From Ugly Car Parks to Loved Buildings
Guest post from Brendon Harre that although Christchurch focused, raises New Zealand wide questions of importance, such as, inner-city car parking policy and how to rebuild extensively damaged city centres.
Christchurch’s earthquake damaged city exposes many underlying urbanism lessons. Minimising land wastage on car parking is one lesson.…
34 Comments Auckland’s Busiest Bus Routes
With COVID-19 impacting things, February represents the current high-point for public transport use in Auckland. In the 12-months to the end of Feb, 103.6 million boardings took place on the network and almost three quarters of those, 75.3 million, took place on buses.…
Weekly Roundup – 19-June-2020
Here’s our weekly roundup Queen St Sense
Sanity has prevailed and yesterday the Council announced that next month they’ll start piloting ‘Access for Everyone’ – the plan in the City Centre Masterplan (CCMP) to make the city more friendly for pedestrians.…
The Framework for Housing Quality
The Covid-19 lockdown showed us all how important housing quality is. Some homes were uncomfortable or got cold. Some homes were fine physically, but not well suited for how they were used over lockdown. For me – a numbers-focused economist type guy – it’s a crucial reminder that it’s not just about the quantity of our housing and whether we’re building enough.…
Speeding up (some) consents
On Monday the government announced they’ve created a new fast track consenting process to speed up consenting for 11 projects around the county with six of them in Auckland. The new process is expected to reduce the time to consent these projects to as little as 45 days.…
Unitec Development Details Emerge
Yesterday the government announced a fast track consenting process for a bunch of projects. I’ll talk about that in a separate post but one of the projects that it will be used for is Phase 1 of the Unitec development.
The government announced back in early 2018 that it was going to take over and develop the Unitec site with 2,500-4,000 homes (possibly up to 8,000 people) but there has been no information about it since then.…
Submit on the Council’s Emergency Budget
The council are currently consulting on their emergency budget with submissions closing this Friday.
COVID-19 has punched a $525 million hole in the Auckland Council’s budget. That’s because about 60% of the council’s revenue comes from things other than rates and those ‘other things’ have been severely impacted by the wider economic and social impact of the virus.…
Weekly Roundup – 12-June-2020
Perhaps it’s because we’re back to Level 1 but there’s a lot to cover this week. Commercial Bay opens
Commercial Bay finally opened yesterday, over four year after the old Downtown Mall closed and of course with a couple of rail tunnels running underneath it.…
Is Auckland getting its ‘Fair’ share?
The impact from COVID-19 on the Council’s budget has been severe and even with a 3.5% rate increase, is set to see funding for projects slashed, with safety and cycling some of the worst hit. All up Auckland Transport estimate it could see $312m to $352m of “shovel ready” projects paused and more concerningly that could see up to 10 people die and 40 people seriously injured on roads that would have otherwise had safety improvements.…
Housing after the Lockdown
I had grand plans at the start of 2020. I was excited to be back on Greater Auckland and writing seriously about housing.
And then a Covid-shaped curveball came along, and didn’t seem to leave space for much else. I’m not sure how you all spent your lockdown (Interesting stories?…
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