Road safety in headlines

Last week the Herald ran an article about the worsening safety of our roads. The number of pedestrians killed on New Zealand roads has increased by a whopping 75 per cent this year, as the total road toll also soars. Ministry of Transport road toll data released this morning showed 244 people have died in 220 fatal crashes so far this year.…
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Guest Post: A Visit to Perth, Western Australia

This is a guest post from reader and friend of the blog, Warren Sanderson If you are interested in the design of cities and transport, for those of us in Auckland this is indeed a very interesting time. With the adoption of the Greater Auckland’s Congestion Free Network 2 (more or less) by the Labour Party we seem as citizens, to be reaching some consensus that Auckland has to well and truly ease off on further motorway development and play catch-up with public transport.…
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Legalising perimeter block housing

One of the paradoxes of planning reform that legalises the development of more housing in established urban areas is that it typically makes it easy to build like this: While still making it difficult to build like traditional perimeter block housing like this: Even from the Google Maps view, you can see that there are some important differences between the first built form, which is in Royal Oak, Auckland, and the second, which in Prague.…
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World-class, liveable or nothing at all – the upcoming Council budget

After nearly a year in the job, Mayor Phil Goff has finally got around to formally outlining his vision for Auckland, which unsurprisingly has a lot of similarities to his election campaign. This vision will become a key part of the updated Auckland Plan and sets the direction for the next version of the Long-term Plan (the Council’s 10-year budget).…
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Sunday reading 27 August 2017

Welcome back to Sunday reading. This week: Land taxes. In Newsroom, Zbigniew Dumieński and Nicholas Smith put forward the case for a major shakeup of New Zealand’s tax system. Sounds like it could be a very good idea: Unlike any other products of labour (including houses), land is not produced and, therefore, won’t disappear when we tax it.…
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Trains to the Planes

Auckland Airport Public Transport access is a geometric problem with a two sided solution. There are two immediate sets of catchments, East and North, plus a city-wide overlay then a region-wide one. The Airport is a natural terminus (excuse the pun), because short of looping around there are no destinations beyond the airport.…
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