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.…
5 Comments 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.…
June PT patronage: spectacular once again
The June public transport patronage report has been released by Auckland Transport, and the results are once again pretty spectacular. Here’s the headline information:For the last couple of months we have seen really high percentage increases from the same month in 2010 – both on the rail network and also for PT patronage in general.…
Different approach to density
My post earlier today about the real reasons behind the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” generated some interesting discussion about urban sprawl, intensification and typical “how should Auckland grow” questions. A really big problem in all these discussions is the fact that most of the time Auckland has done intensification, it hasn’t done it very well.…
The real reason for the holiday highway?
Reading through the two Herald articles last week that related to the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” really got me wondering why the government is so utterly determined to ram through this road. It’s very unpopular, with only 24.8% of Aucklanders and 19.2% of non-Aucklanders supporting the project, plus the Warkworth to Wellsford section of the road appears to have exceedingly difficult geotechnical issues to resolve.…
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