Tomorrow evening I’m giving a public talk about public transport in Auckland, organised by a group called Generation Zero. Here are the details from Facebook:
Unreliable, expensive, slow, inconvenient, useless are just a few of the words that might come to mind when one thinks of public transport in Auckland.
Do you want to better understand why and how things got so bad? OR are you just plain sick of it and want to do something about it?
Joshua Arbury, Planner and blogger on Auckland transport will shed some light on the history and politics behind our current situation. This will be followed by a facilitated discussion on what we as young people can do to ensure that the transport system of the future is affordable, reliable and sustainable.
Location: Room 3.401, Engineering School, Auckland University Time: 26 July · 18:30 – 19:30
I’m going to discuss quite a few things, firstly looking back at some key moments in Auckland’s transport history then looking forward to changing transport trends in Auckland, plus where we need to go in the next 10-20 years. As well as looking at necessary funding changes to enable a fundamental shift in our transport system, I will also look at ways we need to change our PT system to make it more efficient and effective: that we can significantly improve PT even within our current funding constraints.
There will be plenty of opportunity for questions and discussion I hope.
Well a pretty amazing and unexpected day today. My fiancee Leila was due to have our baby on July 14th, but it seems that the little thing was a bit impatient and couldn’t wait that long. Cue very hurried labour and a gorgeous little girl born at 12.04pm today. While she’s a bit smaller than average – due to her being five weeks early – she’s in good health. Hopefully by the time she’s a teenager she’ll be able to ride trains through the central city, out to the airport and potentially with a North Shore line not being too far away.
Blogging might be a bit light in the next wee while (although I am off work, so there might potentially be even more posts than usual). Now, just need to think of some names.
As will be obvious to all, the blog is finally back online after being deactivated by my hosting company at around 7.30pm last night. Apparently something in the database was causing very long delays and crashing their servers.
Through the whole mad process of fixing things up I must say I have been really unimpressed by Blue Host, the hosting company I currently use – so I’m looking for a new location to host the blog. Preferably in New Zealand.
Many thanks to Cam Pitches and Lynn Prentice for assisting in helping me in both helping to resolve (and merely understand) the problems, and for setting up backups that I will be using to shift things to another host as soon as possible.
Let’s hope this doesn’t happen again and sorry for any inconveniences.
Right, I’m off on a quick holiday to Sydney for the next few days! I look forward to riding a few trains and learning a bit more about how both political parties in the upcoming NSW state election appear to be outbidding each other in their promises to expand Sydney’s rail system.
There should be internet where I’m staying so I hope to keep updating the blog – with a few Sydney specific posts I imagine!
My word, what a truly horrible afternoon. Since about 1.30pm – when I found out about today’s Christchurch earthquake – it has been a truly surreal afternoon watching on TV, listening the radio, following updates on Twitter and so forth as events have unfolded.
Latest updates say that 65 people have been confirmed dead, which is a horrifically huge number. I feel so incredibly deeply sorry for the people of Christchurch.
When it was decided that the new transport agency in Auckland would simply be called “Auckland Transport“, I thought it was amusing that if they ever wanted to run a blog, I’d got there first with the name of this blog. Vancouver’s public transport agency actually operates a very successful blog – Buzzer – which is used to interact with customers, encourage feedback, provide updates on service changes and also just comment on various things going on around the transport world. Maybe they’ll have to buy me out one day .
Of course, Auckland Transport does have its own website – a fairly useful place to go to as a repository for transport plans, policies, reports, strategies and so forth. There are also all the recent media releases and board information (including, at long last, more detail on what was discussed at least week’s board meeting). In fact, it was reading through the business report included in the meeting agenda (which for some stupid reason doesn’t include anything about public transport patronage) that I noticed some quite amusing data on the number of visits their website receives a day (though keep in mind most people probably use the MAXX website for information on public transport services): I have no idea whether 700 visits a day is meant to be high for a site like that or not, but it doesn’t seem particularly high for such an official website. On average, this blog gets around twice that: I suppose I think it’s somewhat amusing that this blog gets around twice the number of visitors as Auckland Transport’s official website. But more seriously, I think it also means that Auckland Transport needs to do better when it comes to making their website a place where people go to find out about what’s happening to improve transport in Auckland. Perhaps there should be a blog similar to “Buzzer” in Vancouver? Perhaps they should have some sort of in-built discussion forum or somewhere for people to suggest ideas to improve public transport… there are so many possibilities.
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 going 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 the Maglev Train linking Shanghai with its Airport:
As you may have guessed from the title of this blog post, this is the 1000th post of Auckland Transport Blog, since the very first back in May 2008. The early posts of this blog were really simply a part of a previous blog that I used to run – that was more focused on my personal life. Funnily enough, when I started blogging about transport matters – particularly those with an Auckland focus – people starting becoming a whole pile more interested in what I had to say than had ever been the case before.
Often people who I meet ask me “why are you so interested in transport stuff?” or “how did you get started with writing a transport blog?” Well, I’m an urban planner by profession and as long as I can remember I’ve been interested in cities and interested in how we get around cities. As a child (and more recently) I drew massive make-believe cities, complete with the most spectacular motorway spaghetti junctions that you’re ever likely to see. In fact, it’s quite interesting to think how roads-focused I was until relatively recently – I think largely because I pretty much never used public transport until I started university. I do wonder whether the poor transport decisions that politicians often make are the result of them never actually using the public transport system.
But essentially, I’m interested in transport – and I write this blog – because I think that the only way Auckland can become a better city to live, work and play in, is by first sorting out its transport system. So much emphasis is placed on how land-use patterns influence transport outcomes, but I think that it’s the opposite direction of influence: how our transport decisions influence the form, shape, function and feel of our cities, that is of utmost importance. Construct a lovely pedestrian-focused space like Vulcan Lane, and of course you will encourage bars, cafes and other people-focused activities to locate there. Construct massive one-way semi-motorways like Hobson and Nelson streets, and of course you will end up with crap buildings and no pedestrian activity. Similarly, at the macro-level, construct motorways and you will encourage sprawl; construct high-quality rail systems and you will encourage intensification.
From a fairly humble beginning, I must say I’m amazed and surprised at how the popularity of this blog has grown. Back in May last year (when I really established this blog as completely separate from my previous personal blog), the number of people visiting was around 4,000 a month. This has increased to a high of 50,212 visitors in October this year (the Super City election results boosted the stats for that month). On average, these days this blog gets around 1,500 visits a day.
A few other statistics are quite interesting. There have been 12,755 comments (excluding spam). The 1,000 posts have included a total of 762,362 words, while the comments have included 1,098,506 words. There are 242 tags – identifying post topics, which I periodically try to reduce down a bit (generally without much luck). I know that a number of MPs, councillors, local board members and council/Auckland Transport staff regularly read this blog – and I have appreciated their feedback and willingness to contact me to discuss transport matters. My invitation is always open for people who want to email me about an issue or meet up – if this needs to be done in confidence then of course I will do just that, and I have done so in the past on numerous occasions.
Perhaps my biggest hope from this blog is that all who read it can develop a better understanding of Auckland’s transport situation. I hope that people have learned about complex concepts such as induced demand, cost-benefit analyses, wider economic benefits, the network effect, the importance of bus lanes and so on. Countless poor transport decisions have been made in the past, and continue to be made, because the general population is poorly informed and politicians and/or bureaucrats are able to get away with it. Reading numerous letters to the editor over the past few weeks on transport matters, generally exceptionally well written and well informed, makes me hopeful that the days of an ill-informed public on transport matters is ending. If this blog has had a role to play in assisting the quality of the public debate we have on transport matters, then I think that will have been its greatest achievement.
So where to from here? Amazingly, these days I very rarely sit down in front of the computer in the evening and struggle to know what to blog about. Sure, there has been a lot recently on the CBD Rail Tunnel and Puhoi-Wellsford, but I think the fact that there’s always a blog post or two waiting to be written about something that’s going on just shows how critical getting transport right is to Auckland. So I certainly have a lot of blog posts to pump out in the future.
However, to put it simply, I would quite like some help. At various points in the past I have had assistance, and that has been awesome. There also seems to be a growing number of guest posts, which is also fantastic – as I like to get a range of perspectives on Auckland’s transport situation. But it would be great to have some regular assistance in running this blog. Obviously you will need to know what you’re talking about, but the quality of comments I get suggest that there are a huge number of very well informed people out there when it comes to transport matters.
Perhaps I’m a little naughty to ask, but if there are people within any transport related organisation who wish to assist me, I can assure you of utmost anonymity – and I’m sure everyone would appreciate the knowledge you could bring. One of the biggest problems in having a well-informed transport debate in New Zealand is that pretty much everyone who really knows what they’re talking about happens to work for a transport-related organisation – and therefore can’t actually publicly say anything. While I guess that’s understandable in some respects, I think that as a whole we are much poorer for the relative lack of intelligent dialogue that creates. A lot of fascinating stuff, and very clever thought, goes on behind the scenes – I would love for more of that to be out in the open.
Quite interestingly, out of all the cities we visited I think that perhaps Montreal had transport aspects that Auckland can learn from more than any other place. Perhaps it was because New York is just so different from anywhere else, because Boston’s system is very old and we pretty much walked everywhere anyway, and because Washington DC’s system is just so unique in its design. Whatever it was, I certainly did feel as though I got the most transport ideas from Montreal.
For a start, Montreal was definitely the city which appeared to have done the most to encourage cycling – with those efforts seeming quite successful. Below are a number of photos showing Montreal’s cycling infrastructure:
This is the cycleway along Boulevard de Maisonneuve, one of the main east-west streets in Montreal. I quite like this sort of design for cycle lanes that will carry a high number of people. It’s worth noting that on-street parking on both sides of the road could potentially be retained with cycle lane designs like this.More cycle lanes, once again showing how it’s possible to provide both cycle lanes and on-street parking. I do like this design because the parked cars form a useful buffer between the cyclists and the moving vehicles – it would be a pretty safe place. It’s also worth noting the number of bikes chained up along the street – typical for Montreal.Bike racks like these are located everywhere around Montreal – particularly around the Metro stations. I forget the exact way the system works as I only briefly read about it and didn’t use them, but it seemed quite simple and also quite cheap for the first half-hour to an hour – getting progressively more expensive after that to ensure they get mainly used for short commuting trips.Montreal also has a growing number of “shared spaces”, as shown in this photograph (note the car driving and the pedestrian in the distance walking down the middle). It was amazing to see how the whole “feel” of the street changed when you went from a footpath-kerb-road setup to one where there’s only one street surface and everyone shares it. You immediately want to spring out to walk down the middle, the cars immediately slow down enormously and drive very carefully. Auckland has a lot to look forward to with our proposed shared streets. Of course I can’t ignore the Montreal Metro. This system was built relatively recently, first opened in 1966 and extended at various points since then. Now it is North America’s third busiest (after New York and Mexico City) rapid transit system – carrying over a million people a day. What I liked about the system was the spaciousness of the stations, the superb information provided about when the next train was coming and the high quality of the trains themselves. One unusual aspect of the Montreal Metro is that the whole system is run on rubber tires, rather than your usual steel tired train. This actually seems to have a number of advantages: the trains are quieter, the rides seem a bit smoother and I think the trains can deal with steeper slopes than is possible with typical steel tires. I must say I’m quite curious why more cities around the world haven’t gone down that path.Could Midtown Station look something like this one day?
After a marathon three flights (New York to LA, LA to Sydney and Sydney to Auckland), we finally made it back to the country this afternoon. I’m obviously pretty exhausted still, and it’ll be a while until I can complete both a full rundown of my thoughts on the holiday – and in particular what lessons I think would be useful for Auckland to learn from the public transport systems of the various cities I visited – as well as a bit of a catch up on what’s happened, and is still happening in the world of transport in Auckland.
For now, here’s a photo of a Washington DC Metro train: The DC Metro is, for some reason, very photogenic.
.
Recent Comments