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.
As someone who only gained an interest in these topics only 2-3 years ago, it really does feel like all the momentum and fight has gone out of any sort of street-level urbanism at both the political and activist level.
ReplyDeleteReally does feel like best we can hope for Auckland's future as a city is density-lead. The terrace city and some small pockets of apartments around train stations getting built hopefully generate demand for more attractive urban solutions after they've been built out further in 5-15 years, and there's been enough time for people to rediscover these ideas again without their current prejudices.
There's obviously less money in the pot these days, which doesn't help, but Wellington and Christchurch are still doing good work. I think it's underrated the extent to which the consecutive embarassments of ALR, SkyPath, the pain of the current CRL works and the bus meltdowns of 2022 cowed enthusiasts, empowered critics and moved the conversation on to other things. It's difficult to keep building when the current task is just defending the family jewels.
The backlash against ‘woke’ stuff has been swift and devastating.
DeleteAnd unfortunately over here urbanism counts as woke, much more so than in other countries.