Peters post yesterday reminded me about a post I had intended to write myself based on that Phoebe piece but from a different perspective. Reading it and some of the comments below made me wonder why people think that the speed should be higher and as I’m not that familiar with the area so I made a trip out there courtesy of google maps and street view. The section mentioned was between Pinehill and Northcross so focusing my efforts there and looking at the images, it pretty clearly shows why people think the speed limit needs to be faster. The road is mostly a single lane each way except for around a couple of intersections and is pretty straight, further the houses and many of the footpaths are placed well back from the road. All of these things help make the road feel safer and therefore make it easier to travel faster on it. Here is an image from just one place along the road where you can see just how much space there is, even when there are two lanes (intersections are just behind the image).
So even with two lanes there are substantial road reserves but just how wide is it? The councils GIS viewer helps here with the overlay for property boundaries.
That shows us that all up the road reserve is about 40m wide which is absolutely massive considering that the road itself is only 12m wide. Even factoring in having 4 lanes, wider footpaths etc. there is probably something like 15m of road space sitting being used for nothing but growing grass. My guess is the traffic engineers had way to much control when this was happening and wanted a super wide corridor set aside so they could account for every possibility.
To me that is hardly a good use of valuable land, especially when it is sitting in public ownership. So my next thought was how much is that land worth and could do something with it. On the land value, I did a sample of the land values and sizes on a number of houses in the area around the image above. That suggested that on average land value was in the vicinity of $440 per square metre. Many of the driveways for the existing houses have (or could be modified to have) roughly 20m of space between them. So putting this all together, a 20m x 15m section would then be worth roughly $130k. There would be space for hundreds of similar sized properties all along the corridor amounting to tens of millions of dollars of wasted land.
But is that big enough to do anything with, I think so. Many recent developments have properties that are only this size or even smaller. Take these houses near where I live, each of the three highlighted would easily fit within the dimensions mentioned above.
And what the two southern ones look like from the street level, as you can see there is even space for off road car parking.
So all up what am I suggesting, perhaps we need to look at East Coast Rd, and other roads like it. If needed shift the road to one side of the corridor while still leaving enough space for things like a second lane should it ever be needed (like for bus lanes). Then with the remaining land develop it into either town houses or even stand along places like the image above. By changing the road and developing out the land it would help to give more queues to drivers to slow down as well as obviously getting more housed into an existing area helping towards our housing supply problem.
I agree that the wider road and design encourages people to drive faster. I am not in favour of developing it into houses. I believe selective planting of trees and gardens can help slow people down down, a raised central median with a garden and trees could help and a painted cycle lane. Ensure the road width is only what is required for safe opeartion. Far to often the council and govt get blamed for not planning things ahead such as motoroways, railways and main roads, where they have to spend millions buying land and knocking down houses. Ti Rakau Drive is going to be a good example of this.
Speaking of roads, I know this off topic/thread jack but I have some questions for the learned contributors of this forum. I have been in Napier/Hasting in the past few weeks and I have used the “new” expressway between the two cities heavily to visit the district hospital from our family home in Napier. This bypass/expressway was touted as a major piece of “progress” in the region. It is a brand new ribbon of tarmac driven rather aimlessly through the countryside, with no links to anywhere else other than badly signposted enormous roundabouts and some incredibly dangerous traffic intersections. I am appalled that it was ever allowed to be built. The road is a single lane dual carriageway “expressway”. Apparently this designation is important as it is the fig leaf for a road that has committed so many jaw-droppingly obvious design failures that it beggars belief it was constructed in the 21st century. What are they? First of all, no median barrier. U-turning vehicles causing accidents are so common the local paper prefixes them with “Yet another…” Head-on collisions are also frequent. A gentle curve on the road that is just pronounced enough to make seeing far enough ahead of the vehicle in front to overtake impossible, yet being severe enough to affect your speed. This makes the decision to overtake or not a frustrating and difficult one for drivers. The road traverses low ground, in winters it frequently has fog and mistfrom early evening. Despite being a high-speed link having heavy usage, visibility issues, a pronounced camber, fog and mist and a nasty curve it has no lighting. The general poor design and layout requires far to high a level of driver awareness and safety for a modern , high speed road. According to an ambulance driver I spoke to it is like this because as an “expressway” it didn’t qualify for the additional funding and safety features of a “motorway”. I think the road is a deathtrap that commits the unforgiveable crime of requiring drivers to think sto imply to drive on it safely.
Now, Napier to Hasting has older link roads. Improving and upgrading them would have cost a shitload less than this expressway. The expressway is completely unnecessary. Hell, the two cities are linked downtown to downtown by a bloody railway which is practically never used! So what are my questions relevant to this (Auckland) transport forum? I suppose I want to know what the mechanism is for approving then designing such a road as this appalling badly designed expressway. How could such a road be approved and built without a single objective review of its design? Especially when any PT iniative is subjected to microscopic analysis? Is the Naper/Hasting expressway symptomatic of awider flawed funding/design decision making process at NZTA or is it just a particularly egregrious pork-barrelling disaster? If this napier/Hasting expressway disaster is symptomatic of how roads are built in this country, it is a bloody disgrace and something is seriously and fundamentally wrong at NZTA.
Not sure about the design and I have never driven on that road but I suspect it was thought of as only the first stage. The government has on its next list of possible RoNS to duplicate it which would make it into a dual carriageway expressway.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that the expressway was built to alleviate concerns from people in Napier when the Napier hospital was closed in the 1990s in favour of the Hastings hospital which became the regional hospital. Presumably the bypass would allow ambulances from Napier to get to Hastings quicker.
*A gentle curve on the road that is just pronounced enough to make seeing far enough ahead of the vehicle in front to overtake IT SAFELY impossible, yet NOT being severe enough to affect your speed.
What about being more ambitious here: AC could buy the first row of properties, consolidate the titles,, install a one way access lane across the new consolidated title, and develop the latter into medium-density terraced housing, with some retail and light commercial through in for good measure?
But I forget – this is Auckland not some modern grown up city where the council can take a proactive role in development
.
Yes that would be smarter but would cost quite a bit and probably get a lot of opposition from nimbys. They are actually doing that to an extent in New Lynn though, apparently there is a clause in the public works act that allows for land to be taken for urban renewal purposes but it had pretty much never been used until the old Waitakere city council invoked it. Even went all the way to the environment court but they won so forcibly acquired much of the land in the centre to redevelop it.
Good to know.
I live on East Coast Road, just north of Northcross. We just got a letter from Auckland Transport explaining their plan to widen the road (two lanes and a bike lane each way) starting in 2017. This is presumably to accomodate the extra traffic from the developments at Long Bay to the motorway (or Albany Bus Station), but it seems likely to me that much of that traffic will continue down East Coast Road to the office parks between Constellation and Rosedale.
Anyway, I guess the point of my comment is that it really doesn’t help to add extra housing right on East Coast Road, when that road is already likely to need widening in the foreseeable future.
I agree that there needs to be space for widening the road, my point is more that the width of the overall corridor is still way more than needed for a four lane arterial road with all of the other things to.
Traffic lanes are typically 3.5m-4m wide so 4 lanes at 3.75m wide each = 15m
Median lane at 3m wide (as it is currently)
Cycle lanes in each direction at 1.5m each = 3m
Wider footpaths at 2m each = 4m
All up you have 25m worth of road space in a corridor that has 40m of width.
Add another 6m for bus lanes (for the local feeder buses to Albany bus station), and have proper bike lanes and footpaths separated from the vehicle traffic. So you could have a 1-2m grass strip from the property boundary (for safer visibility from driveways), then 2-3m for a footpath + grass strip + cycle path or a wider combined footpath/cycle path, then a 1-2m grass strip, bus lane, 2 traffic lanes, flush median – 2 (grass) + 3 (path) + 2 (grass/shrubs) + 3.5 (bus) + 3.5 + 3.5 + 3 (median) + 3.5 + 3.5 + 3.5 (bus) + 2 (grass/shrubs) + 3 (path) + 2 (grass) = 38m. That would encourage more walking and cycling.
With regular refuges in the median, the speed limit could be raised to 60kmh, and the surrounding roads could be reduced to 40kmh to discourage rat running.
Sad to see Auckland sprawl out into its beautiful countryside whilst there is plenty of land available in places like this which already has amenities in place.