Rudman's city: Newmarket's crazy to turn down rail station

By BRIAN RUDMAN

Talk about shoving a gift horse's teeth right down its throat. At a time when Tranz Rail is ripping the sides off passenger shelters and leaving its dwindling customer base to freeze, most communities would kill for the chance of a brand-new, cost-free railway station. But not, it seems, the contrary folk of Newmarket.

Not the shopkeepers and neighbouring residents fighting Westfield's Newmarket mall proposal anyway. These Nimbys don't want a bar of the free train station the property company is offering as part of its development. To them, anything Westfield touches is poison.

Incredibly, leading public transport advocate Jack Henderson is against it, too. He's quoted as saying that Westfield's claim that a better rail service would help to alleviate Newmarket's traffic problems is false.

"People will want to take cars to the mall so they can put their shopping into the boot," he said. For a leading campaigner for public transport, that seems a rather bullet-in-the-foot sort of statement. Surely the point of campaigning to spend billions of dollars on improving public transport in the city is that you have faith that people will leave their cars at home when they go shopping, or to the movies or whatever.

If Mr Henderson's faith is wavering, can I suggest he look at the Link bus stops outside the Victoria Park New World supermarket any evening. There he would see that when a regular public transport service is there people do use it - even grocery shoppers laden with plastic bags.

But in Newmarket the protest group is demanding a new station be built on the site of the old one which, they say, "is central to the Newmarket precinct".

Now I'm not sure what the fancy word "precinct" means. Presumably they mean the pedestrian-unfriendly, noisy, exhaust-polluted traffic alley called Broadway. If that's the case, then the proposed Westfield station is hardly less central. The existing station is just to the north of Remuera Rd. The Westfield one would presumably be just to the south.

To my way of thinking, if you can persuade, cajole, bully or sweet-talk a developer or commercial firm into providing a much-needed community facility in return for smoothing the way for something it wants, then why not? Nine months ago, when the Westfield Newmarket project was mooted, I suggested that a smarter move for local opponents, instead of total opposition, would be to persuade the developer to incorporate some needed community facilities.

Instead of the proposed 12 cinemas, for example, lobby for a theatre instead. And a community advice bureau, public health centre or whatever.

To me, a flash new train station sounds like a good start. Then again, perhaps the people of outer Remuera don't want riff-raff Westies and South Aucklanders getting easy access to their trendy area.

It's not as though such trade-offs don't happen. Developers, for example, can earn bonuses for providing public-good art works and community facilities.

A celebrated example would be the Big Pinky creche that wasn't, which was planned for the Queen St property once known as the Fay, Richwhite building. Extra floor space was gained by the developers by promising to provide a public creche. But somehow the creche disappeared during the construction, transmogrifying first into a gentlemen's club when the sales brochures appeared, then a "public" gym. Eventually the developers were shamed into funding an off-site, inner-city creche, which has since disappeared.

Along the same lines are the bus shelters popping up across the isthmus. They are being provided free to ratepayers in return for permission to mount advertising on one wall. As an opponent of rampant outdoor advertising, I had my doubts about such a deal with the devil.

But the ability to wait for a bus out of the rain surely outweighs the drawback of sharing the space with an advertising hoarding. As far as the one I frequent is concerned, it's kept scrupulously clean, with painted graffiti rapidly removed.

Best of all they didn't cost us ratepayers a penny.

In the same spirit, if Westfield wants to build a flash Newmarket train station, then why not? As we all know from the Britomart funding saga, it's not as though the city or region or country is flush with cash to do it out of the public purse.