New York’s pedestrian improvements
Here’s a great video I came across explaining the improvements for pedestrians that have been made in Midtown Manhattan over the past few years. A few things really stood out for me: That reducing the roadspace didn’t lead to more congestion – in fact the simplified intersections meant less congestion and better flowing streets.…
4 Comments Stupid urban planning
As a planner by profession, I can quite honestly say that more often than not we do urban planning in Auckland utterly terribly. We focus enormously on silly details: recession planes, consistency with minutely detailed assessment criteria, road-widths, numbers of parking spaces per unit, number of units coming off driveways and so forth – but we miss the really obvious stuff.…
Rail rolling stock: looking ahead
Broadly speaking, there are two distinct types of trains in Auckland: the “Diesel Multiple Units” that we bought second-hand from Perth in the mid-1990s and the locomotive hauled carriages that were bought second-hand from the UK and then significantly refurbished, and now get hauled around by locomotives leased off KiwiRail.…
Bus route planning – a challenging balancing act
The significant changes proposed to buses in central Auckland, plus my recent blog posts about how to improve bus flow through the city centre have highlighted to me what a challenging balancing act it must be for people whose job it is to improve the bus route network.…
Improving buses in Auckland’s city centre – part II
There was so much interesting discussion on my blog post a couple of days ago about how to make Auckland’s bus network operate better in the city centre that I thought it was necessary to do a secondary blog post to discuss some of the issues raised.…
Audio announcements on trains
A great announcement by Auckland Transport today, that we’re going to join the realms of having a “proper” rail system by having automatic station announcements on board the train:
A new audio information system Auckland Transport is introducing on trains next week is expected to make a big difference for blind and vision impaired people.…
RoNS Videos
There were some videos from the NZTA that admin posted around the beginning of the year looking at the Puhoi to Wellsford RoNS and there was also a video of the Waterview Connection that was posted last year. Looking around online it appears there are a few more for other RoNS projects that were released.…
May 2011 Transport Projects Update
The May Auckland Transport business report has (finally) been uploaded onto their website. It’s well worth a read as there’s plenty of interesting information in there about progress on the various pieces of work Auckland Transport is currently involved in – as well as an interesting insight into how the organisation is functioning.…
IEA: Peak Oil happened in 2006
There was a fascinating interview on Radio NZ this morning of the International Energy Agency’s Chief Economist Fatih Birol, about increasing oil scarcity. You can listen to the interview here.
Mr Birol talks a lot about things I’ve mentioned many times on this blog before: that there are two underlying key factors behind higher oil prices – continually increasing demand (particularly in developing nations) as well as the geological constraints of peaked oil supply in many countries.…
Waterview Connection decision released
A draft decision of the Board of Inquiry into the Waterview Connection project has been released today, confirming reports from a couple of weeks ago that the Board has imposed some reasonably significant changes. These include requiring the relocation of the tunnel’s southern portal building, the shifting of the northern ventilation stack to the other side of Great North Road and the requirement that NZTA contribute $8 million to the construction of a cycleway between SH20 and SH16.…
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