We hope everyone has had a great week after the long weekend! Here is a collection of all things cities and transport to enjoy!
This Week in Greater Auckland
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The RoNS are coming home to roost
The RoNS reality was clearly released before a long weekend in the hopes of limiting the political fallout but the impact has continued this week as journalists dissect the announcement.
The Spinoff’s Hayden Donnell has written that this was always bound to happen and like us, questioned why it was ignored for so long.
Though he didn’t say it outright, it was hard to escape the impression that Bishop had been thrown a flaming bag of bitumen-based turds by his predecessor. National’s Roads of National Significance were announced during Simeon Brown’s tenure in charge of transport. The Pakuranga MP was confident to the point of gung-ho about the programme’s affordability. When he announced the first batch of 10 ahead of the 2023 election, he said they’d cost just $24bn. His faith didn’t waver as he added another seven to the list the following year. Brown also got rid of a source of funding for the projects for good measure, ruling out what he described as Labour’s unnecessary fuel tax increases during National’s first term. “Our plan is fully costed and won’t require the heavy burden of any petrol tax hikes in our first term,” he said.
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Some of the cost estimates look laughable in retrospect. Among other things, Brown said National would be able to build four-lane highways from Whangārei to Tauranga for $6bn. Just one section of that route – Warkworth to Whangārei – is now forecast to cost nearly $20bn. This is not a case of hindsight being 20/20 either. People at the time pointed out these roads were underpriced. Even mostly innumerate bozos from The Spinoff were posting about the problem.
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But for the most part, Brown got away scot-free from his two-year sojourn in monetary fantasyland, moving on to the troubled health portfolio with an untarnished reputation as a political Mr Fix-It. Now it’s Bishop’s unenviable job to arrange some of his promises into an economically feasible plan. That’s the thing with infrastructure: you can only get by on bluster and ideology for so long. Eventually reality will find a way to reassert itself. Maybe it would have done so earlier if our media had paid less attention to politics and more to the actual numbers.
The Post editors struck a similar tone, re the reality catching up with the government:
In the end, everyone gets mugged by reality. Sometimes it is slow, sometimes it is fast. You can never face up to reality too soon. So it is with individuals, households, companies and governments. In the end, reality has to be acknowledged. The sooner it is, the sooner the work of fixing things can begin.
And Thomas Manch at BusinessDesk noted the similarity to the state of Labour’s promises in 2023, which National derided:
Of course, the National Party essentially did the same to win Government.
The party campaigned in 2023 on 13 RoNS costing an estimated $17.36b to be “commenced” within a decade.
By the time investment cases for the expanded list of 17 RoNS were published in 2025, that figure was in excess of $50b, and timelines for each were spreading out.
The fantasy has finally been dispelled almost three years since that campaign promise.
And Nick James at The Post as revealed that the government has spent $323.8 million (so far) on planning the now on-hold RoNS.
The Post can reveal the Government has spent $323.8m on pre-implementation work for six of the projects in the second and third phases of the funding plan as of April.
This information came to light in an answer to a written parliamentary question from Labour to Bishop.
Those projects were sections two and three of the Northland Expressway, East West Link, Hamilton Southern Links, Petone to Grenada and the Cross Valley Link, State Highway 1 Wellington Improvements and the Hope Bypass.
That work included consenting, design, route protection, site investigations, and some early works.
Which is more than Labour spent on the ill-fated tunneled Auckland Light Rail project, for the same result.
Lastly, Robbie Nicol sums up the fate of the RoNS in this short clip:
There’s been quite a few other articles too – feel free to share other good ones in the comments.
Auckland – the city that makes us believe change is possible?
Former Auckland Design Champion Ludo Campbell-Reid has written some reflections on his time in Auckland. (Updated: this is the first of a two-part essay for Newsroom, and the second part landed today).
Auckland didn’t simply transform its streets and waterfront. It transformed its confidence. As the City Rail Link prepares to open, former Auckland design champion Ludo Campbell-Reid reflects on two decades of city making and the lessons one mid-sized city offers the world.
I never became a medical doctor, although for a time I thought I might. Instead, I became something close, a kind of doctor for cities. For more than three decades, I have worked with governments, mayors, businesses and communities helping cities including Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, diagnose what is holding them back and, more importantly, helping them imagine what they could become.
Cities, like people, can lose confidence. They can lose direction. They can become trapped by old habits, short term thinking or a failure to recognise their own potential.
But cities can also recover. Sometimes remarkably.
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When I first arrived in Auckland in 2005 for my interview as first ever design champion and group manager, urban design at Auckland City Council, I was struck not by what the city and city region was, but by what it was not.
It felt grey, dull, underwhelming, and underdesigned. It also had one of the highest levels of car ownership per capita in the world and more carparks in the central city than I had experienced throughout my career, it felt like a city of cars rather than a city for people.
Here was one of the world’s most spectacular natural harbours, yet the city seemed strangely disconnected from it. Queen St functioned primarily as a traffic corridor rather than the civic heart of the country. The waterfront was broken and fragmented and largely locked behind a red fence. Public transport carried little prestige. Walking and cycling were marginal activities rather than everyday choices. Density done well was something other cities did. The bustling trams and street cars of the 1950s when Auckland had one of the highest public transport levels per head of capita in the world, were a distant memory.
Almost as if by design, we noticed some videos earlier in the week of people driving around Auckland. If, like many people you paid tribute to Sam Neill by re-watching his breakout role in Roger Donaldson’s eerily prescient Sleeping Dogs (1977), you’ll have noted a chase scene down a very different-looking Queen St. (Trailer: contains spoilers!)
Then there’s this, from 1988.
And here’s another one from 1996 – a lot has changed!
Big Event Weekend
There are three big events on tomorrow, and AT are putting a few extra services on. There are also some impacts to regular services.
The All Blacks, New Zealand Warriors and Harlem Globetrotters will all pull in the crowds this Saturday evening 18 July, putting more pressure than usual on Auckland’s transport network.
But if you’re one of the 85,000 plus fans expected at one of the three big events, Auckland Transport (AT) has you covered with the best ways to get there and home again.
Check for more details here.
South Auckland rail stations opening
Auckland Transport and KiwiRail have announced that the Drury and Paerātā stations will open on Sunday 2 August.
Auckland’s newest railway stations, Drury and Paerātā, will open to customers on Sunday 2 August 2026, putting South Auckland and Franklin’s fast-growing communities on the rapid transit map just in time for City Rail Link.
The new Drury and Paerātā stations, which have been built by KiwiRail with government funding, will be served by Auckland’s Southern Line, giving nearby communities seamless public transport journeys to Auckland’s city centre, Auckland Airport (via Puhinui and the AirportLink), Middlemore Hospital and destinations along the rest of the Southern Line.
The opening of the two stations will also be supported by an upgraded local bus network, making it quicker and easier for people in Paerata Rise, Ramarama, Drury, Waiuku, Glenbrook and Pukekohe to connect to Drury and Franklin train stations. Each station also provides 350 park and ride spaces with room for further extension in the future.
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Ahead of the stations opening, Auckland Transport will be hosting a public information day for local communities on Saturday 1 August, where staff will be on hand to answer any questions people have about the new stations and the public transport services operating to them.The public information sessions will be held at Drury Railway Station from 10am to 12pm and at Paerātā Railway Station from 2pm to 4pm.Two new bus services will begin from Sunday 2 August to connect local communities with the new stations. Using one of these connecting bus services won’t cost passengers who are connecting to trains, as long as they transfer to the next service within 30 minutes.
The third of the new stations, Ngākōroa, is due to open next year.
We still find it incredible that these three stations cost $500 million to build, and that for that price there’s only a couple of bus stops placed on the platforms for shelter. It’s also hard to tell if it’s just the perspective of these images, but the platforms themselves look quite narrow.
Let’s also not forget how the Drury development was originally envisioned by the council – and compare that to the first image above for what we actually got.
Should (and will) the price of fuel stay up?
Raising fuel taxes as petrol prices start to fall could lock in the changes to transport habits kick-started by the fuel crisis, some say.
One transport urban planning researcher says the gains in fuel savings and public transport numbers will quickly fall away without any policies to permanently shift people’s habits.
Data collated by RNZ shows electric vehicle sales, public transport use and cycling numbers were all still higher than normal in June.
That was despite fuel prices starting to dip below $3 per litre after the Strait of Hormuz re-opened to global shipping in mid-June.
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Auckland Transport data showed the city hit a new June record for bus passenger numbers, with 6.3 million trips taken last month – up 14 percent on last June.
That followed an all-time monthly record set in March, as the annual ‘March madness’ peak coincided with the beginning of the fuel crisis.
Monthly Auckland cycling numbers have stayed up by about 20 percent on last year since fuel prices spiked.
In Wellington and Christchurch, the other centres with significant bus networks, monthly passenger numbers have been up by two to three percent on the same time last year.
Auckland University urban planning programme director Tim Welch said there had been a corresponding drop in nationwide traffic of 2.4 percent since the beginning of the crisis.
In late March, the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) launched a $3.5 million campaign encouraging people to save fuel by modifying their driving, including accelerating and braking more smoothly, and lowering their speed slightly.
A return-on-investment report commissioned from consumer research company Verian estimated those behavioural changes saved 6.6 million litres of fuel over seven weeks.
That came at a total saving of $21 million in fuel costs that could be attributed to the campaign, the report said.
Welch said although the changes were heartening, previous research showed they would likely be “extremely short-lived”.
“We wouldn’t expect them to go beyond a month or two months … if fuel prices really do drop and stay low,” he said.
That was because the government had not introduced any policies to encourage a permanent change to people’s behaviour, he said.
Videos to watch
The return of cars to a Montreal street leads to businesses doing worse, surprise!
From the socials
CRL art!
Streetblog comparing bus times in New York without cars
A lovely bridge in Finland for a cool $250m NZD!
New York Summer streets giving space back to people!
Electrifying food carts
Have a great weekend.
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