Why can’t you walk to the museum?
Lately I’ve spent a lot of time jogging in the Domain, taking every lane and pathway I can find in and around the park. Recently one thing has dawned on me, it is simply impossible to walk to the museum on a footpath.…
47 Comments Auckland’s mass grave
Not many people realise this but there is a mass grave in central Auckland, the final resting place of hundreds of our city’s pioneers. Folks using the new Grafton Cycleway might have caught a glimpse of this as they ride past: Theses pioneers weren’t buried in a mass grave however, they were all respected and beloved family members who were laid to rest in their own graves.…
How Auckland will soon become one of the best cities in the world
Matt’s posts last month on the changes Auckland’s experienced over the last ten years and what might happen over the next ten years got me thinking. Here’s where I think the city could be in ten years:
Auckland will have the best transit system in Australasia.…
Why Demographia’s data is irrelevant and misleading
Demographia is a pro-sprawl think tank in the USA that publishes density and house price data for cities across the world. They’re often seen using their statistics to argue that the only way to deliver affordable housing is with suburban fringe expansion into greenfields land.…
The costs and trade-offs of free public transport in Auckland
One perennial discussion in transport circles is whether we shouldn’t just do away with public transport fares completely and make the whole network free of charge. Why not fully subsidise the network as a public service using public monies as we do with most education, healthcare and other social benefits?…
Postcard from Wuppertal
…from where you say? Wuppertal! It’s a little German city I just dropped in on while passing through from Hamburg to Cologne.
Why would I bother stopping in a small nondescript city on the outskirts of the Rhine-Ruhr? There is only one reason to visit Wuppertal, the Wuppertaler Schwebebahn!…
Postcard from New York
As far as cities go, New York is *the* superlative. At once soaringly vertical and unfathomably broad. Dense and constrained, yet with an expansive commuter belt spread over three states. A place where local neighborhood hangouts sit a block away from global institutions.…
Postcard from Washington DC
A fairly quick post from the capital of the United States. Central Washington is exactly as you’d expect: a grand planned city of monuments and monumental vistas. It is a place designed to inspire awe with a scale that renders humans as insignificant.…
Postcard from Chicago
One of Chicago’s many nicknames is ‘The City With Clout’, and the the reason it is so big is because of the transport connections afforded by it’s strategic position central to the United States. It was first picked as a portage site to drag boats between the upper reaches of the Mississippi River (which provides a navigable route across the continent to the southern states and the Caribbean and on to the worlds oceans), and the Great Lakes (which provide access to the vast interior of the north and access the Atlantic via St Lawrence river through Quebec).…
Postcard from San Francisco
San Francisco is a city that is hard on the knees. It’s hilly, really really hilly. The streets are laid out in a classic grid form with criminal disregard to the natural topography. Particularly downtown there are many roads that literally go straight up a small mountain.…
Processing...