Dialogue: Direction change essential if urban sprawl is to stop

JOEL CAYFORD* says Auckland's rapid growth demands a better standard of governance than that now being hastily applied.

It is a frightening fact that most of Greater Auckland's growth decisions are being rushed by traditional engineers and well-meaning councillors despite the huge capital costs involved and the community risks.

Recent decisions reveal an alarming absence of economic analysis as if large sums of capital are easy to come by. And they indicate a reluctance to adopt alternative approaches, a failure to learn from mistakes and overseas experience, and a lack of awareness of extensive technological change.

Like many cities, Auckland has grown ad hoc. Witness its spread of roads, housing, commercial areas and water infrastructure. To stop sprawl, the Auckland Regional Council imposed a metropolitan urban limit and lines on maps.

The North Shore City Council objected but lost in the Environment Court. Now the Manukau City Council and the Waitakere City Council want new greenfields opened for development.

Old behaviour and traditional developer expectations will take time and strict enforcement to change. The line of least resistance is to develop new land because it is harder to redevelop existing urban areas of Auckland. Policy favouring brownfield development is easy to write but difficult to implement.

But if sprawl is to be stopped, planners and developers must change direction and use existing urban land more efficiently. There will still be quarter-acre properties, but there is a need for intensive housing which is attractive and creates a sense of community.

Councillors sitting as commissioners in North Shore City have made appalling planning decisions. Whole rows of houses have the garages and backdoors of other rows of houses as their main view. Hundreds of low-cost houses will never enjoy a thriving streetscape because they are built up long, concrete driveways.

And people in thousands of new homes are forced into car dependency because there are no shops, community facilities or parks for kilometres, and some streets are too narrow for a bus.

The original vision of high-quality intensive housing with community focal points has collapsed into an abysmal reality of low-cost housing clusters. The market is for cheap housing in these greenfield areas.

Even a cursory skim on the internet reveals North Shore City's biggest mistake has been speed. In other countries, urban development is carefully and deliberately staged. Successful and attractive communities grow slowly, just as North Shore's existing seaside villages did. The main beneficiaries of high-speed development on the North Shore have been developers.

Some blame the councillors and demand that building professionals should make planning decisions. But this ignores the importance of independence. Similar arguments have been used to support the separation of council water services, their establishment as local authority trading enterprises and the appointment of professional directors. There is a touching belief that people with business experience will somehow be better at running city water and wastewater services.

Watercare Services, Greater Auckland's bulk supplier of water and wastewater services, has been run as a trading enterprise by directors for several years. Under their direction, advised by engineers, and supported by most city councils, Watercare has committed to loans of over half a billion dollars.

Most of this is for the environmental upgrade of Mangere, despite inconvenient evidence that far greater environmental damage was being caused, and is still being caused, by leaking trunk sewer networks across the region, mostly the responsibility of councils.

The rest of the money has been allocated to the Waikato pipeline, despite evidence that water demand management methods significantly reduce the amount of water used and could have deferred that spending.

Education has reduced water consumption in Christchurch, and many cities around the world. Metrowater's successes in reducing water demand in Auckland absolutely contradict Watercare's water consumption projections. In fact, Watercare's directors, faced with less-than-projected revenues, suddenly imposed price increases of 6 per cent for bulk water in the latest July year.

Just as the region must face up to using land more efficiently, so, too, with water resources. More water supply means bigger water pipes, bigger sewers, more wastewater treatment, more investment and more debt.

Other paradigm shifts are in play. Development in filtration, ultraviolet and other water technologies has driven down the cost of water treatment, while the costs of labour-intensive pipes and sewers, despite trenchless diggers, continue to escalate. Small decentralised or local sewage treatment is now more economic than large centralised systems, even ignoring the huge uncosted subsidy the environment expends coping with trunk sewer overflows and leaks.

Each kilometre of trunk sewer rehabilitated in North Shore City has cost around $1 million. Estimates suggest it will cost the city $300 million to rehabilitate its public sewers, and that many households will each have to pay $3000-plus to repair the sewer line to their boundary. This is a huge sum to move excrement around the city.

There is a range of alternative onsite technologies for sewage management. Tried and proven community-based cluster alternatives exist also. New thinking is needed to avoid hasty spending on old-technology pipe networks which may become white elephants.

Passenger transport infrastructure investment is the third challenge facing the region. There is pressure from some quarters to spend huge amounts of capital on large projects, including a second harbour crossing, railway lines and the North Shore busway.

Yet again, international experience and economic wisdom point to the best approach being incremental.

By all means protect corridors for future uses, but in the short term the best strategy is to identify the most congested routes and to provide a passenger transport option.

Auckland City's bus priority measures are an excellent example of this approach. Bus lanes are an efficient use of existing roads.

Transfund's patronage funding gets it right by requiring a proven increase in passenger use in exchange for funding.

Just as it takes time for communities to grow, so, too, it takes time to establish effective and trusted passenger transport systems.

The sudden availability of capital through trading enterprise bank loans, through Infrastructure Auckland opening its purse hastily, or through the Government capitulating to mayoral pressures carries the risk of building infrastructure not needed for today's needs, and which may never be needed tomorrow.

Business people have answers; so do councillors and so do engineers. But nobody has all the answers. Community participation, openness to change and incremental development over time needs to be part of Greater Auckland's governance.

* Dr Joel Cayford is a North Shore City councillor and member of the Auckland water review working party.