Integrated ticketing: wow, some news!
It has been a while since we heard anything about the progress of implementing Auckland’s integrated ticketing system, so it’s welcoming to see a media release by NZTA today saying that some progress is being made in the establishment of the national ticketing standards that will ensure inter-operability between all public transport smart-cards in New Zealand in the future.…
22 Comments Auckland Public Transport: an interesting study from 2007
In the last couple of days I’ve come across a 2007 study that the Ministry for Economic Development did into public transport in Auckland. It makes for quite interesting reading in terms of its analysis of what Auckland’s transport problems are, and how they might be best solved.…
The “PT effectiveness project”
As I noted in yesterday’s post, NZTA has been undertaking a significant amount of work into finding out ways to get “better value” out of public transport investment. As I also noted yesterday, NZTA currently gets around $4.40 worth of road user benefits for each dollar they spend on subsidising public transport in Auckland, so they’re actually doing pretty well at the moment.…
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.…
NZTA’s strange public transport “problem”
Thanks to the good old Official Information Act, I have managed to get hold of some interesting information from NZTA on public transport, and in particular a full overview of what they called the “Public Transport Effectiveness Project”. There’s a huge amount of information in this document, so I will probably take a few blog posts to work through it all.…
Join CBT and hear John Banks talk on transport
Tonight at 7.30pm the annual general meeting of the Campaign for Better Transport is being held at the Grey Lynn Community Centre, 510 Richmond Rd. The CBT is a politically neutral lobby-group for transport issues in Auckland and elsewhere in NZ, and has had many successes, like the Onehunga Line, rail electrification and so forth.…
Peak Car?
An interesting blog post by David Metz, author of the very very good book “The Limits to Travel“:
I read with interest Phil Goodwin’s Comment piece in Local Transport Today of 25 June in which he introduced the concept of ‘peak car’, and look forward to his promised further exposition.…
Farebox recoveries & transport emissions
An interesting question time today in parliament discussing the implication of farebox recovery ratios, the emissions trading scheme and so forth.
The transcript is available to read here. Did Joyce really say that forcing people from public transport into their cars will decrease transport emissions?…
Public Transport Lecture
I’m not sure if I will be able to make this, but it certainly looks interesting: If you do make it, it’d be great to hear how this went.…
Embracing Congestion
In a few posts recently I have hinted at the need for us to fundamentally re-evaluate the way we approach transport policy and planning. Just quickly I will briefly summarise a few posts I have made previously on the issue: From reading David Owen’s excellent book “Green Metropolis“, I noted the ecological disadvantages of reducing congestion, because making driving easier just encourages people to drive more – and as a result both pump out CO2 emissions and other pollution from their vehicles as well as generally living in unsustainable low-density sprawl.…
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