We would like to invite all friends, family and supporters of the TransportBlog to celebrate the launch of our new organisation Greater Auckland. This is happening Sunday, June 21st at 3pm. There will be nibbles and mulled wine provided followed by a few speeches. For more details check out our Facebook event. Stay tuned for more information about Greater Auckland.
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Sounds good
Yay! Though mulled wine is an undrinkable aberration….
Mulled wine?
Okay might be a McDonalds run for mind rotting Sprite afterwards but otherwise as Patrick said YAY
Could you explain a little bit about Greater Auckland please?
Greater Auckland is an incorporated society that is now the formal structure that supports and runs transportblog.
We have felt for a while that while the blog is just fine as it is that it does need to get a little more structure to its foundations. More details will emerge including the opportunity for membership and for us to undertake more events and functions outside of the blog.
More will be revealed on Sunday.
Great idea, thanks for the explanation!
A super-blog for the super-city
By the way, now that Fran Wilde has been rolled from the chair of Greater Wellington (ostensibly because of her strident pushing for a Wellington super-city), we might get a more sensible transport policy down here. Here’s hoping anyway.
Hmmmm. Does that mean that Transport Blog is going to be even more Aucklandly-focused ? Does that then give Dave B (Wellington) a chance to set up a rival, Wellington-oriented version of Transport Blog?
And will the new “parent” i.e. Greater Auckland, actually start paying some pocket money to it’s writers? There’s no nasty click-bait adverts, so i don’t know how you guys survive, and I’m very glad indeed that there are no adverts – but how do you get to monetise a volunteer organisation? Looking forward to finding out…
There’ll be a lot more tomorrow but the blog will still cover other areas like we do know – although like now our primary focus will be on Auckland as simply that’s where we live. We’d love the blog to start paying us a little but we’ll have to see how things go and no we don’t intend to ad adverts to the blog.
If anything it may free the blog to be less AK focussed, but that depends on writers from across the country offering posts from their local cities.
However, more local city blogs would be great too. Hamilton Urban Blog is a great example. Welly can surely can muster the creative energy to support one? Though we’ed hate to lose your contributions Guy and Dave B.
What I am impressed with, is that you can keep the blog format alive and relevant in today’s fast-changing world. It’s difficult, with people’s attention being increasingly focused on other, more social forms of media. My students are on facebook 24/7, but even that is changing to other media, like twitter and tumblr, and those forms prioritise the pretty picture and the glib 140 character response over the more thoughtful written blogpost.
In Wellington we used to have the excellent Wellurban blog by Tom Beard (now discontinued), as well as the Arch Centre website (now very quiet), and the Eye of the Fish (still going, just), but the Transport scene in Wellington is curiously disjointed. Brent Efford writes a column, but it is not as coordinated as your splendid work in Auckland.
I’m all for having more content from other cities, if people are going to write it. And maybe that’ll be easier to do if we can pay people to do it. It’d be nice to have at least a monthly Wellington post, a monthly Christchurch post etc. I’m trying to do a little bit of that with the Development Tracker posts, but it’d be good to have more.
In Wellington there’s the Sustainable Wellington Transport blog, https://wellingtontransport.wordpress.com
so I assume that Greater Auckland will be setting itself up as a green lobbyist type group akin to Generation Zero and CFBT and a mechanism to make money? Not a complaint but is good to see the blog coming out rather than distancing itself from what it really is and its agenda.
The intention isn’t so much a lobby group as much as a think tank for ideas, opinions and research, but no doubt elements of both. I wouldn’t say green however, at least issues like the environment, climate change, pollution aren’t a major focus so much as housing, transport, governance and the economy. Many of the supporters are fiscal conservatives although admittedly we all seem to be socially liberal.
Yes there is a medium term goal to collect enough revenue to allow the blog and GA to be self sustaining and stable, rather than relying so heavily on the spare time of volunteers.
Lol so anyone who sets up an organisation is suddenly a Green party lobby group. We get support from people with a wide range of political views and just yesterday the ACT party was praising one of our posts.
As for our agenda, it’s the same as it’s always been, to make Auckland a great city and do that using evidence based analysis.
No Matt, anyone who sets up a group that Jan and his ilk disapprove of is a “Green Party, etc. etc ad nauseam…..
They think it is a pejorative. It’s simpler than coming up with a logical argument – and simple is the name of their game.
Thank you for all your effort in this Blog. I hope that you are able to continue in the same way. But thank you for all you’ve done to date and I like your evidence based analysis.
enjoy reading your Blog and your tireless advocacy for a better Auckland