Light rail on a green street in Barcelona. Photo / supplied
Light rail on a green street in Barcelona. Photo / supplied
Opinion by Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
Imagine, for a moment, it's 2030 and there's light rail on Auckland's Dominion Rd. There it is in the photo.
The lines run down the middle, with a single lane for cars on either side, plus bike lanes and footpaths and loading zones too.
There's car parking on the sidestreets but nobody much uses it. Nobody much needs to drive on Dominion Rd anymore, because those modern trams are so frequent, so cheap and so cool, it's easier to just hop on and off where you want. The terrible traffic? We barely remember it.
Shopkeepers love this, because the street is now soooo full of people.
Partly that's because tens of thousands more people live along the route. Partly it's because Dominion Rd's long and lovely clusters for eating and shopping now stretch all the way from top to bottom. An entire linear cornucopia of culinary and other delights.
And partly, it's because everyone has embraced the green. Beginning in 2022, one of the most tree-barren streets in the city started to change. Retailers, led by the remarkably visionary local business association, planted trees outside their shops.
Customers and nearby residents joined in and the council and Auckland Transport helped out too. And when the light rail tracks went in, they created a rich green swale.
That's the name for a green stretch by a road, designed to help with stormwater runoff and to ameliorate the impact of car-exhaust pollution, and when it's done well it doubles as an aesthetic marvel. A lawn track.
Light rail on a lawn track with trees in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Photo / supplied
A lawn track is not a fantasy. For years, light rail has been running on green swales on city streets just like Dominion Rd: in Oslo, Athens, Baltimore, Parramatta, Singapore, Melbourne, Nice, Frankfurt, Strasbourg, Sapporo, Seattle, Lyon, Washington, Toronto, Toulouse, Jerusalem, Grenoble, Barcelona, Paris, Porto, Rotterdam, Kaohsiung, Kuala Lumpur, New Orleans, Florence, Bilbao, Budapest, Warsaw, Brest - and on it goes until you run out of breath.
It's common. All it takes is the wit and the will to do it.
The fantasy bit is to imagine that our politicians, planners and retailers might have those things. To date, the plans are for concrete all the way. The proposal for Auckland light rail is to put it underground, and under Sandringham Rd, not Dominion Rd, so as not to upset anyone.
This will produce a relatively poor outcome, if it ever gets built. But the cost is so enormous – closing on $15 billion – you have to wonder if it ever will.
And yet, as all those cities have demonstrated, we could do so much more while spending a whole lot less. A gloriously green Dominion Rd. Imagine it.
The Strasbourg version, in northeast France. Photo / supplied
