Density and traffic congestion
Logic says that higher densities will lead to more congestion. Concentrating many more trips within a smaller area may be more efficient (less need for so many roads and a greater role for public transport, walking and cycling) and as more people catch the train or ride the bus along exclusive bus lanes, congestion becomes irrelevant to an increasing number of traveller, but typically we’ve often thought that even taking all that into account it’s inevitable that you’ll see more congestion as you increase densities.…
6 Comments Copying Metrotown, Vancouver
The City Rail Link project undoubtedly provides benefits throughout Auckland, particularly through increasing the capacity of the city’s rail network. However, there are places where the project’s benefits will be felt most keenly. The CBD is obviously one of those places, but so is the inner part of the Western Line: say from Kingsland out to New Lynn.…
High Density & High Rise: not necessarily the same thing
Urban intensification gets a lot of criticism for supposedly wanting to force “high rise” development onto everyone – whether they want it or not. This came through in a recent NZ Herald article which broke the news of the Auckland Plan backing down on wanting 75% of all urban development to occur through intensification:
Auckland Council has eased up on its vision of squeezing residents up closer by keeping 75 per cent of new housing on existing land and just 25 per cent outside the limits within the next three decades.…
Intensification and Heritage
A plainly daft piece on the proposed Auckland Plan by Bill Ralston recently appeared in the NZ Listener. In it he claims, completely without any reason, that the plan sets out to demolish where he lives, as well as every other desirable part of Auckland in the name of instensification.…
Auckland Density Illustrated I: The Inner City
It’s hard not to get the feeling that for some in the Auckland Plan debate the answer is simply that they just need to get out more. Yes I’m thinking of you Dick Quax. But also Bill Ralston, whose advancing years seem to have settled upon him as a sort of domestic panic; a fear that some one will take his villa away.…
Transit Station 26 Jan 2012
As there’s been a lot of discussion about population density here I figure this post from good ol’ Cap’nTransit is on the money. Yes this is my view too, you think more density is needed? Well build the transit and the density will follow [all else being equal], foolish to try to wait for some ideal density then meet that demand with infrastructure.…
The complexity of density
You would think that calculating, and analysing, the density of a city would be a fairly perfunctory mathematical task, and would tell us useful information about the nature of that city. As I noted in this previous blog post, perhaps the most challenging aspect of calculating a city’s ‘average density’ is working out where its boundaries are.…
Shedding light on Auckland’s population density
Last night’s post about Eric Thompson’s silly NZ Herald article highlighted one unresolved matter – the question of “what is Auckland’s population density?” I noted that according to Wikipedia, the urban density of Auckland is around 1250 people per square kilometre whereas Demographia states a density of around 2,200.…
Where to start?
I’m not quite sure how to approach this particular opinion piece in the NZ Herald today by Eric Thompson. There are just so many plain errors in the piece, so perhaps it’s worthwhile starting with a factual examination of some of the assertions:
Taking money from the $1.7 billion highway between Puhoi and Wellsford and ploughing it into Auckland so that Magda can shop in Newmarket and then pop across to Britomart smacks of pandering to city dwellers when most New Zealanders don’t live in cities and need to drive to get anywhere.…
The New North Road corridor
Yesterday’s post about promoting the section of Great North Road between Grey Lynn and Karangahape Road as a high priority area for intensification generated a lot of interesting comments. It would seem that generally there was a lot of support for the idea, although with some justified mention that the impact of more people on existing schools in the area needs to be taken into consideration.…
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