Staging the Northwestern
As described here, Auckland is in the middle of a multi-decade process of retro-fitting a Strategic Rapid Transit Network (RTN) to the city.
The process used to date for this is best described as incremental. All of our current RTN began very much below the ideal standard but have been more-or less constantly improved since.…
106 Comments Rail Across the Waitematā: some thoughts
The North Shore Line, The Northern Line, Te Raki Tereina… NZTA in a recently released report showed that there is some urgency in starting work to replace the Northern Busway with a higher capacity rail system on a new crossing. This is because: Demand to access the city centre from the Shore is on a sustained growth path with ongoing growth on both sides of the harbour.…
Development update: June 2018
Here on Greater Auckland, we’ve got the sponsored RCG Development Tracker page which shows hundreds of housing projects across Auckland (and NZ): apartments, terraces, retirement villages etc. It also shows big commercial developments and Auckland’s rapid transit network.
After a great post from Matt the other week, I’ve updated the Development Tracker with the proposed light rail lines along Dominion Rd and out to the airport, and out to the North West.…
Light Rail Ticketing
Light rail plans are progressing fast, which got me thinking about the different options for doing ticketing for these services.
First off I think it is likely the service will have to either not accept cash fares or will need to provide ticket machines at all Light Rail stations.…
Light Rail is not really about the Airport
There’s been plenty of talk about light rail in the media and why we shouldn’t build it. So we thought we’d offer a different point of view. On Tuesday, the Herald published the below piece from me about it. There’s a lot more that I would have or could have said if it weren’t for word limit.…
Platform Screen Doors – Light Rail
We think Platform Screen Doors should be part of the City Rail Link project, in the underground stations. There are four main reasons for this: Lower operating costs as Air Conditioning/Heating are not lost, and items cannot be thrown on tracks;
Higher platform capacity as larger crowds can be accommodated without risk of people falling on tracks;
Higher resilience as the tracks cannot be accessed from platform by passengers;
Higher passenger satisfaction as creates feel of modern metro system as well as more effective air conditioning; Platform screen doors should be included day one of the CRL as adding them in later will cause unnecessary disruption.…
Crosstown Light Rail: Connecting to New Lynn
Recently I wrote a post about the feasibility of a cross-isthmus light rail line. This is shown in red in the map below and essentially extends the light-rail that is proposed along State Highway 20 between Mt Roskill and Onehunga further west towards Avondale.…
Caution needed over trackless trains
In the debate over light rail in Auckland, opposition to it generally falls into two camps that we should build heavy rail instead
that we can just use buses, especially new technology buses. In this post, I want to focus that second camp and particularly on that last part.…
Crosstown Light Rail
In the comments and on Twitter recently has been some discussion about what would a Crosstown Light Rail line look like, while I think we have a lot on our plate, there isn’t any harm in looking at how it could fit in.…
What a different Manukau Harbour Crossing could mean for Mangere
Recently I wrote about rethinking how we build light rail across the Manukau Harbour Crossing. While writing it, I also thought about how people have spent a lot of time talking about Onehunga, Dominion Rd, Queen St and the especially the Airport, but hardly any time actually considering how this line benefits the people of Mangere and the broader Southwest part of Auckland.…
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