Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown was the first to swim in the new Karanga Plaza pool.
Yes, it’s the mayor in the pool.
Last Thursday, as reported, Mayor Wayne Brown persuaded his council to abolish the urban regeneration agency Eke Panuku. Supposedly that was for wasting money and not doing what it was told.
The very next day, he celebrated with a swim in the new seawater swimming pool he had asked Eke Panuku to build. Which it had done, cheaply.
I asked him how it was.
“Excellent, warm water and it was my idea,” he replied.
Now there’s a man who swims to his own beat, or stroke, or something.
The new Karanga Plaza pool, by the terraced steps into the water near the Viaduct Events Centre, is great. And it’s open to the public and free to use. Daylight hours only, and lifeguards are on duty. There are swimming lanes and a general area, and the steps provide variable depths so you can take your toddler for a paddle.
The Wynyard Crossing Bridge is open, too, with an added feature: when the wind blows a certain way, the new cables that hold its two arms whistle noisily. You can’t have everything, I guess.
But I would say, and presumably the mayor would too, that providing free recreation, with built-in capacity to build kids’ water confidence, is a brilliant basic job for councils.
What does Prime Minister Christopher Luxon think?
Back in August, Luxon made a tough speech demanding that councils get back to “doing the basics brilliantly”. He was responding in part to the 16% nationwide average rise in rates this year, an amount that’s shockingly higher than the low single-figure rises many ratepayers are used to.
Luxon repeated the call on Monday, when he and Local Government Minister Simeon Brown went fishing for councils they say are wasting money. They’ve announced a new regime for council spending.
So it’s out with the “four wellbeings”: the expectation that councils will pursue a balance of economic, environmental, cultural and social benefits. Also known as “no more nice-to-have spending”.
The wellbeing approach was introduced by Labour in 2002, removed by National in 2012 and reintroduced by Labour in 2019.
Instead, there is to be a strict focus on the “core basics”, which Brown defined as “fixing the roads, fixing the pipes, delivering local services effectively and efficiently”.
Also new: the Department of Internal Affairs will publish annual reports comparing all councils on their rates, council debt, whether their budgets are balanced and the condition of their roads.
Brown also wants to cap rates rises, although that hasn’t yet been approved by Cabinet.
Auckland Council may feel a bit aggrieved by all this. The Government has just sliced $500 million per year out of its transport budget and cancelled another $1.2 billion of revenue (over four years) when it abolished the regional fuel tax.
On top of that, the council’s ongoing savings programme has seen it get halfway to its goal of trimming $66m from current spending, with half the financial year to go. Last year, it exceeded the savings goal of $50m, by $10.2m. Over the three years to 2025, it will have saved $337m.
These savings help keep a lid on rates and debt.
The process is not new. In 2022, then-Mayor Phil Goff announced cumulative savings since the start of the SuperCity in 2010 amounted to $2.4 billion.
“Without these savings,” he said at the time, “rates would be 14% higher.”
Despite the loss of transport revenue, Auckland Council has been particularly frugal with its rates rise this year: up 6.8%, compared with the national average of 16%.
Several mayors elsewhere have responded to Luxon and Minister Brown’s demands by agreeing their rates rises this year were unsustainably high. They don’t like it any more than he does: apart from anything else, they know that high rates rises are a recipe for electoral disaster.
But they say their rates have not risen because they’re wasting money on peripherals. Around 90% of their revenue goes on transport, water and other basic infrastructure.
The pressure is on because of years of deferred maintenance, made worse by the demands of the Government’s Local Water Done Well legislation. And those trying to manage growth also have to find money for new infrastructure, without seeing any of the additional tax revenue that comes with that growth.
Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown is one of many who say if councils received some of the GST associated with property development, it would make a huge difference. That’s an issue we really should be debating, but instead Minister Brown is still trying to spook people about the dreaded cycleways.
Rangitoto was the most recent of Auckland’s 53 volcanic cones to erupt. When did it happen?
A. 245 years ago, during the American Revolutionary War.
B. Nearly 600 years ago, when Māori had settled throughout Aotearoa.
C. 1600 years ago, as the Roman Empire was collapsing.
D. 5000 years ago, when Mesopotamians invented portable tablets for writing.
Answer at the end.
Not counting the motorways, what’s the busiest road in Auckland? Mt Wellington Highway? Fanshawe St? Whangaparāoa Rd?
They’re all up there, but the busiest of all, according to data from Auckland Transport, is Onewa Rd, which connects Birkenhead to the Northern Motorway just north of the harbour bridge.
At peak times Onewa Rd carries 3000 people an hour “in the peak direction”. More than 30,000 vehicles a day travel on that road.
For context, that’s as many vehicles as travel on Wellington’s Transmission Gully (cost: $1.25 billion) and are expected to use the new Road of National Significance connecting Warkworth to Wellsford (latest estimate: $3.5b-$4b).
How does Onewa Rd cope? It has a T3 lane, which enables a frequent and efficient double-decker bus service, and that makes the bus option popular. It might not seem like it if you’re in the normal traffic lane, but in peak times, 70% of commuters on Onewa Rd are riding on a bus.
Onewa Rd will soon have pedestrian detection technology, meaning pedestrian crossings won’t hold up the traffic when pedestrians press the button then walk away.
Those are two of the ways AT is optimising the use of existing roads.
Another is dynamic lanes. On Whangaparāoa Rd, which carries 25,000 vehicles a day, the median strip is used as an extra lane during peak times. Despite increased traffic from all the new housing in the area, journey times fell by four minutes when the dynamic lane began in 2018.
Elsewhere the focus is on buses. The new T2 lanes on Te Atatū Rd in West Auckland, AT says, have reduced bus travel times by as much as 48%. On Dominion Rd, also with 25,000 vehicles a day, buses don’t have dedicated lanes but have to use clearways as best they can. At five intersections there are “bus boosters”: a smart system that detects buses and gives them a green light as soon as possible.
Fanshawe St, running beside Victoria Park between the motorway and the city centre, used to be extremely congested. But much more frequent and reliable bus services to and from the North Shore, dedicated bus lanes and smarter traffic lights have changed that.
In peak times, 100 buses carrying 5000 people an hour use Fanshawe St’s bus lanes, compared to 2000 people an hour in the adjacent two lanes of general traffic. That’s more people per hour on those buses than in cars on all four lanes of Nelson St, a motorway offramp, during the same peak time.
AT doesn’t do these things just for bus passengers. “Making bus journeys better and more reliable also means better journey times for cars,” says roads manager Chris Martin.
True that. The more people on the bus, the less traffic there is for private vehicles to get stuck in.
But also: this is something that AT has had in development for years. Dynamic lanes and smarter traffic lights are in use in other parts of the city, too, and clearways are decades old.
So why aren’t all these things ubiquitous? Because, despite the mayor being a big fan, he has not championed the little thing that would make a very big difference: removing all car parking from bus arterial routes, in peak times if not permanently.
Love to see him campaigning for that in the election next year.
Stuck in town over summer but still hoping to get away? How about a night or three on Rangitoto? (Honest, there’s a vanishingly small chance it will blow up.)
The Rangitoto Island Historic Conservation Trust has three beautifully restored baches on the island available for public hire. They’re off-grid, with gas cookers, solar lights and fridges, cold taps, outdoor showers and chemical toilets, surrounded by bush and birdsong and perched on the edge of the Hauraki Gulf. All have three bedrooms and six or seven beds.
The Waiheke ferry calls in, there are water taxis operated by Auckland Sea Shuttles and if you’re feeling really intrepid you could even make it your kayak commute.
When I looked this week there were still several dates available over summer. One of the baches was free on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
“There is no room for wasteful spending,” Local Government Minister Simeon Brown said this week. “Communities deserve value for money, not grand projects that fail to meet expectations.”
“We did consider the possibility of installing a new gravity sewer main beneath the Rose Gardens,” Watercare’s Andrew Deutschle told Newsroom. “However, it was not feasible as our crews would have needed to install the pipeline 28m underneath the Rose Garden, making future access to the pipeline difficult.”
Following the storms of summer 2023 and discovery of a burst wastewater pipe in Parnell, and long before the minister spoke out, Watercare had rejected the 28m-deep pipeline and begun work on the cheaper and easier option of installing a new pump station and rising main. Cost: $13.2m.
When it comes to infrastructure, nothing is cheap.
Driving on Muriwai Beach will be banned, but only for a couple of weeks: from December 31 to January 13. The idea is to make the beach “safe and stress-free for everyone”, says the council’s Parks Committee chair, Ken Turner. His deputy, Mike Lee, says it’s also to give the toheroa “a breather”.
Muriwai Beach is technically a road, which means that for the rest of the time, when it’s open to vehicles, you have to stay within the speed limit, wear seatbelts, drive a registered and warranted vehicle and not go hooning.
There are two ways to look at gardens on bus-stop roofs. The first is the way the Prime Minister does: an obvious example of councils wasting money.
He mentioned them several times this week when telling councils to get on with “doing the basics brilliantly”.
Indeed, it’s not obvious why lavishing environmental attention on such tiny surfaces is a good way to spend rates. It seems trivial and tokenist.
But the second way is to see them as part of something much bigger.
Auckland Transport has 25 green bus-shelter roofs, in a trial that began in 2021. It’s doing this in conjunction with oOh!media, which owns 13 of the shelters, and an innovative Hamilton company called Green Roofs, which provides and installs pre-grown “Click ‘n Go” trays of plants.
There’s one on Ponsonby Rd, outside Ponsonby Central.
These roofs are a small part of Hīkina te Wero, an environmental action plan developed under the direction of AT’s chief scientist, Dr Cathy Bebelman, in collaboration with mana whenua, and adopted in 2021.
The plan addresses pollutants, water conservation, fish passage through drains, biodiversity, waste and the greening of the transport network.
From an environmental point of view, roads are one of every city’s biggest problems. They keep nature away, which is bad for our mental health. Wear on tyres creates greenhouse gas emissions and other air pollutants. Roads contribute to urban “heat islands” and, perhaps most calamitously of all, they cause flooding.
But vehicles need hard surfaces to drive on, so we have roads. That makes it doubly important to green what we can of the rest of the public space. Trees are critical and the plan includes a target of 12% of the roadway, on average, being covered in tree canopy. The focus for this is South Auckland.
Swales (water catchments) and other rain gardens, green walls and berms are also valuable, and so are rooftops.
Planted bus-shelter roofs are not going to save the world. But sometimes the way to tackle a big problem is with a thousand small solutions. Every little bit helps.
The way Green Roofs do their planting, these gardens are also a magnet for bees. And they’re an educational tool: AT works with children from schools near the bus shelters, like Redoubt North School in Manukau.
“They are ambassadors for the living bus shelter and will monitor the vegetation and educate others about the trial,” Bebelman said when the project launched. “They are looking forward to making sure that it’s looked after and respected.”
AT isn’t the only green roofer in town. Engineering students at the University of Auckland have a green-roof study project on their building, the central city library has one and there are others on private buildings too.
Two more things about this. First, it’s a trial that’s being closely studied. AT wants to find solutions that work, without wasting money.
Second, this is really not a big-ticket item. Each of the 13 oOh!media rooftop installations costs around $5300 and the company is paying for them itself. AT says the remaining 12 cost about $3500 each.
The name Hīkina te Wero, by the way, means “to take up the challenge”. Taking up the climate challenge is not a nice-to-have. It’s core business for councils, as it is for central government.
There will never be a time when the economy is all sorted so we can think about climate action. Sorting the economy and the climate have to be done together.
Meri Kirihimete ki a koutou. This is the last Love this City for the year. I’ll be back in mid-January.
Quiz answer
B. Rangitoto erupted from the sea in about 1450 CE and erupted again 50 years later. It is the only one of Tamaki Makaurau’s 53 volcanic cones to have erupted in the Holocene period, which dates from the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago. About 60% of the volcanic rock and other volcanic material around Auckland comes from Rangitoto.
Malaysia have announced they will continue the search for missing flight MH370 more than ten years after its disappearance. Rain is on the horizon for NZ, as we assist Vanuatu.