AT finally coming up with bus route plan
Buried away in the agenda for today’s Transport Committee meeting are a couple of really interesting letters – the first from Mike Lee to Auckland Transport, requesting some further information on Auckland Transport’s plans to reorganise Auckland’s bus routes so they integrate with, rather than compete with, the rail network.…
5 Comments Does Auckland Council support the holiday highway?
It has been difficult to figure out what Auckland Council thinks of the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” project. Obviously the council’s Transport Chair Mike Lee is not a fan, as he was the one who coined the “holiday highway” name in the first place.…
Improving Auckland’s bus priority measures
Tomorrow I’m giving a presentation to the Auckland Council Transport Committee, on behalf of the Campaign for Better Transport, about bus priority measures in Auckland – why they’re necessary and where priorities to improve them should be. The presentation is somewhat in response to a lot of opposition to bus lanes that emerged at the last transport committee meeting – particularly from some of the North Shore Local Boards, as well as Councillor George Wood and (perhaps most determinedly) the Orakei Local Board.…
Auckland’s PT: expensive and poorly used
An Auckland Council report on various aspects of our transport system makes a number of comparisons of Auckland’s public transport system with various cities in Australia, Canada and the USA – as well as Wellington. The cities used to compare Auckland against, including their population and what different technologies their PT system includes, is shown in the table below: These are a good range of cities to compare Auckland’s performance against, in my opinion.…
How did cars come to monopolise our streets?
You only need to look at this fantastic video of San Francisco’s streets in the very first years of the 20th century to get an understanding that the concept of shared streets, which Auckland seems to be embracing at the moment, is hardly a new one.…
Monitoring Auckland’s PT system
There’s a really interesting report in the agenda (from page 43 onwards) for Tuesday’s transport committee meeting that shows the results from a number of transport monitoring projects which have taken place around Auckland over the past few months. All together, they provide an interesting insight into changing transport trends.…
Auckland to get 57 EMU trains
The details of the electric trains deal, which was announced today, were somewhat similar to what I had expected – which is some great news for Auckland. The NZ Herald has the key details:
Auckland will gain ownership of 57 new electric trains in return for taking responsibility for repaying a $500 million Government loan over 35 years.…
Electrification details to be announced today
While we will have to wait until the end of September to find out which company has won the tender to build Auckland’s electric trains, it is my understanding that an announcement will be made at Auckland Transport later today on a few of the details about those trains.…
Lower Hobson viaduct to go!
Out of all the exciting plans and strategies for Auckland’s future that we’ve heard about over the past few days, perhaps the one proposal that gets me most excited is the prospect that the horrific Lower Hobson Street viaduct might be demolished.…
Auckland Council shuns sprawl
Some detail on critical elements of the Auckland Spatial Plan are starting to emerge in the media, although the Plan itself won’t be released for consultation until September 20th. On Monday the ‘Element Magazine‘, which was included in the NZ Herald, noted the following about one of the key issues the spatial plan will face – whether Auckland grows through intensification, sprawl, or a mix of the two (and what kind of mix):
Element magazine questioned the mayor on the sweeping changes proposed in the Auckland Plan and his intentions to drive growth of the sprawling city back into the core of the region by innovations and incentives.…
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