A video from Buenos Aires with a great visual style explaining the benefits of a rail project that will open up the city’s regional rail network much in the same way the City Rail Link will for Auckland. It’s clear enough that even if like me you don’t speak Spanish, you can understand what’s proposed.
I wonder if AT could do something similar showing the CRL and their light rail plans
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Great movie clip. Always loved the design flair of Argentina and Chile, whether street art from Valparaiso (…and the dinky cable cars, the rehabilitated metro using Melbourne influenced EMUs and those crazy down-hill mountain bike races), the swiss influenced log houses of Bariloche (and those mega chocolate log/flake bars in the shop windows, accompanied by awesome cheap red wine and beef sausages), and the sheer style, panache and size of Buenos Aires. A feature of both Chile and Argentina is the recent renaissance of PT after decades of neglect. The transformation of rail in Buenos Aires has very strong parallels with Auckland albeit on a much larger scale.
I lived in Buenos Aires for six months when I first finished uni. Up until then I had owned a car and driven everywhere except commuting into town. Sold the car to pay for the flights and haven’t permanently owned once since. Thats where I learned of the convenience of transit, of interesting walkable places, and in particular the life and interestingness that comes when your city doesn’t have all the roads and parking and garages in between the ‘stuff’. I was quite enamored by the ‘suburbs’ where my cousin lived, small apartment blocks, terraces and townhouses on leafy streets with little corner squares and local parks. People walking on foot with their families, chatting on doorsteps, everything you need just nearby…
what’s the climate like? Sounds like a lot of outdoor living for windy and wet auckland.
Same as Auckland really, wet and a little dreary in the winter, hot and humid in the summer. Actually about the same latitude and Auckland, and likewise a maritime climate on the coast with plenty of wind.
Funny you say that as Auckland has a really mild climate, seriously. If find it weird that people think that everywhere else is always delightful and Auckland is the only city where it rains…
Well it’s a lot winder than London. Cycling takes allot more perseverance here when you are biking into a strong headwind home for almost the whole of spring. And the rain, though it doesn’t often get you, when it does it really does, whereas a bit of London drizzle evaporates off as quickly as it forms. Of course there are plenty of other things to like about the Auckland climate.
You are right in everything you said, except for the recent renaissance of Public Transport in Buenos Aires. PT has always been an integral part of BA. In fact, ‘porteños’ (people from BA) always say that the first ‘colectivo’ (urban bus) was invented in there. I am not so sure about that but what is true is that BA had the first subway of the Spanish speaking world, even before Madrid. The ‘colectivos’ are a tradition in BA deeply ingrained in its culture. They attract exceptionally high use with virtually no public financial support and they are, by far, the most popular mode of transport around the city.
Nice. Simple explanation. Clear visuals. The viewer/listener can comprehend very quickly how the linked system benefits them, their suburb and the city as a whole. Copy this comms piece AT – it’s good.
My recollection is that the Buenos Aires subte opened in the early part of the century -that’s the 1900’s should anyone be confused. As a result it seems that the city has been hugely affected by the rail system. Many people traverse the city by subway leaving many streets uncongested and pleasant to walk.
It seems that we can learn much from BA, Santiago and Rio. The latter offers a solution on how to connect an isolated area (Copacabana and beyond -isolated by the hillside) with the main part of the city. The comparison with Auckland is obvious and that is how to efficiently link the city with the North Shore. As many have said the clever way and the most economically sound is to do this with a rail only tunnel.
For the most part South America has been poor and so are forced to make the best use of scarce resources. I for one love to travel in these cities because the intensive reliance on public transport has had a profound effect on the environment.
As well as the Subterraneo, Buenos Aires has quite a commuter rail system as you can see in the video above. Interesting thing is it was built by the British, those great railway men, and runs British style to point of even running on the left (Argentina came close to formally being part of the British Empire and was certainly well within it’s economic sphere).
The really interesting thing about Buenos Aires is the buses actually. There run on an enormous grid network, being generally one bus per street which is itself an enormous grid, with high frequency and service 24 hours a day for the most part.
Since you bought up buses, now I have to mention Chile’s amazing intercity bus network 🙂
Some of the very best I have travelled on, seating that reclined to almost lie-flat. A cabin attendant who pulled shut thermal drapes at night and served iced water and coffee. And one of the only upsides of Pinochet’s regime being a smooth network of highways in the south – when we arrived at our destination, it felt like we had had a better travel experience by far than any long distance flight we’d been on. We made great use of the bus network right around central and southern Chile, and also in the extreme north travelling through incredible countryside through several routes up into Bolivia.
But, to at least partially come back to the topic…..as with Buenos Aires, Santiago’s bus network is also very extensive, and runs as grid system through the central core. The style of streetscapes, as with Buenos Aires, filled with terrace homes of a complimentary mix of European styles, people, leafy trees, and handy street markets to practice Spanish in.
I like the bit where (I think they’re saying) 15km of tunnel will unlock 800km of network. That should be translated to here.
The video is great and the idea behind it as well. But knowing how things work in Argentina and Buenos Aires, I seriously doubt this project will come to fruition in the near future. What the current administration of BA has done in transport in the last two terms is remarkable. A highly successful bike share system, 140km of protected cycleways, and the BRT (Metrobus in BA). But the city received the management of the subway a few years ago and the transition has been very difficult. The extension of the subway has been a PITA and the advances extremely slow for many reasons: lack of resources, permanent strikes, and complex legal issues.
The strongest candidate to be new chief of govt supports the current PT- and bicycle-friendly policies which means it is likely they will continue. But the cost of the RER project is enormous while the Metrobus has been highly successful for a small fraction of the cost. I think it is much more reasonable to think that the new city govt will put its resources in expanding the Metrobus and the biking policies than in the RER project.
I think it’s a bit of a waste of time to produce something similar for the CRL. I think most people have already made up their minds over this project. The people who are against it seem to either ignore the benefits that have already been stated in numerous ways or remain willfully ignorant of them.
I don’t agree. The message is so simple but it’s never been presented simply and people tune out, don’t care or are otherwise hopelessly lost in cynicism so typical of the public today (those you will never get to). The project can be explained in one sentence. I’ve heard it described so and the reactions have been “why aren’t they telling us that?”
When I first met my girlfriend 5 months ago she honestly believed that the CRL would operate as a loop lin around the CBD. Nowhere near enough people know what it actually involves.
+1. Where’s our “Auckland 2030”?
http://youtu.be/xBsRI1vajkc
I strongly agree with some of the forum colleagues. I was born in BA and in the the late 60’s and 70’s PT was absolutely wonderful. Colectivos (buses), trains and subte (tube) were clean and very efficient, mind you the subte network then was rather small for the size of the massive city; as a matter of fact is still very small compared to other cities. The train system is having and influx of new EMU and DMU, but the rails are still very old. Nowadays the PT could be much better than what it was in those golden era days, however is still miles ahead from Auckland or Wellington’s systems/services.The video itself is brilliant and I wish one day it will be built, however knowing the financial and politics issues of Argentina it will buried under tons of paperwork.
Argentina was pegged against the US dollar for a number of years along with the same typical neolib policies which hastened the decline and destruction of much of the 1970s era PT, including rail. Pinochet and his team of “Chicago boys” implemented a similar package of neolib reforms in Chile through the 1980s and 1990s.
Although the “right wing” economic reforms could be argued to have been necessary, the more extreme policies proved to be unsustainable in the long term. The greater economic disparity between rich and poor that occurred during this era has remained difficult to close in the years since. Yes, there are lessons from Argentina and Chile for Auckland and New Zealand as a whole. But here we can be thankful that we have never experienced unstable and/or un-democratic political reform to the left, or right, in the same way as South American nations.
And, the architects, designers, artists, visionaries and future-thinkers of both Argentina and Chile can take nothing but huge credit for what they have achieved often with limited resources and all sorts of constraints. And there lies the more important lesson for us, here.
>”But here we can be thankful that we have never experienced unstable and/or un-democratic political reform to the left, or right, in the same way as South American nations.”
– Not sure about that: nobody voted for what became Rogernomics, and then when they finally voted against Rogernomics they got Ruthenasia (Rogernomics x 2). It was very unstable for the hundreds of thousands of people who lost their jobs or working conditions (and still is), and I would argue it was un-democratic, in the sense that what was done after the elections (creating a more unequal society) was nothing like what was being sold during the election campaigns (e.g., “a decent society”).
Nobody voted for a law which forced Auckland to sell its buses (Aucklanders voted to keep them), but that’s what we got (from a Prime Minister that nobody voted for). Is that democratic?
Of course we haven’t suffered the totalitarian horrors that Latin America has. We were too easily duped.
That long-time PT user Sr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio would certainly approve.