News Year’s Eve 2019
The last time I spent New Year’s Eve in central Auckland was years ago. We had dinner downtown and as midnight approached, made a break for a friend’s apartment where we could watch the limp fireworks off the Sky Tower while avoiding the clumps of drunken teenagers and wayward boy racers hovering on Queen Street.…
45 Comments Weekly Roundup – 31-Jan-20
As we reach the end of the month and with some kids back at school this week, trains, buses and cycleways have been feeling even busier than normal – and that’s only going to increase next week with more schools back and then in a few more weeks the universities starting.…
The NZ Upgrade transport package
Yesterday the government announced what would be funded as part of their massive $12b infrastructure spend up, that they’ve called “The New Zealand Upgrade Programme“.
As previously indicated, the package includes $6.8 billion on a variety of transport projects and we now know what those are – I managed to correctly pick many of them in my post yesterday.…
What we may see in the infrastructure announcement today
Today the government are announcing what projects they’re going to spend their $12 billion infrastructure fund on. They’ve already said that as part of that they’ll spend “$6.8 billion on new transport projects, with a significant portion for roads and rail“.…
Weekly Roundup – 24-Jan-20
Here’s our weekly collection of smaller pieces.
Otahuhu station works
Over the Christmas/New Year period works were undertaken to enable the third platform at Otahuhu, which is being done as part of the City Rail Link. A timelapse of the works is below. Electric Bus MoU
Auckland Transport’s current plans to roll out electric buses with them specifying all new buses be electric by 2025 and all buses electric by 2040 is simply not ambitious enough.…
Reinventing Auckland using Lessons from Ghent
A few weeks ago, Streetfilms released an eye-catching video about the small Belgian city of Ghent, and the dramatic changes they made to traffic circulation in 2017. This video should be professional development watching for everyone involved in Auckland’s transport planning.…
Weekly Roundup 17-Jan-20
Here’s our weekly collection of smaller pieces. Housing Consents
Stats NZ announced this week that NZ as a whole had reached a 45-year high for new home consents.
“For the first time in 45 years, the annual number of new homes consented rose to over 37,000,” construction statistics manager Melissa McKenzie said.…
It’s time to increase traffic fines
There are not many things that have escaped the clutches of inflation over the last 20 years but one thing that has is traffic fines.
There was a good article by the Herald’s Chris Keall a few days ago about getting ticketed for using a phone while driving.…
Road Deaths in 2019
For the first time in six years, we ended the calendar year with fewer road deaths than the year before. It’s an improvement but only a small victory when you consider that 353 people, just under 1 person a day, died on our roads in 2019 and that’s still 100 more than did so in 2013. We had been tracking even lower but December was the deadliest we’ve had in over a decade.…
2020 – The year ahead
Welcome to 2020. Following my wrap up of 2019 last week I thought it would be good to look at some of the things we can expect to see in 2020. I think 2020 is very much going to be year where there’s lots of things going on but not necessarily a lot completed as projects race against the approaching timelines of 2021 when Auckland hosts the America’s Cup and APEC.…
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