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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

Having recently used Thailand's public transport system we can say this... Bangkok has quietly become one of Asia’s most dynamic public transport cities.

We have spent the last three weeks riding around Thailand on our bikes. It was my wife's idea. Mixing work meetings, the SEA games and some holiday time together.

Fun fact for today. The term Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) was first coined in 2014 in Finland by the wonderful Sampo Heikkila.

We are currently working on a Heavy Vehicle EV project and it got us thinking about the impacts of trucks on or networks.

Today we thought we would touch on the age-old topic of trying to build our way out of congestion. Old school traffic engineering views still hold strong to this day - eg a view that more lanes equal less traffic or less congestion.

We are a fan of Bus Rapid Transit, even though our hometown is Melbourne which has one of the largest Light Rail (tram) systems in the world!

The very intelligent people at the Asian Transport Observatory (ATO) project that annual transport infrastructure investment in the Asia-Pacific will triple between 2020 and 2035. Yay!

"This week as its King's Birthday, we thought we would share an article from our Substack Transitonomics Newsletter.

Walking to work last week, I had an older gentleman (maybe in his late 60s) on an e-scooter hit my shoulder as he went past.

We were in Tauranga on Saturday, and had the opportunity to look at several of the Kinetic ZEB electric battery fleet. They seem to be working well.

This was a question my colleague and I were asked at a briefing session we were presenting at for an updated public transport network. A network that considered the future of PT - particularly EVs - for the next decade(s).

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). It’s the mass public transport system to have when you don't want “real” mass transit. Harsh we know, but that seems to be the view of many. Firstly, we are biased towards BRT.