Campbell Live on motorway on-ramp lights
A good piece from Campbell Live on motorway on-ramp lights which are something motorists love to hate. I did have a bit of an issue at the end where the NZTA claim that traffic has grown over the last 5 years because as we know, that hasn’t been the case at many locations.…
32 Comments Controlling Traffic
Like with public transport patronage, I keep a close eye on what are happening with traffic volumes on the motorways thanks to the monthly data released by the NZTA. The data doesn’t cover the entire motorway network but it does cover a number of key locations on it that can help to give an indication of what’s happening.…
Photo of the day – Under the Motorway
Life under the Victoria Park Viaduct Photo is credited to oh.yes.melbourne…
Do ramp signals really help?
By now we’re pretty well acquainted with ramp signals on motorway onramps across Auckland. You know the ones:
NZTA explains the reasoning behind ramp signals on this old page (which hasn’t changed since the NZTAs predecessor agency over 5 years ago):
Currently traffic on the motorway is disrupted by ‘bottlenecking’.…
St Lukes Rd interchange to get bigger
The NZTA have awarded the contract for the “upgrading” of the St Lukes interchange and the widening of the motorway between there and Waterview. Here’s the press release:
The contract to construct the next stage of Auckland’s Western Ring Route – upgrading the Northwestern Motorway (State Highway 16) between the St Lukes Road and Great North Road interchanges – has been awarded to the Australian-based infrastructure company, Leighton Contractors.…
Does building roads harm the economy?
Most proposals to build new roads or widen existing ones seem to boil down to an ultimate belief that it will “help the economy”. Whether it’s by improving freight reliability or getting people to their jobs faster or helping business travel or whatever, there seems to be a fundamental belief among many that quite a strong relationship must exist between building more roads and improving the economy.…
Northern Motorway widening started
The governments announcement in June that they would fast track a number of (primarily road) projects has now seen the first result. Today John Key turned the sod on a project to widen the northern motorway northbound between Upper Harbour Highway and Grevelle Rd as well as some other works in the area which are designed to “ease congestion”.…
Highway Teardowns
Unfortunately, while freeways did provide vehicular access to downtown, they also disrupted the existing urban grid and street system. Freeways severed local commercial activity from customers, and many once vibrant streets now stand with shuttered businesses and negligible street activity. -Mayor’s Innovation Project
It is conventional wisdom that motorways or other high capacity, limited access roads have no place in productive urban environments.…
Overkill
We know that Auckland’s transport plans are completely unaffordable, a more interesting question is “why?” Much of the answer to that questions comes from what I refer to as “overkill”. Essentially, a solution that’s vastly oversized compared to the problem it’s trying to solve.…
More details on vehicle ownership over time
Yesterday I posted about the Infernal Combustion Engine, a piece discussing some of the issues we face of being so auto dependant. As part of that I also looked at some details about what has happened with vehicle ownership over the last 90 odd years and I also briefly talked about some trends in vehicle engine size. …
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