent Radio NZ piece about the City Rail Link project that played on Sunday morning was that the difference between the government’s measurement of the project’s cost-effectiveness and the assessments undertaken for Auckland Council doesn’t just come down to whether one is right and one is wrong.…
13 Comments RWC transport fail – and what to do about it
I have had a couple of days to think about what happened on Friday night, particularly in terms of the mess that happened with Auckland’s public transport network. It seems that there were an enormous number of contributing factors to what happened, some which should have been foreseen, others were perhaps the result of bad luck.…
City Rail Link discussed on Radio NZ
There was a really good detailed discussion about the City Rail Link project this morning on Radio NZ’s Insight Programme:
The plan to build a commuter rail tunnel under downtown Auckland now overshadows the relationship between the Government and the region’s leadership.…
RWC Opening Photos
While there was much transport chaos last night, there were also some pretty amazing scenes. Here are some of the photos I managed to take: The photo above was taken at around 1pm, when I went out to get my lunch.…
Oh dear…
Well that was an interesting day. On the one hand, I’ve never seen Auckland’s city centre so busy, vibrant and exciting. But on the other hand, well…
Auckland’s transport system ground to a halt tonight, stopping thousands of rugby fans getting to the opening game of the Rugby World Cup on time.…
An exciting day for Auckland
Today is a pretty exciting day for Auckland, with the start of the Rugby World Cup and what promises to be a pretty giant party celebrating the start of the tournament.
All week the city has had this “building up” feeling, getting busier and busier by the day and feeling more and more festive.…
Interesting implications from the EMU decision
There are a few interesting implications that arise from last week’s announcement that Auckland’s electric trains fleet will be completely comprised of Electric-Multiple-Units (EMUs) rather than a mixture of EMUs and electric-locomotives. It seems to me that in the end it was a fairly logical decision to make – over the lifespan of the trains it was cheaper to get a fully EMU fleet, once you include operating costs.…
More transport discussion in parliament
Following on from yesterday, Labour MP Phil Twyford once again had a go at transport minister Steven Joyce in parliament today over the government’s transport priorities and their seeming misalignment with the priorities of the Auckland Council. It’s an interesting watch: You can read the transcript here.…
Secrecy hurts the transport debate
Last week something rather sad happened. After my blog post on the systems used to track buses around Auckland brought attention to a fairly new blog on transport issues in Auckland, there was obviously some pretty messy stuff happening behind the scenes which led to the aforementioned blog being taken down, apparently because it had ‘overstepped the mark’ and shared information it shouldn’t have.…
Making transport an election issue
A couple of of months ago I wondered whether transport can be made into an election issue. Traditionally national elections are fought over issues like the economy, unemployment, health, education, taxes, crime and so forth. In fact, pretty much everything except transport – aside from transport nerds such as myself I doubt too many people choose their vote based on transport policy.…
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