Budget 2024 Highlights
Last week the government delivered their first budget and while there’s been plenty of other discussion about the main aspects of it, I was particularly interested to look at what it meant for transport.
Before getting into too much detail, the chart below shows at a high level where transport funding is going.…
33 Comments May-24 AT Board Meeting
Tomorrow the AT board meet again and I’ve taken a look through the items on their public agenda to see what’s interesting. It’s also the first meeting for two recently appointed directors, former director at Ritchies Transport, Andrew Ritchie and former mayor of Hamilton, Julie Hardaker.…
NZUP RORS back to life
The government has made it abundantly clear they’re addicted to the smell of new asphalt. On Tuesday they introduced a new term to the country’s roading lexicon, the Roads of Regional Significance (RoRS), a little brother for the Roads of National (Party) Significance (RoNS).…
Wayne Brown’s PT Plan
Yesterday the Mayor released what he calls his “plan to save public transport” which is part of his final proposal for the Council’s Long Term Plan (LTP). This comes following consultation on the draft version that occurred in March which showed, once again, that people want more done on transport, especially public transport.…
Will NZ Herald’s ‘poor journalism’ cost lives?
Earlier this year, the Herald ran a series of articles amounting to a sustained campaign against raised pedestrian crossings, by reporter Bernard Orsman. A key part of that campaign concerned the raised crossings being installed as part of the Pt Chevalier to Westmere project, with at least 10 articles over a period of just over two weeks.…
A few PT announcements
There’s been a few smaller public transport announcements over the last week or so that I thought I’d cover in a single post. Fareshare
I’ve long called for Auckland Transport to offer a way to enable employer-subsidised public transport options. The need for this took on even more importance after the previous government removed Fringe Benefit Tax from doing so to effectively bring it into line with carparks.…
The future of Te Huia
The future of Te Huia, the train between Hamilton and Auckland, has been getting a lot of attention recently as current funding for it is only in place till the end of June. The government initially agreed to a five-year trial, through to April 2026.…
New HOP readers for future payment options
Auckland Transport have started rolling out new HOP card readers around the network and over the next three months, all of them on buses, at train stations and ferry wharves will be replaced. The change itself is not that remarkable, with the new readers looking similar to what is already on buses today.…
Auckland Rail Electrification 10 years old
Yesterday marked 10 years since the first electric train carried passengers in Auckland so it’s a good time to look back at it and the impact it has had. A brief history
The first proposals for rail electrification in Auckland came in the 1920’s alongside the plans for earlier iterations of what became the City Rail Link.…
Tolling Existing Roads
One of the government’s transport policy and agreements with it’s coalition partners made it clear that they were looking at options like tolling and road pricing. This was reinforced in it’s draft Government Policy Statement released at the start of March which made a couple of references to it.…
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