What’s happening to rail patronage?
Matt’s post on the latest patronage figures confirmed something that has been brewing for a while now: rail patronage isn’t growing anymore. Let’s track rail patronage increases for the past while, each time comparing against the patronage of the same month the year before:
Just looking briefly at the graph above it seems as though the Rugby World Cup was a turning point – for the worse.…
77 Comments An Unnecessary Battle
It seems that the NZ Herald is determined to undermine support for the City Rail Link, although Auckland Transport also seem to be doing a good job of that too. How so? Well let’s explain.
Here’s the story on the front page of today’s Herald:
Their new dream home – right in the path of rail project
Excited homeowners moving into a new $10.5 million apartment block have been told it may be demolished for Auckland’s rail-loop project.…
How to cover Auckland’s (supposed) transport funding gap?
The Council issued a press release today highlighting that it’s shifting to the next phase of analysing ways in which to bridge the $10-15 billion funding gap between the projects that are (supposedly) required over the next 30 years and the amount of money available under traditional funding schemes.…
How to improve housing affordability?
The Q & A show on TVNZ yesterday morning looked at the vexed issue of housing affordability. Guests Bernard Hickey and Murray Sherwin agreed wholeheartedly that something needs to be done. That’s no surprise really – you have to be living under a rock to not know that housing affordability is a significant problem for Auckland.…
Is the shopping mall dying?
The indoor shopping mall turns 60 this year, but an Atlantic Cities article questions whether it’s dying:
At the mall’s peak popularity, in 1990, America opened 19 of them. But we haven’t cut the ribbon on a new one since 2006, for reasons that go beyond the recession.…
Other RoNS to cut back?
Yesterday’s announcement by NZTA that they are scaling back the Otaki to Levin section of the Wellington Northern Corridor Road of National Significance, from a four-lane highway to an upgrade of the existing road, has some really interesting implications – as Matt commented on in his post last night.…
Learning from Los Angeles
Typically Los Angeles is considered a textbook guide on what “not to do” when it comes to transport and land-use planning. In so many ways it is the utterly stereotypical post World War II city: without a strong core, without a functioning public transport system, with enormous congestion, with terrible air pollution, and so forth.…
NZ’s 6th most popular blog
Well, according to Open Parachute, of blogs which have a Sitemeter stats monitor across all of New Zealand – we are the sixth most widely read blog in the country. Here are the top 14:
It’s quite amazing to see how interested people are in transport matters.…
The perils of ignoring induced demand
Streetsblog draws our attention to an interesting Danish study into the impact of induced demand on the cost-benefit analyses of motorway projects.
Here’s the abstract of the article:
Although the phenomenon of induced traffic has been theorized for more than 60 years and is now widely accepted among transport researchers, the traffic-generating effects of road capacity expansion are still often neglected in transport modelling.…
So what’s with this “Inner West Interchange”?
It wasn’t picked up much by the media last week, but the one truly new piece of information that was revealed in Auckland Transport’s announcements on the City Rail Link was the inclusion of something they’re calling the “Inner West Interchange”.…
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