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).…
25 Comments 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.…
Airport connections, consider the whole network
The idea of a heavy rail spur to the airport has been getting an airing again and there’s a lot of deliberately false and misleading information being presented as fact as part of this. We’ve discussed the issue of a Puhinui connection and many of the other concerns raised by those wanting it many times in the past, including: A look at the HR option specifically
Why agencies dropped it
Seattle’s use of light rail to its airport which is a similar length to what’s proposed and even has an on street section similar to us.…
Express not always best for Airport
Whether to run express services or not is an age-old debate when it comes to public transport. Speed and coverage/accessibility are some of the many variables that need to be traded off against each other when designing a network.
In Auckland, the most notable place this debate is currently occurring is in regard to the airport.…
Flashback Saturday: What about Airport Heavy Rail from Puhinui?
Every weekend we dig into the archives. This post was originally published by Matt in April 2017.
Since Auckland Transport and NZTA decided in the middle of last year to rule out Heavy Rail as the best way of serving the Airport with rapid transit, there has been a lot of ongoing consternation from many about this decision.…
Light Rail is not really about the Airport
There’s been plenty of talk about light rail in the media and why we shouldn’t build it. So we thought we’d offer a different point of view. On Tuesday, the Herald published the below piece from me about it. There’s a lot more that I would have or could have said if it weren’t for word limit.…
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