Why I love the Netherlands
In a recent thread, “OrangeKiwi” posted this link to an aerial image of a roundabout in the Netherlands, which is also shown below. Looking at this aerial reminded me of just how much I love the Netherlands. Having recently returned to Auckland after living/studying in Amsterdam for a year I’m definitely feeling the transport culture shock.…
142 Comments The on-street parking dilemma
Within the discussion about my recent post on pedestrian angst there was a bit of ‘back and forth‘ in relation to the vexed issue of on-street parking. On street parking, whether we’re talking about the city centre, implementing bus lanes on arterial roads or dealing with commuter parking in inner suburbs, is a very heated and controversial topic.…
Ticket gates appearing at Britomart
I got sent through this photo today – highlighting that while some serious questions remain over the rollout of the HOP card at least there is some progress on getting the ticket gates in, building on progress at Newmarket a couple of weeks back:
For a number of reasons I really can’t wait until these gates are operational and we have the HOP card live on the rail, bus and ferry network.…
“Aucklanders are slaves to their cars”
Another funky stunt by Generation Zero today:
This morning, young Aucklanders descended on Freyberg Place in Central Auckland, where some were dressed up as slaves and chained to a car, to express how much the lives of Aucklanders are oppressed by car dependency and the short-sighted policies responsible for it.…
Severance City
Severance is an urban design term term used to describe separation effects on a place caused by some obstacle of scale. Also know as The Barrier Effect. Sometimes these barriers are political and the severance intentional; a physical attempt to keep people in or out or just apart.…
Why the pedestrian angst?
Posts about how badly Auckland treats pedestrians tend to generate a lot of really heated discussion – which is quite interesting and perhaps surprising at first glance. There’s seemingly quite a fundamental debate over how vehicles and pedestrians should interact with each other – how ‘legalistic’ the approach should be, whether cars should have a fundamental ‘right of way’ anywhere other than pedestrian crossings, whether we should structure our street design to encourage separation of uses or their mixing, and many other debates.…
The future of fuel taxes
Earlier this week the “fuel excise duty” (FED) increased by 2 cents per litre. As the Herald noted, taxes of one form or another now make up nearly $1 pre litre from what you pay at the pump:
* Fuel excise – 50.524c
* GST – 27.77c
* ACC levy – 9.9c
* Local authorities fuel tax – 0.66c
* Petroleum monitoring levy – 0.045c
* Total tax – 88.899c.…
And the transport prizes go to …
A few months back I wrote this post where I awarded some prizes based on my own best and worst transport experiences of recent memory. While at the time these awards were meant to become a regular feature of the blog, shortly thereafter I was re-located to work in Brisbane – which caused me to postpone my planned follow-up posts.…
“Swap your HOP” not far away?
Things have been fairly quiet about the implementation of integrated ticketing in recent times. Auckland Transport’s board paper on the project is quite genius in writing quite a lot of words without actually saying anything – a pinnacle of bureaucratic nonsense: However, a few posts on the Campaign for Better Transport forum suggest that some further news might not be too far away (original source apparently here):
The current HOP card is only available for use on NZ Bus buses.…
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