Dreary and confusing bridge hearing destroys the joy
Even as a seasoned council watcher, the hearing on the proposed cycle and pedestrian bridge was one of the hardest-ever to follow.
Palmerston North’s planned new cycle and pedestrian bridge across the Manawatu River is a really big deal.
It will create yet another attraction in the West End, as if Victoria Esplanade, the Lido and the soon-to-be built Wildbase Recovery aviaries are not enough.
Once linked up to the He Ara Kotahi shared pathway on the far side of the river, it will satisfy carfree commuters who want an alternative to tackling the Fitzherbert route to Massey and the State Highway network to Linton, as well as appealing to recreational users. And it will, undoubtedly, continue to worry and upset a few neighbours.
Arguably, and at $10-odd million, the bridge and pathway project could be the biggest thing the city council has been involved with since the City Library, the janine.rankin@fairfaxmedia.co.nz
Regent Theatre refurbishment, or The Square makeover.
The community should be excited. But there is nothing quite like sitting in a resource management hearing for the best part of a couple of days to destroy the joy. For the lay person, the process is virtually impenetrable. Even as a seasoned council watcher, the hearing on the proposed cycle and pedestrian bridge was one of the hardest-ever to follow.
The council chamber was full of expert witnesses and planners, all assuming the others had read and understood thousands of pages of reports and evidence, apparently starting their conversation somewhere in the middle, and in the commissioners’ case, neglecting to use their microphones. A few brave members of the public must have been quite mystified and intimidated.
It was no surprise at all that Ken Baird, a recently-active citizen who thinks the bridge plans are fatally flawed, picked up the wrong end of a couple of sticks. He must have spent hundreds of hours poring over every report he could lay his hands on, or locate on-line, and commenting on errors, omissions and assumptions out of line with his local knowledge, all in very great detail. But the scope for misunderstanding in these processes is significant.
For example, he picked up some council letters that seemed to have granted approval for the bridge before Christmas. Not surprisingly, he was indignant. ‘‘This hearing is either a farce or is designed to appease the residents by giving the appearance of having some official status.’’
Commissioner Paul Rogers explained, while acknowledging the process was ‘‘confusing from a lay point of view’’, that the approvals related to designations on site, and were not planning approvals. Adding to the frustration was the fact the commissioners were in no position to deal with one of the issues that annoyed opponents most – the way the council selected the Ruha St site after consulting on three options further downstream.
If there was one thing that Baird and other submitters were right about, it would have to be that the scale and impact of the bridge has been downplayed. The assessment that the bridge’s overall landscape and visual effects would be ‘‘low to moderate’’ was dismissed by Baird as ‘‘just an opinion’’.
And while surveys and expert evidence should dominate over gut instinct, the figures about how many people are likely to use the bridge are surely conservative.
Cyclists and pedestrians are expected to go back and forth across the bridge just 1180 times each day. The number of vehicles using Ruha Street at the peak morning hour is expected to increase by 30 to 102 vehicles. Across the whole day only an extra 74 vehicles are expected, and less than 40 cars are expected to be parked up at any one time. If those numbers are right, then $7.4m would seem a very high price to pay for the bridge.
Surely, everyone in Palmerston North is going to want to try it out, even if it is just to play Pooh sticks. It won’t be like fireworks over the river or Esplanade Day every day, but hundreds, if not thousands of extra people will surely be in the neighbourhood often.
End notes:
There has been some backsliding on the plastic bag front. A glance through the files revealed that in 2009, I ran out of plastic bags. It was a problem, because plastic bags were still needed for putting out the sorted recycling. The wheelie bins had not arrived yet. I still carry re-useable bags with me most of the time, in case of unplanned supermarket visits, and it is a mystery to me how the fabric sausage I keep in the laundry for plastic bags to be reused as rubbish bin liners is not simply overflowing, it has exploded. I can only attribute this problem to the generous donations of groceries purchased by others. Thank you. But please stop bringing those planet-destroying things into my house.