Auckland Transport Blog

I am up north on holiday at the moment so don’t expect any posts for a few more days I am sorry.

Interestingly, on our way up north we found a way to bypass Warkworth by going via a few gravel roads behind Puhoi. I wonder if it would make some sense to seal those roads as a quick and simple way to provide an alternative to the highly congested SH1 through there.

Well Merry Xmas everyone. I’ve finished with work for the year and a couple of weeks of very nice holidays beckon. It’s likely that my posting will reduce in frequency over the next couple of weeks, particularly in early January as I’m likely to be out of Auckland for a few days. I think it’s unlikely there will be any major transport stories, although it will be interesting to follow the works done to the rail corridors over the Xmas break.

As a Xmas present here’s a truly awesome video of Vancouver’s recently opened “Canada Line“:

A number of factors have combined to lead to my posting on this blog grinding to a bit of a halt lately – which I thoroughly apologise for. Things will hopefully be fully up and running again in a couple of days time.

In the meanwhile, ARTA’s July monthly business report is out – go have a look if you’re curious here.

It’s been a crazy weekend, shifting house and all. I’m still waiting for the internet to be hooked up, so it might be a day or two before I can get around to writing a “proper” blog post. So please excuse the lack of replies in comments threads and the lack of moderation in the last couple of days.

Over the next week things might also be a bit crazy, as I have two work trips to Wellington between now and the middle of next week.

I have formulated a few good ideas for blog posts, but suggestions are always welcome!

I don’t actually like shifting house – although you’d probably never guess it by the number of times I have shifted over the past few years. Life seems to be stacked against me living in the same place for more than a year or so. This time around in many ways it’s particularly frustrating – because we really like the house we’re living in. However, one of the big down-sides of renting and not owning one’s house is that you don’t have an enormous amount of say in what happens with regards to things like your landlord wanting to renovate the house so they can shift into it. Because our lease came to an end and could only be renewed for another month (until renovation work began) we have also had to be in an enormous hurry to find another place to live – which is rather less than idea when you are wanting to ensure that you find a house that’s good enough to make sure you’re going to avoid the whole issue of shifting house yet again in a few months time.

So the last week has been a rather stressful mad rush to find a place to live in, but last night we it confirmed that we are shifting and we have found a place to move to. It’s pretty close to where we live now, just across Jervois Road and down a street off it’s other side – so I still have just as good access into the city via bus each work day, Leila can still walk to her work at the Children’s Bookshop in Ponsonby and I can still easily access the North Shore to pick up my daughter Amalia when I need to. Further positives are that the new place is much more modern it has a dish-washer (I will no longer be able to hassle the government to buy me one as part of a time-savings-benefits analysis) and it should be much warmer than this place for the last little bit of winter (technically it is spring, but it’s damn cold today!) On the down side, we will have to say goodbye to our lovely villa and shift into a somewhat characterless 1970s apartment building/sausage flat. That will probably be a tricky process as I really love the character of our house, and of our street.

And of course, there’s the hassle of shifting house. At the moment we haven’t even started, and the whole process seems utterly daunting ahead. I suppose the first step is to get some boxes so that we can start to pack away the non-essentials, but it’s always amazing how much of your stuff seems to be ‘essential’ so therefore can’t be packed away until the last minute. Oh well, I should know what to do – I’ve done it enough times!

Well I have found myself a new job, which is pretty exciting. I still need to work out the details of how to ensure what I say on here isn’t in conflict with anything to do with my new job, but as it is not related to transport I don’t think that would be much of a problem.

One pretty cool part of the new job is that I will be in the city full-time, starting next Monday. This means that I won’t have to be reliant upon my car at all to get me to or from work. I will be a daily bus user for the first time in many years. This is good in that I can “walk the walk” a bit more in terms of encouraging the uptake of public transport.

I’ve been slowly putting together a fantasy city for a couple of years now, hand-drawn with the help of Photoshop to stitch it all together. It’s now a 361 MB photoshop document, on a canvas that’s now 5.8m wide and 3.0m high – so I’m probably never going to be able to post much of it on here.

Nevertheless, one of the most fun parts of designing that city has been coming up with a rail system to serve it. At a guess there are probably around 5 million people living in my city – and considering it doesn’t have many motorways at all, the place is pretty reliant upon its rail system to shift people around. So here it is:

For a closer look, and I do strongly suggest that you have a closer look at it to make any sense of it all, click here (11mb PDF document).

The city has 12 Metro Lines and a great pile of other commuter rail lines. The metro lines are the coloured ones and the commuter rail are the black lines that spread out from three main railway terminals.

Some (slightly out of date) details on the Metro System are included below:

I’m not really sure how I would calculate the daily usage of each line, or whether I’ve got the average speeds of each line at a realistic level (they seem quite slow).

Auckland really does seem to be the wrong city for me to live in when I look at all this! We can’t even sort out electrification.

It’s just over a month since we moved house now, so I’m starting to get used to living in my nice Herne Bay half-villa. I still miss the old house though at times: it’s spaciousness, the bedroom, the sizeable lounge, the laundry that wasn’t hidden in a cold and dark shed at the bottom of the garden. I also miss Sandringham in many ways too. I really liked its cultural diversity, the way it was a kind of ‘mini-India’ with all the Indian restaurants and spice shops down the road. It certainly had great character. Of course that’s not to say I don’t like the new place, or that I think we made any mistake at all in shifting – as I really do like where we live now. I really like the house, even the fact that it is small in some ways (doesn’t take as long to clean!), I like how beautiful the neighbourhood is, I like how it’s so cose to the city and I like the really awesome cafe up the road. I very much like being close enough to the North Shore that I can have Amalia for dinners during the week.

Herne Bay doesn’t quite feel like “home” yet. I guess that will take a bit of time. I mentioned to Leila this evening that I was only just starting to get to the point where I don’t need to look out for road signs coming along Jervois Road, and just KNOW where my street is. It’s also strange to live in such a “white” suburb. Coming from super-multi-cultural Sandringham it just feels odd to only see NZ European people on my buses, or walking around the neighbourhood. I think perhaps along with Devonport, the Herne Bay area must be one of the “whitest” parts of Auckland. In places like Remuera I think there’s a pretty high Asian population. If anything this feels like a slight negative to me, as I quite like seeing a wide variety of cultures in and around Auckland. I guess wandering around the CBD still provides that to some extent.

I have to admit it’s a little depressing seeing the seasons change towards winter at the moment. For the last couple of weekends we’ve been very lucky with the weather and I’ve spent Sunday afternoons lazing on the couch that sits on our porch, listening to the cricket. I will certainly miss that over the winter months.

Today is a very good day for Auckland. Firstly, it’s Leila’s birthday – happy birthday!

Secondly, the Royal Commission has recommended a single city for Auckland’s local government future. It has also recommended some excellent stuff for public transport. Everything is available to read here.

I’m yet to read through everything, but from what I have read it looks like very good news for public transport. ARTA is to be replaced by a Regional Transport Agency, that will be much more powerful and take on all the responsibilities for transport in the region. The kind of integration I’ve been begging for over the past few years. The Royal Commission also clearly values public transport a lot more than the Government, so it will be interesting how Steven Joyce and his bunch of roads-crazy supporters respond to this.

I’m pretty happy about it all. I will post more details in the next few days. I just hope the government doesn’t mess with their recommendations too much.

Well our house-shift is almost complete. We just need to finish off cleaning up the old house, and unpack a few final boxes, and it will be totally done. Waiting for the phone and internet to be flicked over to the new place is a bit of a pain in the ass too – come on Vodafone if you’re going to charge me $150 for the privilege of moving house you should at least get your ass into gear and not force me to wait days upon days upon days for someone to simply unplug one cord and plug it in somewhere else.

In any case, moving has been its usual mission. It started off last week with us starting to box things up. However, there were pretty big limits as to what could actually be boxed up – due to us having to continue living in the house in the meanwhile. Also, sorting out whose stuff was whose was a rather long process, and also meant that actually getting things packed up and ready to go was harder than what I’d probably anticipated. On Thursday night, last week, we got the keys and started shifting boxes to the new place. A few smallish pieces of furniture also got moved, but we couldn’t really start on the big stuff quite yet – until we had made the decision that “yes, we are actually shifting today”. That day was Saturday, which turned into a rather marathon length day of carrying heavy furniture out of the old place, into a trailer or the back of a car – then driving what felt like the longest 7km trip across Auckland ever – before unloading and heading back. Setting up the new house has involved numerous re-shifting of furniture: especially in the lounge where I think we’re up to the third or fourth variation on how all the furniture will be organised.

Since then there has been more unpacking, more trips back to the old house to clean it up (which will hopefully be concluded tonight) and ever more reorganisations at the new place. We have to keep the cats in for a few weeks so they don’t try to run back to the old place, which is a bit stressful having to work out where they are every time you open a door, but I guess that’s life. It is nice to be so close to the city, and to be able to just pop up the road to a really good selection of shops (on Jervois Road). The driving to the Shore to pick up Amalia is probably about 7 minutes quicker in each direction, which will add up, though probably my biggest annoyance is that I now have to drive to work each day (at least when I’m not working in town).

One of the strangest aspects of the whole “moving” process is when we’re back at the old place. It feels so familiar and still very much like ‘home’ to me. I guess we were there for almost two years, so it’s not surprising that it would feel so homely. Having it empty, and knowing that you’re moving on, actually feels quite sad – like you’re leaving a good friend behind, knowing for a fact that you will soon never see them again. Leila put it quite aptly, when she said that “it feels like you’ve broken up with your partner and are coming to the realisation of how much you did love them and how much you took them for granted”. I’m sure that over time the new place will start to feel like home, but at the moment I certainly do find myself already missing our old house and realising what an awesome place it was.