Free trains this weekend
It sounds like NZTA, ARTA and other parties have finally woken up to the fact that simply saying “don’t travel this weekend” is not a particularly acceptable response to the closure of the Newmarket Viaduct’s southbound lanes for 36 hours on Saturday and Sunday – and have instead finally put some thought into encouraging people to travel via other means.…
12 Comments New train timetables
A series of new train timetables have been released, and will take effect from Sunday September 19th – the day the Onehunga Line starts running. The timetables are here:
Southern Line
Eastern Line
Western Line
Onehunga Line (yay – it actually exists!)…
Customer feedback: an interesting comparison
A few weeks ago I had a rather annoying bus experience, with at least a couple of buses not turning up or being exceedingly late. Usually that would be just somewhat annoying, but on this particular occasion my daughter’s parent-teacher interviews were set down for 6.10pm and because of the exceedingly late bus I was only able to make it there for the last couple of minutes of our alloted time.…
Vancouver’s “Buzzer” blog
While browsing through a few North American transport blogs I found myself looking at the “Buzzer blog”, from Vancouver. The interesting thing about Buzzer, is that it is a blog run by Translink – the organisation which operates Vancouver’s public transport system.…
B.Line: where to next?
I have been hearing that ARTA’s “b.line” initiative, which actually amounted to little more than putting up a few signs at bus stops and on buses, has led to significant increases in patronage, in the region of 20% according to some, on Dominion Road and Mt Eden Road bus routes in the last couple of months.…
Onehunga Station – photos
I managed to head out to Onehunga today and take some photos of the train station, which has now been largely completed. The site was a bit of a “mud-fest” as there has been so much rain in the last few days, but there has certainly been massive progress since I was last there.…
Integrated ticketing: latest news
We are still yet to hear anything much from ARTA about the progress of integrated ticketing, aside from a rather bizarre press release from NZTA a few weeks back that some agreement had been reached on a technical standard. Big questions like whether we will have zoned based ticketing, whether we’ll have free transfers, whether we’ll have time-based ticketing and so forth remain unknown for now, although hopefully ARTA will decide at some point in the near future to share their grand plans for integrated ticketing with the rest of the world.…
Bus changes: Q&A
A week or so back I blogged some preliminary thoughts on the changes to bus routes that ARTA is currently consulting on. In general, I supported the changes as they provide some level of simplification – although I noted that it could be argued the changes didn’t go far enough and some level of unnecessary complexity remained.…
AMETI: still ignoring the elephant in the room
An NZ Herald article today shines light on some growing worries that the “Auckland Manukau Eastern Transport Initiative”, known more commonly as “AMETI” may be a first step to reviving the dreaded “Eastern Motorway” – which Aucklanders resoundingly rejected in the 2004 local government elections.…
Statistics show we are driving less
As I have noted before, there is a giant assumption behind just about every proposed transport project – particularly behind every proposed roading project. That giant assumption is that people will continue to drive more and that traffic will continue to increase and congestion worsen.…
Processing...