Sunday reading 27 September 2015
Tim Harford, “What cities tell us about the economy“, Undercover Economist:
Jacobs is not the only person to argue that economic development may be profitably studied through a magnifying glass. A new research paper from three development economists, William Easterly, Laura Freschi and Steven Pennings, offers “A Long History of a Short Block” — a Shinohata-style tale of the economic development of a single 486ft block of Greene Street, between Houston and Prince Street in downtown Manhattan.…
20 Comments Good progress on marking cycle lanes
You may recall my post recently about how Auckland Transport installing cycle lanes on Upper Harbour Dr – which I use to ride to work sometimes – actually made the road less safe. This was because in the process of installing the cycle lanes AT removed the existing broken yellow lines (BYLs) and it resulted in drivers parking in the cycle lanes.…
Waterview September Update
The latest photos and video from the Waterview Connection project. As of last Friday the TBM had just 332 metres to go before breaking through – which should happen in the next few weeks.
The August Timelapse…
ATs rail tender postponed
Auckland Transport have announced that they’ve postponed their tender for running train services in Auckland. Back in April they said they shortlisted Kiwirail, Serco and Transdev to run services from the middle of next year. I had assumed they must have been getting close to picking a winner.…
Shopping and public transport: Westfield around the world
The conventional wisdom in New Zealand seems to be that people will always drive to go shopping, they won’t take public transport or cycle. It’s even spawned the term #Quaxing, named after your friend and mine, councillor Dick Quax. @lukechristensen @BenRoss_AKL @Brycepearce no one in the entire western world uses the train for their shopping trips
— Dick Quax (@DickQuax) January 3, 2015 I’ll talk about some UK and Australian examples of shopping centres below.…
IPENZ Conference call for abstracts
This is a post on behalf of our friends at IPENZ Got an idea that you would like to share with the transport industry? Working on a really cool project? Got an innovative process underway?
Submit a paper to the 2016 IPENZ Transportation Group conference and get noticed! …
Next Stage of Wynyard Quarter Development about to begin
Yesterday Panuku Development Auckland (PDA) held a blessing of sites for the next big round of construction at Wynyard valued at around $1 billion and consisting of both residential and commercial developments. PDA have also released a video showing how the area will develop over the next 5 years.…
August-2015 Patronage
Auckland Transport have released the patronage results for August and for we’ve now passed 80 million PT trips in a year. In total patronage was up 4.9% on August last year and annually it is up 9.4% which remains one of the highest levels of growth the Auckland network has seen in recent decades. …
Lost Urban Bush
While looking through some photos the other day I was once again reminded of one of the things Auckland lost – a bush clad Grafton Gully. How fantastic would it be to still have a patch of urban native bush like this so close to the city.…
Briefing Papers 6: “The Problem With Migration”
AUT’s Briefing Papers initiative has kindly allowed us to syndicate their recent series on housing. The sixth paper is by economic commentator Bernard Hickey: We’re now having a fractious debate about foreign buying of houses, but the more important and tougher debate we should be having is about migration.…
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