ART for RTN’s sake
What to name the various parts of Auckland’s rapidly evolving transit scene has been a recent topic of discussion.
First was Jon Bridges’ riff on the soon-to-open City Rail Link: “our new beautiful subterranean train set deserves so much better” than the letters C, R, and L, he wrote, provoking a public outpouring of acronyms and nicknames.…
65 Comments For the Avoidance of Diesel, and Doubt
Yet another (not unexpected) fossil-fuel supply crunch is here. It will continue to affect everything in our economy. And be painful. But it should also, at last, shift discussion and action much more strongly towards reducing our structural dependency on fossil fuels where we can.…
What Should We Do?
Or rather:
What We Should Do…
…about the maybe imminent – but always possible – imported liquid fuels crisis.
And by “we”, I mean the New Zealand Government, whose job this is.
First, and above all: we should think and act strategically, not just reactively.…
A Metro for Auckland?
The City Rail Link (CRL) is routinely described as transformational. An overused term for infrastructure projects, but one that is surely appropriate in this case – as you’d hope, given the size of the investment. $5.5b ought to get us something truly new, not just another lane and more traffic.…
Imagine, a city
This summary of where we’re at was originally presented at a City Vibes event run by The Urban Room on 9th December 2025, and like all our work, is brought to you by the Greater Auckland crew and made possible by generous donations from our readers and fans.…
Local control of transport: huge room for change?
The governance reforms of transport in Auckland are set to become law early next year. A great deal is changing, but to most people it likely feels all very abstract and distant. So, in this post I want to take a look at a tangible, practical example of the positive potential this law change could unleash.…
Accessing the Acropolis
Tāmaki/Auckland only has a few public institutions of national significance: the Art Gallery, the Museum, and Auckland University, each housed in nationally significant buildings. Plus only a few truly high quality landmark buildings of similar value: Waitematā Station, Customs House, Ferry Building, West Plaza, and the Sky Tower, say.…
Manchester: an urban renewal case study
I lived in the UK in the 1980s, so whenever anyone describes the Auckland city centre as “dilapidated” (as the Herald did in an recent editorial), I can’t help chuckling. While we do have very real problems, we have nothing like the complete physical ruin of whole areas and communities on the scale that was so widespread in post-industrial Thatcher’s Britain, especially in the north where the Industrial revolution began, like Manchester below.…
Pre-Rapid Transit
A clear game-changer for Auckland would be the earliest possible completion of the long-planned Rapid Transit Network. We have a growing and improving bunch of lines, on a long held and evolving plan, but as yet not enough of the whole to gain the great multiplying benefit of the network effect.…
The City Rail Link is a bargain…
Patrick Reynolds is deputy chair of the City Centre Advisory Panel and is running for council in the Waitematā & Gulf ward in this years local elections.
As the City Rail Link (CRL) nears completion amid talk of city deals and rates caps, I thought it worth looking at what that project can tell us about the nation-city relationship.…
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