Government study brings back “Eastern Highway”
The NZ Herald reports:
In a surprise announcement, Transport Minister Gerry Brownlee yesterday asked the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) to commence investigations into a motorway between Panmure and Downtown: along a very similar route to the alignment of the Eastern Highway that cost John Banks the Auckland City mayoralty back in 2004.…
22 Comments High speed rail – the solution to Auckland’s growth?
The post I wrote a week or so ago, asking the question of whether Auckland should grow at the pace, or to the extent, of current projections, generated more comments than any other post on this blog ever. There has also been an ongoing flow of letters to the editor in the NZ Herald questioning whether it’s in New Zealand’s best interest, including Auckland’s best interest, to see such a significant chunk of the country’s future population growth in one city.…
City Rail Link video
Here’s Auckland Transport’s latest video about the City Rail Link project: This is useful for showing the route, but I still think some further visual material is necessary to get across some key messages which still seem to be regularly misinterpreted: The CRL is the “missing piece” in the whole rail network
The CRL will not operate anything like a “loop”
The CRL significantly benefits the whole of Auckland, not just the CBD I think the best way to show this would be for Auckland Transport to actually come up with some future route options – it seems like they must have advanced from what was in the City City Future Access Study (shown below) because the notice of requirement doesn’t include the Inner West Interchange and does include the East Facing Link. …
Unitary Plan – further thoughts
The other day I outlined some of my initial thoughts on the Unitary Plan – noting that the zoning seems to be fairly bold but not necessarily supported by the more detailed development controls. This is to be expected to an extent, with the plan trying to find a delicate balance between providing for significant growth while ensuring that growth is undertaken in a fairly high quality manner.…
Urban Limits discussed in parliament
There have been quite a few battles in parliament between Housing Minister Nick Smith and Labour’s housing and Auckland issues spokesperson Phil Twyford over the past couple of weeks on the issue of urban limits, land supply and affordable housing. Here’s today’s stoush (transcript here): One thing that keeps confusing me in this argument is why everyone seems to be focusing so much on opening up additional land for rezoning to urban uses (effectively the “busting the urban limits”) when it seems like the real problem is that existing land zoned for urban development and serviced with main roads and bulk water/wastewater simply isn’t getting to the next stage of being subdivided up and put on the market.…
Should Auckland continue to grow so much?
Reaction to the release of the Unitary Plan last Friday has been quite interesting – with yesterday’s NZ Herald article about proposed new growth in the rural parts of Auckland finally providing some balance from the “OMG skyscrapers everywhere” scaremongering. The “up or out” debates will surely continue for quite some time to come, and that’s fine, it’s an interesting and constructive debate over Auckland’s future.…
CRL Submissions Close Tomorrow
Submissions on the notice of requirement for the City Rail Link close tomorrow at 5pm. Even though on this blog we all support the project, we think it’s still worth making a submission – for a few reasons: Inevitably the NZ Herald will at some point run a “how many submissions were for or against the project” even though submissions are never an accurate gauge of public support for something.…
Unitary Plan – first thoughts
So yesterday saw the launch of the Draft Unitary Plan, which is now open to feedback between now and the end of May. Mayor Len Brown kicked off the launch with a fairly rousing speech, fighting back against many of the crazy things Central Government has been going on about in recent times:
We could continue to do things the way they were always done from the 1950s on.…
Housing affordability – it’s not about detached houses
The government’s report on land supply and housing affordability released on Wednesday is actually a really good document – I like how it’s structured as a very visual document (almost like an extended powerpoint presentation) rather than dense text. The document also contains quite a lot of very interesting information about how much greenfield land there is at various stages of the ‘ready to go’ process as well as some of the discussion about housing affordability and what’s happened in the past decade in terms of housing supply.…
The land supply issue
The question of how many available sections there are in Auckland for development has yet again raised its head in the last couple of days, with much debate over whether there are 15,000 or 2,000 or some number in between of sections available to build houses on.…
Processing...