The draft design for a new public transport hub will be revealed at a community meeting at the Whanganui War Memorial Centre.
The draft design for a new public transport hub will be revealed at a community meeting at the Whanganui War Memorial Centre.
The draft design for a new public transport hub in central Whanganui will be revealed this week.
Whanganui District Council will hold community meetings at the War Memorial Centre on Wednesday, May 10, with the draft design for the lower St Hill St hub available to view and comment on. There will be two meetings - an afternoon and an evening session.
The council’s community property and places general manager, Sarah O’Hagan, said it was an exciting milestone for the public transport hub project.
She said one of the key goals was to support Whanganui’s new frequent bus, Te Ngaru The Tide, which was launched in February in response to the community asking for better public transport.
“Since the Tide bus was brought in we’ve seen a big jump in public transport trips and figures for March 2023 show 86 per cent more urban public transport trips than in March 2022,” O’Hagan said.
“This is an incredible start – in other regional cities, we’ve seen numbers usually take a while to build up. From here, we expect numbers will only increase. The public transport hub is a measure the council can put in place to support the development of a user-friendly public transport network in Whanganui.”
Te Ngaru The Tide operates a frequent route between Castlecliff and Aramoho.
The public transport hub would benefit local people and Whanganui was fortunate to receive 90 per cent funding from the Government through Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency, O’Hagan said.
As with Whanganui’s other Streets for People project on Guyton St, the St Hill Street project had been guided by direct community engagement.
“One of the key criteria for this central government funding was for us to work directly with our community to develop the concepts and we’ve taken that very seriously,” O’Hagan said.
“Over the course of four community co-design workshops, we’ve been able to hear a range of excellent ideas and gain a good sense of community priorities.”
Key themes that emerged included a desire for the public transport hub to be safe, functional and accessible to everyone and to feature design and art elements that reflected Whanganui’s unique identity.
The community had also asked for less concrete, more colour and more greenery in the surrounding area.
O’Hagan said this was a chance to “get information straight from the horse’s mouth”.
“We’ll be providing a visual presentation of the concepts and a full rundown of all the proposed design features. We’ll also have members of our project team on hand to answer any questions or concerns people might have.”
O’Hagan said the project was still at the draft design concept stage so changes would be possible, depending on community feedback.
“As with the Guyton St design reveal workshop, this is very much about asking ‘Have we got this right?’. So there will certainly still be an opportunity for tweaks before we present final designs.”
The St Hill St public transport hub draft design reveal workshops are at 1pm and 5.30pm on Wednesday, at Whanganui War Memorial Centre’s Pioneer Room.
