Progress for Hamilton-Auckland rail?
A fairly extensive agenda item (page 17 onwards, and then here and here) to tomorrow’s meeting of the Auckland Council Transport Committee looks once again at the concept of Hamilton to Auckland rail. Over the past few months a working group has been thoroughly investigating the proposal, especially after last year’s local body elections when it became quite a big issue in the Waikato.…
43 Comments Improving Auckland’s PT: what we need to do
At last month’s meeting of the Auckland Council Transport Committee there was a very interesting “benchmark study” that compared a wide variety of measures of public transport in Auckland with a number of cities around the world. Inevitably, Auckland performed worst in most of the measures – even when compared against other cities like Perth, Brisbane and Calgary that have much lower population densities, traditionally seen as a fundamental reason for Auckland’s poor performance.…
Parking and hamburgers
An exceptionally kind blog reader bought me “The High Cost of Free Parking” byDonald Shoup recently. This is a book that I’ve flicked through on a number of occasions in the past, but I’m incredibly grateful of the opportunity to read through it properly, particularly at a time when it seems that Auckland Council is fundamentally reassessing the way it handles parking policy.…
Observing Fort Street
During my lunch break today I headed down to see how the Fort Street shared space is working. The weather was good so I spent around half an hour watching how the place works. Overall I was pretty impressed by how the area works.…
Sprawl in the Auckland Plan
As I noted in yesterday’s post about the Auckland Plan, there is a lot of focus in that plan on Auckland growing through intensification rather than through urban sprawl. If you look at the map of where development is likely to occur, certainly the ares for development through urban sprawl (which I’ve highlighted in yellow for ease of reference) actually look fairly small:
However, if you read through the Plan it becomes clear that a fairly significant number of additional dwellings will need to be provided in these greenfield areas over the next 30 years.…
Actually making intensification happen
One of the toughest challenges facing the Auckland Spatial Plan is ensuring that the city builds enough housing – most particularly ensuring that it builds enough housing through intensification. The plan’s goals in this respect are pretty bold:
The Development Strategy contains policies to maintain our rural and urban distinction.…
July NZTA Board Papers
NZTA continue to refuse to publish their board papers online (even though they spend around $3 billion of taxpayers’ money a year), so in the cause of increased transparency I have been doing Official Information Act requests for their board papers for a while now.…
The modernist approach to pedestrians
The excellent Pedestrian Observations blog has a fascinating post up about the experience of being a pedestrian in Central London. We often think of London as a pretty good example of what to aim for in transport terms: an extremely comprehensive network of trains, buses, an increasing network of cycle lanes and of course the famous congestion charging scheme.…
Independent RWC transport report released
Auckland Transport have just in the last hour or so released the independent report into what went wrong on opening night of the Rugby World Cup. The report was prepared by Chris Moore of Meredith Connell and is a fairly extensive document at 48 pages.…
The end of motoring?
An in depth Guardian article highlights an issue that has been commented on a few times recently, the question of are we reaching peak travel? Or perhaps more specifically, is the golden age of the car over?
In Britain, the percentage of 17- to 20-year-olds with driving licences fell from 48% in the early 1990s to 35% last year.…
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