The A Train: Rail to the Shore and elsewhere
Within the Auckland Transport Alignment Process Interim Report is the news that the six lane highway across the harbour as currently planned, the Additional Harbour Crossing, just doesn’t work, and is now at least mortally wounded, if not actually dead. Clearly a total re-think of ways to serve the growing movement demand between the city and the north east is required.…
101 Comments Remember the last time house prices crashed 40%?
More commentary on this later on, but for now I’m just going to drop in some data.
Former Reserve Bank chair Arthur Grimes commented last week in The Spinoff:
In March 2016, the REINZ Auckland median house price reached $820,000. Four years previously, it was $495,000 – that’s a 66% increase in 4 years.…
CRL Cost Blowout Overblown
On Saturday the Herald proclaimed that the cost of the City Rail Link had blown out by $500 million which came on the heels of Prime Minister John Key saying that the project will “almost certainly cost more than they thought”
The cost of Auckland’s most expensive project – the $2.5 billion City Rail Link (CRL) – has jumped to more than $3b.…
Sunday reading 10 July 2016
Welcome back to Sunday Reading. Here’s a collection of articles I hope you find interesting. Please add yours in the comment section.
Anton Babadjanov, “The Supply And Demand Of Street Space“, The Urbanist. Here’s a nice compilation of the spatial capacity of various modes.…
Key unlocks Quay St
Aucklands newest and one of its most prominent cycleways was opened this morning on Quay St by John Key along with transport minister Simon Bridges, Mayor Len Brown and a host of other officials. The opening was certainly helped by the thunderstorms of we had overnight easing and the clouds even parting to make for a calm winter morning.…
A deadline for PT improvement
Auckland is in the midst of the most transformational change to public transport the city has seen since the trams were ripped out in the 1950’s – and I’m not even talking about the City Rail Link. Much of the change is the result of strategies set a decade or more ago but which have only really started to be implemented in the last few years.…
Watch: Gil Penalosa in Auckland
On Wednesday the latest and one of the best Auckland Conversations took place with the renowned Gil Penalosa in Auckland and talking about creating vibrant and healthy cities. It’s something I think all current or aspiring politicians should watch.
The talk was full of energy and passion for improving cities for all residents regardless of age, wealth or social status.…
The alternative route
Congestion pricing has once again hit the political radar, with the news that the Auckland Transport Alignment Project has recommended it as an option to more efficiently manage the transport network. They find that variable road tolls – highest during peak periods on busy roads and low (or even zero) at off-peak times – are the single most effective intervention to improve traffic flow.…
20 Things for Auckland
Investor, business commentator and friend of the blog, Lance Wiggs, has written an excellent post on 20 obvious things to remember for Auckland, especially with local body elections coming up. Most of it relates to topics we’ve talked about before. We can easily forget that most people don’t read Transport Blog, find The High Cost of Free Parking obvious or understand that great cities are great to walk in – and lousy to drive in.…
A new Road Only Harbour crossing option unpopular
Back in May I wrote about how it appeared a road only harbour crossing might be on the cards following some NZTA documents I recieved as part of an offical information act request. That prompted our friends at Generation Zero to initiate a survey to see just how much support there was for various options.…
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