Sunday reading 5 June 2016
Welcome back to Sunday reading this long weekend.
We start this week with a borrowed slide explaining the way that the quality of your city’s Transit system controls the quality of your driving commute: This explains what’s wrong with current expansion of SH16 and the completion of the Western Ring Route.…
35 Comments Sir Dove-Myer Robinson on his Rapid Transit Scheme – Part 5
This is the fifth in a series of six posts, looking at a collection of articles written by Sir Dove-Myer Robinson in the mid 1970’s promoting and clearly trying to build support for his rapid transit plan. They come from a booklet I stumbled across while in the Takapuna Library one day.…
Sunday reading 22 May 2016
Welcome back to Sunday reading. This week, we’re leading off with two articles on innovative ideas from European places. The first is a Wired article explaining “why you should become an e-resident of Estonia“. Ben Hammersley reports on the Baltic country’s innovative approach to delivering government services digitally:
The most advanced digital society in the world is a former Soviet Republic on the edge of the Baltic Sea.…
Mid-week reading: Kim-Mai Cutler, map-making, the Black Death, and knowledge as a public good
Welcome back to mid-week reading. With luck, there are only going to be a few more of these until I’m back on a more regular posting schedule.
First piece of the week is from Kim-Mai Cutler, a tech journalist from San Francisco who’s produced some invaluable reporting on their (our) housing crisis.…
Things to consider this election
Amalgamating Auckland under a single council was always going to be a big task and the first 5½ years of it have seen the council needing to make some fairly big decisions. Many of these big decisions have helped set Auckland on the path to becoming a great city and I’d argue could not have been achieved without the amalgamation.…
Sunday reading 20 March 2016
To kick off Sunday reading here’s an interesting article by transport professor Rachel Aldred. In “Getting people cycling on residential streets needs more than 20mph limits” she argues that enabling neighbourhood streets to support cycling takes much more than dropping the speed limits, it requires removing traffic.…
The linear city and other science fictions
Last week, urban designer lecturers Dushko Bogunovich and Matthew Bradbury published an article on their vision for transforming Auckland into a “linear city”:
Instead, we suggest a linear, city-region that follows the opportunities and respects the constraints in the landscape. Its central spine would connect many nodes of density, functioning as centres of commerce and production, with high-rise living.…
Sunday reading 14 February 2016
Welcome back to Country Calendar Sunday Reading. Today I thought it would be nice to lead off with a mesmerising video of sheep herding in New Zealand. It’s not very urban, but it does nicely illustrate bottleneck queuing, which is a common phenomenon on urban roads and busy pedestrian streets.…
Houston and the fallacy of “roads first” transport policy
Over the last 50 or 60 years, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and a number of other countries have pursued a “roads first” approach to transport policy. There have been significant public investments in (generally un-tolled) roads, and relatively few investments in competing transport modes.…
Sunday reading 31 January 2016
We are now living in the anthropocene – the period in which humans have begun to shape the earth’s geology, ecosystems, and climate. Vox’s Brad Plumer recently compiled a set of images that vividly illustrate humanity’s transformative effect: “15 before-and-after images that show how we’re transforming the planet“.…
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