The Forty Decision-Makers

There are forty people who will decide whether we decarbonise transport in Auckland, and New Zealand’s ultimate climate response depends on achieving this by 2030. The legacy we leave our children – a city of health and opportunity, or a stranglehold on freedom – will be determined by these people making the right decisions now.…
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Weekly Roundup – 14-Aug-20

It was already shaping up as a hectic week for news even before we had the COVID results on Tuesday night. Here’s our wrap up of some of the things that caught my attention. The Great Rail Network Slowdown I’ll be writing about this more in the coming days but in case you haven’t seen, it turns out Auckland’s rail network is in much worse case than thought and around 100km of tracks needs new rails or other maintenance work done on them.…
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Alert Level 3

Queues to the Quay St supermarket following the announcement. Credit: Damian W via twitter. Today, Auckland returns to Covid Alert Level 3 and the rest of Aotearoa returns to Level 2. The official Covid site currently says: Here are the basics about moving around.…
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2020 Election transport policies we’d like to see

We’re now fully into election season and politicians are keen for attention an we’ve already seen National start to roll out a hugely expensive and likely unachievable transport policy. We’ve been thinking about some of the things we’d like to see in a transport policy so here goes: Plan and start the rest of the Rapid Transit Network/s Auckland’s fledgling Rapid Transit network has been a standout public transport success story, accounting for nearly half of all the growth in the use of PT over the last decade.…
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Weekly Roundup – 07-Aug-20

It’s Friday and here’s out weekly wrap up of stories. National’s Wellington Plans Another week and few more transport announcements by National. On Monday they were on the Kapiti Coast to announce $330 million to Electrifying and double-tracking the rail line between Wellington and Ōtaki Building a full expressway interchange at Peka Peka Completing the Horowhenua Expressway (Ōtaki to Levin) An extra 15km of double tracking and electrification sound positive but it’s notable that the idea isn’t even on the long term list of Greater Wellington or Kiwirail.…
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What are trackless trams

Yesterday Judith Collins announced National’s Wellington transport policy. Amongst all the talk of tunnels and other road upgrades, one small thing that stood out to me was the mention of trackless “We think bus priority and bus rapid transit offers much more flexibility for Wellington, and value for money.…
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The Political Economy of Car Dependence

Leading Image: Sacrificing pedestrian environments and green infrastructure to sell (electric) cars. Why do both our major parties plan to spend billions of dollars on new roads and sprawl development of farmland? Our government is catching up on the backlog of rural road safety issues, is slowly improving rail and public transport, is funding “three waters” infrastructure maintenance and upgrades to assist brownfields housing developments and has introduced internationally-renowned planning changes to enable regeneration of our cities.…
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