Who will turn the transport supertanker around?
This article was first published on The Spinoff yesterday. Cool job alert! Waka Kotahi, the New Zealand Transport Agency, is looking for a new chair of the board, to guide the organisation through the next three to six years.
Okay, so maybe this is only cool to a small subset of transport and democracy nerds.…
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As of today, I am resigning from all roles at Greater Auckland.
I am delighted, and humbled, to advise that my application for a directorship on the NZTA board has been accepted. I am looking forward to working with my fellow board members and all the staff at the agency and its partners, to help deliver this important work for the whole nation.…
Staging the Northwestern
As described here, Auckland is in the middle of a multi-decade process of retro-fitting a Strategic Rapid Transit Network (RTN) to the city.
The process used to date for this is best described as incremental. All of our current RTN began very much below the ideal standard but have been more-or less constantly improved since.…
Completing the RTN
As I state in this recent article at The Spinoff I see Auckland as around half way through a roughly 30 year long programme to retro-fit a complete Rapid Transit Network to itself.
Cities are of course never finished, and nor are their transport systems, but at the end of this period Auckland will have something new and powerful in its very structure: A complete city-wide top tier integrated Strategic Transit Network fed and supported by the Frequent Network below it: A complementary mirror to the city’s motorway and arterial road networks.…
NZTA proposes massive nationwide safety improvement project
The Draft Government Policy Statement released in early April signaled a major shift in government transport priorities. One part of this was the funding for Rapid Transit, which has enabled a quick start to Light Rail procurement. Another major policy shift was that Safety was lifted to become one of the top 2 priorities.…
Rethinking the East-West Link
Alongside adopting the Congestion Free Network as a cornerstone for their Auckland transport policy, Labour’s recent announcement was encouraging because they vowed to fundamentally reconsider the East West Link project:
Some lower-value projects would be also delayed and the cost of the East-West Link would be reduced by adopting an option with a better benefit-to-cost ratio, saving $1.2bn.…
Light at the end of the Waterview Tunnel
After months of delays the opening of the Waterview tunnels is finally in sight with Transport Minister Simon Bridges announcing it will open in early July and that there will be open days over the next two weekends. That follows the ribbon cutting on Sunday.…
Flashback Saturday: Local roads getting screwed over
This post originally appeared in May 2012.
NZTA is funded from petrol tax and road user charges, which obviously comes from cars, trucks, vans and buses using fuel (or travelling kilometres) along our roading network. The theory is that this creates a relatively ‘user pays’ situation, with money raised from road users being spent on projects that benefit road users (including public transport, walking and cycling, which obviously reduce the number of cars that would otherwise be on the road).…
Advanced buses not a solution
Friday certainly turned out to be interesting following on from our post from that morning that the NZTA now supported Light Rail along Dominion Rd and to the Airport in the future. The council pulled down the document our post was based on, which was a waste of time given we’d already published our post.…
NZTA support light-rail to Airport
A briefing to Councillors (from page 251) included in an attachment for the Council’s Planning Committee meeting for next week says that both the NZTA and Auckland Transport boards have now agreed on a way forward for the city to airport corridor. …
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