How not to do intensification - Auckland Unitary Plan style
With the public release of the independent panel’s Unitary Plan for Auckland, it’s worth considering how much density Auckland can absorb. The answer: not much.
Some recent (and selective) reporting of preeminent New Zealand economist Arthur Grimes picked up on his suggestion for ‘Gold Coast style” apartments in and around Auckland’s Tamaki Dr. So let’s take a quick look at Gold Coast and Auckland’s Tamaki Dr area as it says something about Auckland’s capacity to absorb density:
Both those images are to the same approximate scale and both red lines are 1km in length. I emphasize that the scales are as close as I can get them because, on first appearance, they look different. The Gold Coast image looks more close up. It’s not, but it appears this way because its buildings are bigger and, importantly, its roads are wider.
As indicated in the image of the Mission Bay-Kohi area, Auckland does not have the land area set aside for movement that is required to accommodate density. More simply put, it’s roads are skinny and while they can fit a footpath, a car and maybe some parking – usually with impacts on travel flows – they can’t fit much else. Have a look at the width of those roads in and out of Surfers Paradise – they’re massive! They enable buses, pedestrians and general traffic to access the area and one of them even contains light rail.
This “space” for movement is important because this much development creates an incredible amount of traffic. Density and public transport are sometimes conflated and confused. Density, as a general rule, does tend to increase public transport, because things like greater frequencies can be provided with a higher number of potential users in the vicinity. But density doesn’t mean less driving in aggregate. Except for very low levels of density, more people means more public transport and more cars. And those cars, utility vehicles, bikes, service vans, delivery trucks, commercial vehicles, etc all need somewhere to go.
Where would the cars go if we intensified along Tamaki Dr? We could strip out the parking along the waterfront (after massive objections from water users) and put in two lanes, but what then is the public transport option? Do cars move east-west along the waterfront and buses run north-south connecting to rail stations at Orakei or, potentially, St Johns? How many trips would be competitively serviced by bus feeders to rail stations? Getting to the city would still be faster for most folk driving or catching a bus along the waterfront. How much demand is there really to get to Sylvia Park and Manukau?
Would light rail along Tamaki Dr be the answer? Where then do the cars go? There are no four lane corridors in the area – none. There is the eastern corridor designation which would absolutely be required for high densities. But that means in order to achieve some intensification in the area we’ll need a billion dollar rail solution and a multi-billion dollar expressway. Is that really the best use of limited public resources?
Of course it is not. A far better idea would be to build a new Tamaki Dr along the southern coast of the Manukau Harbour, out at Clevedon or around Hobsonville, where you don’t have to negotiate with obstinate locals and you don’t have the inordinate expense of brownfield infrastructure development. You can master-plan for density, design development to integrate with public transport and provide road capacity for a large number of users. And you can do all this for something like a tenth of the cost of brownfield densification.
