Thoughts from “Road to Ruin”
Another fascinating book that I am reading at the moment is “Road to Ruin: an introduction to sprawl and how to cure it” by Dom Nozzi. Like my previous post on How Cities Work, the key point made in Road to Ruin (at least so far) is how important the transport decisions we make are in determining the nature of our urban environments.…
7 Comments Auckland’s Rail Signalling System
A few months ago we learned just how fragile our train system is, even after re signalling it when the the whole system was brought to its knees due to a faulty power supply that that fed the desk from which the Auckland network is managed from.…
NZ Bus pay dispute resolved
Yay some good news at last in the long running pay dispute between NZ Bus and their drivers. The two parties have finally come to an arrangement which means no more threats of strikes or industrial action.
NZ Bus making progress in culture change
NZ Bus has been in negotiations with representatives of the Auckland Tramways Union and First Union for the past 6 months to agree a new Collective Agreement (CA) for their members.…
A Day in the Life of the BIG little City
This new video from Heart of the City nicely captures Auckland as it is today – an increasingly vibrant and diverse city that feels like it’s just starting to properly grow up and not be afraid of being a real city.…
Changing the ground rules
We have been pretty critical of many of the business cases for the roads of nation significance that have been produced because like as has been seen in Australia with their PPPs, many use incredibly over inflated traffic projections and even with those some still don’t make economic sense.…
More on the costs of parking
Here’s some interesting new research from Portland, Oregon where they have been thoroughly investigating the role of parking policy in relation to housing affordability, neighbourhood impacts, and car ownership. This useful report, Cost of Onsite Parking + Impacts on Affordability (PDF), identifies the costs associated with providing various types of car parking for a mixed use project.…
Thoughts from “How Cities Work: suburbs, sprawl and the roads not taken”
There have been so many excellent books about transport and planning come out in recent times: perhaps with Straphanger and Human Transit the two most exciting books for 2012 in that respect (at least in my opinion). But the book I’ve been reading recently is a little older, first published in 2000 – called “How Cities Work: suburbs, sprawl and the roads not taken” by Alex Marshall.…
Another Australian PPP fails – will we learn from it?
Some interesting news coming out of Australia today, with yet another transport public-private-partnership (PPP) on the brink of collapse, due to over-optimistic traffic forecasts. This time it’s the Airport Link toll road in Brisbane:
THE operators of Brisbane’s Airport Link have gone into a trading halt, amid increasing speculation about the company’s financial future following much lower than expected traffic volumes…
…It comes as the operator struggles to achieve even 50 per cent of its forecast traffic volumes of 135,000 vehicles a day.…
Hank Dittmar (@HankDittmar) in Auckland
Here’s another great Auckland Conversations event coming up on Wednesday 14 November. Hank Dittmar CEO of the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment will be talking about sustainable cities and design. Mr. Dittmar has been the Chief Executive of The Prince’s Foundation since January 2005.…
Paint the Auckland Harbour Bridge something other than boring old grey!
The title of this post says it all. Why does our somewhat lacklustre harbour bridge have to be painted the most uninspiring colour known to mankind? As far as monuments go it’s pretty damned blandiose. Can’t we paint it something a bit more, er, not grey?…
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