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.…
77 Comments

Ch-Ch-Changes

Submissions to the Productivity Commission’s Low-emissions economy draft report close today June 8th, here. Arrrg. There is a great deal that’s really good in the report, but one thing that I feel the Prodcom is missing is the changing nature of our cities, in particular Auckland.…
48 Comments

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.…
50 Comments

Why we do this

Here is a great 15 minute look back at the work of Streetsblog and Streetsfilms from New York, that articulates the motivation behind what we do here at Transportblog. However modestly compared to their output. This is a worldwide movement; the profound improvement of lives, one street at a time.…
8 Comments

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.…
35 Comments