How long will my bus trip take?

Regular readers of this blog may recall that I’m no particular fan of the Outer Link bus. While I think the concept is really nice, and the regular off-peak frequencies also are a great step up from what most of Auckland gets, the service has a number of significant flaws that have actually put me right off from catching it in recent months.…
9 Comments

What makes open spaces work

Thanks to John from my post the other day on shared spaces for providing the link for this video. It is just under 60 minutes long but well worth watching. It is described as: Small fragment of William H. Whyte’s witty and original film about the open spaces of cities and why some of them work for people while others do not.…
7 Comments

Showing Changes in Property Values

The Herald have published this really interesting map showing what kind of changes occurred to the capital values as a result of the revaluations that occurred last year. While this does show changes in capital value, for the majority of properties the change will mainly be a reflection of movement in the value of the land that the houses sit on.…
29 Comments

Telecom to “hook into” the AT HOP card

Another article that almost passed me by. This was in Wednesday’s NZ Herald: Telecom is hitching up to Auckland’s $110 million transport ticketing project by turning smartphones into wallets for use on buses, trains and ferries. The company yesterday showed the technology in action at its testing laboratory in expectation of making it available late next year for payments to retailers as well as public transport.…
21 Comments

Thinking about rail to the Airport

The one transport project we tend to follow on this blog more than any other is the City Rail Link. That project is now ticking along and Auckland Transport are proceeding with the designation but another important project has also been going on fairly silently in the background, rail to the airport.…
60 Comments

A visit to Penrose

Along with visiting Onehunga yesterday, I also made a stop off at Penrose to have a look at the work going on there. There is a general station upgrade going on to bring the facilities up to an acceptable standard so here are some photos of where things are at.…
18 Comments

Onehunga is now ready for Electric Trains

A few years ago there was a lot of noise an complaining about Onehunga. At first it was because almost a year after it had originally promised to be operating, the station hadn’t even been started. Then once it was built the issue was that the platforms were built at only 55m long, too short for our future electric trains which we already knew would be around 70m long.  …
36 Comments