Comment of the Week
Interest.co.nz picked up on my slight edits to Rodney Hide’s column in the Herald on Sunday. The comments included an absolute pearler from “Boatman”:
The AUCKLAND TRANSPORT BLOG are a bunch of nutters that should be ignored and given no space to air their stupid views at all, which frankly no Kiwi bloke would ever subscribe to anyway.…
64 Comments Pukekohe Electrification: the case for another station (or three)
I was really excited to see Auckland Transport’s proposal to extend rail electrification from Papakura to Pukekohe. With a whole heap of growth proposed for the southern-most parts of Auckland it seemed pretty insane to cut electrification off at Papakura. Furthermore, if wake up to the reality that running diesel shuttle trains for less than 100 passengers a day between Waitakere and Swanson is absolutely insane, electrification to Pukekohe means that we can completely do away with diesel trains from the Auckland rail network.…
Form follows parking
Here’s a fairly random street in Sydney, Australia that looks like it’s a big box retail area with some office parks thrown in. You know, like the kind of thing you find in Auckland in places such as Albany, Wairau Park, Highbrook, Lincoln Road and of course Manukau.…
Rodney Hide redux
It’s amazing what happens when you only look at one element of planning and then slap your own anti-urban ideology on top of it. Let’s just change a few things in Rodney Hide’s column today:
There are many reasons why Auckland house prices are high.…
Thoughts from “Road to Ruin”
Another fascinating book that I am reading at the moment is “Road to Ruin: an introduction to sprawl and how to cure it” by Dom Nozzi. Like my previous post on How Cities Work, the key point made in Road to Ruin (at least so far) is how important the transport decisions we make are in determining the nature of our urban environments.…
A Day in the Life of the BIG little City
This new video from Heart of the City nicely captures Auckland as it is today – an increasingly vibrant and diverse city that feels like it’s just starting to properly grow up and not be afraid of being a real city.…
Thoughts from “How Cities Work: suburbs, sprawl and the roads not taken”
There have been so many excellent books about transport and planning come out in recent times: perhaps with Straphanger and Human Transit the two most exciting books for 2012 in that respect (at least in my opinion). But the book I’ve been reading recently is a little older, first published in 2000 – called “How Cities Work: suburbs, sprawl and the roads not taken” by Alex Marshall.…
What really happened with Snapper/HOP – Part 2
Following on from my post yesterday on the Snapper/HOP mess, I felt that a lot of further questions remained unanswered. Phil Twyford attempted to get some answers out of the Minister of Transport in parliament: While questions around why Auckland Transport decided to allow Snapper to become involved in the HOP scheme remain frustratingly unanswered (perhaps until I read a bit further into the mountain of information I have), a question that I want to look at in this post relates a bit more closely to the title of this post – why did things go wrong?…
What really happened with Snapper/HOP?
Back in August Auckland Transport kicked Snapper out of helping to deliver integrated ticketing in Auckland. Subject to any legal battles over whether compensation is due or not, this was the final line in a very sad and sorry tale about Snapper’s involvement in Auckland’s integrated ticketing system.…
Melding Cycling and Transit
A great video from Streetfilms looking at how Vancouver is integrating cycling with public transit to extend the reach of its system and provide people with a really high quality alternative to travelling by car: There’s always an interesting debate around whether we should encourage cyclists to carry their bikes with them on PT (either chucking them on the front of a bus or carrying them on the train) or whether the goal should be on storage at stations.…
Processing...