Most people have absolutely no idea what the ‘Centre City Master Plan’ entails.
It is a plan concocted in 2016 by Ludo Campbell Reid as city designer.
He’s the guy responsible for taking away ‘free left turns’ and parking, narrowing arterial roads to single lanes and giving cyclists domination of our city and effectively turning the ‘City of Sails’ into the ‘City of Road Cones’. His ludicrous plan is to divide the city into quarters by making Queen Street a mall, and Victoria Street a ‘linear park’.
Drawing, I got a big cross through the centre that is fairly impossible to cross; it divides the city into quarters - 1. Parnell to the East and South / 2. Mt Eden / 3. Ponsonby to the West / 4. Viaduct to North Shore. Maybe this was inspiration for the design concept “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet" Rudyard Kipling.
Now you know I’m a tree lover, and generally, the more parks the better, but we’re selling off actual reserves with mature trees to finance this preposterous idea. Not everyone lives close to their workplace. Commuters need to get around or through the city. Blocking it with a park and a mall stops that flow.
Commuters that used to come from Parnell and go over Victoria Street to Hobson for the Western motorway or continue to Victoria Park to the Harbour Bridge have been redirected by the construction of the CRL. The alternative is to go around the outside along Quay Street that has also been absurdly narrowed this arterial road to single lane.
The current ’no-go zone’ on Queen, between Wellesley Street and Mayoral Drive, forces vehicles left up Wellesley, either left again into Kitchener Street or straight up, (as only buses turn right into Mayoral) then it’s left again to Princes to go around the block to Symonds Street or straight ahead to the motorway.
Why are vehicles being forced to Symonds Street when it’s the centre of the Auckland University campus? Have you gotten confused by this forced circular pattern that the linear park would block? Is your head in a spin? Mine is - from trying to explain this idiotic concept or compulsory left turns that Ludo vowed to remove, as it affectively keeps people out of the other quarters.
Furthermore, the only right turn into Mayoral Drive which allows traffic to get to K Rd or Ponsonby, occurs from Wakefield but that involves going through the ’no-go zone’. The other choice would be up Symonds Street to the only street to get you back to K Road is the narrow lane of City Road, which is only suitable for mountain goats!
There was a ‘consultation’ in 2020 of the ‘Centre City Master Plan’. I wrote an extensive submission, as did many others. The result - NOT ONE WORD CHANGED.
I don’t want to be stopped from going from Parnell to Ponsonby or from the Viaduct to Mt Eden that this criss-cross will cause. It’s ridiculous, farcical, laughable, senseless, foolish, nonsensical, and mostly ludicrous, just like the designer Ludo who was run out of town.
Architecturally, I totally reject the ‘Centre City Master Plan’, and I’m sure you will too, now you know what it entails.(GAEL BALDOCK, community advocate)
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