Imagine, if you will, that you’re the owner of a dairy, a takeaway, a bottle store or a laundromat, relying on your customers being able to stop and park outside your door for a few minutes to make a purchase or drop off their washing, then your parking is taken away so your customers go elsewhere, for example to the dairy along the road that has 4 car parks.
Or that your business is a car sales yard that relies on car carrying trucks to bring in your vehicles to sell but the yard up the road has a loading zone outside their premises, you used to have one but now you have a bus stop.
Like all shopping villages along arterial roads, these businesses rely on through traffic bringing passing trade.
The economic climate is not in your favour, for survival and then your rates are being spent to destroy your business further, all for a barely used cycleway.
How can the designers of the Great North Road cycleway and so called ‘improvements’ for Auckland Transport be so inept and the Grey Lynn Residents Association. be so heartless by supporting this attack on people’s livelihoods?
Initially the residents association were totally opposed to this design and got a $10,000 grant from the Waitematā Local Board to come up with their own design. They had not done their due diligence so their design of trees in the centre of the road was possible because underground were stormwater pipes, services that couldn’t stand the weight of major trees, once they had matured from seedlings in 30 years. So the GLRA during their presentation at an AT Board meeting,when they discovered their error, then became huge fans of the design they had publicly trashed.
The existing trees, on the sides of the road, had also somehow become in ‘sight lines’ that they hadn’t been in for the rest of their lives and also had to be cut down, adding to the devastation of Auckland’s supposed ‘Urban Ngahere Plan’ to make the city more green.
GNR is a main arterial road that also has traffic that needs the two lanes it once had to keep the traffic moving.
The design includes Tim-Tams, and black and yellow ‘monarch caterpillar’ humps to enter driveways and light industrial business, as well as ‘speed tables’ to side streets that slow traffic leaving the traffic stream. At the corner of Coleridge Street the contractors raised the footpath, including the part on private property making access non compliant for mobility impaired access. They promised to remedy but haven’t done so yet.
The design stops short of the Grey Lynn Village, presumably to avoid consulting the business, but that hasn’t stopped the threats of carpark removal.
The worst intersection is with Bond Street connecting Grey Lynn to Kingsland with another arterial road and the bridge over the motorway. Left turning traffic off GNR has only two spaces, because ironically designers have left car parks here, in the one place they are not needed as Bunnings has a huge off street customer car park. Traffic turning left from Bond Street to GNR turn straight into the rear of a bus stopped in the ‘inline bus stop’ outside the martial arts venue, where next to the bus shelter, a series of three seats have been positioned looking at the vacant lot where Ockham were going to build a high-end apartment block. Across the road is another seat with its back to the street, also awaiting for building works in the vacant lot. Then on steep Grosvenor Street another three seats look at the furniture shop. While they do provide platforms for rough sleepers, they have not been discovered by them yet.
The highlight (or should I say ‘lowlight’ of this bad design) is the blocking of traffic taking the dogleg from Bond Street into one-way Grosvenor Street where locals make their way to Williamson Avenue. By supporting this design choice shows how the residents association do not represent locals.
To add insult to injury, the light phasing from Bond Street to New North Road only allows two vehicles to turn right into Kingsland. This is another method AT uses to cause congestion in their aim of charging a congestion tax.
Simon Wilson’s Herald article 21.03.23 “Time to stop this obsession with cycleways” featured a photograph of Mayor Wayne Brown riding his bike on the very wide footpath, where he suggested the cycleway could have been located, therefore saving Auckland ratepayers approximately $28,000,000 for the ‘Great North Road Improvements Project’. The only improved was upgrading the $3.3 million essential stormwater. The whole design is a ‘dog’s breakfast’. It did achieve transferring our rates to contractors.
Gael Baldock, community advocate. GaelB@xtra.co.nz
GAEL BALDOCK: NO STOPPING - NO SHOPPING
