Mid-week reading: strategy games, housing politics, fossil fuel subsidies, and the benefits of bike lanes
Welcome back to mid-week reading, which is (happily) becoming a more intermittent feature. One of the most interesting things I’ve recently read was Jonathan McCalmont’s exploration of anarchist scholar James C Scott’s arguments about the way that governments interact with their people: “Seeing like a state: why strategy games make us think and behave like brutal psychopaths“:
Cloaked as they were in the trappings of religion and medieval warfare, it was all too easy to overlook the morally dubious nature of the games’ relationship between players and in-game characters.…
16 Comments Reeves Rd Flyover decision: The details
A few weeks ago Auckland Transport announced that the Reeves Rd Flyover was back on again. I happened to be looking through some info for the AT board meetings and found that they’ve published the paper that was used to make that decision.…
Are CRL predictions undercooked
Following the CRL ground breaking event last week one quote from the press releases caught my eye – and it’s something I highlighted in my post on Friday.
“Auckland Transport is forecasting in the first year of operation an 88% increase in rail passengers travelling to the city centre and a 40% increase in rail patronage across the network in the morning peak.…
“The train that saved Denver”
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about “the end of Auckland’s old growth model“. In that post, I argued that the old pattern – build roads and pipes into some paddocks and orchards, and subdivide away – is now kaput.…
Brouhaha over bus colours
Almost exactly 18 months ago, Auckland Transport launched their AT Metro brand which is what they’re using to define public transport in Auckland. As part of that they also revealed that all buses would have a consistent livery. At the time they said:
Auckland Transport’s General Manager Marketing and Customer Experience Mike Loftus says a single identity will give Aucklanders and visitors a clearer understanding of what public transport is on offer, and how buses, trains and ferries serve different areas.…
Sunday reading 5 June 2016
Welcome back to Sunday reading this long weekend.
We start this week with a borrowed slide explaining the way that the quality of your city’s Transit system controls the quality of your driving commute: This explains what’s wrong with current expansion of SH16 and the completion of the Western Ring Route.…
Bikes and Public Transport, Glen Innes and New Lynn
The Urban Cycleway Fund programme is primarily funding a number of specific routes but in and around the city centre however two of the projects we’re individual routes but about improving and entire area so that it is easier to use a bike to access public transport.…
Thoughts on the CRL ground breaking event
So yesterday was the symbolic ground-breaking, or perhaps more accurately the ground-exploding for the City Rail Link. If you weren’t there and didn’t watch the live stream the video is below and the actual ceremony starts from about 48 minutes. I thought I would give some of my views of it.…
Development update: June 2016
It’s been a little while since I wrote a “Development Update” post, and a lot has happened since then: The final batch of Special Housing Areas was approved.
Downtown Shopping Centre has closed, and is about to be demolished. Tunnels for the City Rail Link will be built underneath, and the site will be redeveloped as Commercial Bay, an office tower and shopping centre.…
CRL Groundbreaking Day
Today is a day that Auckland has been waiting for, for nearly 100 years and that even a few years ago seemed like a distant pipe dream, the City Rail Link officially gets under way. The CRL is easily the project/topic that this blog has talked about more than any other having been tagged in over 400 posts, you could almost call it our raison d’être.…
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