Trees, art and lighting part of $23m Queen St facelift

A $23.4 million upgrade of Auckland's golden mile is poised to begin this year, aiming to create a distinctively Auckland feel featuring an avenue of trees, bluestone paving, special lighting and artworks.

The plans will supposedly make Queen St more pedestrian-friendly, although the Auckland City Council has dropped earlier plans to reduce the number of traffic lanes from two to one in each direction and ban on-street parking for private motorists.

After opposition from businesses, the council has decided to keep 51 of the 81 parking bays between Customs St and Wellesley St as loading bays until 11am. After that, six of the spaces will become taxi ranks and the other 45 will be available for short-term parking.

Three new pedestrian crossings are proposed at Durham St East, near the Mid City Arcade and north of Fort St, where a lot of people cross the road. New sets of traffic lights at these crossings will be synchronised with major intersections to manage traffic flows.

Other plans include feature lighting of buildings and historic buildings, keeping the existing "Barnes dancing" crossings at Wellesley St and Victoria St intersections, high-quality street furniture, canopies almost the length of Queen St and special pavement patterns at spots like Aotea Square and Myers Park.

Among the proposed artworks are Polynesian-style stone planters, a lighting artwork at the Karangahape Rd entrance, water sculptures at Myers Park and on the corner of Wakefield St, and sculptural seating at the original foreshore area.

The chairwoman of the arts, culture and recreation committee, Penny Sefuiva, said the aim was to restore Queen St's status as New Zealand's number one attraction for people and business.

"A transformed Queen St will be a high-quality place for people and business. Overall, it will be a more stylish and safer place. It will make all Aucklanders proud," she said.

Heart of the City chief executive Alex Swney said the latest plans were a huge improvement on the original proposals.

They just needed a bit of tinkering to reflect the changing face and needs of the central business district, which now had 12,000 residents, forecast to rise to 30,000 in 10 years.

"Six taxi ranks is useless," he said. "Why don't we start behaving like a grown-up city and hail cabs?"

All going well - public consultation runs until March 24 - the council is expected to approve the plans for work to start in September and finish about the middle of 2007.

Project manager Mark Kunath said the first section to be done would be from Mayoral Drive to Karangahape Rd, followed by Victoria St to Customs St, Victoria to Wellesley St and Wellesley to Mayoral Drive.

Mr Kunath said to minimise disruption the contractors would do one side of the road at a time.

The Queen St upgrade is a key component of a wider $200 million, 10-year council strategy for revitalising the central business district.

Central business project leader Jo Wiggins yesterday acknowledged there would be "some escalation" in costs for the Queen St project, given the rise in construction costs since the budget was set two years ago.

Other CBD projects to upgrade Quay St and Lorne St have faced big cost increases.