Sunday reading 6 November 2016
Hi and welcome back to Sunday Reading. Here is a collection of stories I found interesting over the week. Please add your links in the comments below.
UN Habitat III in Quito came to a close a couple weeks ago. Here Michael Kimmelman describes the urban flavour and urgency of the conference that sits in stark contrast to Habitat I which largely focused on conventional environmentalism and improving the rural habitat- “The Kind of Thinking Cities Need“, The New York Times.…
48 Comments Postcard from Japan: Kamakura Day Trip
I’m back from my holiday now which means I can focus on writing posts again, including sharing more my trip. In this post I’ll cover a day trip we took to Kamakura, a seaside city south of Tokyo that is known for a number of festivals as well as Buddhist shrines and temples.…
SMART Alignments Observations
I recently read through the Jacobs prepared alignments for AT for the SMART (South-western Multi-modal Airport Rapid Transit) project. In it contains the proposed alignments for HR (Heavy Rail), BRT (Bus Rapid Transit), LRT (Light Rail Transit), as well as a Hybrid option.…
New Auckland Councillor Maiden Speeches
Yesterday the new Auckland Councillors gave their maiden speeches. The ones delivered by Efeso Collins from the Manukau Ward and Richard Hills from the North Shore ward were particularly good. Watch them here Here’s Daniel Newman from the Manurewa-Papakura ward and Greg Sayers from the Rodney ward And finally Desley Simpson from the Orakei Ward.…
New Amsterdam
The current cycleway revolution in Auckland has a serendipitous feature for one of Auckland’s most cherished but badly treated areas: All routes lead to Karangahape Rd. Both the recent city by-passes: Grafton Gully and the Pink Path, have one end in the K Rd precinct, our only current cycling ‘superhighway’, the NorthWestern, is about to get its city termination moved forward from Newton Rd to the K, and the coming real on-road separated cycle lanes on Great North Rd also lead straight to the K.…
Skypath and East-West; good, bad and ugly
To borrow a sports analogy, yesterday was a bit of a “game of two halves”. There was good, bad and ugly all thrown in from different sources. I thought I’d highlight them both in this post.
The good fantastic
After decades pushing the vision and years of hard work by some amazingly dedicated people, yesterday it was confirmed that Skypath will be granted consent.…
State Houses and Social Housing (part 1)
State housing, or “social housing” more generally, is often in the news for one reason or another. Governments over the years have all had their own policies. In this post series, I won’t really be looking at the pros and cons (at least not much) – I’ll mainly be looking at some of the numbers.…
Riding the Southern New Network
This is a guest post from reader and friend of the blog, Shan L
Although most southern commuters’ first experience of the New Network for South Auckland was on Monday morning, the go-live was on the day before – Sunday – when travel demand is much lower and any issues can be ironed out before the masses crowd on.…
Light Rail by-election stoush
On the weekend, the Labour Party, as part of the Mt Roskill by-election campaign, announced their intention to fund 50% of the cost of the proposed light rail line from Wynyard to Mt Roskill via Dominion Rd, one of the routes Auckland Transport first suggested in January last year.…
Population Growth in 2016
Last week Statistics NZ released their latest detailed population estimates for the country and they show that Auckland is continuing to grow at a rapid pace. Population increased by an estimated 44,400 people, an annual increase of 2.8% making it the fastest growing region in NZ and of course Auckland already started with the largest base.…
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