Why Carmageddon never comes
The fear associated with even temporary reductions in road capacity in Auckland is often so extreme that this report from Joe Cortright in City Observatory, Why Carmaggedon never comes (Seattle edition), is worth drawing to everyone’s attention. It takes the example of the closure for demolition of the Alaskan Way, a 3.5km, double stacked, 6-lane, fugly as, harbour-severing, 1940s fly-over in Seattle, to illustrate a well observed feature of city traffic.…
86 Comments Copenhagen: Confirmation of the future sensual city
In August this year Greater Auckland reproduced a chapter I wrote for a book speculating on our future world, The Big Questions, in three posts; here, here, and here. Included was the section below describing the city centre. In bold is a short description of what I imagine the sensual experience of these future streets will be like:
The whole Queen Street valley will be car-free, plied only by emergency and delivery and service vehicles, the latter at set times.…
Cities need Transit, both to thrive, and to do so more equitably.
Continuing our summer holiday reading this New York Times article on New York’s Subway, The Case for the Subway, touches on many important issues. Its overt subject is the terrible current state of the Subway, but along the way it covers universal issues about how cities work and the role of effective Transit systems in successful cities.…
Houston, we have a problem
This is a Guest Post by Wellington Architect and regular reader Guy Marriage
For quite some time now, Demographia has been touting Houston, Texas, as the way forward for New Zealand, and especially Auckland, to copy their stunningly low housing construction costs.…
Democratic Tin: Observations from Bourke St
Melbourne has the largest surface Light Rail network in the world (there were larger ones, mainly in the Americas, but these all fell to the fashion of the mid last century for all-in motordom). And this network, despite its foibles and peculiarities, is part of what makes Melbourne such a successful, connected, and particular city.…
Auckland PT Performance Comparison 2017
Public transport in Auckland has come a long way over the last 10-15 years on the back of numerous improvements to the network. From the upgrading of the rail network to the building of the northern busway to improved local buses, all have played a part in the immense improvement in the PT network that we’ve witnesses.…
City Centre Streets for the 21st Century
Santiago de Chile is home to some 6m+ souls, its origins date back to the 16th Century, and it has south American largest, and still expanding, Metro system. But, like almost all cities coming out of the 20th Century, its city centre streets have been allowed to be dominated by vehicles, with all of the disbenefits this brings.…
The Ideology of Traffic
Sometimes we come across something that is so perfect and so timely that it just needs repeating as it is. This is one of those times. The following post by Charles Marohn is lifted in its entirety from StrongTowns.org The Ideology of Traffic by Charles Marohn The greatest accomplishment of any ideology is to not be considered an ideology; to be a belief system that is not considered a belief system.…
A Visit to Portland
This is a guest post by our most august regular reader Warren Sanderson.
Over many years I have developed a dislike for what the concentration of motorway/roading only expenditure is doing to our cities and particularly Auckland. This heavy concentration on roading expenditure with ever widening multi-lane roads is promoting unsustainable car dominance and frequent severance of neighbourhoods from parts previously closely aligned.…
Sunday reading 5 June 2016
Welcome back to Sunday reading this long weekend.
We start this week with a borrowed slide explaining the way that the quality of your city’s Transit system controls the quality of your driving commute: This explains what’s wrong with current expansion of SH16 and the completion of the Western Ring Route.…
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