The Airport to Botany Rapid Transit project (A2B) will deliver a new public transport route between the airport, Manukau and Botany. It will improve accessibility in the southern and eastern areas of Auckland. It will also provide an important link in the rapid transit network, with connections to the rail network at Puhinui and Manukau …
Read more “Evaluating the impact of Airport to Botany Rapid Transit”
Abstract PT has been generally accepted as a green replacement for driving in many cities worldwide. While average GHG emissions for buses are much less than for driving, its distribution shows that some bus routes emit more GHG than cars. Exploring the spatial distribution of bus emissions is important because it can justify alternative PT, …
Read more “PT is a green replacement for driving, or is it? (a case for on-demand PT)”
Measuring accessibility There is a subtle difference between transit accessibility and the accessibilities provided by other transportation modes. The main difference of transit accessibility is in its schedule. While travel time to/from transport and in-vehicle time is common between car and transit, the real test of freedom in transit relies on its spontaneity. Frequency has …
Introduction Bus service, especially in busy urban areas, is facing the challenge to enhance its reliability. Studies have revealed that unreliability can seriously undermine the attractiveness of bus service (Lin et al., 2008). Hence, most transit agencies have monitored service reliability as one of the key performance measures for their bus operations (Benn and Barton-Aschman, 1995). …
Read more “Fixing the reliability issue of public transport in Auckland: A short term solution.”
There has been a growing interest to improve urban rail services for increasing a city’s economic competitiveness. While accessibility provided by rail services has been the focus of many studies, determining accessibility to rail stations is less investigated. The present study examines how accessibility to rail stations via walking has social justice implications. Accessibility can …
Read more “Evaluating Spatial Justice in Rail Transit: Access to Terminals by Foot”
Introduction Aucklanders are heavily reliant on their cars to meet their travel needs with more than 80% of daily trips being made by cars. However, the high socio-economic costs of private cars such as congestion, poor quality urban environments, pollution and carbon emissions, poor public health and high travel costs to name a few, have …
Although the concept of social justice seems to be ubiquitous in most transportation plans, methods adopted to evaluate transit systems have little engagement with political theories to define justice. Without a proper definition, transport planners will be unable to design transit systems that achieve justice. The present study proposes a combination of sufficientarianism and egalitarianism …
Many policy-makers are grappling with the twin challenges posed by growing travel demands and persistent socioeconomic inequality. To address these issues, numerous studies propose and apply “justice tests”, which relate the effects of transport policies to prevailing socioeconomic deprivation. While the theoretical foundations of justice tests are well-established, there exists less agreement on methodological aspects …
Read more “Right to the city: Applying justice tests to public transport investments”
I recently saw an article in NZ Herald about a race between 4 people using different transportation modes (car, bus, bicycle, and train) to travel from New Lynn into the city. Google Maps can provide an estimation of travel time for all these modes but the experiment showed the actual travel time can be different. The final …
Read more “Car, transit, or bicycle who wins in a March Madness race?”
Recently, I had a chance to visit Dubai and use its iconic Metro system. The Dubai Metro is a rapid transit rail network with three operational lines, and it seems a few more lines are planned. In this review, I would like to summarise what I learnt from it. Good It is driverless and stylish. …