One more week to submit on Auckland’s future
Submissions on the Auckland Spatial Plan, the City Centre Master Plan and the Waterfront Plan close this time next week. If you ask me, I think it’s pretty stupid of Auckland Council to consult on all three plans at the same time, let alone do so when Auckland is severely distracted by the Rugby World Cup.…
8 Comments Improving Auckland’s PT: what we need to do
At last month’s meeting of the Auckland Council Transport Committee there was a very interesting “benchmark study” that compared a wide variety of measures of public transport in Auckland with a number of cities around the world. Inevitably, Auckland performed worst in most of the measures – even when compared against other cities like Perth, Brisbane and Calgary that have much lower population densities, traditionally seen as a fundamental reason for Auckland’s poor performance.…
July NZTA Board Papers
NZTA continue to refuse to publish their board papers online (even though they spend around $3 billion of taxpayers’ money a year), so in the cause of increased transparency I have been doing Official Information Act requests for their board papers for a while now.…
The end of motoring?
An in depth Guardian article highlights an issue that has been commented on a few times recently, the question of are we reaching peak travel? Or perhaps more specifically, is the golden age of the car over?
In Britain, the percentage of 17- to 20-year-olds with driving licences fell from 48% in the early 1990s to 35% last year.…
Transport in the Auckland Plan
I touched on the transport chapter of the Auckland Plan in Tuesday’s post, noting that it seemed to have taken a “we can’t pick this project or that one, so chuck them both in” approach. The list of transport projects proposed in the Plan is certainly extremely extensive: The numbering doesn’t really seem to indicate anything like a priority list, perhaps being more of a listing from north to south in a rather rough way.…
Smart Transport conference in Wellington this week
While government transport policies over the past few years have been nothing short of utterly depressing, what has been a lot more promising has been the thought opposition parties have put into creating smarter transport policies. An example of this is a conference put together by the Greens and Labour, related to smarter transport outcomes, that will be on later this week in Wellington.…
Tolling motorways to fund City Rail Link?
An article in the NZ Herald yesterday talked a bit further about the different options being looked at to fund Auckland’s transport projects over the next 10-20 years.
Aucklanders could pay between $1 and $3 to drive on the city’s motorways to pay for the inner city rail loop and a new harbour crossing.…
How should we allocate transport funds?
With a general election later this year there should hopefully be some good debate about transport matters. A lot of this will inevitably revolve around projects: City Rail Link of Puhoi-Wellsford? In Wellington, Basin Reserve Flyover or light-rail to the airport?…
Guest Post: User Pays or Carbon Tax?
This is a Guest Post by regular commenter Patrick Reynolds.
In 2007 the Transport Minister Labour’s Annette King formalised NZ’s excise tax on petrol as a hypothecated tax for the National Land Transport Fund. This means that the tax is only to be used for funding transport.…
Time-of-use road pricing – Taking the next step, voluntarily!
Recent posts (here, here, and here) have touched on the issue of time-of-use road pricing. In this post I will briefly examine its merits, before suggesting a strategy for how it might be implemented in a way that overcomes it’s main disadvantages. …
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