Slow down

This is one of the more common traffic diagrams depicting how vehicle speed leads to increase accident severity. I have seen versions of this in different languages and the two common measurement systems. I would expect this information to be imparted to transport professionals on day one or two of school. …
67 Comments

The Steady Transformation of Travel to the CBD

Despite the critics, Auckland’s city centre is probably in better shape than it has been for decades. Foot traffic is high, new streetscape improvements continue, Queen Street is clearly still extremely “hot property” and the place just feels vibrant. Looking into this steady, almost sneaky, transformation of downtown over the last ten years or so, I went searching for what seemed to possibly be the cause.…
31 Comments

Tauranga Eastern Link – another white elephant motorway?

NZTA were pleased to announce on Wednesday that they are making good progress on the “Tauranga Eastern Link” road, a Road of National Significance that we haven’t paid much attention to in the past. Given our general disdain of the justification for projects given this title (Victoria Park Tunnel and Waterview Connection excepted) I thought I’d look in a bit more detail around what the Tauranga Eastern Link road actually is – and whether it falls into the category of pointless and stupid RoNS (like Puhoi-Wellsford, parts of the Waikato Expressway and most of the Wellington Northern Corridor project) or more reasonable RoNS (like the aforementioned Auckland projects and perhaps part of the Christchurch projects though I’m not too familiar with them).…
31 Comments

The Great Reset?

We have talked quite a bit recently about what is happening with traffic volumes, both here and overseas. If you haven’t seen those posts then a quick recap, all across the developed world we have seen stats showing that traffic and total distances travelled by people have not only stalled but fallen.…
111 Comments

What really happened with Snapper/HOP – Part 2

Following on from my post yesterday on the Snapper/HOP mess, I felt that a lot of further questions remained unanswered. Phil Twyford attempted to get some answers out of the Minister of Transport in parliament: While questions around why Auckland Transport decided to allow Snapper to become involved in the HOP scheme remain frustratingly unanswered (perhaps until I read a bit further into the mountain of information I have), a question that I want to look at in this post relates a bit more closely to the title of this post – why did things go wrong?…
27 Comments