Transport spending: what Victoria’s doing
Victoria in Australia is often hassled as being a bit of a “roads loving” part of that country, and certainly Melbourne public transport academic Paul Mees seems to spend half his life hassling the state of Melbourne’s public transport system (usually with some justification).…
Comment 2010-2040 RLTS Launched
The 2010-2040 Regional Land Transport Strategy was today formally launched (downloadable in two parts: one and two). I have blogged about the RLTS on a number of previous occasions as it has slowly wound its way through the process of becoming a reality.…
What The Kiwirail Announcements Make Clear
Today’s KiwiRail announcements make it clear that the transport arrangements in New Zealand are a mess. The various streams of funding, the lack of comparison of projects of different modes, the competing subsidies and our Benefit to Cost Ratio (BCR) process, are all contributing to some very poor outcomes.…
Changing Mindsets
There’s a lot of talk in transport and land-use planning circles about changing mindsets, that to get people using public transport more often (or to get people living in higher density housing if we’re talking about land-use planning) we need to change their mindsets, to overcome decades of habit and somehow create a giant “culture change” in the way that people live and move around urban areas.…
Bizarre rail funding controversy
There has been an interesting debate in recent days about a speech that Steven Joyce gave at the 2010 Australasian Rail Association Conference. In particular, I think that the controversy relates to these parts of his speech:
The fourth group we need buy-in from are the regional councils in Auckland and Wellington which, along with the Transport Agency, are responsible for the commuter rail services in their respective cities.…
Final RLTS tweaks being made
Tomorrow is a pretty important day for transport planning in Auckland, with the 2010-2040 Regional Land Transport Strategy taking its second to last step towards adoption, in its consideration by the Regional Transport Committee. In the appendices to the agenda for that meeting there is a summary of the changes made as a result of hearings conducted on the RLTS in February, as well as a marked up version of the RLTS showing changes that have been made.…
I’ll put in for the ticket
This is William S. Lind, he is the Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism (sounds like someone I wouldn’t get along with usually) but he is one of the biggest conservative supporters of public transport in America and co-author of, Moving Minds: Conservatives and Public Transportation, here he is talking about some of the points made in the book.…
Buses vs Trams vs Trains is a stupid debate
A couple of days ago I was reading through the comment of an interesting post on “The Transport Politic” blog about Los Angeles, the same post which inspired my post of a couple of days ago about how Auckland’s relatively dispersed employment patterns (which actually may not be as dispersed as we thought) doesn’t mean that public transport can’t work here – as is slowly being shown in Los Angeles.…
Victoria gets it…. why don’t we?
The latest edition of the excellent Going Solar transport newsletter outlines a new piece of legislation that the Victorian State Government in Australia has passed to ensure a better and more integrated approach to transport. The Transport Integration Bill is briefly outlined in the Going Solar Newsletter – as shown below: There are a number of very very important steps that Victoria is taking to ensure it gets the best transport and land-use outcomes.…
Local road funding “crisis”
A rather strange lead story on One News tonight about ‘roading jobs around the country being under threat’. Here’s the video for the story, and TVNZ’s full story is included below:
There is more grim employment news with roading jobs around the country under threat because of a lack of local government funding for planned projects.…
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