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.…
61 Comments 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.…
Rethinking the Manukau Harbour Crossing
With the election of a new Government, it is highly likely we will see Light Rail from the City to the Airport via Dominion Rd and the Southwest built within the next decade. This was not only a campaign policy of the Labour party but a major part of the confidence and supply agreement between the Labour Party and the Greens.…
10 Years
Change and Continuity Rather than just look ahead a short distance I thought it may be productive to project forward a decade or so into Auckland’s future urban form. Partly as this is surprisingly easy because of the long lead in times for urban infrastructure, we know what’s coming, and partly because a longer look ahead gives us a better sense of the what the coming change is likely to mean.…
What makes a good light-rail route different from a good busway route?
While the “bus versus light-rail” argument over Dominion Road and Airport “mass transit” is now settled, it is inevitable that this argument will come up over and over again as we develop Auckland’s strategic public transport network over the coming years.…
Northwest Light Rail Thoughts
In the Congestion Free Network 2, we floated the idea of Northwestern Light Rail along State Highway 16, rather than a Busway. We did this for a few reasons: Aspirational: We suspected that like the Northern Busway the Northwest Busway would also be a victim of its own success.…
Airport Rapid Transit isn’t really about the Airport
The idea of providing Airport rail through a short spur from Puhinui is one of those ideas that continues to pop up. It emerged again in an opinion piece the NZ Herald ran just over a week ago (which was oddly a repeat of a piece they ran exactly a month earlier).…
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