Photo of the Day: 50 shades….
The new suburbia; detached buildings so close you wonder why they bother and every mood from drab to dreary. At least you can no longer hear children play… now they’ve been banned.…
86 Comments Next stage of Beach Rd Cycleway underway
Auckland Transport yesterday started the second stage of the Beach Rd cycleway which when finished should finally help to make the first stage as well as the Grafton Gully cycleway useful. The Beach Road walking and cycling project begins its second and final stage on 30 March, continuing the transformation of a key link into the city centre.…
An Alternative AWHC
Two weeks ago the government once again talked about an Additional Waitemata Harbour Crossing (AWHC). There are a number of reasons why another road based crossing is not a great idea – and even the Herald has been sceptical about it – but perhaps the biggest issue of all is the sheer cost of it.…
Alternative explanations for Auckland house prices
Last week I took a look at the economics underlying Demographia’s “International Housing Affordability Survey” and found them severely lacking. As it turns out, Demographia’s data isn’t much good as a measure of the costs of poor planning rules – but it does seem to provide some information about people’s “revealed preference” for urban amenity.…
AT March Board Meeting
Tomorrow the Auckland Transport board meet once again. I’ve already covered the new network consultations for West Auckland and Pukekohe as well as the patronage results so here are the highlights from the rest of the reports available.
First to the items in the closed session that caught my attention Parking strategy – this follows the consultation on it last year.…
Sunday reading 29 March 2015
Every week we read more than we can write about on the blog. To avoid letting good commentary and research fall by the wayside, we’re going to publish weekly excerpts from what we’ve been reading.
Chris Parker, “Auckland Economic Quarterly March 2015“, Auckland Council Chief Economist Unit:
The price of land is driving high house prices
As Figure 1 shows, it is the price of land that has ballooned relative to incomes, not rents, nor construction costs.…
Would we ask motorists to tolerate this?
A few readers had some insightful comments on a recent post about Auckland Transport’s quite good plans to add safe cycle lanes on Carlton Gore Road. They highlighted how it is necessary to deliver a complete cycle network if we want to improve Auckland’s livability and choice of transport modes.…
Guest Post: Orange Smoothy II
This is part two of a two part guest post by highly visible e-cyclist and regular reader Greg Nikoloff
This post is about my (continuing) experiences with my Pedego (http://pedego.co.nz) electric bike (e-bike).
In part 1, I covered the basic of my e-bike experience which I’ve owned and used for over 2 years.…
February 2015 Patronage
We’d already heard about the spectacular rail patronage results of passing 13 million trips, an increase of 1 million in just 5 months. Now we’ve got the full patronage information for February and it’s looking good. One of the aspects I noticed in the table above is the Western line appears to have dropped however AT say that is just because of the timing of events last year and so if removing special event tickets from the numbers of each year shows patronage growth for the month of 9.8%.…
West Auckland and Pukekohe/Waiuku New Network Consultation Outcome
Reports to the Auckland Transport board next week gives the outcome of the West Auckland and Pukekohe/Waiuku new network consultations that occurred last year.
West Auckland
In total AT say they had 1242 submissions on the network with an equal number (41% each) supporting and opposing the changes with the rest neutral.…
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