Weekly Roundup 13-September-2024
Ooh, Friday the thirteenth. Spooky! Is that why certain zombie ideas have been stalking the landscape this week, like the Mayor’s brainwave for a motorway bridge from Kauri Point to Point Chev? Read on and find out.
This roundup, like all our coverage, is brought to you by the Greater Auckland team.…
43 Comments Cross-party consensus: there’s no pipeline without good faith
There’s been a lot of talk recently about a cross-party agreement to develop a pipeline for infrastructure, including transport. Last month, outgoing CRL boss Sean Sweeney talked about the importance of securing an enduring infrastructure programme. He outlined the high costs of the relentless political flip-flopping of priorities, which drives away skilled workers, drives up the cost of delivery, and hamstrings our future .…
Northern Expressway Boondoggle
Transport Minister Simeon Brown has been soaring high with his hubris of getting on and building motorways, but some uncomfortable realities are starting to creep in.
Back in July he announced that the government was pushing on with a Northland Expressway using an “accelerated delivery strategy”:
The Coalition Government is accelerating work on the new four-lane expressway between Auckland and Whangārei as part of its Roads of National Significance programme, with an accelerated delivery model to deliver this project faster and more efficiently, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says.…
Our transport planning system is fundamentally broken
Ever since Wayne Brown became mayor (nearly two years ago now) he’s been wanting to progress an “integrated transport plan” with the government – which sounded a lot like the previous Auckland Transport Alignment Project (ATAP) with just a different name.…
Could outdoor dining revitalise Queen Street?
This is a guest post by Ben van Bruggen of The Urban Room,.An earlier version of this post appeared on LinkedIn. All images are by Ben. Have you noticed that there’s almost nowhere on Queen Street that invites you to stop, sit outside and enjoy a coffee, let alone a meal?…
Weekly Roundup 6-September-2024
Welcome to another Friday and another roundup of stories that caught our eye this week. As always, this and every post is brought to you by the Greater Auckland crew. If you like our work and you’d like to see more of it, we invite you to join our regular subscribers and shout us the equivalent of a coffee or whatever you can manage.…
Satisfying the Minister’s Speed Obsession
The Minister of Transport’s speed obsession has this week resulted in two new consultations for 110km/h speed limits, one in Auckland and one in Christchurch. There has also been final approval for the Kapiti Expressway to move to 110km/h following an earlier consultation.…
What if we freed up our streets, again?
This guest post is by Tommy de Silva, a local rangatahi and freelance writer who is passionate about making the urban fabric of Tāmaki Makaurau-Auckland more people-focused and sustainable. New Zealand’s March-April 2020 Level 4 Covid response (aka “lockdown”) was somehow both the best and worst six weeks of my life.…
NLTP 2024 released – destroying pipeline of shovel ready local projects
Transport Minister Simeon Brown and Waka Kotahi yesterday released the latest National Land Transport Plan (NLTP) for 2024-27. The NLTP sets out what transport projects will be funded for the next three years, including both central and local government projects.
As expected, given the government’s extremely ideological transport policy, it’s terrible, not just because of what it does fund – focusing much of the country’s transport investment into a handful of roads that carry less traffic than the average Auckland arterial – but also because of what it doesn’t fund: destroying a pipeline of shovel-ready local projects, right at a time when the government claims to care about having an infrastructure pipeline.…
Container trucks on local streets: why take the risk?
This is a guest post by Charmaine Vaughan, who came to transport advocacy via her local Residents Association and a comms role at Bike Auckland. Her enthusiasm to make local streets safer for all is shared by her son Dylan Vaughan, a budding “urban nerd” who provided much of the research for this post.…
Processing...