The Campaign For Better Transport

The New Zealand Herald reports:

Householders face being transported to and from their homes in a shuttle vehicle as contractors widen North Shore’s busy Onewa Rd during a nine-month project starting today.

Why not catch a bus?

Former North Shore Mayor and bus ways campaigner George Wood writes for the North Shore Times today.

Brian Rudman writes in today’s New Zealand Herald:

The Government’s antipathy to embracing new Auckland public transport projects has made the debate over a rail link to Auckland International Airport rather academic.

Which makes it rather surprising that the airport company should be so sensitive about a recent Metro article’s passing mention that it opposed such a link.

Lincoln Tan reports in the Herald on recent Auckland public transport patronage figures.

Use of public transport in Auckland has hit a 25-year high, with commuters reporting increased satisfaction with the service on offer.

The Auckland Regional Transport Authority’s annual passenger figures showed 58.6 million trips were made in the year to June 2009 a 7.7 per cent increase on last year and the highest level of public transport use in the city since the mid 1980s. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a fantastically interesting post over at Human Transit on comparing the benefits of buses and streetcars (trams), and how it is easy to get blinded by the romance of streetcars rather than looking at the transit problem we are trying to solve and then going about the best way to fix it. Jarrett Walker, a well respected transport consultant who writes this excellent blog, outlines his observation (after making a seriously large number of disclaimers):

Streetcars that replace bus lines are not a mobility improvement. If you replace a bus with a streetcar on the same route, nobody will be able to get anywhere any faster than they could before. This makes streetcars quite different from most of the other transit investments being discussed today. Where a streetcar is faster or more reliable than the bus route it replaced, this is because other improvements were made at the same time — improvements that could just as well have been made for the bus route. These improvements may have been politically packaged as part of the streetcar project, but they were logically independent, so their benefits are not really benefits of the streetcar as compared to the bus. Read the rest of this entry »