October-24 AT Board Meeting
Today the Auckland Transport board meet again as a whole for the first time in two months. AT note:
Members of the public are welcome to join the meeting via Teams. Please note, due to technical difficulties, the video feed will be unavailable.…
31 Comments Is the Isthmus becoming a retirement village?
We’re continuing to look at the recently released census results. A few weeks ago I looked at how travel to work and education had changed and John looked at how our cities have grown over the last 130 years. Today I wanted to look some of that growth in a little more detail.…
Auckland to see biggest PT improvements in six years
In just over a month, Auckland is going to see some of the biggest changes to our public transport network since the completion of the New Network over six years ago.
The decade between 2008 and 2018 was one of the most significant for public transport in Auckland.…
Getting the rail network up to speed
The scale of delays on our rail network was highlighted by the Herald last week – and while it’s bad, it also highlights the huge opportunity for getting our rail network back up to speed.
KiwiRail has promised to cut delays on Auckland trains, amid growing concerns about the readiness of the city’s failing rail network for the opening of the $5.5 billion City Rail Link in 2026.…
2023 Census first look: how we travel to work and school
Last week finally saw the first major release of detailed data from last year’s Census. There are a huge number of stories to be told from this data. Over the next few weeks we’ll be illuminating a few of them – starting today with an initial look at how New Zealanders travel for work and education.…
The Mayor’s Plan for Bridging the Harbour
Discussion of another harbour crossing has been in the news a lot recently as a result of Mayor Wayne Brown pushing for a bridge from Point Chev to Birkenhead. While I believe his proposal is bad, at least some of his reasoning behind his push for a bridge is correct.…
Northern Expressway Boondoggle
Transport Minister Simeon Brown has been soaring high with his hubris of getting on and building motorways, but some uncomfortable realities are starting to creep in.
Back in July he announced that the government was pushing on with a Northland Expressway using an “accelerated delivery strategy”:
The Coalition Government is accelerating work on the new four-lane expressway between Auckland and Whangārei as part of its Roads of National Significance programme, with an accelerated delivery model to deliver this project faster and more efficiently, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says.…
Our transport planning system is fundamentally broken
Ever since Wayne Brown became mayor (nearly two years ago now) he’s been wanting to progress an “integrated transport plan” with the government – which sounded a lot like the previous Auckland Transport Alignment Project (ATAP) with just a different name.…
Satisfying the Minister’s Speed Obsession
The Minister of Transport’s speed obsession has this week resulted in two new consultations for 110km/h speed limits, one in Auckland and one in Christchurch. There has also been final approval for the Kapiti Expressway to move to 110km/h following an earlier consultation.…
NLTP 2024 released – destroying pipeline of shovel ready local projects
Transport Minister Simeon Brown and Waka Kotahi yesterday released the latest National Land Transport Plan (NLTP) for 2024-27. The NLTP sets out what transport projects will be funded for the next three years, including both central and local government projects.
As expected, given the government’s extremely ideological transport policy, it’s terrible, not just because of what it does fund – focusing much of the country’s transport investment into a handful of roads that carry less traffic than the average Auckland arterial – but also because of what it doesn’t fund: destroying a pipeline of shovel-ready local projects, right at a time when the government claims to care about having an infrastructure pipeline.…
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