Harbour Bridge traffic flows
One of the many reasons why I oppose an additional road crossing of the Waitemata Harbour (along with the insane price tag and the horrific environmental effects) is that I simply don’t think it’s necessary. Let’s take a look at monthly averaged daily traffic flows across the Harbour Bridge over the past few years – thanks to this excellent data from NZTA: The gaps in the data (it would be really nice having the earlier months in 2007 in particular) limit comparison to some extent, particularly as 2008 was an incredibly unusual year for traffic volumes (it’s when petrol prices skyrocketed through $2 a litre for the first time).…
14 Comments Walk the Victoria Park Tunnel
On November 7th the Victoria Park Tunnel will open to traffic – somewhat ironically (given how many motorway projects were built ‘for the Rugby World Cup’) just a few days after a certain tournament finishes. A week before the tunnel opens to traffic though, there will be the ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity to walk through it, on October 29th.…
July NZTA Board Papers
NZTA continue to refuse to publish their board papers online (even though they spend around $3 billion of taxpayers’ money a year), so in the cause of increased transparency I have been doing Official Information Act requests for their board papers for a while now.…
Aligning our plans
There are a huge number of very important plans for Auckland’s future out for consultation at the moment, as I commented on in this previous post. However, one key thing will be to ensure they align with each other – as it’s pretty silly for one plan to be promoting something that would completely undermine what another plan is trying to achieve.…
Looking closer at the Harbour Crossing proposal
The most expensive transport project outlined in the Auckland Plan (and that’s quite an achievement in a transport chapter full of incredibly expensive transport projects) is not a rail project, but rather another motorway: the $3.9-$5.3 billion additional harbour crossing project.…
What is the holiday highway’s BCR?
There was an interesting exchange in parliament yesterday about the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” – and in particular focusing on the issue of whether the Minister was confident the project still represents good value for money. Here’s the video: Here’s the full discussion.…
NZTA revisiting their assessment of PT projects
One thing that came across most clearly in the excellent Radio NZ piece about the City Rail Link project that played on Sunday morning was that the difference between the government’s measurement of the project’s cost-effectiveness and the assessments undertaken for Auckland Council doesn’t just come down to whether one is right and one is wrong.…
Secrecy hurts the transport debate
Last week something rather sad happened. After my blog post on the systems used to track buses around Auckland brought attention to a fairly new blog on transport issues in Auckland, there was obviously some pretty messy stuff happening behind the scenes which led to the aforementioned blog being taken down, apparently because it had ‘overstepped the mark’ and shared information it shouldn’t have.…
Waterview Connection contract awarded
Yesterday NZTA announced that Fletcher Construction, along with a bunch of other companies, forming what’s called the “Well-Connected” consortium, have won the contract for the Waterview Connection project:
NZTA awards contract for New Zealand’s biggest-ever roading project
New Zealand’s biggest and most complex roading project – Auckland’s Waterview Connection – is a step closer to completion with the NZ Transport Agency’s announcement today that it has chosen the preferred tenderer for the project’s construction.…
Northern Busway saved from HOVs
Over the last couple of years there have been some worrying rumours circling around that high-occupancy vehicles would be allowed on the Northern Busway. This leads right back to the original resource consenting process, which allowed up to a set number of these vehicles to be allowed on the busway.…
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