General Election Debate on Transport – Campaign for Better Transport
The Campaign for Better Transport is holding an election debate with all the major parties this month in Auckland. The CBT is led by Cameron Pitches and over the years has led campaigns and advocated for many transport issues including: Airport Rail
Reopen Onehunga Rail
Rail Electrification
Integrated ticketing
Hamilton – Auckland Rail
City Rail Link
Operation Lifesaver – An Alternative to Puhoi-Warkworth
Northwestern Busway
North Shore Rail
A more economic alternative to the East West Link The Campaign for Better Transport will be hosting a public meeting for political parties to present their transport policies, with a particular focus on Auckland’s needs.…
25 Comments Pouring gasoline on the housing fire
Yesterday, Prime Minister Bill English announced that he would encourage the Reserve Bank to remove the loan to value ratio (LVR) rules that it put in place to take the heat out of rising house prices. As reported in Newsroom:
Prime Minister Bill English has rediscovered his jawbone and has sent a clear message to the Reserve Bank that he expects it to start thinking about scrapping its restrictions on loan to value ratios, now that house prices across the country are flat or falling.…
Wijkontsluitingsweg
This is another post about my recent trip to the Netherlands. The Netherlands has a standard road classification system with ideally three types of roads: flow roads (motorways), distribution roads (arterials), and local roads (residential roads). This system does not recognise roads with the dual functions of through traffic and destination traffic.…
Victory on Victoria
The Victoria St Linear Park has been saved from the clutches of Auckland Transport.
You may recall that we’ve been concerned about ATs plans for the future of many of the streets in the city centre for some time. In particular we were concerned that many of ATs emerging plans seemed to completely ignore the Council’s publicly consulted City Centre Master Plan (CCMP), and even their own strategic plans.…
Dual Modes and Axle Loads
Last year KiwiRail made the decision to replace the 16 current 30-year-old EF class electric freight trains currently in use on the North Island Main Trunk with the procurement of more DL Class Diesel Trains. These EF Class trains use the 25kvAC electrification between Te Rapa and Palmerston North that was built during the Think Big years. …
ATAP Revised
The Auckland Transport Alignment Project (ATAP) released just last year has been already been one of the most influential transport documents Auckland has seen. That’s because for the first time Auckland and the Government agreed on the future of transport in Auckland and even though it asked many of the wrong questions, ATAP still came out with many of the right answers.…
Sunday reading 13 August 2017
Welcome back to Sunday reading.
This week, I’d like to start out with two stories of self-inflicted screwups (by other people).
Self-inflicted screwup number one is Australia’s broadband rollout. As Jennifer Hewett sets out in the Australian Financial Review, it’s gone much worse than ours:
In September 2009, the Key government in New Zealand announced it would invest in an all-fibre, ultra-fast broadband network.…
Why world-class public transport is so crucial to Auckland’s future
It’s been interesting over the past week or so to see so many of our ideas being picked up by major political parties, on both sides. In many ways it feels like a long, hard slog is really starting to pay off.…
Development update: August 2017 (the “top 10” for Auckland apartments)
This month, I’ve pulled out some of the data behind the RCG Development Tracker, to give a picture of the people helping to solve Auckland’s housing crisis. I’ve taken a narrow focus here – just looking at apartment developers, builders and architects – but they’re an important part of the solution.…
Airport Rail Responses
There have been numerous reactions since Sunday following Labour’s announcement of their plan to build light rail to the airport, as part of them adopting our Congestion Free Network. Reactions have included plenty of uninformed opinion and a general misunderstanding of just what’s proposed, which tends to lead to a skepticism about the project.…
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