Reflections on Nelson St
As you know, on Thursday the Te Ara I Whiti (The Lightpath) and the Nelson St cycleway opened to the public. They are both fantastic additions to Auckland and are rightly making many people proud to see their city developing into a more people friendly place.…
57 Comments Ponsonby Rd Pedestrian Improvements
I’ve left this a bit late; today is the last day to get your feedback in on some quick fixes coming to P Rd. But it doesn’t take a moment to choose between the two near identical options and just a few moments more throw a word or two it in as well.…
Sunday reading 6 December 2015
Welcome back to Sunday reading. To start out, here’s a fun little quiz from the Guardian: “How well do you really know your country?” It tests your knowledge about statistics from obesity rates to wealth distribution.
The most important article I read this week was Paul Krugman’s New York Times column on “inequality and the city“.…
Tourism is booming
It hasn’t had the media coverage it deserves, but New Zealand is going through a tourism boom. The Tourism Satellite Account, the comprehensive record of tourist spending, found that international tourists spent 17% more in the year to March 2015 than they had the year before that, for a total of $11.8 billion.…
HOP in Wellington
Wellington has been making some noises about moving towards integrated ticketing and fares for some time and doing so is formally listed Greater Wellington Regional Council’s Regional Public Transport Plan (RPTP). In the RPTP they say “Improving the fares and ticketing system is the next significant element in the modernisation of Wellington’s public transport system”.…
Photo of the Day: Caption That
Courtesy of the NZTA comms team we have this fine photograph from the opening of Te Ara I Whiti or LightPath. I guess it’s calling out for a caption or two. Had a good discussion with the ministers en velo, no imminent big news; things are winding down for the year; but next year will be a biggy…!…
Te Ara I Whiti – the lightpath
Auckland’s newest and certainly it’s most colourful cycleway (so far) was officially opened today by Transport Minister Simon Bridges. And I must say, Simon gave a fantastic speech showing he gets it, talking up the environmental, health, congestion and economic benefits of investing in cycling – this view was reinforced in discussion with him later.…
Costs, benefits, and East-West Connections
How transport projects are evaluated has always been of interest to me. I believe that although the standard cost benefit analysis approach that lies behind the NZTA economic evaluation manual has its flaws, the resulting BCR is still an important factor in determining whether a project, or a particular project option, should proceed.…
2,600 years of culture
This is only loosely transport related – with the strongest bit about the US after the west was opened up by transport links – but a fascinating visualisation on how notable people have shifted around the world.
Maximilian Schich, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas, and his colleagues used Freebase—a crowdsourced database of facts—to record the birthplaces and locations of death of 120,000 people who were considered important enough to be included on the site.…
Future Urban Area Transport Networks
You may recall the Draft Future Urban Land Supply Strategy that the Council consulted on back in August which looked at the greenfield land that was to be released along with the costs of the infrastructure needed to service it. The outcome of the consultation is due soon however Auckland Transport’s presentation that I wrote about yesterday gives some more detail on the future transport networks needed for some of these major areas.…
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