CBD revival plans call for character and car-free zones
Pedestrianising Nelson’s main street would bring more visitors and vibrancy to the ‘‘tired’’ city centre, benefiting both businesses and people, high school students have told city leaders.
A ‘‘multidimensional, carfree’’ zone with two-way bike lanes on Trafalgar St would help to increase al fresco dining and night life, allow for green spaces, and facilitate events like street performances and markets, the Nelson College students said.
The year 10 students presented their ideas for reimagining Nelson’s CBD to an audience including local business and council representatives on Wednesday and yesterday.
Other proposals included colourful road crossings, and making the city an interactive area where people could play and listen to music, exercise, and express themselves through art.
The 14- and 15 year-olds said the city centre was tired and lacking anything that made it unique, and there was currently no reason for people to stay there.
Pedestrianising the main street between Bridge St and Hardy St would make it more inviting, increase retail sales, and reduce pollution and traffic noise in the CBD, they said.
Examples elsewhere showed that pedestrianising city streets had increased foot traffic, with retail spend on such a street in Boston up 61%, the group said.
The students showed photographs of Trafalgar St, with its perpendicular car parking spaces flanking the road, unchanged from over 10 years ago.
Student Pyay Oo said the CBD currently offered ‘‘nowhere for youth to go’’, and it needed to ‘‘go through character development’’ to reflect cultural diversity and become somewhere people wanted to come back to.
Nelson MP Rachel Boyack commended the students, saying she had recently been to Montreal, where it felt safe in the city at night – partly because the city had increased the ability for people to walk around.
Boyack applauded their inclusion of separate areas for walking and cycling – something there was still ‘‘a bit of journey’’ towards achieving in New Zealand, she said.
In 2020, the Nelson City Council voted to keep Trafalgar St the way it was, after the public narrowly supported the status quo over closing the street to cars.
Councillor Rachel Sanson said some businesses owners felt they had not had an opportunity to be heard, but the focus of cities needed to shift from cars to people.
‘‘I think at some point, we just have to be politically courageous – the youth are telling us they want it differently.’’
The top end of Trafalgar St was turned into a pedestrian-only zone in 2019.
A pedestrian-focused ‘‘linear park’’ on Bridge St was already in the pipeline for Nelson after the city won $36 million from the Government’s Infrastructure Acceleration Fund in October.
Nelson Tasman Chamber of Commerce chief executive Ali Boswijk said pedestrianising Trafalgar St was an idea that should be revisited.
Removing parking spaces would be a difficult subject as long as ‘‘people drove cars to get places’’, Boswijk said. But Trafalgar St had two car parks nearby, and the CBD needed to be thought about from a ‘‘people perspective’’.
‘‘Generations change, and views change.’’
The council’s city centre development programme lead, Alan Gray, told the students that data already supported what they were proposing. ‘‘In our own study on this, what becomes compelling is getting more people living in the city or near the city, who want the shops . . . to set up the demand.’’