Video of the week: How wind turbine blades are transported
Via How Things Work, here’s an interesting video of wind turbine blades being transported through challenging terrain: This is how wind turbine blades are transported in difficult terrain pic.twitter.com/W5wxvxBGDr
— How Things Work (@ThingsWork) September 21, 2016 Pretty remarkable how large the blades are relative to the trucks, and how careful the drivers are on some pretty challenging routes.…
5 Comments Farewell Len
After two terms, yesterday was Len Brown’s final meeting as Mayor of an amalgamated Auckland and so I think it’s appropriate to look back at what he and Auckland have achieved over the last six years. First here is his valedictory speech.…
Manukau Bus Station Fly Through
Auckland Transport have released a fly-through video of the Manukau Bus Station that is expected to start construction soon. They are also saying it will be complete in the second half of 2017 which is at odds with the board report a few days ago.…
New data on cycling
We’re always on the lookout for interesting new pieces of transport data. Smartphone apps and automated trip counters provide an increasing amount of usable, timely data that can tell us how, where, and (at times) why we’re travelling.
Moreover, transport agencies are increasingly open about publishing their data and opening it up for others to analyse.…
Unitary Plan hits a snag
In August we celebrated as the Unitary Plan was finally approved by the council and then formally notified after a four-year roller coaster of a process. Even better was the end result was actually pretty good, far better than we could have hoped for back in February after the agreed to most of the changes the Independent Hearings Panel made.…
Farnham Street residents looking at each other down the barrel of a gun
Caution: this post contains references to John Farnham.
I was updating the Development Tracker recently, and added another one to the list – 9 Farnham Street. It hasn’t made it off the starting blocks yet, despite a couple of attempts.
In 2008, and perhaps for some time before that, 9 Farnham Street was being advertised for a five-storey building, with three floors of office and two penthouse apartments:
The sign was still up in 2009, but sometime after that it was taken down.…
On the way to some Inner West bike routes
Earlier this year Auckland Transport consulted on walking and cycling routes for the Inner West of Auckland with improving connections in the area included as part of the Government’s Urban Cycleway Programme. In August they released the results of the consultation which saw 865 submissions.…
Pick up your shopping at your Station
Often it’s the big things such as improved infrastructure and services that are needed to make public transport more viable but sometimes small enhancements can help in removing barriers for new users or just improve customer satisfaction with existing users. Yesterday Auckland Transport announced a trial of the latter kind, a deal with Countdown for people to pick up groceries at a few selected locations with the potential for it to be expanded to more locations in the future.…
Zoning reform: Who participates in local elections? (4 of n)
This is the fourth installment in an ongoing series on the politics and economics of zoning reform. In the previous post, I took a look at the demographic factors underpinning variations in submission rates on the Auckland Unitary Plan between different parts of the city.…
Breathing new life into Aotea
Some good news last week with the announcement that the Council’s former Civic Administration Building – which was given Category A heritage status under the Unitary Plan – will be restored. To make things better, it will be joined by a number of new buildings filling in what is currently a dead zone surrounding it.…
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