“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.…
17 Comments

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.…
31 Comments

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.…
21 Comments

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.…
36 Comments

Auckland Plan: first thoughts

As I discussed this morning, the Auckland Plan was notified for consultation today. The whole plan can be read here, while a list of sections and chapters can be read here. While the plan is a 250-odd page tome, it follows in the steps of the London Spatial Plan by summarising most of what the plan discusses in one somewhat complex map: A more zoomed out version of the map, showing the whole Auckland region, can be found on page 9 of this document.…
20 Comments

Lower Hobson viaduct to go!

Out of all the exciting plans and strategies for Auckland’s future that we’ve heard about over the past few days, perhaps the one proposal that gets me most excited is the prospect that the horrific Lower Hobson Street viaduct might be demolished.…
25 Comments