Light Rail: How we got here
Over the last few weeks we’ve seen numerous articles and opinion pieces about Light Rail and the airport. A common and incorrect theme amongst many of them has been the suggestion that the choice to use light rail was a political one and that it’s a vanity project that we can choose not to do or do something different.…
47 Comments 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.…
A new waterfront stadium proposal
A few weeks ago there were rumours about a new, privately funded stadium proposal for Auckland. The proposal has now been released and it’s far more than just a stadium with its backers saying it will become New Zealand’s largest ever infrastructure project and could be delivered within the next 10 years.…
Transport Growth Networks – Northwest
We’ve recently written about consultation in the North and South about future transport networks as part of a project to designate the corridors before the growth starts occurring. Back in August they consulted on Warkworth and in the North around Dairy Flat and Silverdale.…
Developing Park & Ride sites
Park & Ride is always a hot topic of debate, being seen by some as the key to get more people on public transport. We believe the issue is much more complex, in large part because they take up a lot of land, cost a lot to build and don’t provide all that many extra trips.…
Lime e-scooters launch in Auckland
Overseas e-scooters have very quickly become a disruptive player in urban transportation in many of the cities where they’ve launched. Being powered and relatively easy to use and taking up even less space than a bike, they’re ideal for short trips around cities.…
Fuel Prices an opportunity for change
Increasing petrol prices have unsurprisingly remained a hot topic of conversation. Brian Fallow wrote an excellent piece on the subject last week.
So why not give drivers a break?
Because fuel prices are too low, not too high.
This week we also received the latest, sobering report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), spelling out the adverse impacts we can expect from even another half a degree of global warming beyond the 1C we have generated already.…
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.…
Private Funding for Penlink?
There was some interesting news late last week with the Auckland Chamber of Commerce announcing it had achieved a “breakthrough” on a funding deal for Penlink
An unsolicited bid by an international group to establish a joint venture with a NZ construction company to undertake the Penlink Toll Road Project as a BOOT – Build, Own, Operate, Transfer – has been lodged with the NZ Transport Agency.…
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.…
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