Making congestion charging politically feasible
Transport economists and planners have long argued that the only way to really solve traffic congestion is through some form of road pricing, or as it is commonly known – congestion charging. The theory behind it is simple: congestion is the result of there being excess demand for road space in comparison to the level of ‘supply’ that exists.…
18 Comments Exciting ideas in Waitemata Local Board plan
Digging through the details of how Auckland Council operates is quite a challenging task: what is the responsibility of the council, what is the responsibility of any of the CCOs and how on earth do these “local boards” fit into the whole thing?…
Is a PT funding crisis around the corner?
An article in today’s Sunday Star Times looks at the possible repercussions of NZTA’s decision (forced upon them by the upcoming government policy statement) to cut the funding assistance rate for public transport around the country. The results are potentially pretty ugly:
The government will cut up to $17 million from its public transport budget for the 2011-12 financial year.…
Celebrating urbanism
In New Zealand we struggle to celebrate urbanism – perhaps central Wellington aside. For some reason our national psyche is very rural, even though we’re a highly urbanised country, and there’s something almost apologetic about our cities – so we try to make them as quasi-rural as possible.…
Peak travel?
I came across an interesting journal article the other day – entitled Are We Reaching Peak Travel? Trends in Passenger Transport in Eight Industrialized Countries by Adam Millard-Ball and Lee Schipper. It is an interesting examination of an issue that I’ve been looking at in my analysis of recent traffic trends on roads in New Zealand – the idea that perhaps we’re shifting away from the decades long process of people travelling more and more each year.…
Huge problems for the holiday highway
There was an interesting article on the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” in the NZ Herald today – which notes the enormous difficulties NZTA is facing in finding a route that is feasible for the Warkworth-Wellsford section through Dome Valley.
Unstable ground around Dome Valley north of Auckland threatens to rip the wheels off the Government’s “road of national significance” from Puhoi to Wellsford.…
A different approach to bus routes
A few days back the Human Transit blog superbly outlined the basics of designing bus routes – using Halifax in Nova Scotia as the example. There are some excellent “basics” outlined in that post: the need to identify choke points, the need to have good “anchors” at each end of your route, the benefits of bouncing routes off at right-angles once you reach the edge of a grid system and so forth.…
Huge public support for City Rail Link
As I mentioned in this post recently, I feel that generally the public understands Auckland’s transport situation and wants better public transport. However, the big problem is that they generally only consider transport when voting in local elections (not national elections), whereas it’s central government that holds most of the transport purse strings.…
Future Proofing the City Rail Link
Now that Auckland Council & Auckland Transport have made the decision to push ahead with protecting the route for the City Rail Link, a process that will probably take a year or two as the designation and all the necessary consents are acquired, it’s a good time to start thinking about some of the design details for the project and also some important ways in which we can be clever about its design while ensuring that it is well future-proofed for whatever further rail projects Auckland might need over the lifespan of the CRL, which will be around for a very very long time.…
Guest Post: Tale of two cities
This is a Guest Post by regular commenter Patrick Reynolds. It was published as an Opinion Piece in a recent Sunday Star Times (though not online).
William Bambridge, flautist ‘of some competence’, future photographer Royal to Queen Victoria, and sire of no fewer than three all-England international footballers, made this observation in 1844: ‘I suppose as a whole Auckland is a gradually thriving place, tho’ as a town it is miserably laid out and built.’…
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