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End of year, good time for introspection & looking to the future.
Here's a thread covering my reckons from this year about what Auckland needs to succeed in the future against problems in our big congestion, housing, climate, etc while improving liveability & affordability
Here's a thread covering my reckons from this year about what Auckland needs to succeed in the future against problems in our big congestion, housing, climate, etc while improving liveability & affordability
On affordability, the govt has made good steps in legalising 6 storey apartments near rapid transit. But there's still a few suburbs where people would build with that intensity (or more) close to employment hubs (eg Ponsonby, Parnell, Mt Eden, Epsom) which were missed.
More broadly there's very likely unrealised demand across the city for 'gentle density': townhouses, duplexes, and so small apartments. We could allow more of these by abolishing rules like setbacks, recession planes, and 1-2 storey height limits.
in fact wrote my first article about this, pretty proud of it to be quite honest https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2020/12/14/does-auckland-intensification-mean-soviet-tower-block-apartments/
A lot of Auckland's suburban commercial centres look like a handful of rundown takeaways, a decrepit mall, and a big box supermarket bisected by a 4 to 8 lane arterial taking you through a residential area to a suburban commercial centre which looks exactly the same.
This isn't an emergent phenomenon. Sadly, our city has been designed this way, as commerce has been considered as a "nuisance" to be kept away from houses. The effect of this is to lock in car dependency, making our neighbourhoods less livable and increasing carbon emissions.
It's quite hard to justify why a suburban residential street is made better off without light commerce like cafes, barbers, restaurants, grocers, and perhaps even things like an architect's office. Auckland should end segregation of light commerce and residential.
That said, you're never going to have every possible shop you'd need within walking distance, but it's absurd that an expensive 2 tonne block of metal is the default mode for local trips. If we're to overcome congestion and climate crises, we need to make space for bikes.
A bizarre side-effect of our COVID response has been that we haven't had to socially distance our hospo & streets, which overseas has actually resulted in explosion of 'parklets' & low traffic neighbourhoods, making those cities much more bike/walk/liveable. We should copy them!
In reducing commute times & emissions, there's a few big things we need to do, such as light rail (and more generally, a pipeline of rapid transit projects), but most of it is small stuff: keeping buses out of general traffic, reducing wait times, running buses more frequently.
Regarding general traffic, we should also look at how much of it we actually need in the city https://twitter.com/pv_reynolds/status/1164624701668245504
A lot of people are hesitant about this stuff because they think these are technically difficult problems to solve. They're not. Politicians just require explicit social licence from the public to reduce urban vehicle kilometres travelled and housing prices.
