Guest Post: Two Aucklands

This is a Guest Post by planning historian and consultant Chris Harris. On the day of Len Brown’s election last year, a Herald feature pointed to a “stark divide” between North and South in Auckland. On the 24th of March this year, a Herald editorial also reported that “Coastal sprawl will defy plan for Auckland,” by which was meant a continuation of RONS-fuelled growth up the eastern bays of the North Shore, as far as Mahurangi and Matakana.…
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Guest Post: Alternative Auckland? Notes on Perth

This is a Guest Post by transport expert Chris Harris. Earlier this November, I paid a visit to the roughly Auckland-sized Australian cities of Perth and Brisbane. This blog entry records my impressions of Perth, which of all cities is perhaps the closest to an “Alternative Auckland,” for the following reasons: Perth’s urban area extends north-south for roughly 100km, between coastline and coastal ranges.…
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How everything went wrong for Auckland

Strangely enough, while today Auckland is a highly auto-dependent city (notwithstanding recent improvements to the public transport system and the upswing in patronage), this has not always been the case – and certainly this outcome was not completely inevitable. An excellent journal article by transport expert Chris Harris, called “Slow Train Coming“, explores how it all went wrong for Auckland in the mid-20th century.…
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Transport and Quality of Life

I came across a bit of a “think-piece” written by Chris Harris (the public transport advocate, not the cricketer) that is simply too good and interesting not to share. I won’t quote all of what he wrote verbatim, because it relates to a submission on a policy plan, but there are some fascinating tracts.…
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Exploring why Auckland’s PT is so bad

Hopefully one of the most useful aspects of this blog for readers is that I can do all the tricky stuff – digging through incomprehensible transport committee agendas, scouring ARTA monthly business reports and keeping watch on all new transport announcements – and then break it all down into somewhat readable chunks for your average person to make sense from all this mess.…
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