Chief Science Advisor for Transport?
One of the impressions I have of many of the government ministries is that they act on “you say jump, I ask how high” kind of arrangement. We seem to see this particularly strongly in the Ministry of Transport where staff appear to have gone to almost extraordinary lengths in the past to paint projects like the City Rail Link in a bad light while giving uneconomic RoNS projects a free pass, all of which is strongly in line with the positions taken by government ministers.…
11 Comments Auckland’s Transport Future Public Meeting
The Campaign For Better Transport is getting into the spirit of what has so far been a lacklustre run up to the Auckland Council elections. They’ve lined up the Mayoral candidates to put forward their transport vision at a public meeting next week: Auckland’s Transport Future
Wednesday 11th September, 6:45pm
Pioneer Women’s and Ellen Melville Hall, Freyberg Square, Auckland Central Confirmed candidates include current Mayor Len Brown, John Palino, John Minto, Paul Duffy and Rev Uesifili Unasa.…
Will the Councillors be as worried about Sprawl?
The past few days has seen a pretty sad process of watering down the Unitary Plan to provide much less affordable housing and intensification within the existing urban limits. The push to limit intensification has come from a somewhat strange mix of councillors who I don’t think would often find themselves on the same side of the debate.…
Why are ratepayers funding the NZCID?
Infrastructure plays a critical part in our everyday lives and improving our infrastructure is seen as a way of improving our economy and our standard of living. The group pushing for more and better infrastructure more than any other is the New Zealand Council for Infrastructure Development (NZCID).…
Density Delusions
One of the saddest and most frustrating parts of the Unitary Plan deliberations being held at the moment is the misinformation about density controls and their effects. Phrases such as “unlimited density” create images of high-rise apartment buildings in suburban areas or tiny “chicken coop” sausage flats squeezed onto small suburban sites.…
Visualising Bus Route Performance
In any transport system there are routes which perform much better than others. In Auckland for example we know that the Northern Express, and Dominion Rd buses are incredibly successful while I’m sure there are other routes out there in the spaghetti like network we have today that carry almost no passengers and probably a very bad use of resources.…
The opportunities for ferries
With elections coming up we are bound to get the odd political hopeful throwing out the old line that we are a harbour city so if we want to improve public transport we should be thinking about investing in more ferries.…
GiveALittle – CFN Edition
Our GiveALittle campaign to cover server hosting costs was a huge success.
As a result, we’ve moved our hosting on to a more grunty server with more memory, and we have enough in the bank to cover hosting costs for at least the next twelve months.…
The Bridges and Art of Henderson
One of the interesting policies that he former Waitakere City Council implemented was to improve the amount of art in the community. Many of the installations revolved around integrating the pieces while also the process of doing infrastructure works. Walking around Henderson, here are some of the artworks that can be found (sorry these are Patrick quality photos)
First up we have the bridge on Sturges Rd over the rail lines (the station is just behind me).…
CRL NoR hearing update
Earlier today I said that it would be a few months before we hear anything about what the outcome of the City Rail Link Notice of Requirement was. While that is true for the final outcome, the hearings panel have just sent out an update which includes information on what the outstanding issues are.…
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