O’Connell St upgrade, another cop out?
Auckland has started taking a few small steps to transform the CBD the the introduction of shared spaces around the city and unsurprisingly they have been a huge success. However since the Fort St one opened just over a year ago things have gone quiet on rolling upgrades out to more streets, presumably so that things like the City Centre Master Plan (CCMP) could be completed confirming that street scape upgrades were still the plan going forward.…
37 Comments The City Centre Master Plan – Part 1
The final version of the Council’s City Centre Master Plan was released, with relatively little attention, a couple of weeks back. There’s a fairly flash little website associated with it here, or if you’re patient you can download the whole 33.2 MB document here.…
Vancouver CBD traffic: back to 1960s levels
With the final version of the City Centre Master Plan now approved, a key element of achieving the vision for the city centre that the Council wants will be achieving what seems – at first glance – to be an impossibility.…
Auckland supports the CRL and the CRL supports Growth
In news sure to annoy the government, a recent survey shows that almost 2/3rds of Aucklanders back the City Rail Link.
According to Research New Zealand, 63 per cent of Aucklanders surveyed are in favour of the link, while 29 per cent were against it and eight percent didn’t care.…
“Locking in” Vic Park Tunnel’s benefits
The additional southbound lanes over the Victoria Park Viaduct, made possible through the construction of the Victoria Park Tunnel, open to vehicles today. John Roughan’s NZ Herald editorial can barely contain his excitement at this prospect, largely because (he hopes) it will get rid of queue jumpers holding up traffic through St Mary’s Bay.…
Transport in 2011: some steps forward, some steps backwards
Trying to get my head around whether 2011 was a good year or not such a good year for advocates of a more balanced transport system like myself, is a bit of a challenge. There were a number of good things which happened, but at the same time there were also a number of steps backward.…
The real benefits of the City Rail Link
My post on Tuesday, which looked at the ongoing debate occurring over the economics of the City Rail Link (and the huge under-counting of benefits under New Zealand’s system, by comparison to the UK’s system), prompted some interesting debate in the comments over what the real benefits of this project are, and who experiences them.…
The modernist approach to pedestrians
The excellent Pedestrian Observations blog has a fascinating post up about the experience of being a pedestrian in Central London. We often think of London as a pretty good example of what to aim for in transport terms: an extremely comprehensive network of trains, buses, an increasing network of cycle lanes and of course the famous congestion charging scheme.…
Aligning our plans
There are a huge number of very important plans for Auckland’s future out for consultation at the moment, as I commented on in this previous post. However, one key thing will be to ensure they align with each other – as it’s pretty silly for one plan to be promoting something that would completely undermine what another plan is trying to achieve.…
The fantastic City Centre Masterplan
As Brian Rudman noted so eloquently in his NZ Herald column yesterday, there are so many plans out there relating to Auckland’s future at the moment that it almost makes your brain freeze. Auckland Plan, City Centre Master Plan, Waterfront Plan and an economic development strategy for the city.…
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