Midweek reading: Road pricing and safety, urban-rural, the history of California, and trees
Starting this week I’m trying out a new feature: a midweek post rounding up some new articles on transport and urbanism. (Time for writing more substantive posts has been a bit tight lately.) The themes will be familiar to regular readers.…
40 Comments London: Urban Heart Surgery
Many of you are due to head back to work tomorrow. If you’re looking for something to keep you entertained for a few hours before doing that, this series on the construction of London’s CrossRail might just fit the bill. It also gives an idea of some of the challenges Auckland Transport face in the construction of the CRL.…
Collins Comments on Auckland
Every now and then you see comments that make you want to laugh, cry or just bang your head against a wall at the stupidity of them. Yesterday there were a couple of such comments from Judith Collins in an opinion piece talking about the Auckland mayoralty.…
A Day on the London Undergound
A neat visualisation of actual passenger journeys on the London underground
A visualisation of 562,145 journeys on the London Underground network, from a 5% sample of Oyster-card journeys during a week in 2009 He explains more behind the visualization here.
Wouldn’t it be great if Auckland Transport released HOP data in a similar way so something similar could be done here.…
The Underline
Auckland’s not quite at the point of having lots of old tunnels sitting around unused – with the exception of those under Albert Park – but if we did here’s a suggestion from London. Personally I’m not sure it’s such a great idea and would much rather be riding on the street in a protected bike lane but still an interesting idea none the less.…
CRL engagement ideas
As the CRL inches closer to reality we’re bound to see a lot more of the general public start to get involved and as such discussion about it is only likely to intensify. This isn’t a bad thing as the more people that learn about the massively positive benefits the project brings the more support the project will have.…
Give Away!
Film distributors Madman Entertainment have kindly sent us four DVDs of the BBC documentary on the London Underground: The Underground: Narrated by Julian Barrett of Mighty Boosh fame, each of the six episodes is an incredibly in-depth and unblinking look at what it takes to keep Four Million people moving under the streets of London everyday.…
Transport’s not a left/right political issue
As I discussed yesterday the debate on big urban issues of housing and transport far too frequently descends into left/right debates and today I’m looking at transport.
One of the reasons this has come up is that we’ve had some interesting conversations on Twitter in the last few days with a couple of Nationals MPs, which apart from highlighting a scary lack of understanding about transport, inevitably touched on the issue about whether the transport policy that we generally advocate on this blog fits into the traditional “left-right” political spectrum.…
Happy Birthday, you don’t look a day over 150
On this day in 1863, that’s 150 years ago, the first section of the London underground opened in the form of the Metropolitian line between Paddington Station and Farrington. The reason the the line was built in the first place is that there were a series of main lines that terminated at what was then the edge of the city and a combination of property prices and local laws prevented them from being linked up on the surface.…
Road pricing and rail
The issue of road pricing comes up quite frequently in the comments on this blog and it’s certainly not something we’ve shied away from in the past – though I find myself a bit frustrated by how polarised arguments over road pricing become: Its advocates think it’ll solve all transport issues, tend to ignore its potential negative side effects and think we should do it tomorrow if only the politicians had some guts.…
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