AT to reconsider communication
An item for the Auckland Transport board meeting the other day covered off the feedback to the Regional Land Transport Plan (RLTP) that was submitted on alongside the councils Long Term Plan. I intend to cover more deeply the report in the coming days but for this post wanted to highlight just one specific part of it right at the end – and an aspect we’ve long been critical of.…
38 Comments Is public transport an “inferior good”?
I’ve recently been taking a look at Statistics NZ’s Census data on car ownership in Auckland. One interesting observation is that low-income households are considerably more likely to not own a car. One implication is that minimum parking requirements, which require everyone to have carparks (or pay for their provision every time they go to the shops), are a quite regressive policy.…
Drinking the Kool-Aid: IPENZ event tonight
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Auckland Office space Low – More on the Horizon
An interesting piece was hidden in the Herald’s business section yesterday from Chris Dibble, the national research manager at Colliers International talking about the shortage of office space in the central city.
The amount of vacant office space in the Auckland CBD has been shrinking for the past three years as the economy grows, business confidence reaches record highs and supply stays still.…
Do parking minimums restrict competition?
During the Unitary Plan submissions process, a number of retailers and shopping centre owners took a pretty conservative stance on transport. They argued for maintaining parking minimums, replacing maximums with minimums in some areas, and so on. Some argued that cars would always be the main way of getting to shops, and this should be written into the Unitary Plan.…
More thoughts on Light Rail details
On the closed session agenda for tomorrow’s Auckland Transport board meeting is an item asking for a decision about Light Rail. Hopefully this will see the project move forward and the public provided with more information. With that in mind I thought I’d chuck together a few thoughts I’d had that hadn’t been discussed too much.…
A year ago today – Auckland’s first electric trains
A year ago today transport in Auckland was forever changed as the first electric trains started carrying passengers – although they didn’t start running in normal service till the following day. Electrifying Auckland’s rail network is something that had been on and off the transport agenda for almost 90 years.…
Is Auckland boring enough?
Via Jarrett Walker, I recently ran across a provocative article by Aaron Renn in the Guardian: “In praise of boring cities“. Renn takes his fellow urbanists to task for the narrowness of their vision about what makes a good city:
Those of us who love urban areas’ walkability, variety and novelty often have a tendency to universalise – not to say sacralise – our values and tastes.…
Sunday reading 26 April 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.
Joe Cortright, “Our Shortage of Cities“, City Commentary.…
Auckland Train Ops Shortlist
Auckland Transport have announced the short list of companies to run Auckland’s trains from July next year onwards and none particularly fill me with confidence. Auckland Transport has short-listed three companies that will be invited to tender to operate passenger rail services from 1 July 2016.…
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