Mill Road economic evaluation
In this earlier post Matt discussed the proposed Mill Rd project in South Auckland.
I actually grew up in Franklin (Waiuku) and know the wider sub-region quite well. Mill Rd is, in my experience, an unsafe stretch of road within a somewhat disconnected/fragmented network.…
16 Comments Mill Rd Horror Show
Auckland Transport are about to publicly notify the Northern section of the massive Redoubt Rd-Mill Rd Corridor project. This section of the corridor was estimated two years ago to cost up to $374 million and the recent draft 2015-18 Long Term Plan documents suggest the entire project all the way to Drury will cost around $800 million over the next 30 years.…
Massive March Patronage
We were expecting public transport in March to be mad and throughout the month we certainly saw it living up to that expectation with daily reports of full services. Some people watched up to 12 full buses go past their stop before one with enough space arrived for them to squeeze on.…
Guest Post: FlyKly Review
This is a guest post from our friend Lennart Nout on his FlyKly. If you don’t know what that is then read on.
Why would a (relatively) fit young man like me invest in an electric bike?
Because I am lazy.…
Getting the maths wrong on the cost of housing
The New Zealand Herald’s cover story last Friday was quite sensational: “Homeowners in Auckland’s fringe saving up to $50,000 a year“. But while the eye-grabbing headline was worthy of clickbait merchants like Buzzfeed, the underlying analysis was not so good.
Here’s the key point of the article:
Bayleys calculated the first-year mortgage repayment costs for different suburbs based on median house prices from the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand (REINZ) and the ANZ variable rate of 6.74 per cent.…
Open Streets 2015 review
On Sunday the Open Streets event along the Waterfront was held and this is a mini review of the day as I saw it. In particular I think there were a couple of really good aspects about the day and a couple of failings that absolutely have to be addressed when the event happens next year.…
Development update: April 2015
New projects are starting to pop up around Auckland, Christchurch and (to a lesser extent) the rest of the country at an amazing rate. There are plenty of new additions to the RCG Development Tracker this month – in residential alone, that includes Botanica Mt Eden, Anzac Lofts, Hemisphere Apartments, and Beach & Cavalli.…
Oi!
Auckland Transport have launched their newest safety video and it’s aimed at the stupidly high number of people that still use a phone when driving – something you notice even more when walking or on a bike. The ad has fairly typical ending for a road safety video but what stands out to me in this video is the reaction of the people using the phones when strangers call them out.…
What’s happening to Takapu Valley?
As Peter found when covering the Ministry of Transport’s review of capital spending on roads (parts 1, 2, 3, and 4) our multibillion dollar national transport budget is being spent in some bizarre ways. Money’s being allocated to major roading projects that don’t offer many economic benefits in return.…
The un-funded liabilities of sprawling suburbs
Matt’s post last month on a new apartment development in Albany caused me to start thinking about street grids. As Matt noted, the development will start filling in the big gaps between Albany’s broad, curving roads to nowhere. Here’s a picture of the development: Albany’s got many attractive aspects.…
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