Category: Sunday Reading

Starting out the Sunday Reading with a cautionary tale from Canada where the commodity boom has quickly faded. The Loonie a “global laughingstock” is now down to US$.71 and in Calgary experts estimate a 16.3 per cent commercial vacancy rate, the highest in nearly a quarter-century.  …

Emily Badger, “America’s Cities Are Still Too Afraid to Make Driving Unappealing“, The New Republic. Badger raises a relevant point about the shortage of “stick” in US transportation systems. At a macro level, this decision-process implies that there are two ways to shift more commuters out of single-occupancy vehicles and into other modes of transportation, whether that’s biking, carpooling, walking, or transit.…

The idea of technological advances in transport captured our imagination in 2015. But besides the introduction of Uber in Auckland, things remain mostly unchanged. My experience with Uber so far has been mixed. In many cases I find myself awkwardly hunting around the city centre to position myself for both a direct pick-up and departure.…

Running motorways through cities, it seems, was not the best of last century’s ideas. Alana Semuels in The Atlantic describes the growing trend of Motorway tear downs in North America- “Highways Destroyed America’s Cities: Can tearing them down bring revitalization?“. “Where urban highway construction did occur, in urban design terms, it was highly detrimental to the urban fabric; creating physical and psychological rifts that are extremely difficult to bridge and introducing a substantial source of noise and air pollution,” Shelton and Gann wrote.…

One day New Zealand’s transport institutions and processes are going to have to get real about induced driving; the vast inconvenient fact of the whole highway expansion business. What we feed grows, what we build will be used, so to try to help justify any transport investment that is likely to make driving a better choice, especially at scale, on lowered emissions or lower energy use etc, requires simultaneously claiming that the project is of so little use it won’t generate new trips.…