Last Post

Tomorrow I start work as a transport planner for the Council, and so ends my stint as a blogger on this site. As I outlined in more detail in this post and this post, this blog has meant a lot to me over the past few years and it has been truly awesome to see it develop from a personal blog that pretty much nobody read into what the site is today – something that is seemingly quite influential and gets around 2,000 views a day during the week.…
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NZTA wants slice of developer contributions

A very interesting article appeared in Friday’s Bob Dey Property Report, noting how NZTA is keen on developing arguments for them to be able to receive development contributions to help fund state highway upgrades – like Council can use them to fund infrastructure that is required by the new development.…
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The complexity of density

You would think that calculating, and analysing, the density of a city would be a fairly perfunctory mathematical task, and would tell us useful information about the nature of that city. As I noted in this previous blog post, perhaps the most challenging aspect of calculating a city’s ‘average density’ is working out where its boundaries are.…
16 Comments

Blog Statistics

With only a few days to go of my contribution to this blog, I thought I’d have a look back at some of the statistics of this blog. A few of them can be seen down the left-hand side of this page – as I write we have: 1,688 posts 1,266,909  words in those posts 26,198 comments 2,249,494 words in those comments But some statistics can only really be seen behind the scenes, so for your curiosity here are a few: 1,198,579 all time views 3,771 views on the blog’s busiest day ever – which was May 31st last year (the day the review of the City Rail Link business case was released)  Aside from the main page, the most visited post ever is this one on the world’s best rail systems (generally because it is a high result when searching for maps of Tokyo’s rail network).…
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Peaking

I’m not going to repeat the excellent Guest Post review of the book Human Transit – other than to note from what I’ve read of the book so far I agree with pretty much everything in the review. It is a very good book.…
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A Southern Link?

This will be my last blog post about bus route changes, as the blog transitions towards being run by Matt, Stuart, Patrick, Nick and whoever appears out of the woodwork in the future. I still have a few more posts to write over the next week, but they will focus on other matters – including a look back at my involvement in this blog.…
24 Comments

How parking shapes urban form

I noted a few posts back that I’m reading the book “Edge Cities: life on the new frontier” by Joel Garreau, at the moment. The book is broken up into chapters that focus on a particular place, although within each chapter is a wide variety of information about how edge cities function, why they exist and details on particular examples of them.…
10 Comments

“Swap your HOP” confirmed

An article in today’s NZ Herald confirms that HOP cards will need to be changed over later this year to the new Thales system, enabling them to work on all buses, trains and ferries. Auckland’s “integrated” public transport cards, introduced in May with a $1 million marketing budget from the public purse, will have to be replaced because they are not compatible with a new system for trains, ferries and some bus companies.…
29 Comments

Shifting transport beyond partisan debates

While I have often complained about transport not being in the top of people’s minds when voting in nationwide elections, yet so many decisions are made by central government – the flip side of this (and unfortunately it seems that we do get the worst of both worlds) is seeing the transport debate becoming more and more partisan.…
51 Comments