Postcard from Sydney: March Madness
This is a guest post from reader Nik
With the start of the academic year in both secondary and tertiary institutions along with everyone having settled back into work, March has traditionally been the time of the year when Public Transport is strained the most, as is often talked about within the blog.…
11 Comments Queen St Light Rail
On the day that the Sydney Morning Herald runs an intelligent editorial showing a grown-up attitude to the disruption that comes with important infrastructure builds…
The Herald remains a strong supporter of the light rail project to run through the inner city and eastern suburbs, and urges the Baird government to prosecute the case forcefully for the line.…
Reflections on Melbourne and Sydney
2014 was an auspicious year. Whether by cosmic alignment or fickle chance, Easter Monday and Anzac Day fell in the same week, and I was able to shoot off to Melbourne and Sydney for ten days with only three days off from work.…
Transport’s not a left/right political issue
As I discussed yesterday the debate on big urban issues of housing and transport far too frequently descends into left/right debates and today I’m looking at transport.
One of the reasons this has come up is that we’ve had some interesting conversations on Twitter in the last few days with a couple of Nationals MPs, which apart from highlighting a scary lack of understanding about transport, inevitably touched on the issue about whether the transport policy that we generally advocate on this blog fits into the traditional “left-right” political spectrum.…
Sydney’s extended light-rail network
I guess this is what happens when you have a centre-right government that isn’t completely insane in its ideological dislike of public transport:
Premier Barry O’Farrell and Minister for Transport Gladys Berejiklian today announced light rail would be built through the Sydney CBD to Randwick and Kingsford to reduce congestion and revitalise the city.…
Form follows parking
Here’s a fairly random street in Sydney, Australia that looks like it’s a big box retail area with some office parks thrown in. You know, like the kind of thing you find in Auckland in places such as Albany, Wairau Park, Highbrook, Lincoln Road and of course Manukau.…
Traffic’s declining in Sydney too – so why don’t we get it?
Auckland is certainly not alone in experiencing a pretty dramatic drop in traffic growth in the past few years – calling into question massive roading projects relying on massive traffic growth projections for their justification. We have pointed out similar trends in the USA, Canada, the UK, Europe and now – Sydney:
Gavin Gatenby, the convenor of lobby group Ecotransit, said the NSW government’s support of the WestConnex motorway was “about supporting private vested interests that have sunk billions into building motorways”.…
Guest Post: Improving housing affordability
This is a Guest Post by commenter Tim Robinson
Fixing Auckland’s housing problems is rightly high on the local and national agenda. Barely a day goes by without the Herald trumpeting the one side or the other of the real estate prices argument, and Auckland Council acknowledges that the issue is a key consideration in the Auckland Plan.…
Sydney’s Rail Strategy
Recently the New South Wales Government released a long term rail strategy for Sydney. It makes for interesting reading. Like Auckland, Sydney is experiencing relatively fast population growth and expects to grow from its current population of 4.6 million to around 6 million by 2031.…
What’s Auckland’s future?
Sometimes it’s helpful to take a step back and try to see the big picture – the “forest for the trees” as the saying goes. While this blog focuses on transport, really it’s interested in Auckland’s future – what will this place be like in 10 years, 30 years, 50 years or even 100 years?…
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