Boston – urban rehabilitation
Tomorrow morning we leave Boston and head to Montreal on our Greyhound bus. It has been an interesting three days here, and I have certainly found myself very much liking the city. Compared to New York, Boston has felt quite small, a bit quiet and I guess certainly a bit more familiar.…
11 Comments Is fare-free a fair go?
It’s been a while since I posted anything so I thought I’d step in while Josh is away to help keep things ticking over, my apoligies for the length and wordiness of this one!
The outcome of last Sunday’s motorway closure in Newmarket left me with some sense of vindication as a public transport advocate.…
Flat Bush: very expensive sprawl
I have written a number of posts about Flat Bush in the past. For those that don’t know, Flat Bush is a large greenfields development in the southeast corner of Auckland. Over the next 20 or so years around 40,000 people are expected to call Flat Bush home.…
How do you actually integrate land-use and transport?
It seems these days that just about every transport policy document and every land-use planning document talks about the need to integrate the two. I have discussed the importance of integrating land-use planning and transport on many occasions before myself, but I do worry that we are starting to bandy about this integration in a somewhat meaningless way.…
Where is this (and can it be fixed)?
In this spirit of last week’s post on the car-centric design of Botany Town Centre, here’s another bit of Auckland that seems to have been dedicated entirely to the parking of cars. Strangely enough, the area is actually superbly served by public transport (which should be a bit of a clue about where it is).I…
Where is this (and how on earth did it happen)?
It should be a fairly easy one to guess. Perhaps the better question is “how could we let this happen?” This intersection should be the focal point for a great town centre, but instead we have 10 lane wide roads, surrounded by more roads and then a bunch of carparks.…
Auckland’s population density: killing off the myths
One of the common excuses for why public transport supposedly “won’t work in Auckland” and why we need to continue to plow money into motorways, is that Auckland is supposedly “too low density” for public transport. In fact, aspiring Auckland Super City Mayor John Banks went so far as to say that Auckland was the “second most spread out city in the world” (after Los Angeles) in a Guest Post on Aucklandtrains.…
Transport CCO must do urban design
Reading today’s article about Jan Gehl got me thinking about how all the cool things he proposes might actually happen in the brave new world that is the Auckland super city. While a lot of people call Mr Gehl an architect, urban planner and so forth (inspired genius is what I tend to call him), what I think is probably the most appropriate job title for him is “public space urban designer”.…
Jan Gehl – the urban genius
A very interesting article in the NZ Herald today about Danish urban planner Jan Gehl. Gehl is the type of urban planner we need a lot more of in this world – concerned about humanising spaces, creating areas that are friendly for people, reducing auto-dependency, and above all – looking to make our cities nicer places to be in: surely what all urban planner should aspire to.…
Parking and St Lukes
There’s a particularly large planning application (in the form of Private Plan Change 8) working its way through the Auckland City Council system at the moment, which relates to the possible expansion of the St Lukes shopping centre. The proposed expansion is pretty damn big – upping the possible size of the mall from around 45,000 m2 of floor area to a maximum of 92,500 m2, of which some would be office rather than retail.…
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