Congestion pricing moves forward with bi-partisan support. www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

More Ws emerging. Mercury Lane former car sewer now mostly pedestrianised.

Momentum is gaining momentum. The railroad infrastructure framework developed by @ndhapple.bsky.social has gone bicoastal. A new report from @calelectricrail.org shows how level boarding and electrified trains would transform transportation in SoCal. benjaminschneider.substack.com/p/how-southe...

Australia: More Homes, better cities. Letting more people live where they want. (Image of how zoning constrains housing close to the centres of capital cities.) Link grattan.edu.au/wp-content/u...

Nice!

They're calling it Woke 2.

We’ve opened a trial version of this web app. Test the e-bike range, see the gaps in rapid transit, etc. census-sampler.mrcagney.works (user and login are “public”)

The ol spend $.5 billion to move the bottleneck further downstream trick www.times.co.nz/business/at-...

Subsidise e-bikes and home batteries !

Australia news live: home battery subsidy helped add 50% to capacity in four months as Labor hails ‘solar nation’

Never gonna happen. “Combined, that’s $18.2-22.1 billion – which is incredible for a road that for most of its length carries only 10-15,000 vehicles a day.” www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2025/10/21/r...

E-bikes as rapid transit. There is a sweet spot, 8-14km from the city centre, where gaps in the mass rapid transit network and slow buses can be filled by e-bikes. Map = 45 minute e-bike travel time.

15 months to get Stage 2 of Collie Battery in Australia going. 👀 Combined capacity = 560MW. esdnews.com.au/neoens-colli...

It's 2025 and our economic model is still reliant on maintaining a decent bufferstock of unemployed people. This model was *designed* to ensure that employers have the upper hand (and labour could be uberised). Govt distract us from this reality by bashing beneficiaries and abdicating responsibility

Report “littered with errors including three nonexistent academic references” www.afr.com/companies/pr...

NEW STARTER PACK! This time I’m hoping to encourage and support global urbanists from OUTSIDE North America here on Bluesky, so hopefully this will help! Who’ve I missed? Just joined? Let me know! I’ll keep updating, so please keep checking & sharing this pack! And let’s try using #GlobalUrbanists.

It's difficult to imagine Trump ruling any country other than America. If he did, he would be an international pariah. But because he is the President of the United States, foreign leaders are forced to pretend that he isn't an absolute lunatic. It's really something

Morning rush-hour near London's Oval station. Trains pass underground every few minutes and there's a continuous flood of bicycles, but still there's one lane of gridlocked traffic. Your city will always have exactly as much gridlock as it makes room for.

The most underappreciated issue in urbanism is the Anglosphere’s transit construction cost problem. It’s not just that we’re spending too much money on any particular project. It’s that we could be getting *much more transit* for the *same amount of money we’re currently spending*.

Demand for housing in Auckland. knowledgeauckland.org.nz/publications...

This is Oxford Street, completely transformed & traffic-free. It was fantastic to see community spirit in the heart of the West End. By removing traffic, this created the space to stride, stroll and explore. This street is for everyone to enjoy with music, art, food and fun.

Central Auckland houses condemned after the biblical 2023 flood are starting to be removed

No mention of overall costs, failed PPP, ongoing construction liabilities, just bEniFitS. The sorry state of media covering infrastructure in NZ.

Removal of parking mandates and zoning restrictions in Lower Hutt Wellington led to a boom in housing including council owned rentals. www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/3608...

One of the key elements of many European circulation plans is the use of a combination of strategies to create a large "no through traffic" core Pedestrian and transit-only streets are complemented with loop-y patterns of circulation in isolated pockets, sending traffic back to through itineraries.

>Sydney’s CBD Light Rail project exemplified this type of risk-aversion, where guideway standards “sourced to America… that would befit a coal train” were interpreted as hard rules, excessively applied to a surface tramway – identified as a key driver of the project’s high cost

Zurich. “ The key to developing an urban space that is attractive to everyone lies in the organization of traffic.” 💯 www.stadt-zuerich.ch/de/planen-un...

Good on NZ’s bipartisan housing reforms. www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360...

This is super interesting and well explained. The incredible opportunity of speeding up existing train lines by electrification and better stations. youtu.be/Qe10JA9utOw?...

“At all levels of government, they want to promote housing supply,” Rehm said, adding that as demand slows and supply increases, the perception that housing is a safe investment has slipped. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

Classic clip from the Australian show Utopia. When the government is looking for an “independent assessment” they know who to call. youtu.be/3M7SzS_5PlQ?...

If you want good news, follow the solar energy transition happening in Australia. 1,000 home batteries installed every day transforming how the grid works. reneweconomy.com.au/stunning-suc...

Our media is great at covering and mocking the zoning reform debate in NZ. 😘 thespinoff.co.nz/politics/22-...

Scoot breaks down the latest Auckland zoning reforms including re-zoning along some of the frequent bus network. www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2025/08/21/i...

I think Starter Parks have been one of the best ways to grow the conversation on smarter, better cities here on @bsky.app. This was my 1st (I have several you should check out). Please consider following the accounts on them, and share with your followers who love cities & want them to be better!

Auckland fans know that our successful zoning reforms were largely focused outside of central areas. That’s about to change.

Next step in upzoning Auckland. 10-storey and 15-storey developments will be allowed within a 10-minute walk of some train stations, rapid bus stations and the edge of town centres. There will be 44 such “walkable catchments”. www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/auckland-...

“The rush to leave comes amid one of the worst economic downturns since 1991, which analysts blame on low productivity and various policy missteps.” www.reuters.com/world/asia-p...

Awesome video on Los Angeles' rapid transit expansion. youtu.be/OimL8T4b4hg?...

I’m 100 hours into the Power Broker when Mumford enters the chat and implores people to ‘think’ about how the decisions being made won’t scale/work in the long term. Next chapters cover the (failed) advocacy of adding rapid transit and investing in the crumbling subway (including 2nd St subway)

Queen St with @patrickreynolds.bsky.social and @connorsharp.bsky.social ?

Where IBX and proposed Melbourne SLR sit within international 'ring' lines. (research by: Aaron Fernando1, Graham Currie2)

“refusal to learn” (railroading especially)

The 2nd Ave. subway is of course near and dear to my heart and infamous in NYC history, but the IBX is the most transformative NYC transit project in our lives. We should of course always demand more transit, but it's good to be excited for this one.

Our PM wants to double down on his failing economic strategy and says this approach (cost cutting, lower debt, etc) is “immutable”. Yikes.

Interesting article on the Swiss approach of ‘electronics before concrete’. Relevant lessons for Auckland rapid transit and regional rail.

More detail on the Greens proposal to re-instate passenger rail to Tauranga linking up half of NZ’s population. www.1news.co.nz/2025/07/25/g...

The mid-block signals on Queen St have been turned off. Long overdue since cars were mostly removed from this end.

Fascinating. Instead of just reducing emissions we have to make offsets that might involve planting out majestic ranch with monoculture of pine trees. Land manager taps out. www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/3607...