NZTA pessimistic about impact of Hobsonville Motorway?
The Hobsonville Deviation motorway project has its open day today, and properly opens for traffic tomorrow morning. This is a fairly critical part of the Western Ring Route and will make a big difference to Hobsonville Road in particular – removing around 80% of the traffic from this road.…
2 Comments Another ‘hit’ for the road addict
A truly depressing article in yesterday’s NZ Herald indicating that NZTA are planning to spend another $160 million (which they can somehow whip out of a hat) on two previously unplanned motorway upgrades in Auckland. This comes at a time when public transport and cycling projects in particular are struggling for each and every dollar available to spend on them.…
“Locking in” traffic benefits of motorway projects
A number of motorway projects underway at the moment – like the Manukau Connection, the Hobsonville Deviation and (not quite yet underway) the Waterview Connection – will have significant traffic reduction benefits for the local roads that they bypass. Well, actually I should say that these projects potentially will have significant traffic reduction benefits for local roads they bypass – because unless these benefits are ‘locked in’, over time it is inevitable they will be lost to induced demand.…
Building motorways only shifts congestion
A very interesting article in today’s Herald on how the new Manukau Connection motorway – linking State Highway 20 with State Highway 1, is actually create massive congestion on State Highway 1 just south of the connection.
A new $220 million Auckland link road designed to take the pressure off State Highway 1 is having the opposite effect, forcing transport bosses to install traffic lights to ease congestion.…
Waterview Connection – submissions open
A week or so ago the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) notified NZTA’s application for consent to build the Waterview Connection and to widen State Highway 16. Submissions are now open until October 15th. It’s possible to download a submission form here, and then email it to both waterview@epa.govt.nz…
Public Transport & traffic congestion
Jarrett at Humantransit.org has another one of those “must read” blog posts up, this time exploring the linkage between public transport and traffic congestion – and seeking to answer the question “does public transport improvements reduce traffic congestion?” He starts off, quite interestingly, by stating this:
To my knowledge, and correct me if I’m wrong, no transit project or service has ever been the clear direct cause of a substantial drop in traffic congestion.…
People are not the same as stormwater
I remember someone once telling me that a significant problem with the “transport field” is that many of the experts start out their academic studies as civil engineers, and the first thing they study is stormwater. Now I have a great appreciation for stormwater engineers, as they make sure our cities don’t flood when it rains, but ultimately it’s fairly logical stuff: x amount of rain falls and you need to get rid of it without flooding the place and without polluting the environment.…
Tearing down highways to fix congestion
There’s an interesting post on “The Infrastructurist” blog that proposes a counter-intuitive, but seemingly very successful method of reducing congestion on motorways: tear them down. Here’s part of the post:
Though our transportation planners still operate from the orthodoxy that the best way to untangle traffic is to build more roads, doing so actually proves counterproductive in some cases.…
Are we really “saving time” when investing in transport?
A couple of days ago I posted about my worries that the true benefits of the CBD rail tunnel: such as its ability to transform Auckland’s city centre and its ability to allow further development of the rail network – may not be being fully taken into account in the current business case analysis for that project.…
Can we actually “fix congestion” (and should we even try)?
As I blogged about a few days ago, I am reading the book “Still Stuck in Traffic: Coping with Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion” by Anthony Downs. This book is probably the most in depth look at the causes, and potential solutions to, traffic congestion that I have ever come across.…
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