For those who know me, you will know we have four children - three adult one 15 year old at home and at school. Almost feel like empty nesters...except we still do the occasional school drop off. Today was the first day of Term 4.

On 1 October, four road rules changed in New Zealand. There wasn't too much flair just legislative changes were made based on feedback and research - probably a good thing!

Firstly, welcome to our 60th edition! For this one we thought we would touch on what four countries are doing with charging and changes in technology. Enjoy!

Hope everyone is doing well. Another short CRL article this week:) Auckland's trains carried 528,007 passengers in the City Rail Link's first week (13 to 19 September). That beats the previous weekly record of 504,380, set in March 2019.

We are back in New Zealand this week and came home to the opening of the CRL...exciting times! This week's article focus on CRL and what other examples around the world can teach us for the city of sails.

I have just come back from three weeks in China, in Guiyang, Beijing and Guangzhou. I was there through sport rather than through work, which turned out to be the better way to see a transport network.

Every few months a photo of the Suroboyo Bus does a lap of LinkedIn. Passengers boarding with bags of empty plastic bottles, paying their fare in waste. It is a genuinely good idea and the coverage is uniformly warm.

Most options assessments start with the answer already in them. Not deliberately. Nobody sits down to rig a business case.

Wishing everyone a good start to the week and hope everyone had a good weekend. Was amazing weather here in New Zealand...although slightly cold.

There's a version of this newsletter I could have written in about four minutes. It goes: Luxembourg made public transport free, ridership soared, emissions fell, why can't we be more like Luxembourg. It would have read well.

On 9 July 2026, NZTA published its Major Transport Projects Pipeline. Depending on which headline you read that week, this was either "Transport pipeline provides certainty" or "Govt pulls flagship roading projects into the slow lane."...

A slightly different article this week. We have a good transport friend in San Franciso and over the weekend we had a 20 min chat on robotaxis and what has been happening in both San Franciso and more broadly the USA.

Rising seas are forcing the hardest questions in infrastructure to be answered first - in the smallest places. Spend enough time working on transport in the Pacific and you start to notice the same thing on almost every island.

Every efficient new car is good for the climate and for the household budget. However, it's also quietly draining the fund that keeps our roads open.

Labour's proposal to cap public transport at $20 a week in our main centres - and $10 everywhere else - has done what good cost-of-living policy is meant to do: it's clear, it's relatable, and it gives people a number they can picture in...

We spend a lot of time reading and listening to podcasts. One we listened to last week really stood out from Charlie Munger and his famous quote..."Invert, always invert" While the quote isn't originally his, he has borrowed it from the...

I've just come back from Rarotonga, where I had the pleasure of sitting down with several members of the team at CISNOC (the Cook Islands Sports and National Olympic Committee).

We have spent a bit of time thinking about Uzbekistan recently. This is for a few reasons: The Stans (well at least some of them) are fast becoming very competitive host nations for sports.

Just a short article this week:) While fuel prices are having a massive impact globally, it's interesting to see that this 'financial shock' has achieved more than some of the public transport business cases we have worked on.

With a cyclone over New Zealand over the weekend we had a bit of time to think about transport planning and network resilience.