Seattle moves on Transit
Another great video from the ever excellent Street Films highlights the work being done in Seattle to make the city particularly more PT friendly but also more bike friendly. Seattle is a perhaps one of the more useful comparator cities for Auckland due to its similar geography and topography challenges.…
34 Comments LRT: The Seattle example
Auckland Transport have published a new version of their airport rail video, essentially stripping out the heavy rail parts while also adding a little bit more detail about the airport. Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects is it shows a bit of how light rail would get through Onehunga.…
Postcards: Street Facing Units
One of my favorite aspects of Vancouver urban design is the way that buildings meet the street. This reminds me of classic urban neighbourhoods of New York and Philadelphia with their stoops or the humble porch of bungalows and cottages across California.…
Postcard from Seattle
On first impressions Seattle is a lively and interesting place, but perhaps a little, er, grungy. It’s a hilly city with a downtown built across a reclaimed tidal beach and nearby cliffs which have overtime been regarded into some very steep streets.…
Campbell Live’s great urban episode
On Monday night Campbell Live dedicated an entire show to urban issues.
The first segment looked at density in Seattle showing that done well it can be popular and not a blight on the landscape. Next up was an interview with Janette Sadik-Khan And lastly a few vox-pops from what appears to be on Ponsonby Rd.…
Don’t believe the traffic projections
We have frequently raised concerns about projected future traffic growth, given that in recent years there has been an extended flat-lining of traffic growth. What’s perhaps most concerning about these projections is how they ignore what has actually happened in the recent past and how those producing the projections don’t seem to learn from past mistakes.…
Zero Parking Developments
For good reason there has been a lot written recently about the influence of parking policy on good urban outcomes. Parking policy strongly affects trip generation, mode choice, urban form, and housing affordability. While parking reform may seem radical today in Auckland, it is already being widely implemented across North America.…
Auckland’s PT: expensive and poorly used
An Auckland Council report on various aspects of our transport system makes a number of comparisons of Auckland’s public transport system with various cities in Australia, Canada and the USA – as well as Wellington. The cities used to compare Auckland against, including their population and what different technologies their PT system includes, is shown in the table below: These are a good range of cities to compare Auckland’s performance against, in my opinion.…
1960s thinking alive and well in Wellington
As much as I think Puhoi-Wellsford is a stupid project and a complete waste of money, I have now been convinced that it is nowhere near the worst of the Roads of National Significance. That incredibly dubious prize must, without a doubt, go to Wellington’s Northern Corridor RoNS.…
Frequent Network Mapping
I have mentioned on many occasions in the past how Auckland’s bus route maps look like someone “threw spaghetti at a wall”. Let’s have a look at the eastern isthmus area as a classic example of this:
This map is actually completely useless – except for reinforcing the point that Auckland’s bus network is extremely complicated and difficult to understand.…
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