Traffic’s declining in Sydney too – so why don’t we get it?
Auckland is certainly not alone in experiencing a pretty dramatic drop in traffic growth in the past few years – calling into question massive roading projects relying on massive traffic growth projections for their justification. We have pointed out similar trends in the USA, Canada, the UK, Europe and now – Sydney:
Gavin Gatenby, the convenor of lobby group Ecotransit, said the NSW government’s support of the WestConnex motorway was “about supporting private vested interests that have sunk billions into building motorways”.…
37 Comments People buy stuff, not cars
We talk a lot about trying to improve our city and on of the most common things is about making things better for pedestrians. Invariably that tends to involve doing things that reduce or even remove the vast amount of priority that we have given to vehicles, particularly parking, through improvements like shared spaces and street upgrades.…
And the winners are …..
Thank you to everyone that entered our competition to win a HOP card with $50 on it. There were some great entries but in this case there can only be two winners. They are :
Therese T
I wrote a poem/verse to explain why the Britomart Station is my favourite station :
Britomart Station
Is definitely the best in the nation
From when the first train arrived on 23 June 2003 at 5.40am on Platform number five
It has literally changed lives!…
Dominion Rd upgrade announced
Auckland transport has released the latest plans for improving Dominion Rd, here’s the press release:
Dominion Rd bus lane and village centres upgrade approved
A major upgrade of Dominion Rd to create peak hour bus lanes along most of the road and upgrade its three village centres has been approved by Auckland Transport.…
The Other Great Transit Dividend
We know that for cities clever investments in Transit systems are the best way to keep their road system working efficiently. By adding additional capacity for movements of people these complimentary systems can save us all multiple billions of dollars in deferred or unnecessary additional roading projects.…
AT to become more transparent and customer focused
The new chairman to the Auckland Transports board starts next week and is promising to try and make the organisation more transparent and customer focused. Here is an interview with him on Radio NZ this morning.
Click here to listen or the MP3 version Overall it sounds positive so it will be interesting to see how things go.…
Will something constructive actually be done about housing affordability?
I get pissed off at housing affordability debates a lot of the time. There’s just something slightly nauseating about right-wing commentators who usually couldn’t give a stuff about poor people suddenly caring a great deal about housing affordability because they think it’s a way to do away with pesky planning controls like urban limits and make an absolute killing out of that speculative land they bought on the urban periphery a while back.…
Confusion over the AT HOP card
One day I’d really love to write a post about the Hop Card which wasn’t dominated by the utter incompetence of those involved in its introduction. Unfortunately, today is not one of those days.
On Monday sales of the new AT HOP card went live (apparently) and from October 27th (this coming Saturday) you will be able to start using your AT HOP card on the rail system.…
Our driving trends aren’t unique
Following on from my post this morning around the Harbour bridge, I was pointed to this article from the US on trends on the amount of vehicle miles travelled each year. The post starts as
It’s now common knowledge that annual changes in the volume of driving no longer follow the old patterns.…
AT introduce some new monthly rail passes
This post is both a bit of a bouquet and a brickbat. Auckland Transport appears to have quietly introduced some new rail monthly passes that will come into effect as HOP rolls out later this Saturday. The positive thing is that they finally acknowledge that not everyone travels to Britomart so gives people more options, the problem though is the pricing doesn’t seem to provide a lot of value in many situations and the graphics on the sign can be a little confusing.…
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