The next 50 years: It’s
Region will grow — but we can shape how and how much
The Urban Form and Transport Initiative (UFTI) has just produced its final report: a high-level plan detailing how growth in the Western Bay should be managed over the next 50 years, in terms of transport and housing.
Civic issues reporter Samantha Motion spoke to the man behind the plan, UFTI project director Robert Brodnax, about some of the most interesting bits in his team’s 140-page report.
Give me the elevator pitch for this plan.
Basically we allocate population at higher densities particularly along public transport corridors and nodes so that you’ve got your places where people live connected by highfrequency public transport services. That’s every 10 to 15 minutes or so.
That way we’re going to be able to manage the impacts of growth on the transport network in Tauranga to make greater use of our public transport system.
You’re not going to be able to build your way out of congestion. So you need to find ways of making it easier for people to move around the city using other modes. The density piece is important because the beauty of public transport is it works best where you get higher densities.
We don’t have enough good land to grow on to not start growing up, getting greater densities. We can’t continue to sprawl as a city, we don’t have the land on which to sprawl and to build and we don’t have the capacity to build a transport system that could accommodate 400,000 people.
What will happen to congestion?
We’re not going to be able to solve congestion. You can’t continue to grow and somehow have some sort of panacea that says you won’t have congestion in a centre that’s growing and that people want to move around.
But you can manage congestion much better if you’ve got a better public transport service. Not about moving lots and lots of cars with one person in them.
The plan says we might have more lanes crossing the harbour. What does that mean?
The modelling tells us that if we’re serious about moving more people through the network, we need this public transport network that moves us from east to west and east to north.
That means there will come a point in the future where we’re going to need additional lane capacity so that the buses aren’t caught up in the traffic on Hewletts Road or on the Harbour Bridge or wherever.
Sometime in the next 30 years, we’re going to have to add additional lane capacity either on the Harbour Bridge or at Turret road, or somewhere in between.
What UFTI says is that in around about 15 years, the Matapihi Rail Bridge is due for replacement so why don’t you look at the whole issue of how and where we put buses and trains and stuff across the harbour and have a think and make sure we get the optimal solution.
Given the sensitivities of crossing the harbour under any circumstances, I think it’s sensible to take a long run-up at that.
Why didn’t passenger rail make the cut?
We don’t think you’ll be ready to pivot to passenger rail until you get your population densities at your key stations quite a lot higher than 30 per hectare in the CBD, and potentially at four or five other points along the rail line.
So we think there’s a bit of time to play out before your it’ll become viable to run a rail service.
So we’re saying beyond 30 years, and all likelihood, particularly when that new eastern centre that we’ve envisioned comes on. Rail needs longer distances and high population and job densities around the station.
Rail scored highly — did it come down to money?
Effectively yeah, it comes down to economic viability, costs and benefits, and hitting that sweet spot.
Rail scored highly when we evalu