I recently attended the final breakthrough of the City Rail Link tunnel which connects our new subway underneath Auckland.
It was at the new Aotea Station, which will be slap bang in the middle of a revitalised arts precinct. It’s easy now to imagine what it will be like when it’s finished and the trains are running.
I am genuinely excited. I got the buzz I usually get when I go to a famous city and I go into a big beautiful train station which connects the subway and the trains to far flung places. It isn’t just evocative thoughts of Harry Potter which have done this to me; it’s the fact that busy undergrounds usually mean I am in a vitally important city. I have been fortunate enough to travel to some wonderful places.
My favourite subway location is New York Grand Central Station. I also love the subways in Budapest and Paris, which are so beautiful. I can’t wait to see what our artists bring to the design of these Auckland stations. Experiencing this change in our own city feels like a poignant moment in time.
When complete, the City Rail Link will carry up to 54,000 people per hour, an equivalent capacity to three harbour bridges or 16 extra traffic lanes at peak times. It is going to be critical that the CRL links with trains and buses (electric ones of course) and connects to as many homes as possible within walking distance of the stations. That is all coming.
I think about motorists stuck on Auckland’s Southern Motorway; the time they missed with their kids because they didn’t have this option and an affordable home got further and further away from the city. I was lucky enough to live close, which made it possible to get to my work in the city by using an electric scooter.
At the motorway overbridge at Upper Queen Street, I’d see all those cars crawling home to their whanau. I know just how much pressure I had been under trying to juggle work and childcare, without a long commute thrown in. So I am incredibly happy to see the city get a transport system it should have had decades ago. It isn’t just the excitement of joining London, Paris and Rome, it is the common sense of it.
Once the work is finished it will leave the above ground area to transform into a beautiful place to live, shop, play and eat. I think we are moving towards a much nicer city. Good design and initiatives like the Streets for People programme will allow communities to upgrade existing streets and create safer more people friendly spaces.
These are essentially local street change projects which are funded centrally. Projects like these help address our current infrastructure deficit while also meeting future needs caused by population growth and climate change. The idea is to make it safer, quicker and more attractive for people to use public transport, walk, scoot and ride bikes in urban centres right across Aotearoa New Zealand.
The initiative will also help New Zealand meet its emissions reduction targets and improve health and wellbeing.
It’s actually quite hard for lots of people to imagine the city we are going to have in the next few decades because it will involve many steps and phases and see rapid change in housing design, transport and environmental consciousness. I’ll be holding a public meeting alongside Michael Wood, the Minister of Transport, at the Auckland Trades Hall at 5pm on November 2nd to discuss transport and its future in our city. This will be a great chance to kōrerorero with local residents on these issues. The good news is the venue is nice and close to public transport! (HELEN WHITE)