Transit Station
This is a new kind of post for readers interested in a quick roundup of transit related news and analysis from around the world. The plan is to aggregate a bunch of links that relate either directly or tangentially to Auckland transit issues.…
9 Comments Shared spaces: traffic volumes matter
As regular readers will know, I’m a huge fan of the shared spaces we’ve seen rolled out around Auckland’s city centre (and in New Lynn) over the past year or so. It’s fantastic to see pedestrian freely milling around streets that were once the sole property of vehicles, but also to see a regular “eyes on the street” value that traffic can provide, if you compare shared streets to pedestrian malls.…
“Locking in” Vic Park Tunnel’s benefits
The additional southbound lanes over the Victoria Park Viaduct, made possible through the construction of the Victoria Park Tunnel, open to vehicles today. John Roughan’s NZ Herald editorial can barely contain his excitement at this prospect, largely because (he hopes) it will get rid of queue jumpers holding up traffic through St Mary’s Bay.…
What to do about parking?
An interesting New York Times article delves into what I’ve often thought of as the “elephant in the room” when it comes to urban and transport planning: parking. The article begins by highlighting the extremely high number of parking spaces available in many US cities – the fact that we give over so much of our city to the storage of cars (generally for “free”):
There are said to be at least 105 million and maybe as many as 2 billion parking spaces in the United States.…
Victoria Park viaduct – southbound changes from Monday
Changes to the lane layout of the Victoria Park viaduct will be happening on Monday – finally enabling the use of the entire viaduct for southbound traffic. This has the potential to provide the biggest increase in capacity from the whole project, adding two southbound lanes and (hopefully) putting an end to the significant delays experienced by southbound traffic in the morning peak most particularly.…
Managing seasonal traffic – Cathedral Cove as a Case Study
Recently returned to Auckland from the Coromandel, where I worked over New Years serving drinks to muddy revellers at the Corogold Music Festival in Whitianga. While away I managed to squeeze in a visit to Cathedral Cove. Photo credit: DOC website
I must say that Cathedral Cove has developed nicely as a visitor attraction over the last two decades or so, since I first started going there as a young sprog on summer holidays to Matarangi with my parents. …
The NZ Police – Enabling crime through poor urban design
One of the most unfortunate consequences of bad urban design is that there is a loss of “eyes on the street” and a concomitant reduction in safety and security. Basically, if there are more people walking around, then the safer people will feel and the more willing they are to walk (holding other factors constant).…
March of the Wires
Trains started running again on some lines yesterday marking the end of the Christmas shut down for some sections of the network and passengers at a few of those stations will have seen a new sight as well as a bit of a milestone, the first completed sections of overhead wire.…
Embracing the transfer
An article in the Sydney Morning Herald highlights a key step that public transport system both in Australia and New Zealand need to take in order to both improve their usefulness and the cost-effectiveness of their operation: by encouraging (rather than discouraging) transfers, connections or interchanges (whatever terminology you want to use) between services.…
Solving the “Warkworth Problem”
One of the amusing things about me and the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” is that my family actually owns a beach-house at Mangawhai Heads and our trips to and from that house would very much benefit from this highway being put through.…
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