Council to decide on Skypath funding this week
The council will decide on Thursday if they will go ahead with a funding arrangement for Skypath. An item (Page 21) at the council’s Finance and Performance Committee gives an update on the project, much of which will be nothing new to those who have been following it.…
201 Comments How to reduce Auckland house prices
Arthur Grimes, the former chair of the Reserve Bank board, caused a stir with his proposal to crash Auckland house prices by 40% by building lots more housing:
My call for policies to drive a house price collapse is driven by my personal value judgement that it’s great for young families and families on lower incomes, to be able to afford to buy a house if they wish to do so.…
Sunday reading 17 July 2016
Welcome back to Sunday reading. This week, a different take on housing markets. We normally focus on issues like zoning and development that affect the quantity of housing that gets built in a city, but things aren’t necessarily all hunky-dory once the housing’s there.…
Local board Rhetoric Doesn’t Match Reality
Let’s start with a quick pop quiz: you’ve got an existing town centre that you want to improve, making it more vibrant and successful. Do you
A) Encourage more people to live locally who will use the town centre
B) Encourage more people to live locally who will use the town centre
C) Encourage more people to live locally who will use the town centre
D) Oppose people living nearby and worry about the cars trying to drive through and past your town centre being ever so slightly hindered.…
Submit (today) on East-West
The East-West Link feels a lot like the preverbal snowball rolling down a slope, constantly gathering momentum as it simultaniously gets bigger and bigger in scale, cost and the NZTA’s haste to get started. A month ago and based on documents received from an OIA, I wrote about how the cost of the project had ballooned from an estimated $550-660 million when the government gave the go ahead to accelerate its construction up to now $1.8 billion and presumably still climbing.…
Development update: July 2016
Christchurch
It’s been a while since our last update of Christchurch building consents – the number of new homes being approved by the various councils in the area. Christchurch City has had a bit of an uptick in the last couple of months, whereas consent numbers in the surrounding districts (Selwyn and Waimakariri) have flattened off – for Selwyn, at least, still much higher than the historical average.…
Does Rapid Transit have the Capacity for Auckland’s Growth
Auckland’s budding rapid transit network is already starting to make a significant difference to public transport in the region. Despite only being a few routes, now around 25% of all PT trips in the region are made on either rail or the busway, up from just 5% a decade ago – and the numbers continue to growth strongly with over 20% growth currently being seen.…
Mangere and Otahuhu bus stop upgrades planned
With implementation of the new bus network in South Auckland coming up in October, Auckland Transport are consulting on the designs for the bus station in Mangere Town Centre and the bus stops in the Otahuhu Town Centre. Both of these improvements are also being classed as part of the East-West Link Connections project.…
What are the preconditions for congestion pricing in Auckland?
The inclusion of congestion pricing in the recent Auckland Transport Alignment Project interim report has (helpfully) reignited the public debate on the topic. Transportblog’s authors have been pretty enthusiastic about the idea – see e.g. Stu Donovan’s posts on the topic.…
Lincoln to Westgate Motorway Widening Underway
On Friday while we were basking in the glow of the opening of another great cycling project, the government were busy turning the sod of the next motorway widening project to get underway, something with decidedly less fanfare – to the point there hasn’t even been a press release about it.…
Processing...