The Peak Oil debate rears its head
An article in the Guardian by environmentalist writer George Monbiot has led to some really interesting debate around whether peak oil will happen, when it might happen, whether it’s happened already or whether the old adage of “the stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones” might be true or not.…
18 Comments Assessing alternatives to the CRL
With Auckland Transport announcing yesterday that they have selected a preferred route for the City Rail Link, this might be a good time to highlight some work that various bloggers on this site have been doing to build up a top quality repository for information on this project.…
CRL route confirmed
From the NZ Herald
Officials are contacting more than 200 landowners whose properties are in the way of a just-revealed route for an Auckland inner city rail link.
Auckland Transport today released its preferred path for the City Rail Link, which is expected to cost up to $2.86 billion.…
Vancouver CBD traffic: back to 1960s levels
With the final version of the City Centre Master Plan now approved, a key element of achieving the vision for the city centre that the Council wants will be achieving what seems – at first glance – to be an impossibility.…
Integrated Ticketing in Parliament
The HOP Card fiasco has continued in the last couple of days, with articles in the NZ Herald, on the news, on the radio and now in parliament – with Phil Twyford asking some questions yesterday around whether Auckland Transport were pressured by the government to allow Snapper to launch its product as a rebranded HOP card back in the first half of 2011.…
Big changes in store for KiwiRail
Some interesting announcements by KiwiRail today – confirming that their freight business will essentially be split away from the network business, which is in charge of maintaining, operating and developing the rail network (the tracks and associated infrastructure). Here’s KiwiRail’s media release:
At KiwiRail’s Annual Public Meeting in November 2011, we outlined our intention to make a change to the Balance Sheet that would reflect a standard commercial valuation approach.…
London Underground Videos
After a link to this series of videos was posted on the CBT forums, I’ve spent much of the last few days enjoying this detailed insight into the operation and improvements being made to the London Underground. The series is from 2012, so right up to date too:…
New Chair for Auckland Transport
An important announcement made today by Mayor Len Brown – that Lester Levy will be taking over as Chair of Auckland Transport from Mark Ford, from November onwards:
The Mayor has named Lester Levy as the new chair of council controlled organisation, Auckland Transport (AT).…
HOP implementation slipping again?
You really do have to read the Auckland Transport board papers quite carefully to pick up on the important things – including a lot of “reading between the lines”. Here’s a classic example, from the business report to Monday’s meeting, in relation to the rollout of integrated ticketing:
Go-Live date prior to 30th November was confirmed for Rail and Ferry services, the Bus services will follow
This is almost the worst sentence I have ever read in the history of anything, because it is completely unclear.…
Our “Tin Pot Dictator” bus reliability stats
As I sat at my bus stop yesterday waiting for the bus to turn up to begin its run, which finally arrived about 7-8 minutes after its scheduled time, my mind wandered onto thinking about the bus reliability and punctuality statistics reported on in every monthly patronage report.…
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