The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

On progress in Auckland in 2025

Ray Delahanty, aka Citynerd, did a video about Auckland, and wow, it has electric trains and a new underground rail tunnel. And actual bike lanes.

Yeah I liked that video. When watching it, I got a distinct feeling of nostalgia.

The vibe in the video reflects quite well the sentiment among urbanists in Auckland — up until around 2018. Even me — me — I was still writing optimistic blog posts about Auckland. And for good reason. When I arrived here in 2011, we still had diesel trains. The rails weren’t even electrified. *1 By 2015 we had modern electric trains.

Auckland Transport used to have a walking and cycling team. We actually got new cycleways built. We had Ludo Campbell-Reid the Design Champion.

How did we go from this, to this?

This is an attempt to cancel upgrades to streets around a new train station which will open soon. Streets which for the record look like this.

What happened to our steadily improving city?

Something broke in Auckland around 2018. Some existing projects still got completed (the City Rail Link is a prominent example). Others disappeared. Progress on bike lanes has almost completely stopped.

So, I have no idea what happened. It was shortly after Phil Goff became mayor, and shortly after we got a Labour government, but as far as I know that is just correlation.

And you don’t have to go far to figure out that for most people, in urbanist terms, things still just suck. It only takes a short walk from Wynyard Quarter.

Ray said in the video that he looked for places he could reach without a car. Well, the channel is called “Citynerd” and not “Suburbnerd”, so what am I gonna say? And yes, you can still do this in Auckland, especially as a yuppie. But sadly it remains a lifestyle accessible only to a small and dwindling share of our population.

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