Feb-19 Ridership

With the country rapidly moving towards lockdown, thinking about how many people used public transport last month doesn’t seem like a high priority, but then nor does a lot of other things. Over the last decade we’ve seen public transport use in Auckland grow like never before, rising by over 44 million trips to nearly 104 million and 60% of that was in just the last five years.…
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Feb-20 AT Board Meeting

Today is first Auckland Transport board meeting of the year and it’s an important one as it’s also the first one with new chair Adrienne Young-Cooper as well as board member Darren Linton. As usual, I’ve looked through the reports publicly available and here are some of the things that caught my attention.…
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2019 – A Year in Review

With 2019 drawing to a close I thought I’d pull together a quick post wrapping up the most important things that happened during the year. Thank you to everyone who has visited the blog and supported us in making Auckland greater City Rail Link The country’s biggest transport project got a billion dollars bigger this year as a result future-proofing for 9-car trains ($250m), increased contingency costs ($310m), increased construction costs ($327m) and other increases, such as property purchases ($152m).…
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Planning for Air Travel

This is a guest post by Paul Callister and Wallace Rae. As Auckland transitions from an ‘overgrown town’ to a ‘world-class city’, it faces many challenges. These aren’t just related to liveability concerns from our sprawling land use and high car dependency.…
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City centre employment keeps growing

Hottish off the press: there are now more than 120,000 people working in Auckland’s city centre,* making it the biggest hub for employment in New Zealand. Almost 3,000 jobs were added in the last year. That’s based on a fairly typical definition of the city centre, stretching from Wynyard Quarter to the eastern end of the ports, and inside the motorway noose (plus the western end of K Road).…
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Sep & Oct-19 Ridership

It’s been a while since we last talked about what’s happening with public transport ridership and cycleway use so this post will cover the high-level results for both September and October. For PT we won’t see the more detailed breakdown of the numbers until the next AT board meeting in December.…
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Gathering Momentum by Gathering Data

This is a post by Paul Callister and Heidi O’Callahan. What is required to start developing a co-ordinated passenger rail and bus network for the whole country? One important step, outlined in the Government Policy Statement, is ensuring we’re gathering the right, quality data: The NZ Transport Agency and regional authorities need to provide high quality analysis to input into a rigorous, fit-for-purpose investment analysis system.…
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Big projects change

The years of work and millions of dollars that have already been spent on designing and developing light-rail potentially end up going down the drain if the Government picks the Super Fund option. But as I’ll cover below, large projects not only tend to take a long time to deliver but significant changes in them are almost a certainty.…
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Flashback Saturday: The cost of space (for cars)

Every weekend we dig into the archives. This post by Peter was first published in June 2015. Earlier this month, urban policy researcher Todd Litman published a useful summary of some of his new research into the cost of sprawl: Our analysis indicates that by increasing the distances between homes, businesses, services and jobs, sprawl raises the cost of providing infrastructure and public services by 10-40 percent.…
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