Unfunded Auckland
Death and taxes are said to be the only certainties of life but when it comes to cities, especially growing ones, perhaps it’s that they’re never finished. There’s always more that could be done to improve our transport networks. If by magic our 30-year list of transport projects were suddenly completed tomorrow, we’d come up with another 30-years’ worth of projects by the following day.…
50 Comments How to bring Hobsonville into Auckland
This is a guest post from Brendon Harre. It first appeared here.
Hobsonville Point has been a great commercial success.
It demonstrates that Aucklanders will eagerly choose higher density living if it is master planned to a good quality.
The challenge for Auckland is in replicating that success for its existing suburbs that were originally designed for low density autocentric living.…
Greater Auckland’s Submission on the 2018 draft Government Policy Statement
Last month the government released their draft policy statement (GPS) for transport. It represents a significant change from GPS’ of the previous government and is a positive step forward, not just in its funding bands but in its language too. Consultation on the GPS closes today at 5pm.…
Eastern Busway – Why Panmure will be fine
The Eastern Busway (previously known as AMETI) will extend Auckland’s rapid transit network out into the east and southeast part of the city – extending from Panmure out to Botany: Unlike other parts of the rapid transit network, which run all the way into the city, the Eastern Busway essentially ends at the Panmure station (although over time it may be extended to Ellerslie).…
What will the Regional Fuel Tax fund?
Back in March, as part of consultation on the Long-term Plan, the Council was in the awkward position of needing to ask the public whether they supported a Regional Fuel Tax without being able to exactly say what the money it would raise would be spent on.…
The impact of speed on our transit networks
One of the more common arguments we’ve seen against having light rail to the airport, even though it’s not only about the airport, is that heavy rail is faster. A simplified version of the argument is that our heavy rail trains can travel at up to 110km/h so that is better.…
Penlink – two lanes or four?
There has been surprisingly little criticism of the Auckland Transport Alignment Project so far. One of the the only ones has been about the plan to build Penlink as a two lane road instead of four lanes. For example, the CEO of the National Road Carriers, David Atkin said:
Mr Aitken said the projects need to be future proofed now.…
Sunday reading 29 April 2018
Welcome back to Sunday Reading. These posts are now irregular, but hopefully still interesting. I’ll start off here with a bit of disappointing news from California where State Representative Scott Wiener’s housing bill was killed.
Benjamin Schneider, “YIMBYs Defeated as California’s Transit Density Bill Stalls“, CityLab.…
Flashback Saturday – LRT: the Seattle example
Every weekend we dig into the archives. This post, which is quite topical given announcements on Thursday, was first published in August 2016.
Auckland Transport have published a new version of their airport rail video, essentially stripping out the heavy rail parts while also adding a little bit more detail about the airport.…
ATAP 2.0 – wrapup
Words like transformational and step-change get thrown around far too often when talking about transport announcements. But I think yesterday’s release of the updated Auckland Transport Alignment Project is one announcement that certainly qualifies.
At $28 billion over the next decade, the plan the biggest we’ve seen and for the first time it’s fully funded too – although there are a couple of caveats on that¹.…
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