A plainly daft piece on the proposed Auckland Plan by Bill Ralston recently appeared in the NZ Listener. In it he claims, completely without any reason, that the plan sets out to demolish where he lives, as well as every other desirable part of Auckland in the name of instensification. This is simply untrue. It is true that the Plan hopes to encourage Auckland to continue to become a more intensive city, but not by demolishing the very best bits, or even very much of it at all. In fact it is decidedly half-hearted about containing the spread outwards, even proposing 140,000 new detached houses be built in the next 30 years under one scenario. All on what is currently productive and attractive distant countryside, and all to be served by endlessly and expensively rolling out new services: From the current 385,000 detached houses to 526,000! Did you actually read the thing, Bill?
In any case, intensification is clearly a matter of degree and the areas proposed for the kind of high density high rise growth that so alarms dear old Bill [but of course not everyone], is all carefully allotted to currently empty or underused commercial ‘brownfields’ sites on transport corridors in areas like the CBD, Glen Innes, and New Lynn. Not Bill’s neck of the woods. Other areas are intended to be encouraged to move from low to medium density. Bill’s place isn’t on this list either.
Ironically, in light of this reaction, the type of intensification that would go a long way to both accommodating Auckland’s growth and greatly improving our quality of life is about trying to help more of Auckland more closely resemble Bill’s very own suburb. His suburb is, in fact, a role model for how much of Auckland ideally could be. But that isn’t by repeating the thing that Bill thinks his ‘burb is all about, the appearance of the buildings, but rather about how they are organised. Not architectural design, but urban design. Really, how?
Freemans Bay is, along with St Mary’s Bay, Herne Bay, Parnell, Devonport, Northcote, Ponsonby, Grey Lynn, and Mt Eden, a highly sought after and therefore expensive bit of old Auckland. So it is worth asking what is so good about it?
Well most of the buildings are old. That’s it isn’t it? Most people love old houses, with their mature trees, and in Auckland that means Victorian and Edwardian houses, usually detached wooden dwellings. Unlike Sydney, Auckland isn’t old enough to have Georgian buildings and also unlike Sydney or Dunedin there wasn’t the resource of stone or even much brick to compete with the pillage of the native forests that our forebears felt so entitled to use so completely. Furthermore, in a reversal of the trend of the second half of the last century we have recently been rediscovering the advantages of these close-in old suburbs. So instead of looking on these areas as slums and bulldozing them wholesale in order to build motorways as we did from the 1960s we have recently been turning houses like this one:More and more into houses like this one:
But that isn’t the whole story is it? Properly understood three factors make Freemans Bay such a great place to live, and only one of them is the irreplaceable age of the structures. And this is important because while we can’t time-travel and build real Victorian houses again we can take the best urban design features from these areas to improve what we build next, and even fix other parts of the existing city with these ideas too. The three essential features, in no particular order, that make Freemans Bay so desirable are:
1. Physical Heritage
2. Proximity to the centre
3. Population density
All the things that you may like about Freemans Bay flow from these; for example, great cafés and shops? They are a function of the quantity of people around and the desirability of the place, which in turn is because of the density of the housing and the proximity to the centre of town. Retail businesses need enough customers, and specialised ones need an even higher number going by because their appeal is, by definition, narrow.
But hang on, waddaymean population density?, this is just a suburb with detached houses and some shops isn’t it?, same as Dannemora or Botany? Well it isn’t high density but it is medium density and is considerably higher than most more recent suburbs. And here’s how: As this post by Admin shows, when looked at in detail you can see that the narrow streets and painted shiplap conceal a clever spatial order that maximises private space yet retains public charm. It is in fact this spatial order, and its resultant density of population that sustains the local businesses and other amenities all at close proximity.
Of course old buildings add texture and charm, but it is important urban design features and not architectural ones that make the real structural differences. Let’s look at Bill’s favourite café, mentioned in his article: Agnes Curran.Yes it is in a building pleasingly made of plastered brick and the door to the rooms above are surrounded by Georgian style decoration, lovely. But let’s look at everything else that makes this a really successful streetscape and business. The café occupies a tiny space about the size of two car parks, it is right up to the generous footpath, a footpath separated from the traffic by mature Plane trees [with a new one recently added on the right], the trees also accommodate a limited number of on-street car parks. A small apartment building to the left of the shot is smack up the boundary with the cafe and the footpath, and there are other levels of accommodation above retail spaces on the main road. Thus there is an extremely tight integration of the residential and commercial functions of this neighbourhood; so everyone walks, no need to drive when your destination is already right there. Here it is from above: The cafe is in the alley between the grey and reddish rooves at bottom left. Occupying the space that would have to be given over to off-street parking were this a new building- by current council regulation. Note that the houses are closer than is currently allowed in new subdivisions, and that their garden space is all together in one piece at the rear of each house. Small, but all usable, and private. And Ponsonby Rd is, by Auckland standards, relatively well served by public transport, especially in the form of the frequent new Inner Link bus service, connecting this place to the CBD, the universities, the hospital, everything really.It is easy to see that this is quite an intensely built place, but also pleasantly leafy, and is in fact at the intersection of two pretty busy roads; Ponsonby and Franklin. How can it be of such density but still be so pleasant, it must be the design of the buildings? Well that is of course important, but how much they appeal to you is really a matter of personal taste, no, it has much more to do with what is not visible in this picture. To show what that is lets have a look at a cafe in a more recent part of town:Dunkin Donuts at Botany Downs courtesy of Google [sorry but I'm not going there]. And from above:Well in fact there’s a whole lot of food outlets on in this image, a KFC, a seafood place, as well as Dunkin Donuts. And yup they are all pretty nasty new buildings, built to a price and without any conviction that they mean to stay. But also note there are no houses or apartments of any kind here and no one walking. But there is the one amenity that is almost entirely absent from the earlier scene. This is a place rich in carparking. Viewed from above or from street level it is clear that this is a place entirely made for the movement and storage of cars. Yes you can argue that that what most distinguishes the natures of these two places is the age and design of the structures, but it is also clear that the spatial organisation is at least as important a difference. Put simply the first is designed for people and the second for cars. The first has a higher density of humans and the second of machines. The first, of course, commands much higher values and is where Bill wants to live. And the first, while more expensive to buy into, is actually cheaper to live in, because the intensity of the place means the costs of movement are much lower. It is a place that you can easily function without a car at all for example [As local resident, Bill, says in this article].
But of course the people living Freemans Bay do still use cars, but unlike those that live in the these new areas, they don’t have to use them just to get to their local café or other common local amenity, like schools, workplaces, or bars. They walk more and they use public transport more. Why? not because they are cleverer than the people in Dannemora but because their area was designed for those choices to be the most obvious, most productive, and most enjoyable things to do. And we can spread more of this simple genius to other parts of our city, even Botany, if can just reverse the insane auto-centric planning priorities of the last fifty years. This means putting people at the centre of the spatial organisation of places. It means repealing the rules that insist that the car must be catered for first. And it means for many of our primarily residential areas mixing the living and working and playing in the kind of intense proximity that Bill enjoys in Freemans Bay.
And it also means that we must provide systems of movement that do not devalue the very places they are meant to serve. Which of course means fast, frequent, smart, public transit. Something lacking in the newer suburb.
Furthermore, if we can get those planning settings right and are able to encourage the kind of spatial organisation that Bill enjoys so unconsciously in Freemans Bay, it is highly likely that we will see the design of the individual buildings in these places improve significantly, because increased intensity of humans also means increased intensity of economic activity. And, of course, because it involves unlocking the land and the resources currently tied up so unproductively in providing so much amenity for vehicles.
We can have Freemans Bay’s qualities of urban design in other places with contemporary design and technologies, after all Freemans Bay isn’t all old buildings and is all the better for it. It isn’t a museum. Here are two quite different and award winning recent detached houses there, The first by Marsh Cook: And the second by Malcolm Walker:Freemans Bay also has contemporary buildings by Mitchell + Stout, Stevens Lawson, Fearon Hay, Andrew Patterson, and more. Along with council pensioner flats, town houses, and apartment buildings.
And remember, while The Plan doesn’t envisage the core of Freemans Bay changing much at all, it does for some other underperforming areas of Auckland. And as the picture below of Freemans Bay in 1877 shows change is always possible, and can be a very good thing indeed……… Anyway, why shouldn’t more Aucklanders get the chance to enjoy their neighbourhood as much as our friend Bill Ralston enjoys his?
As there’s been a lot of discussion about population density here I figure this post from good ol’ Cap’nTransit is on the money. Yes this is my view too, you think more density is needed? Well build the transit and the density will follow [all else being equal], foolish to try to wait for some ideal density then meet that demand with infrastructure. Transit supply is causative. Or as the Cap’n says: ‘The population density to support my ass’
Here are two interesting posts on Twitter and Transit. One beautiful the other more for the quants. Both instructive.
The second is via Atlantic Cities where there is also this argument for High Speed Rail in the Union’s most populous State, California. Newt of the GOP has been banging on about the US heading back to the moon in some kind of pissing contest with China, but frankly if they can’t even get a train to run from SF to LA and any decent speed I think he’ed better dodge that race. *Note for Geoff: These arguments here for HSR are intended as a metaphor for local arguments for urban transit, not as a literal argument for HSR in NZ. Same things apply, land use transformations, economic return not a financial one etc, but at a vastly different scale.
More from the States on gas prices [as they call them] and what to do, and for once this doesn’t involve bombing somewhere else or other wise frackin’ it all up.
Closer to home; no round up from me will be complete without at least a passing note on resource supply issues. As we head to the exciting singularity of peak damn near everything it’s good to see some people have their heads up. Here’s an introductory note from across the ditch, what I especially like about this is that it states a view that I also have, namely that it could just be that a world with less freely available oil may well be a lot better in a number of ways; once we’ve made the adjustment. Like London after the peasoup smog and mountains of horse-shit. I’m also guessing less isolation, more localiasation, more human interaction, less alienation. Perhaps more meaningful lives. Perhaps.
There’s also this guy, Denis Tegg, I know nothing about him but he has been manfully plugging away on this issue in NZ for a while and here he is bringing an important shelved report to the surface. I say manfully because there is a really creepy silence on this issue and Climate Change in the mainstream media and in government in NZ. It’s like if we don’t mention these problems they’ll just go away.
Look away Actoids! Here’s a well reasoned piece on the attractions and limitations of neoliberalism. It’s short too. Relevant how? Transit like our cities need long term planning, by elected bodies. The market is a great tool, but a lousy master, and an even worse god. As I think we’ve just seen.
Those interested in the strange ways that change can happen will like this. Why the US Marine Corp may well lead the US into a solar future.
Back to transit, and more personally; I have new wheels, yay! and loving it, but won’t be going to these extremes to protect them. No.
I must admit to being quite a map geek, or perhaps more accurately, a geography geek in general. Which is why one of my favourite Christmas presents this year was the excellent bookMaphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks, by Ken Jennings. The book is fantastic, running through many oddities about the wonderful world of maps.
The book talks about this amazing Youtube video, for example:
One of the other fascinating things the book discusses, is the little town of Baarle-Nassau – sitting in the Netherlands (or Belgium, we’ll come to that). Zoomed out, there doesn’t seem to be too much that is strange about the town, sitting near the borders of the two countries: However, if you zoom in, you see a weird mess of grey lines (indicating national borders):
The book Maphead describes the situation:
It’s made up of no fewer than twenty-six separate pieces of Belgium sitting, thanks to a complicated series of medieval treaties between two warring dukes, in the middle of the Netherlands. Some of these little bits of Belgium have little bits of the Netherlands inside them, leading to an impossibly intricate border that divides some village homes in half between the two nations. Your nationality depends on where your front door is, and residents have been known to ‘emigrate’ by moving their door every time the tax laws change. When bars and restaurants in the Netherlands close, landlords just move their tables onto the Belgian side of their establishment and keep on serving.
An aerial photograph of the area (yellow lines show borders) highlights just how weird the situation is. Little bits of some fields fall into a different country than the remainder of that field:
There are some other strange borders, perhaps most notably the Northwest Angle and Point Roberts, but I think this is the weirdest. And most interesting.
Last week I was invited to appear on the Asian Radio Show on RadioLIVE to discuss the topic of what New Zealand can learn from public transport in Asia. Having spent a large part of this year travelling across Asia by public transport I guess I can now consider myself something of an instant expert on the topic, or at least I’ve had plenty of experiences to curry an opinion on the topic. This post summarises and expands on the panel’s discussion, but if you’re interested the original segment can be heard here:
Asia has some fantastic examples of efficient metros, high speed lines, mega bus systems, and even maglevs. I could write pages and pages about some of the great systems I’ve tried that we could try to emulate here. While these are obviously a lot different to what we have in New Zealand, the really key differences are at a strategic level. So what are the differences between transport here and in Asia, and what we could learn or do differently as a result?
Normalcy
Chinese high speed rail
In Asia public transport is an immediately accessible and functional part of life and used by a large proportion of the population (together with walking and cycling) for daily transport, in same way that driving is considered completely normal here in New Zealand. Public transport is usually the normal way to get around in Asia, rather than something that is reluctantly provided to those who are too unfortunate to drive. Surely ‘normalising’ public transport as something used by regular people is the first thing we can learn from Asia.
Cost efficiency
In general Asian countries have to deal with either limited wealth per capita, large population pressures, or in many cases a combination of the two. This means that out of necessity Asia must adopt transport and planning outcomes that are efficient in terms of money and resources, unlike Europe which perhaps has the luxury of more money to spend per person. While New Zealand has a small population and relatively high wealth, our transport costs are among the highest per person in the world.
Should we be squandering such a large proportion of our wealth just to get around each day? The good point was made that maybe we should look to Aisa rather than Europe for future transport cues. Given the current state of New Zealand’s economy, perhaps we could take a page out of Asia’s book and look to efficient and cost effective public transport to lower the drain on our economy that comes from expensive and wasteful transport policy.
Ideology and politics
One very important point brought up in the panel was the somewhat peculiar fact that public transport in New Zealand is weighted with political ideology, while in Asia there is no such partisan division. In Asia public transport is politically neutral, it is accepted by all political groups in the same non-ideological way that we in New Zealand treat other infrastructure such as stormwater drainage or electricity supply.
Yet in New Zealand public transport is always framed in terms of leftist ideology and aligned with socialist, authoritarian thinking, while private transport is the domain of right wing capitalists. It is simply wrong that in our country the Minister of Transport writes an editorial response to his detractors and speaks in terms of ideology, ‘freedom’ and how good honest Kiwis chose to live their lives in “the real world”. It must be perplexing for a business visitor from Singapore or Hong Kong to discover that in New Zealand buses and trains are only for jobless sandal wearing hippies, while wasting time and petrol on a congested publicly-funded motorway is the domain of successful freedom loving capitalists!
Anyway, before we descend further into the black hole of partisan politics I will suggest the number one thing New Zealand could learn from Asian transport is to drop the ideological vitriol and accept that public transport can be just as useful to the right wing as the left.
Labour costs and regulation
One thing not touched on in the radio discussion is the issue of labour costs and regulation, I would like to discuss it here because operating and compliance costs can create critical differences which we need to bear in mind when making comparisons between countries. In most of Asia the labour market is so broadly spread you still have things like pedicabs and jitneys, where one operator can move only one or a few people at a time and still make a living (albeit a poor one). To be blunt, most Asian public transport can afford to be highly labour intensive because there is a large, poor working class who are willing to work long hours for a pittance to make ends meet. In New Zealand we have a high standard of living, a high minimum wage and consequently high labour costs. Even on minimum wage a bus driver in Auckland would make more in a day than a Chinese driver makes in a week, or a Cambodian driver makes in a month.
A Thai Songthaew
The other issue is the lack of regulation around operation and safety standards. While not quite the case in the more developed economies of east Asia, in the developing nations basically anything (and everything) that moves is employed as public transport. Not long ago I took a ‘public bus’ across the northern part of Bali that consisted of a large van with no side window glass, no passenger side door at all and a hole in the floor big enough to lose a daypack in! Obviously here they are happy to trade safety and security for low maintenance costs, but we cannot do the same in New Zealand.
I’m really making this point because one often hears the opinion from neo-liberal commentators that we should follow the example of the jitneys and songthaews of Asia in the western world. What they propose is we dump our expensive regulated buses and trains and replace them with a loose network of small privately run transport vehicles operating a flexible, demand responsive transport service that picks people up from anywhere and take them more or less directly to their destination, a sort of shared taxi-van system.
I guess that kind of thing is attractive to a card carrying free-marketeer because it requires no regulation or co-ordination from local government, it provides a ‘flexible freedom’ of travel according to the passengers needs, and it is in the spirit of private capitalism. However what such commentators quietly glaze over is the issue of labour and operational costs. In parts of Asia you can have a small ute with a few wooden benches in the back operating a profitable private transport service (assuming the driver works twelve hours a day, seven days a week of course!). But in New Zealand such a service could never be vaguely profitable for a private operator if they were required to maintain our vehicle safety standards and labour conditions.Also I have found if you’re not going close to where the driver is headed you don’t get a lift! This means that in practice these types of services end up operating a pretty regular route anyway, sending the argument of flexibility and demand responsiveness out the window.
So how to make the change?
To finish up one final question was posed to me in the radio panel: the supposedly difficult question of how to shift people out of their ‘Kiwi’ cars and into more efficient ‘Asian’ public transport? To me this needn’t be a difficult question at all because the answer lies in simple logic: people will generally use the transport that is easiest for them; they will do whatever is cheap, convenient and actually gets them where they need to be on time.
Speaking generally, people drive for transport in New Zealand because we have spent the last seven decades or so focussing our transport policy and funding almost entirely on providing for private road transport, while all but disassembling the public transport system and marginalising walking and cycling in favour of cars. Auckland used to be world leaders in public transport use, but we then planned and funded an all but completely car based transport system and have got exactly what we asked for: an almost entirely car dependent city.
The point here is these isn’t any innate cultural or genetic reason why Kiwis drive all the time and Asians don’t, it is simply people doing what is easiest in light of the conditions and options they have. In my opinion the idea that New Zealanders have a ‘love affair’ with cars is more of a justification than a cause. In reality the relationship is ironically closer to that Asian institiution of arranged marriage.
Indeed, to force New Zealand drivers out of their cars would be quite a task when (in most cases) driving is the only realistic option and public transport is in relation difficult, expensive and ineffective. Now I’m not suggesting that driving is inherently better, but rather that New Zealand public transport is usually so poor and marginalised that taking the car is the lesser evil (despite traffic, fuel costs, parking and all). The fact that half the commuters to the Auckland CBD each weekday get there without driving shows that Kiwis will happily take public transport when it works for them.
So the answer is of course that we don’t have to ‘force’ drivers into public transport at all. If we continue to change the planning and funding of our transport system in a way that makes transit an effective and realistic option, then car drivers will make the shift themselves… regardless of whether they are Kiwi, Asian or whatever.
Greece has been in the news a lot lately, for all the wrong reasons. Having travelled through Greece on my way back to New Zealand, I felt compelled to add a personal (and more positive) spin on Greece’s fortunes.
My first few days were spent in Kalamata, where I spent much of the time huddled beneath an umbrella trying unsuccessfully to avoid the blazing sun, while playing backgammon and sipping on iced coffees. The view from my office window is shown below.After spending over 12 monhs in frigid Northern Europe, Greece’s beach culture was refreshing – and somewhat reminiscent of New Zealand. The beach is for hanging out and having fun in whatever way you can.
At one dance party on the beach I witnessed a charming tradition: Paraffin kites would be lit and allowed to fill with hot air, before then being released to sail off over the ocean. The kites would travel for miles, lighting up the night sky like slow moving shooting stars. It was, so I was told, a modern-day salute to the fabled, but ill-fated, attempt by Icarus to fly to the sun on his wax wings.
Putting relaxation, revelry, and tradition to one side, there is no doubt that Greece is a charming place. There’s any number of small coastal villages to visit and while away the hours. The photo below shows the town of Methoni, where an ancient fort overlooks the town and beach.
Thoughts about transport did not cross my mind so much during my week in Greece; there were too many other interesting things going on. I can, however, recommend the long distance buses, even if the KTEL bus terminal in Athens is dire and not easily navigated by the faint-hearted.
I was particularly impressed by the metro in Athens. My favourite example is Monasteraki Station, shown below (yellow building to left), which blends in seamlessly with what is a wonderfully historic square. Many metro stations have in-built displays to show the artefacts that were discovered during excavations for the tunnels and stations. By tastefully blending transport with culture the metro is definitely a winner.
The Old Town in Athens is an absolute urban delight; all those who love cities should wander and savour it’s ancient atmosphere.
All in all I had a wonderful time in Greece. Looking forward I hope Greece can sort through it’s economic challenges and so devote more time and energy to the important business of enjoying life, albeit perhaps now with a chastened awareness of fiscal/economic constraints. I left Greece wanting to see more, which is always a good sign.
*** This post is dedicated to my fantastic hosts: Voula Adamopolous, her family, and friends ***
During my lunch break today I headed down to see how the Fort Street shared space is working. The weather was good so I spent around half an hour watching how the place works. Overall I was pretty impressed by how the area works. People generally have the confidence to walk down the middle of the street, the cars generally travel at a slow speed (around one in four went a bit fast for my liking) and the mix of pedestrian and cars, a kind of glorious chaos, actually seems to work. It’s also interesting to see how the area is starting to change as a result of the shared space. The Kebabs on Queen and Sumo Sushi stores you can see in the photo above have pushed seating out onto the street.
What the Fort Street shared space highlights though is how bad pedestrians have it in other parts of the city. Not far behind where this photo was taken is the corner of High Street and Shortland Street, an incredibly busy intersection for pedestrians but with no traffic calming measures for vehicles zipping down the Shortland Street hill. It’s only a matter of time before something goes wrong there. Plus the bizarre nature of High Street, with its narrow (and generally overflowing with pedestrians) footpaths so we can provide a handful of on-street parking spaces.
For future shared spaces there is one thing that I think could make them better, and that is a noisier road surface. Not only would this slow drivers down (nothing like a rough noisy surface to slow you down) but it would also ensure that when you’re walking down the middle of a shared space in the same direction as vehicles you’d actually be able to hear them come up behind you, rather than feeling somewhat unsettled and constantly looking over your shoulder to see if there’s anything behind you. I’m not quite sure how you could achieve such a surface that’s still comfortable to walk across – while ensuring the noise isn’t so loud as to annoy people in the area, but I think it’s worth looking into.
I think the shared spaces will be really popular as the weather improves. It certainly felt like a really nice place to enjoy my lunch.
In the aftermath of Friday’s transport debacle, a lot of focus has gone on the people who didn’t make it to Eden Park because of problems with the rail network. To an extent this is justified, because these people had paid a lot of money for their tickets and it’s shameful the system let them down. However, from my experience (and the experience of others) this was by no means whatsoever the only transport issues faced on that day.
To start with, the whole public transport system seemed to be incredibly busy throughout Friday during the day, as many thousands of people came into town to enjoy the opening night celebrations. One person I know drove to Herne Bay to park their car and catch the Outer Link bus into town, but after waiting for around an hour for a non-existent bus, ended up driving back to the North Shore and catching a Birkenhead Transport bus in from there. Ferry services were cancelled, people trying to catch trains into town were left stranded on platforms, the busway stations on the North Shore got completely overloaded and so forth.
In town, as I noted in this post, the number of people kept on growing and growing throughout the afternoon. This led to safety issues as the evening wore on, because stupidly streets weren’t closed to traffic:
Lower Queen St and Customs St westbound were later closed to traffic on the advice of police [actually they never were].
But six people were hurt when a bus hit them in Fanshawe St in the city. The bus and a car had collided before the bus hit the group.
A 33-year-old man and a 50-year-old woman were taken to Auckland hospital.
Auckland District Health Board spokesman Mark Fenwick said both were in a stable condition.
But the real transport problems that I experienced related to getting everyone home. People had already started trying to get home after the fireworks, but the system was in chaos. My sister tried to get a train out west (while the game was on) but after waiting for well over an hour – with no communication about what was going on – she (and her 5 month old baby and 3 year old son) eventually gave up and caught a bus to somewhere relatively near home. They got home around midnight.
After watching the fireworks I headed back to my office to wait for the crowds to go down, then attempted to catch an Inner Link bus to Ponsonby before walking home. Waited on Victoria Street while two non-existent Link Buses on the real-time sign went by, then walked to Wellesley Street to see a half-empty Outer Link bus with “terminates at Civic” on its front drive past a bunch of people. Then walked down to Victoria Park Market just in time to have an Outer Link bus with quite a few standing passengers (but still plenty of room) pull up, but had the driver say there was only room for two more people. As we had my seven year old daughter (and three month old in a baby carrier) with us, we weren’t allowed on. Eventually our friend who had by this time managed to catch a Birkenhead Transport bus to the North Shore and drive back to my place, offered us a lift home.
Most people I’ve talked to about the evening had similar stories about the difficulties of getting home. It seemed that, just like most other things that happened that day, there was a complete lack of planning for dealing with so many people. Birkenhead Transport seemed to be the shining exception to this – providing a fairly constant stream of buses to whip people either into town earlier in the day, then out of town later on.
Overall though, the evening was a complete shambles for far more people than those who got stuck on the trains trying to get to Eden Park. I certainly hope that the study of “what went wrong” extends to the disoganisation of getting people in and out of town and is not only focused on the Eden Park issue.
Today is a pretty exciting day for Auckland, with the start of the Rugby World Cup and what promises to be a pretty giant party celebrating the start of the tournament.
All week the city has had this “building up” feeling, getting busier and busier by the day and feeling more and more festive. It’s been really awesome to be in town every day this week and soak it all up. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing what the “vibe” of Auckland is like over the next month and a half – as we experience the huge number of international visitors, as we have so much of the world’s focus on us, as (hopefully) the All Blacks march towards finally winning back the World Cup.
In the end, I think the greatest legacy of the World Cup has already happened, and that is the way the city looks at the moment. So many projects that probably sat in the “maybe some day” basket have actually happened: the public getting back Queens Wharf, the various shared spaces around downtown, something of an integrated ticketing system, the upgrade of Kingsland Station and modernisation of our rail signalling systems, Wynyard Quarter, the Art Gallery refurbishment, the list goes on and on.
Let’s just enjoy the day, as a great day for Auckland.
Last week something rather sad happened. After my blog post on the systems used to track buses around Auckland brought attention to a fairly new blog on transport issues in Auckland, there was obviously some pretty messy stuff happening behind the scenes which led to the aforementioned blog being taken down, apparently because it had ‘overstepped the mark’ and shared information it shouldn’t have. This was kind of weird, because the post in question had gone to some lengths to disguise commercially sensitive information by blocking out the particular route number and how many passengers were on that service: Before the blog was completely taken down, there was an insightful comment by someone, once it had been announced that the blog was to be discontinued. The comment noted that the information in the various posts – that had offered a useful insight into some of the inner workings of Auckland’s PT system (but in a sensitive way) – had led to them having a higher opinion of Auckland Transport and many of the bus operators than they’d ever had before. Like me, they were actually surprisingly and thoroughly impressed by the detailed, advanced and professional way in which buses were being tracked.
While I understand issues of commercial sensitivity, and the need for confidentiality on issues where decisions are yet to be made, I generally think that the various agencies in charge of transport matters in Auckland (and throughout New Zealand) are overly secretive, and that they are actually hurt by this fact. Most of Auckland Transport’s interesting board reports are confidential, NZTA turns down or delays Official Information Act requests all the time, no transport agencies have detailed public blogs like you see in Canada, and so forth.
The result of all this secrecy is, I think, a poorer transport debate than we would otherwise have – and as a result of that, poorer transport decisions. It is beyond doubt that Auckland in particular has made a series of incredibly bad transport decisions over the years, typically the result of ‘experts’ over-riding and ignoring public opinion – an obvious case in point being the roads-centric 1955 Master Transportation Plan. The transport plan was taken away from public participation as it was considered ‘purely a technical matter’.
Even now it’s mightily difficult to have excellent transport debates in New Zealand – where are our independent transport experts? We need to bring them in from Australia to ignite any public debate. The difficulty is that most people who know a lot about transport matters work for the transport agencies, or for consultancies who work for them. Of course they can’t talk about transport issues – so most of the work continues behind the scenes without the public really knowing what’s happening.
I guess all of this perhaps helps to explain why I get a bit dispirited.
More and more into houses like this one:
Yes it is in a building pleasingly made of plastered brick and the door to the rooms above are surrounded by Georgian style decoration, lovely. But let’s look at everything else that makes this a really successful streetscape and business. The café occupies a tiny space about the size of two car parks, it is right up to the generous footpath, a footpath separated from the traffic by mature Plane trees [with a new one recently added on the right], the trees also accommodate a limited number of on-street car parks. A small apartment building to the left of the shot is smack up the boundary with the cafe and the footpath, and there are other levels of accommodation above retail spaces on the main road. Thus there is an extremely tight integration of the residential and commercial functions of this neighbourhood; so everyone walks, no need to drive when your destination is already right there. Here it is from above: The cafe is in the alley between the grey and reddish rooves at bottom left. Occupying the space that would have to be given over to off-street parking were this a new building- by current council regulation. Note that the houses are closer than is currently allowed in new subdivisions, and that their garden space is all together in one piece at the rear of each house. Small, but all usable, and private. And Ponsonby Rd is, by Auckland standards, relatively well served by public transport, especially in the form of the frequent new Inner Link bus service, connecting this place to the CBD, the universities, the hospital, everything really.
It is easy to see that this is quite an intensely built place, but also pleasantly leafy, and is in fact at the intersection of two pretty busy roads; Ponsonby and Franklin. How can it be of such density but still be so pleasant, it must be the design of the buildings? Well that is of course important, but how much they appeal to you is really a matter of personal taste, no, it has much more to do with what is not visible in this picture. To show what that is lets have a look at a cafe in a more recent part of town:
Dunkin Donuts at Botany Downs courtesy of Google [sorry but I'm not going there]. And from above:
Well in fact there’s a whole lot of food outlets on in this image, a KFC, a seafood place, as well as Dunkin Donuts. And yup they are all pretty nasty new buildings, built to a price and without any conviction that they mean to stay. But also note there are no houses or apartments of any kind here and no one walking. But there is the one amenity that is almost entirely absent from the earlier scene. This is a place rich in carparking. Viewed from above or from street level it is clear that this is a place entirely made for the movement and storage of cars. Yes you can argue that that what most distinguishes the natures of these two places is the age and design of the structures, but it is also clear that the spatial organisation is at least as important a difference. Put simply the first is designed for people and the second for cars. The first has a higher density of humans and the second of machines. The first, of course, commands much higher values and is where Bill wants to live. And the first, while more expensive to buy into, is actually cheaper to live in, because the intensity of the place means the costs of movement are much lower. It is a place that you can easily function without a car at all for example [As local resident, Bill, says in this article].
And the second by Malcolm Walker:
Freemans Bay also has contemporary buildings by Mitchell + Stout, Stevens Lawson, Fearon Hay, Andrew Patterson, and more. Along with council pensioner flats, town houses, and apartment buildings.
Before the blog was completely taken down, there was an insightful comment by someone, once it had been announced that the blog was to be discontinued. The comment noted that the information in the various posts – that had offered a useful insight into some of the inner workings of Auckland’s PT system (but in a sensitive way) – had led to them having a higher opinion of Auckland Transport and many of the bus operators than they’d ever had before. Like me, they were actually surprisingly and thoroughly impressed by the detailed, advanced and professional way in which buses were being tracked.
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