Editorial: New plan for Queen St far too careful

Opinion

Urban design is a difficult art. Sometimes the most attractive plaza on paper turns out to be cold and lifeless in reality. The Auckland City Council's designers have presided over several such disasters in the central area. Queen Elizabeth II Square springs to mind. When the bottom of Queen St was closed to traffic and the square laid out, the result was a windswept expanse of seats, pools and art that did not become inviting until several food carts were allowed to set up there. The designers, however, clearly learned nothing from the experience because after a year or two they decided the kiosks were far too untidy, ordered them into a straight line and the square died again. Now it is a bus terminal.

The lesson to be taken from the bottom of Queen St is that public places can be too carefully designed. The more successful are those that leave room for people to use in the way they find most congenial. That lesson should not be ignored in the redesign of the rest of Auckland's "golden mile", which certainly needs work if the street is to live up to that description again. It is looking tired and as tatty as the $2 shops, quick-lunch bars and tourist traps that now proliferate there.

The council has this week produced yet another plan it hopes will make the street more attractive to people on foot. The latest design is a less bold version of the last. This one retains two lanes of traffic in each direction and car parking along the kerb. Three additional pedestrian crossings are proposed, each with traffic lights. They will be synchronised with intersection lights to maintain the traffic flow. The new "attractions" to pedestrians amount to more trees, bluestone paving, better lighting of the better buildings and some artistic features at the Karangahape Rd end, at Myers Park and Aotea Square, Polynesian-styled planters and sculptured seating at the original foreshore. It hardly seems enough.

The revised design is a concession to the retail and other business "stakeholders" who feared that the previous plan left too little room for loading bays, car parking and traffic. Yet if Queen St is ever to become a pleasant place to stroll, sit and move between shops, cafes and entertainment venues, the removal of at least kerbside parking seems imperative. Service lanes could surely suffice for loading bays in most sections of the street and as for customer parking at the kerb, who does? Queen St is hardly a place where drivers expect to pull in near their destination, even at weekends.

If the parking bays were given over to widened footpaths there would be more room for seats, trees, cafe tables and other street furniture that people enjoy - so long as the designers contained themselves. Those are the areas where room could be left for private enterprise to work in its haphazard way. Kiosks, newsstands, fruit barrows, street entertainers would all be likely to spring to life if the newly paved areas were not moulded too much to a draughtsman's geometry.

The street need not be closed to vehicles entirely but it could discourage traffic more than it does. It might be better if those new light-controlled pedestrian crossings were not synchronised quite so well. The outside lane in each direction could be exclusively for buses, or trams if the "light rail" from Britomart ever comes to fruition. Britomart is essentially a council investment in Queen St, as is The Edge entertainment district. The terminal is grander than could be justified by the diverse travel patterns of greater Auckland, and The Edge is a response to the steady disappearance of cinema to the suburbs.

But those investments might come to nothing unless the street can regain its attraction. Developments off Queen St, such as the new alleys around the Freyberg memorial, and Viaduct Harbour, demonstrate the scale and character that work. Queen St is main street; it needs traffic as well as people. A better balance has to be struck. The latest design does not appear to do it.