How did cars come to monopolise our streets?
You only need to look at this fantastic video of San Francisco’s streets in the very first years of the 20th century to get an understanding that the concept of shared streets, which Auckland seems to be embracing at the moment, is hardly a new one.…
Guest Post: Why are there cars on Queen St?
This is a Guest Post by regular commenter Patrick Reynolds and was originally published in Metro magazine
Queen St, from the water to Mayoral Drive, has an unusual and unexpected feature for a city street in Auckland. It’s easy to miss but it’s true: There is not one vehicle entrance to a building from Queen St.…
More detail about the City Centre Master Plan
I’ve discussed the City Centre Master Plan a few times on this blog previously, as it’s a pretty exciting document which seeks to transform Auckland’s City Centre from the car dominated place it is now to a truly world-class downtown, dominated by people rather than vehicles.…
Our street network working against us
The City Rail Link (CRL) is a vital project for the city however as we know the government commissioned review has rejected the business case for it. While many of us know that the review has many flaws, some of the recommendations made about how to improve the BC for it are sensible, in particular the need to get more people using the existing rail network.…
Elliott Street shared space opens
I wandered through the Elliott Street shared space today, a couple of hours after its official opening. It was really impressive: While the place was obviously busier than normal, due to it being the opening day, I started feeling a bit regretful that Elliott Street is a shared space rather than being fully pedestrianised – as it works so utterly amazingly when closed off to cars.…
Why are we so mean to pedestrians?
If there’s anything that annoys me, it’s how the design of the streets in Auckland is so frequently horrifically unfriendly to pedestrians. As I have pointed out before, there are busy intersections in the city centre that have traffic lights, but no pedestrian phase to them.…
How do we stop this?
I finally got around to taking a photo this evening that I’ve been meaning to take for weeks now – at the corner of Hobson and Victoria streets in downtown Auckland:
Note the green light in the background. It had actually been green for quite some time when I took the photo – there’s a bus just out of view to the right that missed an entire phase due to these idiots.…
The ultimate outcome of ignoring pedestrians
This is a pretty shocking video showing how pedestrians are treated along a major highway in auto-focused Atlanta. What is very interesting to note is how the USA is starting to see a shift in poverty from the inner city to the outer-suburbs – reversing the trend that occurred through most of the 20th century when the rich migrated to the suburbs, leaving the poor downtown: Watch the full episode.…
Herald wants a pedestrianised Queen Street?
I’m generally quick to criticise the NZ Herald for its backward thinking on transport and urban planning matters, so I feel a bit bad for taking so long to comment on what was actually an exceptionally good editorial from Wednesday last week, that pushes the case for further pedestrian improvements to Queen Street.…
Exciting ideas in Waitemata Local Board plan
Digging through the details of how Auckland Council operates is quite a challenging task: what is the responsibility of the council, what is the responsibility of any of the CCOs and how on earth do these “local boards” fit into the whole thing?…
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