Taking a second look at North Shore Rail
Nick’s post a few days back on looking at a Vancouver Skytrain type solution for providing the North Shore with a long-term rapid transit system (as well as other areas, but I think North Shore is the one which makes the most sense initially) inspired a lot of discussion.…
32 Comments Making best use of comparator city studies
Jarrett Walker’s Human Transit blog has a post up about the study which compares Auckland to 13 other somewhat similar cities that I posted about yesterday. The post also usefully links to a full copy of the report. Jarrett helped put together the study, which compares many elements of Auckland’s public transport system to systems in Wellington, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Edmonton, Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver, Honolulu, Portland and Seattle, coming to the general conclusion that on a lot of measures Auckland falls dead last.…
Auckland’s PT: expensive and poorly used
An Auckland Council report on various aspects of our transport system makes a number of comparisons of Auckland’s public transport system with various cities in Australia, Canada and the USA – as well as Wellington. The cities used to compare Auckland against, including their population and what different technologies their PT system includes, is shown in the table below: These are a good range of cities to compare Auckland’s performance against, in my opinion.…
Keeping Track newsletter
Auckland Transport has launched what I think is a good initiative, by having a bi-monthly newsletter that discusses improvements to the rail network throughout Auckland – known as “Keeping Track”. The first version of the newsletter can be viewed here, and they will be handed out to rail passengers over the next week or so.…
Bus route planning – a challenging balancing act
The significant changes proposed to buses in central Auckland, plus my recent blog posts about how to improve bus flow through the city centre have highlighted to me what a challenging balancing act it must be for people whose job it is to improve the bus route network.…
Auckland Transport Blog v Auckland Transport’s website
When it was decided that the new transport agency in Auckland would simply be called “Auckland Transport“, I thought it was amusing that if they ever wanted to run a blog, I’d got there first with the name of this blog.…
Vancouver’s TravelSmart
Vancouver in Canada is a city that Auckland can learn a lot from in terms of improving our transport system and the general quality of our urban environment. Vancouver has many similarities to Auckland, a constrained geography, a similar density and a similarly low proportion of jobs in its central city.…
Vancouver vs Auckland: the case for openness
I’ve talked a lot about the need for the new Auckland Transport CCO to be open, transparent and accountable about what it does – and how this will be a dramatic change from the highly secretive agency that ARTA was. There were some very positive steps towards this last week, with Auckland Transport announcing at the first meeting of their board that all future meetings will be held in public.…
Why “Auckland Transport” needs to engage with the public
Last week I asked the question of whether the Auckland Transport CCO would become a “secretive agency”, like ARTA has been, or whether it would be publicly open, accountable and transparent. While my concern in that blog post was about the specific question of whether Auckland Transport will publish agendas and minutes from their Board Meetings online (and there’s still no sign that they will), the extent to which Auckland Transport engages with the public – or conversely the extent to which it undertakes most of its work in secret – will be a key factor in whether the agency becomes a success or whether it ends up being a failure.…
Vancouver’s “Buzzer” blog
While browsing through a few North American transport blogs I found myself looking at the “Buzzer blog”, from Vancouver. The interesting thing about Buzzer, is that it is a blog run by Translink – the organisation which operates Vancouver’s public transport system.…
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