Mā te wā
As of today, I am resigning from all roles at Greater Auckland.
I am delighted, and humbled, to advise that my application for a directorship on the NZTA board has been accepted. I am looking forward to working with my fellow board members and all the staff at the agency and its partners, to help deliver this important work for the whole nation.…
62 Comments Staging the Northwestern
As described here, Auckland is in the middle of a multi-decade process of retro-fitting a Strategic Rapid Transit Network (RTN) to the city.
The process used to date for this is best described as incremental. All of our current RTN began very much below the ideal standard but have been more-or less constantly improved since.…
Completing the RTN
As I state in this recent article at The Spinoff I see Auckland as around half way through a roughly 30 year long programme to retro-fit a complete Rapid Transit Network to itself.
Cities are of course never finished, and nor are their transport systems, but at the end of this period Auckland will have something new and powerful in its very structure: A complete city-wide top tier integrated Strategic Transit Network fed and supported by the Frequent Network below it: A complementary mirror to the city’s motorway and arterial road networks.…
Quiet Revolution
This post originally appeared on TheSpinoff, reproduced here with permission. There’s a quiet revolution underway in Auckland. Slowly but relentlessly transforming the city. It began early in the century, a big change of direction taken in small steps, and has been continued by every council and government since.…
Implication and Opportunity: NorthPort and the AKL rail network.
With the Upper North Island Supply Chain Study (UNISCS) starting to show results, I thought it would be a good time to examine some of the possible implications; constraints and opportunities, for the Auckland rail network, of an increased freight task to and from Northland.…
Scoot Math
Lime have been operating in Auckland since October last year. Six months. I know, is that all? It feels like they’ve been around a lot longer; e-scooters just seem part of the city now. So as they are seeking to renew their licence to operate I asked them if we could run some data.…
Off-Ramp City
The Auckland city centre street network is, at last, about to undergo some proper change. As with any change it will face resistance. A fair bit of that resistance will come from people who are simply used to how it is now.…
Rail Across the Waitematā: some thoughts
The North Shore Line, The Northern Line, Te Raki Tereina… NZTA in a recently released report showed that there is some urgency in starting work to replace the Northern Busway with a higher capacity rail system on a new crossing. This is because: Demand to access the city centre from the Shore is on a sustained growth path with ongoing growth on both sides of the harbour.…
Why Carmageddon never comes
The fear associated with even temporary reductions in road capacity in Auckland is often so extreme that this report from Joe Cortright in City Observatory, Why Carmaggedon never comes (Seattle edition), is worth drawing to everyone’s attention. It takes the example of the closure for demolition of the Alaskan Way, a 3.5km, double stacked, 6-lane, fugly as, harbour-severing, 1940s fly-over in Seattle, to illustrate a well observed feature of city traffic.…
Small is e-Beautiful
The electric revolution on our city streets, already underway, looks much more like a scooter than a Tesla. Why? Physics. And geometry: Size really matters for both energy consumption and spatial efficiency. And both drive affordability and therefore the speed of uptake.…
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