CBD Rail Tunnel Study Announced
Well after a lot of bad news relating to public transport recently, it’s very nice to see some good news emerging for once. ARTA and KiwiRail have announced a jointly funded study into Auckland’s CBD Rail Tunnel project, to determine the best route, the best station locations and an economic justification for the project.…
14 Comments Details of electrification cutback revealed
As rumoured last week, the government has indeed been exploring options to cut back Auckland’s electrification project – so that it can keep within the very tight budget set for the project. Full details of the proposed changes are included in a report here.…
If I could change 2 things about transport policy…
They would be: To remove the complex funding arrangements for different types of transport projects, where you have perverse situations like NZTA promoting a Northern Busway extension to Orewa that would be completely pointless because they have the funds but can’t direct them to more necessary projects like Auckland’s CBD Rail Tunnel.…
Carparks everywhere!
A few days back I wrote a scathing blog post on minimum parking requirements, and how they are a huge hidden subsidy for private vehicles. Not only that, but MPRs actually completely destroy the urban fabric of our town centres.
Let’s take a look at Manukau City Centre as an example.…
Joyce’s $2 billion pet project
It’s a real struggle to get funding for public transport projects – particularly for rail projects it seems. There are a couple of classic examples of exactly how difficult it is in the Auckland Region. The first example is the CBD Rail Tunnel, where planning progress on this important project is slowly starting to grind into action – although funding for it is still about as far from confirmed as possible.…
New Public Transport cut by $63m
Well I’ve done a bit more fisking of the figures in terms of focusing on what the National Land Transport Programme – announced today – has done to the amount of funding available from NZTA for public transport infrastructure projects in Auckland over the next three years.…
2009-2012 NLTP – predictable roadsfest
The 2009-2012 National Land Transport Programme – which details all the projects that will receive funding from the National Land Transport Fund (NLTF) – has been released today. It’s quite a stylishly put together document, and includes an Auckland section – to make life easy for people like me looking to see if anything unexpected has emerged.…
Exploring why Auckland’s PT is so bad
Hopefully one of the most useful aspects of this blog for readers is that I can do all the tricky stuff – digging through incomprehensible transport committee agendas, scouring ARTA monthly business reports and keeping watch on all new transport announcements – and then break it all down into somewhat readable chunks for your average person to make sense from all this mess.…
The Auckland Transport Agency
It’s quite bizarre finding myself agreeing with Steven Joyce, and disagreeing with Mike Lee, on a transport matter – but hey, I guess one can always be surprised. Yesterday, the government announced that the transport arm of the future Auckland Super-City will be established along similar lines to ARTA, and will be called the “Auckland Transport Agency”, or ATA for short I suppose.…
Electrification – questions in parliament
Well someone in parliament has finally got around to asking the government about the delays in the announcement of funding for Auckland’s electric trains, thank you Keith Locke. Today’s parliamentary questions on the issue provide a bit more information, but certainly aren’t particularly comforting that we’re not going to end up with the half-baked system I was worried about in my post yesterday.…
Processing...