Gerry Brownlee on the CRL
Phil Tywford asked transport minister Gerry Brownlee in parliament yesterday about the CRL Transscript is here.
Perhaps it is just me dreaming but Gerry did at least seem less negative about it than he had in the past. Based on his answers it suggests he waiting for the final version of the CCFAS to come across his desk before he can properly comment.…
35 Comments Belittling the City Centre
The results of leaked release of the Horizon survey and the CCFAS last week has clearly started to cause concern amongst the anti rail councillors with the number of comments from them, and George Wood in particular increasing quite a bit.…
Urbanism dividend: return on rates
The continuing weight of major centers, is in a way countersensical..dispersal would seem to be a good option given the high cost – Saskia Sassen, Global Networks, Linked Cities
I’m still fascinated with the results from earlier posts looking at land value in relation to cbd location.…
Not a single metre of new bus lane in two years?
I was wracking my brain last night thinking about an interesting question – has Auckland Transport actually added a single metre of bus lane in the last two years since they came into existence? They’ve certainly wound the Remuera Road bus lanes back to being T3 lanes and, looking at the November board papers, it seems they’re even chickening out on creating a new T3 lane on Onewa Road westbound in the evening peak:Given that the Council has made it quite clear that improving public transport is close to the number one priority it has, it seems utterly incredible that Auckland Transport have been so useless that they haven’t managed to add a single metre of new bus lane in over two years from what I can remember.…
300 Queen St: The Perfect Future Transit Station
This post is about the other critical break at the heart of Auckland’s RTN network: the Waitemata Harbour. The one that needs to be addressed after the City Rail Link mends the first one. Some may think that I’m getting ahead of myself here but I think it is important to look ahead so that near term projects are future-proofed and so that our thinking is kept open to all sorts of possibilities.…
“It’s the economy stupid #3” – Is there an optimal city size?
Previous posts here and here have discussed how the growth of cities can be attributed to some underlying economic advantages, namely shorter travel distances and economies of scale in the presence of fixed costs.
In this post I want to flesh out these economic factors in more detail.…
Treasury’s interesting position on road pricing
The National State of Infrastructure Report was released by Treasury’s Infrastructure Unit a few weeks back, and makes for some quite interesting and amusing reading in relation to transport. I’ll leave what’s said about transport in Auckland to another post (basically it seems like they’re suggesting Auckland needs a whole pile more motorway but aren’t quite sure where they’ll go), but perhaps one of the most amusing parts of the document is in relation to road pricing.…
Sydney Morning Herald predicts Auckland’s Future
People seem to love to compare us to Sydney, it is after all the closest international to Auckland and one of the things that is frequently commented on is the their public transport system, in particular their train system. But there is one area where Sydney has been behind us and that is in integrated ticketing (and I’m not suggesting that we are the model system).…
Finding Lost Space
The “flush median” is a pernicious road design that lingers in many places around Auckland and is still being utilised in many new road designs. I can only guess that its genesis originated in the late 60’s as a way to separate cars from the most severe of collisions, the head-on.…
Did the NZTA just admit they are incompetent
Last week the NZTA and government announced that they were going to build Transmission Gully using a PPP and in the process seem to either shovelled a whole pile of ideological crap or admitted they are completely incompetent at the one thing we thought they seemed good at, building roads.…
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