PT to miss this years targets
Is Auckland Transport doing enough to improve public transport or is it resting on its laurels basking in the glow of the spectacular increases being seen on the rail network and busway. That’s a question asked by Radio NZ the other day in highlighting that patronage on the bus network outside of the busway has actually fallen recently and will mean that AT misses its PT targets for the year.…
135 Comments Parking Shuttle flop
Back in March, Auckland Transport announced a special shuttle to link a Park n Ride at Lloyd Elsmore Park to the Half Moon Bay Ferry Terminal. At the time it was announced I thought it was a silly idea but said that at least AT were trying things.…
Do motorways inevitably generate economic growth?
There were a number of odd things in the report released several weeks ago by the New Zealand Council for Infrastructure Development (NZCID), a lobby group. Matt has already reviewed the report in detail. Perhaps the oddest part of it was this sentence:
Motorway capacity is essential because motorways generate economic activity.…
Are vacant homes adding to the housing shortage in our leafy suburbs?
People sometimes worry that investors (or foreigners) are buying up properties and leaving them empty, speculating on capital gains instead – but if this is happening at all, it seems to be on a very minor scale. In a post last year, I looked at unoccupied homes in Auckland and other NZ cities, using census data.…
East-West an ever increasing cost
I recently received back an OIA request from the NZTA on a few projects. One part of that was related to the Additional Waitemata Harbour Crossing and the other which I’ll cover in this post was about the East West Link Connections.…
Sunday reading 12 June 2016
Welcome back to Sunday Reading. Here’s a collection of interesting articles/links I’ve comes across over the last week. Please post your links in the comments section.
In most growing, dense cities, housing affordability is becoming as serious economic concern. Conor Sen of WinkBlog calls it the “The biggest business story of the next five years“.…
Sir Dove-Myer Robinson on his Rapid Transit Scheme – Part 6
This is the last in a series of six posts, looking at a collection of articles written by Sir Dove-Myer Robinson in the mid 1970’s promoting and clearly trying to build support for his rapid transit plan. They come from a booklet I stumbled across while in the Takapuna Library one day.…
The high cost of fossil fuel subsidies
One challenge in writing about hyper-local issues like transport infrastructure and urban planning policies is that it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture.
Planet-wise, the big picture is climate change. As California Governor Jerry Brown said in a recent interview, our environmental impact increasingly has an “uncompromising gravity”: climate change is a potential extinction event for the human race.…
Petrol station shakeup
Last year, Z Energy announced its plans to buy Caltex’s New Zealand operations. The merger was approved in April 2016, and took effect last week on 1st June.
This is quite a shakeup in the fuel retailing market – we’re going from four major companies to three – but in a way, the consolidation was inevitable, and reflects the way the market has been heading for a number of years.…
Battery powered trains for Pukekohe
Since the majority of the Auckland network went electric last year, people travelling to and from Pukekohe have had to catch one of the old diesel trains as a shuttle from the end of the wires at Papakura. As I understand it the main reason the wires weren’t extended further than Papakura was the cost.…
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