Parking and hamburgers
An exceptionally kind blog reader bought me “The High Cost of Free Parking” byDonald Shoup recently. This is a book that I’ve flicked through on a number of occasions in the past, but I’m incredibly grateful of the opportunity to read through it properly, particularly at a time when it seems that Auckland Council is fundamentally reassessing the way it handles parking policy.…
10 Comments July NZTA Board Papers
NZTA continue to refuse to publish their board papers online (even though they spend around $3 billion of taxpayers’ money a year), so in the cause of increased transparency I have been doing Official Information Act requests for their board papers for a while now.…
The end of motoring?
An in depth Guardian article highlights an issue that has been commented on a few times recently, the question of are we reaching peak travel? Or perhaps more specifically, is the golden age of the car over?
In Britain, the percentage of 17- to 20-year-olds with driving licences fell from 48% in the early 1990s to 35% last year.…
Aligning our plans
There are a huge number of very important plans for Auckland’s future out for consultation at the moment, as I commented on in this previous post. However, one key thing will be to ensure they align with each other – as it’s pretty silly for one plan to be promoting something that would completely undermine what another plan is trying to achieve.…
The fantastic City Centre Masterplan
As Brian Rudman noted so eloquently in his NZ Herald column yesterday, there are so many plans out there relating to Auckland’s future at the moment that it almost makes your brain freeze. Auckland Plan, City Centre Master Plan, Waterfront Plan and an economic development strategy for the city.…
Transport in the Auckland Plan
I touched on the transport chapter of the Auckland Plan in Tuesday’s post, noting that it seemed to have taken a “we can’t pick this project or that one, so chuck them both in” approach. The list of transport projects proposed in the Plan is certainly extremely extensive: The numbering doesn’t really seem to indicate anything like a priority list, perhaps being more of a listing from north to south in a rather rough way.…
Auckland Plan: first thoughts
As I discussed this morning, the Auckland Plan was notified for consultation today. The whole plan can be read here, while a list of sections and chapters can be read here. While the plan is a 250-odd page tome, it follows in the steps of the London Spatial Plan by summarising most of what the plan discusses in one somewhat complex map: A more zoomed out version of the map, showing the whole Auckland region, can be found on page 9 of this document.…
Secrecy hurts the transport debate
Last week something rather sad happened. After my blog post on the systems used to track buses around Auckland brought attention to a fairly new blog on transport issues in Auckland, there was obviously some pretty messy stuff happening behind the scenes which led to the aforementioned blog being taken down, apparently because it had ‘overstepped the mark’ and shared information it shouldn’t have.…
Auckland’s PT: expensive and poorly used
An Auckland Council report on various aspects of our transport system makes a number of comparisons of Auckland’s public transport system with various cities in Australia, Canada and the USA – as well as Wellington. The cities used to compare Auckland against, including their population and what different technologies their PT system includes, is shown in the table below: These are a good range of cities to compare Auckland’s performance against, in my opinion.…
Smart Transport Conference videos
As I noted last week, there was a “Smart Transport Conference” held at parliament jointly by the Green and Labour parties. Below are three videos showing talks from that conference.
Green Party MP Gareth Hughes: Transport Consultant (and parking guru) Julie-Anne Genter: And last, but certainly not least, keynote speaker Paul Mees.…
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