Looking at Auckland’s economic future
An opinion piece by sprawl advocate Owen McShane in the National Business Review refers to a series of research papers undertaken by the Ministry for Economic Development over the past few years. The papers relate to MED trying to get a better handle on what policy interventions in Auckland are likely to have the most impact on improving the city’s economic performance.…
31 Comments Auckland Transports Draft Statement of Intent
Auckland Transport will devote their next board meeting on 29 June entirely to their draft statement of intent (SOI). The SOI will be a pretty key document as it effectively determines what their goals will be for the next 3 years (they have had a temporary one to cover November to July).…
The Unitary Plan
There has been a lot of talk over the past few months about the “Auckland Spatial Plan” and more recently about the City Centre Master Plan. Both these documents are undoubtedly important in defining goals for Auckland as a whole or for the city centre, highlighting important projects, discussing how funding might be acquired for various important projects and generally setting out an important vision for what Auckland should be like in 30 years: whether that vision be for the entire Auckland region (in the case of the spatial plan) or for the city centre (in the case of the City Centre Master Plan).…
Sylvia Park: PT success or missed opportunity?
When I think of the Sylvia Park shopping centre in Auckland, from a transport perspective, it seems to tick a lot more boxes than many other shopping centres around Auckland (particularly St Lukes). The primary reason for this is that Sylvia Park has a train station right next to it – a station that seems fairly popular, especially on weekends.…
Auckland’s improving CBD
One of the pitfalls of looking at transport and urban planning matters on a daily basis is that you can sometimes lose sight of the bigger picture. For want of a better phrase, it definitely is possible to “lose sight of the forest for the trees”.…
Convention centre: catalyst for improving Hobson & Nelson?
I was initially disappointed by the decision that SkyCity had won the bid for a new international convention centre in downtown Auckland. I was more of a fan of “The Edge” proposal, largely because a key part of that proposal would have involved the restoration of the St James theatre.…
Stupid urban planning
As a planner by profession, I can quite honestly say that more often than not we do urban planning in Auckland utterly terribly. We focus enormously on silly details: recession planes, consistency with minutely detailed assessment criteria, road-widths, numbers of parking spaces per unit, number of units coming off driveways and so forth – but we miss the really obvious stuff.…
The price of parking
There’s an interesting article in today’s NZ Herald, which notes that the cost of reserved monthly parking in Auckland is relatively high compared to other overseas cities.
Monthly parking rates in Auckland are more expensive than in most big cities around the world, says a global survey.…
Restoring Horotiu Stream
I remember a few years ago when the Queen Street upgrade project was under construction, someone suggested that they should flood the street so you can ride a boat up there – for a real Auckland experience. It was obviously a joke, though the idea of restoring the Horotiu Stream – which used to follow the course that Queen Street now takes between Myers Park and the waterfront – did intrigue me to an extent.…
Looking closer at the transport & density debate
There’s a fascinating ongoing debate in planning circles about the question of how important density is to the likelihood of people using public transport (or a form of active transport, like walking and cycling). I’ve blogged about the issue a number of times before – particularly in terms of the argument put forward by Melbourne-based transport academic Paul Mees: that there are plenty of low density places in the world with good public transport, so we should focus on improving the PT and worry less about increasing density.…
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