What’s happening with Airport to Botany
One of the few public transport projects the current government have said they support is the Airport to Botany project (A2B) and it’s one we haven’t covered in a while so worth looking at where things are at.
A business case for the project was completed in 2021 before being confirmed by the boards of both Waka Kotahi and Auckland Transport and like the Eastern busway it will connect to, includes some big roading components too.…
71 Comments The latest on Airport to Botany
Last year the impressive new Puhinui station along with bus and transit lanes linking it to the Airport and Manukau were opened creating a much improved public transport connection to the airport.
The station is just the first stage of a larger plan to build a new rapid transit line from the Airport to Botany (A2B) and that’s an important project we haven’t heard a lot about recently.…
Airport to Botany and the problem of Flat Bush
A couple of weeks ago Waka Kotahi NZTA and Auckland Transport gave a brief update on the outcome from consultation late last year of their Southern Gateway Programme, the most prominent aspect of which will eventually be the Airport to Botany Rapid Transit route (A2B).…
Alternative ways of achieving airport goals
Last week we learnt that the light rail process had ended after the government parties couldn’t come to an agreement on the outcome. One reason for that that appears to have been a desire from the minister for the project to become a much more expensive, fully grade separated Light Metro system with a key requirement that it could get from the city to the airport in 30 minutes.…
Flashback Saturday: Airport Rapid Transit isn’t really about the Airport
Every weekend we dig into the archives. This post by Matt was originally published in October 2017.
The idea of providing Airport rail through a short spur from Puhinui is one of those ideas that continues to pop up. It emerged again in an opinion piece the NZ Herald ran just over a week ago (which was oddly a repeat of a piece they ran exactly a month earlier).…
Airport connections are over-rated
There hasn’t been much news on the Auckland light-rail projects for a while now, with the project seemingly stuck in some sort of purgatory as the Government (hopefully) slowly comes to the realisation that the NZ Super Fund proposal to build an elevated and tunnelled route is complete madness.…
Airport Access Numbers
Improving access to the airport has been the subject of countless debates over the last few years and most recently with confirmation that the Puhinui station will be upgraded to a bus/train interchange. Sometimes those debates have resulted in claims such as that the proposed solutions of both a light rail line to the north and busway to the east won’t have enough capacity.…
Improving airport access
Improving access to the wider airport area has quickly become one of the most important pieces of work in Auckland for the coming decade. But there is not just one project to improve access but a number of overlapping and interlocking projects that have been pulled into what is called the Southwest Gateway Programme
Yesterday Auckland Transport and the NZTA launched the first, of what is bound to be many rounds, of public feedback about some of the elements that make up the Programme and there are three separate and overlapping projects within it.…
How “easy” is a Puhinui-Airport rail spur?
One of the key things that I think attracts some people to the idea of an Airport-Puhinui rail spur is that it seems, intuitively, to be a relatively easy and therefore cheap piece of infrastructure to build. After all, it’s not that far and most of the land between the rail network and the Airport is currently undeveloped farmland.…
Over-estimating the importance of City-Airport trips
At its core, the argument over between the proposed City Centre to Mangere light-rail line and a Puhinui-Airport heavy rail spur boils down to the importance we place on serving direct trips between the City Centre and the Airport, compared to the importance we place on meeting other transport needs of the city.…
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