Monday’s bus strike – PT alternatives
So unless there’s a miraculous fix to the ongoing labour dispute between NZ Bus and its drivers, it seems as though all NZ Bus services will not run this coming Monday and every subsequent Monday for the next eight weeks. That means no buses at all – including school buses – if your service is operated by any of the following: Metrolink
GoWest
Waka Pacific
North Star
Link (City, Inner or Outer) All up NZ Bus services account for just over half of all public transport journeys in Auckland, which I guess gives us the opportunity to look at things from a “glass half full” approach and note that half of Auckland’s public transport will still be running.…
7 Comments LTMA Bill debated in parliament
Major amendments to the Land Transport Management Act – the primary piece of legislation that governs the management and funding of transport in New Zealand – have been introduced to parliament. There was a bit of discussion of the changes last year when they were first announced, as well as further discussion of changes to borrowing policy more recently, but we will watch the issue closely over the next few months as the bill winds its way through the process – to highlight areas where it really needs to change and why.…
Noisy bus advertisements – like torture!
I’ve been catching Inner Link buses this week – rather unusually for me but that’s how things are at the moment. Generally I have found them to be pretty fantastic: incredibly frequent, pretty fast (especially now that there’s no longer the enormous detour down into the city between K Road and Grafton Bridge) and quite consistent with their timing.…
Density and Public Transport
Arguments about density and public transport usage are notorious. Paul Mees dedicated an unfortunately large amount of his most recent book, Transport in Suburbia, to a rather implausible argument that there is little relationship between density and public transport usage – although in the process making a pretty helpful argument that service quality is also extremely important.…
Sometimes I am baffled by AT’s stupidity
I felt my blood begin to boil when reading yesterday’s “Ask Phoebe” on the rollout of the AT HOP card:
The Herald last week reported that old Hop cards may be exchanged free of charge for new ones. The Maxx website says new Hop cards for the trains are $10 each.…
Measuring ‘transport benefit’ better
In transport planning there’s a lot of talk about ‘cost-benefit analyses’, leading to a “BCR” (benefit cost ratio) for a particular project. Projects with a BCR of greater than 1.0 deliver more benefits than the money expended upon them (and any disbenefits the project generates) and are therefore worth considering spending money upon.…
Warkworth-Wellsford: in or out?
Yesterday NZTA released a map of their projects and priorities in Auckland, as part of the National Land Transport Programme release of information. The whole map (in case NZTA remove or update it) is shown below: As Cam’s post yesterday noted, there’s something in the way Puhoi-Wellsford is shown that really stood out – showing the Warkworth to Wellsford section of the road as a “possible” Road of National Significance.…
Rolling out the AT HOP card
With confirmation that Snapper have been kicked out of the integrated ticketing project, the rollout of the AT HOP card is now underway. This will start first on the trains, as detailed on the MAXX website. The biggest change is that we are (finally) shifting our ticket sales away from the 1920s approach of selling them onboard:
On-board ticket sales are being phased out
Get used to buying your ticket before you board.…
Smart Transport for New Zealand
Generation Zero have released a nifty little video about improving the way in which we spend our transport budget so we are building for the future, not the past: They are also promoting a petition, calling for a significant rebalancing of the transport budget.…
More Matangi trains for Wellington
Some pretty exciting news for Wellingtonians today – with an announcement that instead of refurbishing the rather old Ganz Mavang trains, Wellington will instead replace them with an extension of their current order for new Matangi trains:
Greater Wellington Regional Council (GWRC) and the NZ Transport Agency announced today they intend to replace rather than refurbish the existing Ganz Mavag trains to complete the region’s peak train requirements.…
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