Making light-rail make sense
A week or so ago I wrote a post about how I think we can make sense out of ferries in the mix of Auckland’s public transport system. I think my key conclusion was that ferries do make sense in certain locations and we should try to take advantage of where they do make sense rather than pushing new routes all the time.…
110 Comments You know you’re winning when…
… long time sprawl and car advocates are beginning to realise that private vehicle use is dropping – even if their reasoning behind the trends and their analysis of the implications is somewhat strange.
But it is interesting to see a post on New Geography, using Auckland as the case study city, detailing the falling use of private vehicles to travel around.…
The Alternatives considered in the CCFAS
The City Centre Future Access Study was originally conceived by Steven Joyce when he was the minister of transport as a way to explore the alternatives to the CRL, especially those involving buses. I think he was so adamant that once his officials, under fairly strict instructions, looked at the issues that they would be able to find holes in it.…
Auckland’s future growth
There’s a lot of regular discussion about how much Auckland is projected to grow by over the next 30 or so years – “another million people” being the common catch-phrase. The “response to Minister’s questions” included as part of the documents released with the City Centre Future Access Study includes quite a lot of interesting information about Auckland’s future growth and how realistic the projections are.…
Intensification and the Rail Network
Included with the City Centre Future Access Study documentation released late last year were the answers to a number of questions that the previous Minister of Transport, Steven Joyce, had asked in mid 2011. As well as requesting the preparation of what turned into the CCFAS, Joyce requested the following: “Finalisation of the spatial plan and master plan including establishing achievable growth projections for the CBD
Demonstration of a commitment to resolving current CBD issues, for example by improving bus operations and addressing capacity issues
Evidence of rail patronage increases, particularly in the morning peak, residential intensification and CBD regeneration as a result of current investment
Beginning implementation of large scale residential developments along the rail corridors
Implementation of additional park and ride sites, and changes to bus feeder services” There’s a lot of really interesting information in Auckland Council and Auckland Transport’s response to these questions, but for this post I’m going to look at an element of the third question: evidence of residential intensification as a result of current investment.…
CCFAS and the Additional Harbour Crossing
Along with making a fairly compelling case for the City Rail Link project, the City Centre Future Access Study (CCFAS) also provides some interesting information on my least favourite transport project: the Additional Waitemata Harbour Crossing (AWHC). For some unknown reason the AWHC made it into the “balanced reference case” (otherwise known as the “no CRL option”) for 2041, which means that its impact on the transport network made it into the modelling analysis.…
It’s a bus capacity problem
One part of the City Centre Future Access Study that is particularly interesting to look through is Appendix C – the deficiency analysis. This effectively highlights in more detail what ‘the problem’ is in terms of future access to central Auckland.…
Political response to the CCFAS Ctd.
Following on from my post yesterday, Radio NZ had a number of discussion about the CCFAS yesterday including a chat with Gerry Brownlee and Len Brown about the response. Here is Brownlee: Or listen to it here.
Most telling is at 1:25 when after being questioned if his officials don’t agree with the report responds with “Well they certainly agree with the position I’ve taken today”.…
The irony of government’s dismissal of CRL
The government’s rather odd dismissal of the findings of the City Centre Future Access Study (CCFAS) leave them in a relatively strange position of effectively endorsing a ‘do nothing’ scenario. There are a lot of posts to be written on the CCFAS and its supporting documentation over the next days and weeks and I won’t try to get through everything in a single post, or even 2-3 of them.…
Political response to the CCFAS
So I attended the councils release of the City Centre Future Access Study (CCFAS) today and came away pretty happy with the outcome. Within a few hours though that happiness ground away due to the governments head in the sand response to the study.…
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