Higher fares, and other transport updates

Tomorrow, the Council’s Transport and Infrastructure Delivery committee meets for the first time this term (Tuesday 9 December at 10am) and there’s a bunch of interesting updates on the agenda. Fare Increase Incoming Public transport use seems to have stagnated this year with ridership stuck at about 86% of pre-COVID levels due to a combination of factors, including the ongoing rail disruption and the fare increases we’ve experienced in recent years.…
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Light Rail Lives On?

Earlier this year Te Waihanga, the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission, invited submissions for Round 2 of its Infrastructure Priorities Programme (IPP), looking to help identify proposals and projects that: are nationally important will meet New Zealand’s strategic objectives represent good value for money and can be delivered.…
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CRL delayed till second half of 2026

While Melbourne’s Metro Tunnel officially opened yesterday, our own rail tunnel just got a little further away. For some time now, it has been said that the City Rail Link (CRL) will open sometime in 2026, and there was a lot of hope that it could be early in 2026 given we’re already seeing Auckland Transport running timetable testing and that the construction part of the project was due for completion now.…
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The frequentisation of Tāmaki Makaurau

This is a guest post by Darren Davis. It originally appeared on his excellent blog, Adventures in Transitland, which we encourage you to check out. It is shared by kind permission. The bad old days To get a full appreciation of just how big a transformation Auckland’s bus network has undergone, you have to look back to the bad old days.…
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More progress on the Northwest Busway

One of the few major transport projects that we agree with the government on is the Northwest busway and it’s about to take another step closer to reality. Earlier this year it was announced that the NZTA board had approved an investment case for the project and that more work would happen “Funding of around $116 million has also already been approved by the NZTA Board in late 2024 for early consenting work and strategic property acquisitions for Brigham Creek and Lincoln Road stations.…
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Manchester: an urban renewal case study

I lived in the UK in the 1980s, so whenever anyone describes the Auckland city centre as “dilapidated” (as the Herald did in an recent editorial), I can’t help chuckling. While we do have very real problems, we have nothing like the complete physical ruin of whole areas and communities on the scale that was so widespread in post-industrial Thatcher’s Britain, especially in the north where the Industrial revolution began, like Manchester below.…
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Pre-Rapid Transit

A clear game-changer for Auckland would be the earliest possible completion of the long-planned Rapid Transit Network. We have a growing and improving bunch of lines, on a long held and evolving plan, but as yet not enough of the whole to gain the great multiplying benefit of the network effect.…
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Electrifying the Golden Triangle

This is a guest post by Darren Davis. It originally appeared on his excellent blog, Adventures in Transitland, which we encourage you to check out. It is shared by kind permission. A Detailed Business Case for the electrification of the Golden Triangle’s rail network has been underway for a while but information recently shared by KiwiRail with Waikato’s Regional Land Transport Committee sheds some light on their emerging thinking on what this might look like.…
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