A (more detailed and equitable) ode to time-of-use transport pricing
EYE CANDY WARNING: This post contains no pictures.
In a recent post I penned an “ode to demand-based transport pricing”. The main suggestion was that incorporating “time” into our transport pricing would be beneficial because it would help us to allocate our limited transport capacity to people who valued it more highly.…
20 Comments The elephant in the room: a familiar tale of traffic decline
While the UK trends have been around a bit longer than ours, this could very easily be a good description of the current disjoint between reality and the government’s transport policies in New Zealand:
Build on falling traffic trend – not on the countryside
10 November: Quarterly traffic figures are out, showing falling vehicle numbers and undermining the case for new roads.…
“It’s the economy stupid #3” – Is there an optimal city size?
Previous posts here and here have discussed how the growth of cities can be attributed to some underlying economic advantages, namely shorter travel distances and economies of scale in the presence of fixed costs.
In this post I want to flesh out these economic factors in more detail.…
Alten and Symonds Street – Destined for a smackdown?
A few weeks ago I wrote this post on red light running.
In my experience the intersection of Symonds and Alten Street suffers from this fairly regularly, especially in the PM peak when vehicles heading east onto Alten queue back across the intersection.…
Young people really are driving less
Another article on changing travel patterns – this time looking at the driving habits of younger Americans:
An April study by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group found that between 2001 and 2009 the average annual vehicle miles traveled by Americans ages 16 to 34 fell by close to a quarter, from 10,300 to 7,900 per capita (four times greater than the drop among all adults), and from 12,800 to 10,700 among those with jobs.…
Another Australian PPP fails – will we learn from it?
Some interesting news coming out of Australia today, with yet another transport public-private-partnership (PPP) on the brink of collapse, due to over-optimistic traffic forecasts. This time it’s the Airport Link toll road in Brisbane:
THE operators of Brisbane’s Airport Link have gone into a trading halt, amid increasing speculation about the company’s financial future following much lower than expected traffic volumes…
…It comes as the operator struggles to achieve even 50 per cent of its forecast traffic volumes of 135,000 vehicles a day.…
The Steady Transformation of Travel to the CBD
Despite the critics, Auckland’s city centre is probably in better shape than it has been for decades. Foot traffic is high, new streetscape improvements continue, Queen Street is clearly still extremely “hot property” and the place just feels vibrant. Looking into this steady, almost sneaky, transformation of downtown over the last ten years or so, I went searching for what seemed to possibly be the cause.…
Auckland’s red light district – is Central Government the problem?
The title of the post says it all really. Nonetheless it’s worth elaborating on a few interesting angles to this debate.
First some personal context. As a car-less household, I spend a lot of time walking around Auckland’s City Centre. When I do I’m constantly amazed by the number of drivers that run red lights. …
Tauranga Eastern Link – another white elephant motorway?
NZTA were pleased to announce on Wednesday that they are making good progress on the “Tauranga Eastern Link” road, a Road of National Significance that we haven’t paid much attention to in the past. Given our general disdain of the justification for projects given this title (Victoria Park Tunnel and Waterview Connection excepted) I thought I’d look in a bit more detail around what the Tauranga Eastern Link road actually is – and whether it falls into the category of pointless and stupid RoNS (like Puhoi-Wellsford, parts of the Waikato Expressway and most of the Wellington Northern Corridor project) or more reasonable RoNS (like the aforementioned Auckland projects and perhaps part of the Christchurch projects though I’m not too familiar with them).…
The Great Reset?
We have talked quite a bit recently about what is happening with traffic volumes, both here and overseas. If you haven’t seen those posts then a quick recap, all across the developed world we have seen stats showing that traffic and total distances travelled by people have not only stalled but fallen.…
Processing...