Postcard from Edinburgh
Here in Edinburgh the sun is shining and it’s warm enough to open the windows, which I’m guessing means two things: First, Scotland has finally emerged from the last ice age and, second, the woolly mammoths will soon retire to their summer cottages in the heathery highlands.…
46 Comments Has HOP made your bus faster?
After a couple of weeks catching really random buses to and from the hospital, last week I got back to something near my normal commuting. I also noticed that the uptake of people using the HOP card seemed a lot greater than it had been a couple of weeks earlier – especially during the peak times when I normally catch my buses.…
PT Advocates: technicals & politicals
Alon Levy’s Pedestrian Observations blog has a fascinating post on the two group of ‘transit advocates’ in the USA, which he splits into the ‘technicals’ and the ‘politicals’. Here’s how he describes the two groups:
Politicals are the people who tend to trust the transit authorities, support a general expansion of all rail transit projects, and believe the primary problem is defeating oil-funded anti-transit lobbies.…
Marketing PT better
Generally I feel that Auckland Transport (and ARTA before them) does a pretty poor job of marketing public transport in Auckland. They’re obviously not helped by key factors such as the vast variety of different bus companies, or the general lack of funding and neglect for the PT system up until recently, but there are clearly ways in which we could do things better.…
PT funding getting screwed over (again)
The agenda for next week’s Transport Committee meeting is online. Generally it’s a fairly light agenda, with the most interesting things likely to be presentations from Auckland Transport on the rail station upgrade program and on the final version of the Central Flagship Project bus changes.…
Where did the four new RoNS come from?
The draft Government Policy Statement document, that was released for consultation a couple of months back, was a highly perplexing and depressing document. Focusing an even greater amount of money on building new motorways, slashing (already slashed) spending on public transport infrastructure and capping money for new local roads and even the maintenance of existing roads is just plain stupidity – and is completely ignorant of recent transport trends both here in New Zealand and overseas.…
Fare evasion slashed – really?
A few weeks back I wrote a post outlining my concerns over the large amount of fare evasion I was seeing on the rail network, as well as my concerns that the introduction of the HOP card to the rail network (which will happen in around November this year) may actually make things worse – rather than better.…
May 2011 PT Patronage: very strong
Auckland Transport have released the May 2011 public transport statistics report, and the results patronage-wise are pretty spectacular. Here are the highlights:
These are particularly strong increases, as compared with April’s numbers we see all patronage increase by 10.3% (compared to 3.9% in April) and rail patronage grow by 21.5% (compared to 12.7% in April).…
Steven Joyce’s revenge? Big changes proposed to LTMA.
The government has today announced some pretty big changes are being proposed to the Land Transport Management Act (LTMA). This is a pretty vital piece of legislation, forming the legislative framework around which most of the country’s transport plans, policies, rules and guidelines are created.…
The MUL and housing affordability
An article in today’s NZ Herald notes that new councillor Dick Quax, who replaced Jami-Lee Ross as the representative for the Howick Ward, argued against the council’s generally agreed position of preferring a ‘compact city’ in his maiden speech. I’ve discussed the metropolitan urban limits (MUL) in many previous posts, including reference to a pretty detailed study undertaken for the ARC that showed an expansionary model of urban development generally delivered the worst outcomes for the highest cost.…
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