It's another wet Friday so here are a few stories to read while you (hopefully) avoid the rain.
This Week in Greater Auckland
On Monday, Matt covered Auckland Transport's latest plans for speeding up buses on Dominion Rd.
For Wednesday, Matt looked at what is happening with ridership on our PT network.
On Thursday, Matt reviewed the plans for removing level crossings at three train stations.
This post, like all our work, is brought to you by the Greater Auckland crew and made possible by generous donations from our readers and fans. If you’d like to support our work, you can join our circle of supporters here, or support us on Substack!
GA's presentation to Council's Transport, Resilience and Infrastructure Committee on Project K
Connor presented at public input to Councillors yesterday about Auckland Transport's last-minute changes to the Karanga-a-Hape Station precinct integration project.
It seems like nothings set in stone yet with the project, so there's a chance to return to a good outcome.
You can check out the presentation here:
John Key on the origins of the CRL
The Herald's Simon Wilson reports on how the last national government finally agreed to approve the City Rail Link.
How did the City Rail Link (CRL), New Zealand’s most expensive transport project, get approved in 2016, when the Government’s priority was to pay off debt?
Sir John Key, Prime Minister at the time, spilled the beans at a breakfast event yesterday marking the first 15 years of Auckland as a Super City.
“Probably the biggest problem,” said Key, “was getting it past Bill English and Steven Joyce.”
English was the Finance Minister and Joyce the Minister for Economic Development. Simon Bridges, Key’s Transport Minister at the time and also a speaker at the breakfast, backed him up.
“I think of the CRL as having three parents,” Bridges said. “Me, Len Brown and Sir John Key.”
Brown was the first mayor of the Super City in 2010, serving two terms until he retired in 2016.
“Len was on at me all the time,” said Bridges, “and when I got it, it was clear Bill English and Steven Joyce were a lost cause. So I went to Sir John and wore him down. My point is that you need to be meeting, all the time. Central government and local government need to be talking.”
GI to Tamaki Dr Stage 4
Auckland is one step closer to having a safe, accessible and iconic path connecting the Eastern Bays and city centre as work begins on the final stage of Te Ara Ki Uta Ki Tai – the Glen Innes to Tāmaki Drive shared path.
Jointly funded by the Government and Auckland Council, the Glen Innes to Tāmaki Dr shared path - ‘Te Ara Ki Uta Ki Tai’ (the path of land and sea) is a 7km path that connects Glen Innes, Meadowbank, Kohimarama with the city centre via Ōrākei Basin, Hobson Bay and Tāmaki Drive.
Auckland Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson, Minister for Auckland Simeon Brown Ōrākei Local Board Chairperson Scott Milne and Deputy Chair Sarah Powrie, and AT Board Chair Richard Leggat gathered in Ōrākei earlier this afternoon to turn the first sod for the shared path’s vital final stage.
Works on the fourth and final section, an 870m concrete boardwalk in Hobson Bay next to Ngapipi Road, began this week and will take around 20 months to complete. This final section will replace the temporary walking and cycling path on Ngapipi Road installed as an interim measure to offer a safer link to Tāmaki Drive.
The History of the Road Cone
An interesting piece from Wellington City Council on the history of the road cone.
In the 1940s, across the world in the city of Los Angeles, a street painter named Charles D. Scanlon designed a hollow conical marker to stop cars from driving over his wet paint.
His objectives were to make something recognisable; while making sure it caused no damage to any vehicle if it were to make contact with it. He also wanted it to be easy to transport, stackable with minimum storage required.
His solution? The road cone.
The road cone has gone through many iterations, including the development of its colour. A lot of colours were already associated with traffic, such as red for stop and ‘danger’, and yellow for waiting or slowing down. Orange proved to be the appropriate choice.
Neil Young's pro-electric vehicle anthem
What city do your travel patterns match?
An interesting little tool comparing travel patterns in various cities
Funding Te Huia
A proposed “gamechanger” Sunday service for Te Huia would be part-funded by Auckland if Waikato Regional Council had its way.
There’s a little over a year left in the trial of the inter-regional rail service, meaning start-up funding from NZ Transport Agency is due to dry up mid-2026.
Waikato Regional Council has plans “to ensure Te Huia’s continued success and growth”, chairperson Pamela Storey says, hence asking Auckland Council to stump up with $223,000.
“Introducing this [Sunday service] for the final year of the trial would be a gamechanger, opening up even more opportunities for leisure, tourism, and family visits between the two regions,” Storey said.
And while some in Auckland don’t want to see the train stop “for the want of a relatively small subsidy”, there’s caution about committing to funding.
The Hamilton-Auckland rail service is currently funded by a mix of passenger fares and public money.
The $223,000 requested from Auckland represents half the cost of a year-long trial of having the train run on Sundays.
Patrick is quoted in the article saying
On the issue of funding, “the short answer” was “yes”, said Reynolds, who’s running for Auckland Council this year.
“About 20% of the users of Te Huia are Aucklanders, and obviously the train goes between Auckland and Hamilton.”
But, he’d rather see the Government subsidise the service.
“It's a drop in the bucket of NZTA's budget.”
If Waikato and Auckland step up to fund the service next year, he said the risk was the Government “never would”.
“But for me, it would be a far greater tragedy if it stops just for the want of a relatively small subsidy, or if they squeeze the ticket prices.”
He said Te Huia was still in its trial stage, so expecting users to pay more on fares wasn’t justifiable.
“The journey is quite long and the service is infrequent, it’s not a premium product, so you can’t charge a lot.”
“This was always set up as a start-up service to get it going.”
Supercharge Sprawl?
Newsroom took a look at the progress on the government's promise to abolish Auckland's rural-urban boundary. Thankfully there doesn't appear to be a lot of progress so far on it but Matt had a few comments about the idea.
Matt Lowrie, a director and spokesperson for urban advocacy group Greater Auckland, told Newsroom there was no need to abolish the boundary, when it could already be amended through private plan changes from developers.
Instead, Lowrie believed the bigger contributor to stalled development and increased house prices was the high cost of infrastructure provision, which would only worsen if the boundary was removed.
“If you remove the urban boundary, infrastructure providers then have no clear idea of where development’s going to occur, so it’s much harder for them to plan…
If you think about something like [Auckland’s council-owned water services company] Watercare, if there’s potentially subdivisions popping up all over the place … how do they do that when they’re also trying to do all the other things that they’re needing to do?”
There had been cases of new developments needing to have sewage trucked away while a permanent sewerage network was built, while increased congestion and roading improvements also needed to be carefully planned for.
“We’re seeing that when the actual cost of infrastructure is put onto developers and onto future homeowners, they baulk at the idea – they don’t like the idea of it happening and a lot of business models are set up on being able to basically charge everyone else for that,” Lowrie said.
The most effective change the Government could make would be amending special character zones and other restrictions in existing urban areas of Auckland that were restricting development.
We did find this response funny though.
NZ Initiative chief economist Eric Crampton told Newsroom the rural-urban boundary “has to matter” for prices, although it was difficult to identify the exact effect through empirical research.
Crampton has been one of the key advocates for removing the boundary and him suggesting it "has to matter" despite there being no evidence it does (confirmed to us by others who have looked at it), confirms that this largely about ideology.
NZTA's Safety Camera rollout
New Zealand Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA) will roll out its first mobile safety camera next week – the next step in the transition of safety camera operations from NZ Police to NZTA.
As part of the change, for the first time in New Zealand speeding vehicles will be detected by cameras operating in cars (SUVs), alongside the vans which NZ Police have traditionally used. Later this year NZTA will also add trailers to the fleet of safety camera vehicles.
A camera-equipped Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) will be parking up on roadsides across Auckland from next Tuesday (13 May) to improve safety for all road users by detecting drivers exceeding speed limits. In the coming months, it will be joined by other SUVs and trailers as NZTA expands its mobile safety camera operations across the country to a total of 44 mobile cameras – 35 of which will be operating at any given time.
.....
From 1 July 2025, NZTA will be responsible for the operation of all safety cameras and NZ Police will no longer operate their mobile safety camera vans.
And last week it was that they'd started work on installing average speed cameras.
New Zealand Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA) will begin construction of a new pair of average speed safety cameras to improve safety on Pine Valley Road, in Dairy Flat Auckland, from next week.
NZTA Auckland and Northland Director of Regional Relationships, Steve Mutton, says the safety cameras aim to significantly reduce the number of people traveling over the speed limit on this road and lessen the likelihood of a serious or fatal crash.
.....
“In June 2024 we ran a speed survey on this stretch of road that showed around 74 percent of drivers were speeding. Despite the 80 km/h speed limit, the average speed vehicles were travelling was almost 90 km/h.
“There were three crashes between 2018 and 2023 that resulted in people receiving serious, and potentially life changing, injuries.”
One camera will be installed near the Kahikatea Flat Road intersection and the other near the Pine Valley Road roundabout.
When installed, the two cameras will work together, measuring the average speed drivers travel between them. Drivers will only be ticketed if their average travel speed over the entire distance between the two cameras is over the limit – they aren’t ‘pinged’ by a single camera or at a single point where they are over the speed limit.
“We know that average speed safety cameras are more effective at reducing deaths and serious injuries than the traditional speed cameras we’ve had in New Zealand. We expect they will reduce deaths and serious injuries by around 48 percent,” says Mr Mutton.
.....
NZTA is expecting to begin operating its first average speed safety cameras at Matakana Road, Warkworth, later this year, and will progressively bring other average speed safety cameras online in the following months.
Have a great weekend