Being Rational About Transport Spending
New Zealand spends a lot of money on transport. More than half our rates are spent on building and fixing roads and footpaths as well as funding buses, trains and ferries. Further to this, close to a third of what we pay at the petrol pump is tax, with the bulk of that money – around $3 billion a year – also being spent on transport, an ever increasing proportion going to State Highways.…
18 Comments NZ’s 6th most popular blog
Well, according to Open Parachute, of blogs which have a Sitemeter stats monitor across all of New Zealand – we are the sixth most widely read blog in the country. Here are the top 14:
It’s quite amazing to see how interested people are in transport matters.…
Passenger rail in New Zealand: Blending beauty and controversy
Today I accompanied a group of Norwegians on the 830am InterIslander ferry from Wellington. After a short stop Picton for lunch we boarded the Coastal Pacific bound for Christchurch at 1pm.
Without doubt the Coastal Pacific is a superb rail journey.…
The perils of ignoring induced demand
Streetsblog draws our attention to an interesting Danish study into the impact of induced demand on the cost-benefit analyses of motorway projects.
Here’s the abstract of the article:
Although the phenomenon of induced traffic has been theorized for more than 60 years and is now widely accepted among transport researchers, the traffic-generating effects of road capacity expansion are still often neglected in transport modelling.…
Get your Feedback in on the Future of the Wellington St on-ramp
The NZTA has currently been doing some consultation on whether the Wellington St on-ramp should re-open and the chance for feedback closes on Friday so if you have a view make sure you get your thoughts in. The whole thing has been a bit of a saga so it would be good to get a final decision, whatever the outcome.…
So what’s with this “Inner West Interchange”?
It wasn’t picked up much by the media last week, but the one truly new piece of information that was revealed in Auckland Transport’s announcements on the City Rail Link was the inclusion of something they’re calling the “Inner West Interchange”.…
Welcome to Auckland, Transport Blog
If you can see this post it means you are looking at the Auckland Transport Blog running on its own dedicated vitural server here in Auckland. Report any errors or issues here so we can take a look.
We still have a few tickets left to our fundraising event that is making this possible, be in quick!…
Server Migration In Progress
We are currently migrating the Auckland Transport blog to our own dedicated Auckland based server. Comments are disabled for a short time while we do that.…
Why the AA and Steven Selwood are wrong
Whenever there is a large transport project like the CRL, or probably any large project for that matter, the responses tend to fall into four categories. The enthusiastic supporters and you can put us in that category
Those that don’t really have a view either way and this probably covers most of the general public
Those that object to the project and we can probably put the government in this group
Those that could be classed as fence sitters or who think they know better For this post I am going to look at that last group as while they publicly support the project, they don’t back this up with their actions and this is usually manifested in one of two ways.…
EMU Mock up video
Most people probably won’t get a chance to see inside the EMU mock up and while I posted some images a few weeks ago, here is a video of AT showing some members of the transport committee (along with our former admin) through along with an explanation of some of the features.…
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