Brian Rudman: A new language... and an old horror story

Queen Street will be 'the Engine Room'. Photo / Dean Purcell

The authors of Auckland Council's city centre masterplan have not only created a vision of how they'd like to "unlock the city centre's potential". They've also created a new language.

The Queen St valley's central business district is no longer the CBD, it's "the Engine Room". Except, that is, for the bits occupied by universities and language schools which become "the learning cradle".

Uniting the waterfront and the city centre is "the north-south stitch," which shouldn't be confused by those without a compass with "the east-west stitch" which is connects the western edge of the city to the centre.

But putting the jargon to one side, this 20-year plan manages to balance the eternal conflict between Aucklander-the-motorist and Aucklander-the-pedestrian about as well as could be hoped.

The planners have resisted mayoral pressure to turn Queen St into a mall saying "this might be an unnecessary and overly expensive step". I can only agree with them, though they then try to have a bob each way by saying "desired outcomes could be delivered through a shared space approach with buses, service vehicles and local traffic ... sharing the street with pedestrians".

I can reluctantly live with sharing my space with the odd car and delivery vehicle, but I draw the line at buses.

Anyway, as the report says, Queen St had a $40 million rebuild in 2007, when the pavements were widened, Nikau palms planted and new seating installed. Pedestrian traffic increased 25 per cent within a year.

Now, with parallel streets on either side of Queen St going through the "shared space" transformation, is allowing wheeled vehicles in one street of the CBD so awful?

Making better linkages between the Domain and the CBD and the waterfront, greening Victoria St and restoring the St James Theatre are all priorities in the plan to be encouraged. But I searched in vain for its solution to one glaring obstacle to several of the goals, not least, the objective of achieving the "north-south stitch". I speak of the horror that is the downtown bus terminal.

The document enthuses about Auckland's "incredible coastline" and downtown waterfront but despairs of "the challenge people face in getting to these destinations on foot from the city".

Pedestrians have trouble, it says, crossing busy Fanshawe, Customs and Quay streets, and proposes grand plans to calm traffic. But it ignores the creeping cancer of the ever-expanding central bus terminus, centred on Queen Elizabeth Square, but oozing out into surrounding streets for blocks around.

All we get is a sentence in a section on "QE2 Square and Britomart Station" which says "Work here would begin with an assessment of the public transport interchange, specifically the bus stops on Lower Queen St, which divide Britomart Station from QE2 Square and inhibit pedestrian crossing."

Reducing traffic on Quay and Customs streets is seen as the main task. But that leaves the north-south pedestrian flow blocked and intimidated by the buses. If the planners succeed in getting more people on to public transport, this problem will expand.

When the old Britomart bus station was bowled to make way for redevelopment, it was to be replaced with an underground station linked to the new railway station. Costs, and complaints by bus operators that driving in and out of the station would add time to busy schedules, led to that plan being canned.

The third world compromise was to blight Queen Elizabeth Square and streets for blocks in all directions with waiting buses, belching noise and exhaust fumes on all who were forced to venture near.

Perhaps in 20 years, all the buses will be electric and silent, but that would only create a new problem for pedestrians, death by stealth. I did once suggest a possible solution would be a bus terminus on the wharf space to the east of Queens Wharf, but concede that would hardly add to the waterfront vista.

Another possibility is to commandeer the council car park in Customs St which the new report muses about replacing with a high rise office block.

Finally, the council wants your views on this, but the report is not going to be officially released until September 20.

If you can't wait, it is on the Auckland Council website, buried in the August 31 agenda of the future vision committee.