The impact of speed on our transit networks
One of the more common arguments we’ve seen against having light rail to the airport, even though it’s not only about the airport, is that heavy rail is faster. A simplified version of the argument is that our heavy rail trains can travel at up to 110km/h so that is better.…
53 Comments Penlink – two lanes or four?
There has been surprisingly little criticism of the Auckland Transport Alignment Project so far. One of the the only ones has been about the plan to build Penlink as a two lane road instead of four lanes. For example, the CEO of the National Road Carriers, David Atkin said:
Mr Aitken said the projects need to be future proofed now.…
Sunday reading 29 April 2018
Welcome back to Sunday Reading. These posts are now irregular, but hopefully still interesting. I’ll start off here with a bit of disappointing news from California where State Representative Scott Wiener’s housing bill was killed.
Benjamin Schneider, “YIMBYs Defeated as California’s Transit Density Bill Stalls“, CityLab.…
Flashback Saturday – LRT: the Seattle example
Every weekend we dig into the archives. This post, which is quite topical given announcements on Thursday, was first published in August 2016.
Auckland Transport have published a new version of their airport rail video, essentially stripping out the heavy rail parts while also adding a little bit more detail about the airport.…
ATAP 2.0 – wrapup
Words like transformational and step-change get thrown around far too often when talking about transport announcements. But I think yesterday’s release of the updated Auckland Transport Alignment Project is one announcement that certainly qualifies.
At $28 billion over the next decade, the plan the biggest we’ve seen and for the first time it’s fully funded too – although there are a couple of caveats on that¹.…
ATAP 2.0 – first details look great
Auckland’s next decade of transport is looking fantastic with latest version of the Auckland Transport Alignment Project just released by Transport Minister Phil Twyford and Mayor Phil Goff. We’ll have some more complete analysis but here are some of the highlights: It’s a fully funded, $28 billion package over the coming decade.…
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.…
How should smarter pricing affect business cases?
Through the Auckland Transport Alignment Project (ATAP), the former government and Council agreed that road pricing (which it called “smarter transport pricing” needs to be a key part of Auckland’s transport future. The new government, although occasionally sceptical about pricing, has continued investigation into it as part of the Congestion Question project.…
Cheaper Fares or Better Services?
The draft Government Policy Statement clearly indicates that the Government are keen on encouraging more people to use public transport. In the release for the GPS they state this about the 46% increase in funding for PT: This will support an expansion in public transport networks.…
The Politics of Road Safety
This is a guest post from Bevan Woodward. He is the project director for SkyPath and spokesperson for Movement, an alliance of national organisations seeking safe journeys for active transport users. bevan@movement.org.nz Last week Julie Anne Genter released an evaluation report on the previous Government’s road safety strategy.…
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